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Services For Michael Wallin Are Tuesday

Funeral services for 33 year old Michael L. Wallin will be on Tuesday, September 16th. Mr. Wallin was killed in an airplane accident at Sisseton, South Dakota on Thursday evening, September 11.

Funeral services will be at 10 a.m. in the First Methodist Church in Blair. Rev. Gordon Patterson will officiate with arrangements being handled by the Campbell Funeral Home. Burial will be in the Hillcrest Cemetery in Omaha.

Michael Wallin was born at Sargeant, Nebraska on October 5, 1946. He lived at 1616 Adams Street in Blair. He had never married and was in several business ventures including the Data Processing Systems in Blair.

Mr. Wallin was a graduate of University of Nebraska and was a Viet Nam Veteran in the Air Force. He was very active in youth programs in Blair including the Little League and the Youth Golf program at the Blair Golf Club. He held several offices in the Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity and the Alumni Association. He had also been the executive Director of the Blair Chamber of Commerce for several years.

He is survived by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. W. . “Pete” Wallin of Omaha.

Pallbearers will be: Rick Banta, Steve Brown, Joe Kobes, John O’Hanlon, Mark Harrison, Phil Perry, Roger Lorsch and Robert Elliott.

Memorials have been set up in Mike Wallin’s name. They are for the Blair Golf Club Youth Program and the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity Foundation.

Omaha World Herald

(Veteran Flag)

WALLIN-Mike, age 33 yrs., Blair. Survived by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. V. L. (Pete) Wallin, Omaha.

SERVICES First Methodist Church, Blair, Tues. 10 AM. Burial Hillcrest Cemetery, Omaha

CAMPBELL-FUNERAL HOME 444 So. 17th Blair, Neb

Omaha World Herald Sept 1980

Friendship Bound Crash Victims

Two Blair businessmen killed in a plane crash last week near Sisseton, S.D., were close friends who shared a love of sports, flying and children, a friend said Saturday.

The description came from Margaret Beck, secretary to Blair Bank Senior Vice President Maurice “Lyn” Wederquist, 36, pilot of the plane. Also killed in the Thursday crash was co-pilot Mike Wallin, 33, head of the Blair Account Systems, a collection agency, and a former executive director of the Blair Chamber of Commerce.

Mrs. Beck said the two had flown bank President Howard C. Hansen to Canada Wednesday in the bank’s plane.

She said Hansen had gone to Canada to prepare his cabin thee for winter. Wederquist and Wallin died on the way home.

“Lyn was super. He was everybody’s friend,” Mrs. Beck said Saturday, her voice choking with emotion. “I worked for him for six and a half years. He always remembered birthdays and secretary’s day. He was my little girl’s godfather. He remembered her birthday and Christmas.”

A native of Randolph, Iowa, Wederquist developed an early love of flying, Mrs. Beck said.

“Their house was in the flight pattern of Eppley Airfield,” she said. “There was a fellow at Randolph who would take him up in a plane.”

Mrs. Beck said Wederquist started flying three years ago and had been president of the Blair Aeros, a flight club.

“He was a very capable pilot,” she said. “He was very safe and cautious. He always check the plane out.”

Wallin shared that love of flying, along with a devotion to the Blair Little League, she said.

“He was just like Lyn,” she said. “They were very close friends.”

Mrs. Beck said Wederquist was devoted to his wife, Judy, and their sons, Shawn and Kyle. “His children were his life.”

A “Super Athlete” who played softball in Blair’s “Over 30” League, Wederquist also was a past president of the Blair Little League, she said. Wallin, a bachelor, was Little League secretary.

“Mike will probably be remembered as everyone’s Santa Claus,” she said. “Every Christmas Eve, he dressed up and went around and visited all his friends with small children. It made him happy to make kids happy.”

Mrs. Beck said that when word came early Friday morning that the plane carrying the two was missing, friends kept a vigil at the bank. “People sat there praying,” she said.

It ended about 8 p.m. when friends and family learned what had happened, she said.

Funeral services for Wederquist will be at 1:30 p.m. Monday at First Methodist Church in Blair, with burial at 4 p.m. in Randolph. Other survivors include his mother, Eleanor Wederquist of Randolph.

Funeral services for Wallin, a native of Broken Bow, Neb., will be at 10 a.m. Tuesday at First Methodist Church in Blair, with burial in Omaha’s Hillcrest Cemetery. Wallin is survived by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. V. L. “Pete” Wallin of Omaha.

World Herald New Service

2 Blair Businessmen Die in Airplane Crash

Sisseton, S.D. – The wreckage of a light airplane and the bodies of two Blair, Neb., men were found Friday afternoon after a four-hour search in a remote area near Sisseton in northeast South Dakota.

Trooper Tom Sandfick of the South Dakota Highway Patrol identified the victims as Maurice Wederquist, 36, and Michael Wallin, 33, both of Blair.

Wederquist was an officer of the Blair Bank, according to an official of Campbell Funeral Home in Blair.

Wallin, a former executive director of the Blair Chamber of Commerce, was a business associate of Wederquist but was not employed by the bank, the funeral home spokesman said.

