May 28, 1964 - Heavy-hearted searchers, many of them fellow students from his college days, failed today to find a trace of Minnesota Viking football player Terry Dillon in the swollen Clark Fork River in Montana.
The 23-year-old Minnesotan, a star defensive back at Hopkins High School and Montana State University before joining the Vikings last year, was presumed drowned after a portion of a bridge flooring collapsed on a construction project 25 miles west of Missoula. Rescue workers and volunteers probed the river all day without success.
Dillon’s parents in Texas clung to the faintest shred of hope and prayed for a miracle. But officers at the scene said they could not conceive of how Dillon could have survived.
Fellow workers said a gasoline-powered cement bucket he was operating plunged through the bridge decking, hurling Dillon into the stream 75 feet below.
It was his first day on the construction site. He had worked at another site since finishing school at Montana State University in March.
Witnesses saw him riding the current, clinging to floating debris until he neared a grassy bank jutting into the river a quarter-mile below the bridge.
Dillon, a good swimmer, apparently pushed away from the debris and started heading for shore 30 feet away. But current sweeping around the bank pulled him under.
He bobbed up once more before being carried further downstream, where he vanished.
Dillon was the Vikings’ regular deep safety in the last half of the 1963 season after being activated from the taxi squad.
“We couldn’t have asked him to do more than he did as a player,” Viking coach Norm Van Brocklin said today in Minneapolis. “But the loss to the Vikings is nothing compared to what it is to his parents.”
The news of Dillon’s disappearance shook Van Brocklin as nothing has in his four years as the Viking coach.
“Such a wonderful, decent kid,” he said. “He had the perfect temperament to play safety in the NFL. He wanted to learn, and he learned quickly. In our postseason grading, he was near the top. But I really don’t want to talk about the Vikings’ loss. It is a terrible loss for his parents and family and for anybody who knew Terry well. He did not force his presence on anybody, but ours was a better team for having a man like him on it — both for his ability and his character.”
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