By Jim Heffernan
 |
| Bernie Gerl, Duluth Dukes baseball player, 1948 Source: Chicago Sun Times, The Herald News, July 12, 2013 |
Talk about a name from the past…
Last Sunday I went to a Huskies baseball game at Wade
Stadium, and just outside the ballpark before the game a Duluth man escorting
an elderly gentleman guided his older companion over to me for an introduction.
“Meet Bernie Gerl,” the Duluthian said.
Recognition of the name was immediate. I was 8 years old the
summer of 1948, the morning paper in the hands of my father at the breakfast
table, the front page headline announcing that five members of the Duluth Dukes
baseball club had been killed in a fiery bus-truck collision near St. Paul.
Many others were injured, one of whom later died of the injuries.
Never a big baseball fan, nevertheless I’d attended quite a
few Dukes games at Wade Stadium with my father in those days. There were two
names on that team that I knew: “Peanuts” Peterson and Bernie Gerl.
Peterson was a local hero because he was a local boy. He
came out of Proctor and made the Dukes’ roster, no small thing in the world of
professional baseball. The Dukes were a farm team of the St. Louis Cardinals
comprised of players from all over. Peterson died in the crash.
The other player whose name I knew was Bernie Gerl, probably
because he was such an effective player, the team’s 21-year-old catcher. Gerl
survived the crash, but just barely.
An excellent account of the crash and Gerl’s fate and later
life appears in the Thursday (July 18) Duluth News Tribune, written by DNT
sportswriter Jon Nowacki. (Read it HERE) Gerl was honored during Sunday’s Huskies game with
Rochester on the 65th anniversary of the crash year. Gerl is the
last survivor of that team.
Meeting Bernie Gerl, someone who was part of my early life
in an unlikely way, was haunting. We shook hands and I told him how well I
remembered the tragedy. “Duluth kids were crying,” I recalled. He knew.
Now 86 and looking mighty fit for a mid-octogenarian, after
he recovered from his injuries he played ball again, retiring in 1953 and
returning to his Joliet, Ill., home town. (It’s all in Nowacki’s story.) But
he’s visited Duluth in the intervening summers, and has many friends here. We
recalled our mutual friend, the late Bruce Bennett, long-time Duluth newspaper
sports editor and columnist. Bruce was handicapped, born with no arms below the
elbows. Gerl recalled golfing with Bennett, saying “he could drive the ball 150
yards straight down the middle of the fairway.”
It was amazing to meet someone now whose name I knew so long
ago and who was so admired by my generation of Duluth boys. It was
life-affirming to see this 86-year-old survivor of a terrible tragedy surviving
so well 65 years later.
I hadn’t been to a ball game at Wade Stadium since the Gerl
era of the Dukes. I used to sit along the first base line with my father, who
would smoke fat RoiTan brand cigars as he watched the games and I restlessly
looked around at everything except the action (as I said, I wasn’t a fan).
Now I was there with my son and grandsons, two of whom are
about the age I was when I went to Dukes games with my dad. We sat along the
first base line where I’d sat three-score-plus years ago with my own father,
long gone.
I missed the fragrance of a good cigar, but there were two
constants: Wade Stadium and Bernie Gerl. Two out of three ain’t bad.