Sandfick said the men had stopped in Sisseton for refueling Thursday night after leaving Canada en route to Omaha. One of the passengers apparently called Blair from the Sisseton Airport, authorities said.

They departed Sisseton in the single-engine Cessna 210 about 10 p.m. Thursday. It is believed that the plane crashed about 10:45 p.m.

Remote Area

A relative of one of the men notified authorities about 5:30 a.m. Friday that the plane was late arriving in Omaha. A search of the area began about 1 p.m. Friday after inclement weather cleared, Sandfick said.

Maj. Pat Schafer with the CAP office in Sioux Falls, S.D., said the emergency locating transmitter in the plane led searchers to the Roberts County area. A CAP search plane located the plane about 4:40 p.m.

It took land vehicles more than an hour to get to the scene of the crash – a hilly, remote pastureland 16 miles south and one mile west of Sisseton, Sanfick said. Wederquist and Wallin were dead at the scene, he said. It was not immediately known which man was piloting the craft.

Sandfick said conditions were foggy and cloudy with a light drizzle at the time the plane went down. He said the wreckage indicated that the accident was a crash.

The plane did not burn, but it broke up as it skipped along the terrain, Sandfick said. The wreckage was spread over a 60 foot path, he said.

On Fishing Trip

Wederquist and Wallin had taken off Thursday evening from Kenora, Ontario, Canada on the northern tip of the Lake of the Woods northwest of International Falls, Minn., Sandfick said. It is believe the men were on a fishing trip.

Federal Aviation Administration officials from Rapid City, S.D., and National Transportation Safety Board representatives from Kansas City, Mo., were to begin an investigation of the crash today.

Another Article Blair Newspapers

Two Blair Business Partners Killed In South Dakota Plane Crash

Funeral services were held in Blair for two Blair men who died in an airplane accident in South Dakota. The two men were Maurice Lyndon Wederquist, 36, 506 South 23rd and Michael Wallin, 33, 1616 Adams Street, Blair.

Mr. Wederquist was a Vice President of the Blair Bank and pilot of the plane. Mike Wallin was an executive in charge of sales for the Data System business located in Blair.

The two men were business associates and long time friends and were returning from a trip to Kenora, Canada. The accident took place about fifteen miles south of Sisseton, South Dakota at about 10:45 on Thursday night, September 11th, near the community of Peever, South Dakota.

Mr. Wederquist, Mike Wallin and Howard Hanson, Jr. had left Blair at about 6 a.m. on Thursday, September 11, for Kenora, Canada. They had spent some time at the Hanson cabin and prepared to have a boat pulled back to Blair for the winter. At about 7:30 p.m., Thursday evening, Mr. Wallin and Mr. Wederquist left Kenora for the return flight to Blair. Mr. Hanson was going to pull the boat back the next day.

Flight service radio transmission recordings show that the flight plan was filed with a stop for customs at the Canadian border and then on to Blair. Records show that the plane did stop for customs and then altered its course to avoid some bad weather. The plane radioed Hibbing, Minnesota Flight Service and closed its Flight plan as they were landing at Sisseton because of bad weather.

According to a report, from a Sisseton news media source, the two men had reportedly gone to a motel in Sisseton and planned to spend the night. The motel was full and the men decided to check weather again and come on into Blair. A resident near the hills, south of Sisseton, said that the weather in the valley was clear but that the hills were shrouded in fog with light rain. He said he heard a plane flying low just about the time the crash apparently took place.

At about 10:30 p.m. Mr. Wederquist called his wife in Blair and said that he had checked weather and ceilings were better down toward Nebraska and the weather was getting better at Sisseton too. He said that they would be back home by midnight. When the plane didn’t return home as scheduled, Mrs. Wederquist contacted Michael Jensen, of Blair, and asked if he could do some checking for her. He contacted the Flight Service system and found that the last reported contact was the landing in Sisseton. He then contacted the airport operator at Sisseton who said he saw them take off heading south just shortly after 10:30 Thursday night. He did say that weather at Sisseton had become better but there still were some thunderstorms south of the area.

The Air Force search team was contacted and the possible route was plotted into their computers.

The search was started Friday morning but poor weather kept observation flights down until Friday afternoon. In the late afternoon an ELT signal was hard by an observation plane. An “ELT” is an Emergency Locator Transmitter that is armored and activates only by impact. The emergency frequency will allow search planes to home in on the location. Because of the continued poor weather conditions the observation plane could not immediately find the downed plane. Search teams on the ground did find the aircraft in a pasture on a hillside. The terrain was about 900 feet higher than the Sisseton airport and about fifteen miles south.

According to law officers, the area where the plane hit the hill was at about the 2000 foot level. The hills are listed at 2135 feet on the aeronautical charts. The hill was the last one before the terrain drops low again going south. The area was very hard to reach even though it was just two miles from the Interstate Highway. According to persons from that area, there have been many airplane accidents in those hills under similar conditions. Jack Adams, of the Sisseton, South Dakota Courier, “For some reason there is rain and fog in the hills many evenings when it is clear in the valley.”

~~~ Obituary courtesy of the Washington County Genealogical Society. Newspaper clippings on file in the Blair Public Library at Blair, Nebraska.~~~