Stephen Colbert lost 3 family members in Flight 212 crash. He rarely talks about it.
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9 / 11 / 74 — The untold story of Charlotte’s deadliest plane crash.
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At the end of “The Late Show” on CBS on Sept. 11, 2024, after host Stephen Colbert said good night to the audience and his house band played over the credits, the screen briefly faded to black. The show was apparently over.
Then photos of three people appeared, filling TV screens around America.
There was a picture of an older man who appeared to be in his 50s on the left. Two teenaged boys, wearing suits and ties, smiled from the photo on the right.
The photos stayed silently on the screen for seven seconds, with no explanation or identification of the people pictured. Then the photos disappeared, and the show was really over.
Only if you understood the great tragedy of Stephen Colbert’s life would you have also understood the photos and their significance. The older man on the left was Dr. James Colbert, Stephen’s father. The two teenagers on the right were Peter and Paul Colbert, Stephen’s older brothers. All three Colberts had perished in Charlotte due to the crash of Eastern Flight 212 on Sept. 11, 1974, exactly 50 years before.
The photos acknowledged their deaths a half-century ago in Charlotte to the select few who knew what they meant. But Stephen Colbert didn’t discuss the tragedy’s 50th anniversary on his show, although he certainly could have. And that was completely in character.
Stephen Colbert — the youngest of James and Lorna Colbert’s 11 children — eventually became a famous comedian and talk-show host. But on Sept. 11, 1974, he was 10 years old and the youngest of James and Lorna Colbert’s 11 children.
That morning his brothers Paul, 18, and Peter, 15, were on their way to prep school in Massachusetts. They were accompanied by their father, a 53-year-old medical doctor who was vice president of academic affairs at the Medical University of South Carolina.
Colbert, now 60, couldn’t be reached for this story despite repeated attempts. But since rising to fame as a cast member of Comedy Central’s parody-news series “The Daily Show” in the late ’90s and graduating to hosting his own show for the same network, he has occasionally — very occasionally — discussed the crash’s impact on his life publicly.
During an interview with Colbert in 2012, Oprah Winfrey noted that she’d read that he didn’t really grieve his father and brothers until college. Colbert replied: “I mean, I did in small ways, but ... oh! — then I was in bad shape.”
He said he lost 50 pounds over the course of his freshman year, the first of two he spent at Hampden–Sydney College in Virginia before transferring to Northwestern. “I was just green. I was just so sad about it. I just had time to sort of, I suppose, to be alone with the idea.”
Three years later, for a GQ profile published around the time he officially succeeded David Letterman as host of “The Late Show,” Colbert again briefly touched on the tragedy. He explained that his surviving elder siblings were all grown by the time of the Flight 212 crash, so it was just him and his mother at home in Charleston together for years.
“By her example am I not bitter,” he told the magazine. “By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.”
Colbert talked about the crash most extensively in 2022, as a guest on an episode of Anderson Cooper’s “All There Is” podcast.
Colbert told Cooper he now has difficulty recalling anything about the first 10 years of his life before the plane crash.
“September 11, 1974 — for me, everything before that is in black and white,” Colbert said. “And, matter of fact, I have trouble remembering things. I mean, before that moment, there is such a break in the cable. … My awareness of the world changed. My emotional life changed. My relationship with my mother changed. And my relationship with my father and my brothers changed, too, because now I never really got to know my father. …
“(He was) always this sort of saintly figure in a way. And my brothers are always, you know, about to go play baseball. … They’re just looking for their gloves, all the time.”
On the podcast, Colbert also repeated a story he said he had recently told a friend — about hunting for marsh hen as a boy with his dad and his older brother Billy in South Carolina, not long before the plane crash.
“We got on our little boat and one of these hens just peels off from the group and lands between two stalks of grass in the marsh,” Colbert recalled. “And my dad goes, ‘Flush it out!’ And so my brother Billy pulls us a little bit closer, so he can take the oar he’s got in his hand and flush the duck out. He brings it down exactly where that marsh hen landed, and nothing happens.
“And my dad goes, ‘Try it again.’ … It didn’t startle. It didn’t come out. And so I’m pretty sure … the only bird we got that day my brother Billy killed with an oar.”
Colbert said that at this point in his telling of the story, his friend started laughing. “He goes, ‘Is that a true story? And I said, ‘Oh, there’s nobody to ask. Dad’s gone. And now Bill’s gone. (Billy Colbert died in 1999.) I’ve always thought that was a true story. But, I mean, I was 9. Maybe it’s not a true story.’ …
“And that’s a profound feeling, to know that you’re the only one with that story.”
Colbert told Cooper that, for years after the crash, he feared he would also die when his own children were young — and that he wouldn’t live past age 53, the age his father was when he died in the crash of Flight 212. He kept one of his brother Peter’s belts for decades before eventually giving it to his own son, also named Peter. (Stephen Colbert has two other children, son John and daughter Madeleine. All three are now in their 20s.)
Colbert also said he believed that the subject of grief isn’t addressed often enough.
“It is a need everyone has eventually to deal with in their lives, if they’re lucky in a strange way,” Colbert said. “It means they’ve lived long enough to experience the loss of someone else…. And yet, it’s a subject that just doesn’t get addressed, partly because of the lack of common public ceremony associated with it anymore.... The loneliness of grief is extraordinary. ... Just someone acknowledging that you’re going through it is a consolation.”
Yet if you watch the Oprah Winfrey interview closely, Colbert appears to be at least somewhat uncomfortable talking about the loss of his father and brothers. And although he has opened up since then about the Flight 212 tragedy, he doesn’t do so very often — or very easily — at all.
Just as The Observer was unsuccessful in reaching Colbert, Sonny Hendrix, son of Flight 212 survivor Roy Hendrix and a longtime American Airlines pilot, said he also has failed to connect with the comedian despite the fact that “I have written many handwritten letters and emails to (him).”
Another relative of a Flight 212 passenger, whose family knew the Colberts at the time of the crash, told the Observer: “I know you haven’t been able to talk to Stephen Colbert — ’cause (for the most part) he will not talk to anybody about it.”
This story was originally published September 11, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
