If you watched Wednesday night’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, you may have noticed an unusual end card with photos of three people in the show’s closing moments.
The card, which was presented without explanation, was a quiet tribute to Colbert’s father and two brothers, who died 50 years ago this week—on September 11, 1974.
James William Colbert, Jr., 53, and his sons Paul, 18, and Peter, 15, were on a flight from Charleston, South Carolina to Chicago when the plane crashed, killing 74 people on board.
Stephen Colbert was just 10 years old at the time.
Colbert did not directly address the anniversary on Wednesday night’s show, but in the past he has described the deaths of his father and brothers as the defining moment of his young life.
“For years, I sort of thought that that was my secret name,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 2012. “That the loss was my name, if you know what I mean… [the experience] is who you are.”
Speaking with Anderson Cooper a decade later, Colbert revealed that he has a hard time remembering his life before the crash.
“September 11, 1974—for me, everything before that is in black and white,” Colbert told Cooper. “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.”
