By By DAN SMITH / Principal, Kincheloe Elementary School
Mary VanderMeulen was a young mother of four living in Niles, where her husband taught at the high school in 1958.
On July 26 that year America lost the man it hoped would be its first space traveler, Captain Iven C. Kincheloe Jr.
In January 1958 the Air Force had announced Kincheloe would pilot the X-15 experimental rocket-powered plane to an altitude at least 100 miles high.
But that summer he was killed when the supersonic jet he piloted lost power and crashed.
It was a blow felt everywhere across the country, but was especially sad to the residents of southwest Michigan who lost a local hero.
When VanderMeulen read reports about the crash and about Kincheloe's unborn child, she was very moved.
"Mrs. Kincheloe's plight after the death of her illustrious husband caught my heart and I turned to poetry to express what I thought must have been in her heart," VanderMeulen said recently.
She wrote the poem at the end of July 1958, then tucked it into a notebook, where it stayed hidden for 48 years.
When VanderMeulen heard about the planned rededication of the Kincheloe monument, she decided to share her poem with Dan Smith, principal of Kincheloe Elementary School in Dowagiac.
She then learned that Iven and Dorothy Kincheloe have a son, Iven C. Kincheloe III, born in 1957, and that their second child, Jeanine, was the unborn child she wrote about.
A copy of her poem has been forwarded to the Kincheloe family, and VanderMeulen hopes to meet some of the family members at the ceremony.
The general public is also invited to attend the rededication being held on Saturday, Sept. 23, at 3 p.m. at the Kincheloe monument, corner of M-60 and Decatur Road, just east of Cassopolis.
Limited seating will be available.
Audience members may wish to bring lawn chairs.
To Mrs. Kincheloe
by Mary VanderMeulen
What shall I say to you, my unborn child?
Say he was careless, carefree, wild?
Moaning tell you how they found him broken
Proof again that life's but an earthly token?
Shall I say his soul was higher than the sky?
And tell you, "Soar he must or else would die?"
Mere earth his being could not retain.
Ever and eternally aloft it shall remain.
Brave men, reaching for a star
At times over reach, swing out too far,
Too swift, too high, too near eternity
Beyond the understanding of earth's company.
Life is more than this – the mortal frame,
Product of earth, surely; but heaven is its aim.
It was his pleasure to have mastered space,
Viewed intimately pale ether's grace.
And you, small soul, straining here within,
Will you long to know the place where clouds begin?
Be fired with that longing fiercer than a love,
Turning your eyes from mine to lights above?
Fulfillment your unborn strength will surely know,
Star-touched, not part of feeble firmament you'll go.
Soar you will and find that star above
For you must know you are a being of love.
What greater glory, more free from pain
Than to be ever part of sun and wind and rain?
July 28, 1958
Niles, Michigan
On the tragic death of super-sonic pilot,
Officer Iven Kincheloe