Sometimes the difference between heroes and fools is time. Kenova, W. Va., city council president Ric Griffith finds himself being portrayed as a little of both.

"I've always been the village idiot," Griffith said. "I didn't expect the nation to find out."

Somewhere in his home, Griffith has a paper bag filled with four tail pieces from the Southern Airways DC-9 that crashed near Kenova 32 years ago, killing 75 members of the Marshall football traveling party. It's still the worst sports-related air disaster in history.

Three days after the crash, Millard Robertson, now 83, walked through the forested hills where the plane went down and for some reason picked up the piece of the tail section, about half the size of a piece of paper (it has since broken into four pieces). He kept it for 12 years before turning it over to his friend Griffith.

Marshall coach Bob Pruett is among many torn over the remnant issue. (AP)

"It's still in the same paper bag," said Griffith, who runs a pharmacy in the town of 3,500 located eight miles from the Marshall campus. "Whenever Marshall had a big game or a bad game, I'd often get it out and often look at it."

Now he has publicly suggested that it might be time to display the remnants, either in a memorial near the crash site or as a "motivational tool" for the football team. That's when, in some people's minds, Ric Griffith became the village idiot, or worse, West Virginia's.

The issue has touched Marshall and the region down to its very soul. There were references by Griffith to the plane pieces being treated the same as Howard's Rock at Clemson or Notre Dame's "Play Like A Champion Today" sign, which are touched by players before each home game.

A recent Marshall Herald-Dispatch reader survey showed that 36 percent thought the idea was in bad taste. Marshall coach Bob Pruett seemingly is trying to distance himself from the situation until he knows more. Griffith and his partner in the project, Carl Berry, have been criticized. They say early wire service stories were hurtful to their cause, using the term "good luck charm."

"Oh gosh, where do they get this 'good luck charm'?" said Berry, a Marshall alumni association member. "It's being done in great reverence. It's so screwed up it's not funny."

This is where the time element comes in. When is it OK to honor the dead with such icons?

"Almost like the sacraments of the church, they have a purpose of representing something else," Griffith said, "the sacrifice and rebirth of Marshall's program from that tragedy."

But using plane parts for some kind of inspiration would be unprecedented. Howard's Rock is an inanimate object. Several teams touch signs or horseshoes or some kind of symbol above a locker room door before taking the field.

There is no manual on the subject. There are only a handful of programs attached to such a tragedy. How they deal with it is their business. John Madden doesn't fly to this day, citing the crash that killed many of his former teammates at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Madden, a graduate assistant at the time, stayed behind to coach a junior varsity game. That same weekend, a plane went down near Toledo, Ohio, killing 16 Cal Poly players.

A month before the Marshall crash, Wichita State lost 14 members of its football program in a crash in the Rocky Mountains. The school dropped football in 1986. Evansville lost its entire 14-member basketball team in a 1977 crash. Administrators recently questioned its place in Division I. After a study, the school reaffirmed its place in the NCAA's highest division.

It has been only 14 months since an Oklahoma State plane went down, killing 10 people after a basketball game at Colorado.

Looking back through the decades, Marshall might not be where it is if not for the school's recovery from the crash.

At the time, the school was pulling itself out of an athletic scandal that got it kicked out of the MAC. After the crash, the school received both emotional and financial help

It hasn't been easy. For the longest time, Marshall was known as the state's under-funded school, operating in the substantial shadow of giant West Virginia.

Marshall recovered, at least on the field. After the crash, some people wanted to disband the program. But in the 1990s, Thundering Herd football was the winningest program in the country. Pruett has produced a series of star quarterbacks. Current starter Byron Leftwich might be the NFL's No. 1 draft choice this time next year.

Pruett, who played at Marshall from 1961 through 1965, lost his former position coach in the crash. He has turned down offers to go to bigger, better programs to stay at his alma mater, still a special place.

"I think we could place it in a case in our athletic facility and keep it in reverence," Pruett said of the plane pieces. "I've never said we're going to get it for 'good luck.' That's sort of morbid. Certainly there is a huge soft spot in my heart."

It's obvious Pruett is waiting to see which way the wind blows public opinion. The same goes for Berry and Griffith. There will be a Kenova city council meeting on April 30, when Griffith plans to at least pursue a memorial.

"Those victims and that event are ingrained into the being of Marshall," Griffith said. "You're immediately caught by their current success, but the history of that event is written into the minds of everyone."

It is, in Griffith's mind, perhaps time to honor those dead in these unique minds.

Sunday marked the 71st anniversary of Knute Rockne's fatal plane crash near Bazaar, Kan. Eighty-four-year-old Easter Heathman, who lives nearby, still takes visitors to a remote memorial and can still scrape up pieces of glass from Rockne's plane for visitors as souvenirs.

Notre Dame itself has displayed parts of Rockne's plane at the Athletic and Convocation Center.

So what is honor and what is morbid? The mere suggestion of displaying the plane pieces has caused controversy. But don't blame the sources who have dared say it's time to remember the dead.

Griffith, 53, saw heavy combat in Vietnam and knows about the personal demons that survive witnessing violent death.

"There were two personal tragedies I had," Griffith said. "The death of a guy on our fire base during a mortar attack, seeing that young man die. Another was seeing a little (Vietnamese) girl that was shot trying to run across the street during a firefight.

"The little girl ran across the street to be with her mother. The screams of that woman ..."

During his tour of duty, Griffith specially remembered a note from his mother in 1971. In the midst of all the death he had seen and experienced, his mother recounted Marshall's emotional victory over Xavier that year with only freshmen and sophomores.

"She was crying when she wrote it," Griffith said.

Berry, a registered nurse in 1970, had actually bought tickets with a friend to fly with the team on the fatal flight. The pair had to work that day and gave their tickets to wives of local doctors who were boosters.

"This is close to my heart," Berry said. "I remember what I was doing when the plane went down. I was with a friend helping tune up an old, old International Scout. My beeper went off."

Berry spent one night at the hospital -- "Of course, no one ever came." -- and three days identifying bodies.

When Griffith dared pull out the pieces at the pharmacy and tell Berry of his plan, "I almost cried. I told Ric I had to go and get out of his drug store. It was a little deep for me. I had to stop and think about it."

"Look at the cross," Griffith said. "It was a hated symbol of Roman tyranny. It has become for us the symbol of salvation. I'm not equating the two by any means, but sometimes things that have a negative history are symbolic of triumph."

Whatever the result, Griffith said the school cannot deny its history.

"I cannot separate that from myself," Griffith said. "I cannot separate any success Marshall has from sadness that you naturally feel at those people not being part of it. It's always present. Every game, every triumph."