Zenith City: Stories from Duluth

Keep Your Eyes Open

on july , , I was nine years old and mad for baseball. I played on age-appropriate baseball and softball teams, both based at the Central Field playground on Tenth Avenue East and Eleventh Street, about a block from our house. That morning I learned that the day before, the bus carrying the Duluth Dukes, a professional team in the class C Northern League, had collided with a truck that had crossed the center line on Highway  in Roseville, Minnesota. The team was on its way to a game in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Five members of the Dukes, including the manager George “Red” Treadway, pitcher Don Schuchmann, infielder Steve Lazar, utility man Gil Tribl, and star centerfielder Gerald “Peanuts” Peterson, were killed in the crash. All the other players suffered season-ending or career-ending injuries , including third baseman Elmer Schoendienst, younger brother of Red, the St. Louis Cardinals star. Only four from that team would ever play again. Among those were Mel McGaha, who eventually made the big leagues as a coach and manager. All my neighborhood chums had baseball heroes on the Dukes team. We listened to the play-by-play radio broadcasts by Bill Kirby on WDSM and pored over the box scores in the next day’s Duluth News Tribune. Peanuts Peterson, who batted left-handed like I did, was my favorite, and in  he was voted the team’s most popular player by Dukes fans. At the time I didn’t realize it might have been because Peanuts was practically a local boy—a standout three-sport athlete from Proctor, a Duluth suburb. We boys rooted mightily for our Dukes, cajoling parents into buying us their T-shirts and ball caps. The luckier among us might get a Dukes sweatshirt for his birthday. keep your eyes open 113 114 | Keep Your Eyes Open One Saturday morning, my brother David and I took the East Eighth Street bus downtown where a couple of Dukes players were signing autographs and meeting fans at the Tri State Sports store on Superior Street. Peanuts Peterson was supposed to be there, but he wasn’t, and so David and I stood in line to have a pitcher, Joe Svetlick, sign our official Duluth Dukes scorecards. I was mildly disappointed, but I brightened when Svetlick picked up my scorecard and, mussing my hair with his hand, said, “Hey, how you doin’, slugger?” He gave me his signature and instantly became my favorite pitcher. But since I wasn’t a pitcher, Peanuts remained my favorite everyday player. on that tragic july morning we learned to our horror that the fatal, fiery crash had wiped out our Dukes. No survivor would be able to continue with the season. The parent club of the Dukes, the St. Louis Cardinals, cobbled up a squad from within the farm system , but they were players we didn’t know and had never heard of, and as it turned out, the team didn’t make the playoffs. I don’t think I ever saw the faux Dukes play a game. I don’t recall any of our gang crying over the loss, but we were devastated. How could baseball players die like that? “It probably happened so fast that they died before they could remember to keep their eyes open,” Larry offered. None of our gang laughed at the comment because we believed it. Death meant closed eyelids; immortality beckoned, we reasoned, if when faced with death or serious illness, you persisted in keeping the eyelids wide apart. Still, we worried that something like that could also happen to us; we’d be dead before we could think to keep our eyes open. I suppose my boyhood buddies and I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old when we began having serious discussions about mortality. All of us had been thinking about what would happen to us if one or both of our parents suddenly died. We knew parents of children died because there was an orphanage on Fifteenth Avenue East and Fifth Street, not far from our neighborhood, and most of us had seen the large three-story house. Keep Your Eyes Open | 115 It troubled us that it wasn’t only old people who died. One boy in our crowd had a cousin who died when he was a baby. “He was too little to...