One of the most inspiring moments in the life of U.S. Sen. Angus King happened on a cold Tuesday morning on Feb. 10, 1959, a week after rock ‘n’ roll legend Buddy Holly perished in a blinding storm in a plane that plummeted into a cornfield.

Since King was just 14 years old, the event may not have happened quite the way he recalls — “some of my friends remember it differently,” King admits — but there’s no doubt it proved life-changing.

At the time, the future senator was a freshman at a high school in a pretty, pleasant section of Alexandria, Virginia. It had 1,400 students, every one of them white. The city, not yet the thriving suburb it later became, had three high schools, two for whites and one for blacks.

They were so far apart culturally that King, whose father was a lawyer, said he never knew anybody who attended classes at the school for black children.

The city’s train station had separate waiting rooms for each race and drinking fountains reserved for whites and for “colored,” King said in a recent interview.

It was “a totally different world” in the 1950s, he said. “We may as well have been on different planets. Looking back on it, it’s unbelievable.”

Five years after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered an end to segregated schools with “all deliberate speed,” educators in Virginia and across the South were in no hurry to comply, even in districts like Alexandria so nearby that from some vantage points people could easily see the U.S. Capitol dome.

Fed up with the paltry pace, a federal district judge, Albert Bryan, ordered Alexandria’s school board to admit nine black students to three of its all-white schools with no further delay.

So that month, two African-American teens — 14-year-old Patsy Ragland and her 13-year-old brother Jimmy — cracked the color line at Francis C. Hammond High School, one of the first steps toward the dismantling of a Jim Crow system that had divided youngsters along racial lines for generations.

As King remembers it, police cars surrounded his school and tensions ran high. Two U.S. marshals escorted the two children inside without a hitch, he said.

“But at that point, no one had figured out what the next piece of choreography was — how these young people were to find their way in this new school,” King remembered in a speech he delivered last summer at the launching of a new naval ship at Bath Iron Works.

“All the emphasis was on getting them through the door,” King said.

“Many of us were gathered in the atrium of the school,” the senator said, “not knowing what to do. It was a moment of tension that could have gone either way.”

He once told a reporter there were as many as 300 students gathered in a semi-circle in front of the brother and sister who had just entered Hammond’s halls.

At that instant, in King’s account, a voice called out from the back of the crowd. “Excuse me. Let me through. Excuse me,” someone said with enough volume to fill the space.

“We looked around,” King said, “and it was a guy named Mike Vopatek, who was the captain of the basketball team, the quarterback of the football team, the president of the senior class.”

In short, King said, the guy was “the campus hero.”

“He walked through the crowd, through that silent moment, and went up to Jim Ragland and shook his hand,” King said. “My name is Mike Vopatek. Can I help you find your class?”

Looking back on that morning as a 72-year-old junior senator from Maine, King said, “That was heroism. That was a life-changing event for those of us who watched it.”

“Mike Vopatek was 18 years old. He didn’t have to think about it, but he knew he was making, potentially, a sacrifice. This was 1959 in Virginia,” King said. “But what he did inspired us. It inspired me. It lives with me.”

King traces his life in public service — and his commitment to civil rights — in large part to what he saw that morning when two black children walked into a new world.

He said that what he learned that winter day as a high school freshman that has stuck with him every day since is the importance of leadership, “of how one person can change a situation from dangerous to calm.”

“All of us have the capacity to be good or bad and it’s all in how we’re led,” King said.

When everyone else stood silent, unsure what would happen next, he said Vopatek stepped forward and offered a seemingly simple gesture of decency whose impact continues even after all these years.

Maybe that’s how it actually happened.

News accounts, including one by Anthony Lewis in The New York Times, merely noted the pair had entered their new school without incident.

Under the headline “Integration Peaceful at All Three Schools,” the Alexandria Gazette reported that “press services, television news cameramen and newsreel photographers stood at some distance from the building to record the moment for the rest of the United States and other countries. In all instances, what they found was quiet, little controversy and the beaming faces of the new students and their relatives who accompanied them.”

A front page photograph showed the two Ragland children and their mother walking toward the school at 8:37 a.m. There were no police or U.S. marshals in sight.

Kassy Benson, a classmate of King’s who still adores him, said memories of that morning differ.

As she recalls it, “We were not allowed to gather that day in the lobby or anywhere else. The teachers, who served as hall monitors that day, made sure we moved along.”

“Any group of students quickly scattered,” she said. “We were curious, but trust me, in those days we feared our teachers.”

King said he “could swear I remember being in a group” but knows there are others who don’t think there ever was one.

Yet Bill Heimann, also a freshman at the time, said he also recalls a crowd of about 75 to 100 students “standing right out in front of the main doors” when the two black children walked up.

He said it was “a dramatic setting,” kind of like a stage, and that police, reporters and television cameras were gathered around.

But, Heimann said, not much actually happened. “It settled down real quick,” he said.

“All of our class leaders were asked to help keep the calm that day,” Benson said, but everything went smoothly so they didn’t have to do much of anything.

Outside, she said, there were some police officers but their cars didn’t circle the school.

“There were no demonstrations or anything like that,” said Joe Moraski, another classmate who doesn’t recall any kind of problem or gathering that day.

And Vopatek?

“Mike did not intervene” that morning, Benson said. But, she added, he “helped Jim Ragland find his way when he came across him in a hallway looking lost.”

Heimann said he also has no memory of any student doing anything unusual when the Raglands appeared in front of the school or later in the day.

But a number of students who were there that day said it’s always possible something took place that they either never knew about or have forgotten.

King, who has met with Vopatek in recent times, said there is “no doubt” that the older student “intervened publicly, and I guess I would say notoriously, to help this kid — and it was a big deal.”

There was, in any case, courage aplenty at Hammond High on that notable day.

As King put it, the Ragland children “were heroes, too,” displaying “sacrifice and love” to have faced the possible dangers in their path.

A younger sister of the two high school students, Sarah Ragland, 8, was simultaneously crossing the line to attend a once all-white elementary school nearby.

“Brave family and mother determined to get a good education for her children,” Benson said.

Whatever the hardships they faced, the Raglands also found at least some acceptance.

Sarah Ragland told a reporter years later that when students passed around Valentine cards at the end of that first week, “I got a Valentine from every kid in the class. My name was spelled a hundred ways, but that didn’t matter. The message was there.”

Moraski said that Jimmy Ragland landed in his physical education class at the end of the day. He remembers wrestling with Ragland on the big mats in the gym. Once, he said, somebody called Ragland “a tar baby,” but generally everything was fine.

And while there were many in Alexandria who opposed integration, they were in the minority. That year’s state Senate election in the city pitted a die-hard segregationist former mayor against a contender who stood up for the African-American students. The old-school racist lost two-to-one, a clear sign of where the community stood on the issue.

Efforts to reach both Vopatek and the Ragland family proved fruitless. Patsy died some years ago.

Moraski remembers hanging after high school with Jimmy Ragland at Alexandria’s Tops Drive-Inn, home of the “Sir” Loiner sandwich. Both young men had hot rods. Jimmy’s was a 1957 Chevrolet, Moraski said, with the license plate number A425409 that accurately described its 425-horsepower 409 engine. But it’s not clear where his old pal is now.

Several other former students, who declined to speak on the record, said their memories match up pretty closely with Benson’s but none were entirely sure they could trust their fading recollections.

Benson and several others said that while they didn’t view Vopatek as a hero that winter day almost six decades ago, he was a wholly admirable young man. Everyone thought the world of him, so it’s no surprise King remembers him at the center of things, they said. After high school, he attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and is today a financial advisor in northern Virginia.

Despite the breakthrough that allowed the Raglands to attend the school, Hammond never did open the doors wide to African-American students. It wound up closing in 1971 when Alexandria consolidated all of its high schools into one, T.C. Williams High, named for the superintendent who held out against integration until the judge left him no choice.

King’s own class showed it wasn’t exactly enlightened on racial issues.

A class history compiled afterward, which didn’t mention integration at all, pointed out how much fun everyone had at the junior-senior prom when “the bare gymnasium was transformed into a beautiful Southern Plantation complete with mansion and magnolia trees.”

Still, King emerged with a new appreciation for the fight to end segregation. When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the future senator was sitting on a tree branch with a young African-American man beside the Reflecting Pool, listening intently and watching history in the making.

Something clearly happened that day at Hammond High School that touched a senator’s soul.

King said he’s told Vopatek “that I tell this story, and he’s sort of embarrassed about it. But the importance of the story is that leadership takes place every day, in large ways and small.”

In the end, the details don’t matter so much. What matters is that one of Maine’s senators learned a lesson as a teenager on that nearly-forgotten morning almost 58 years ago that helped propel him to national leadership and a life rich in public service.

scollins@sunjournal.com