Eric Vickrey: Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, the Spokane Indians, and a Tragic Bus Crash that Changed Everything

Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, the Spokane Indians, and a Tragic Bus Crash that Changed Everything – Eric Vickrey – Rowman & Littlefield – Hardcover – 9781538190722 – 176 pages – $34 – April 16, 2024

I am sure that most of my listeners already know that I have long been a dedicated baseball fan – at least since I was six years old and was captivated by seeing the New York Yankees play the Milwaukee Braves in the 1957 World Series on a tiny black and white television set along with my best friend at the time, Tony Grafton. As a kid, I absorbed baseball history like a sponge, reading everything I could lay my hands on and memorizing the names and statistics of all the great players who lived long before I was born. Even now, I am always attracted to reading books about baseball history, and especially stories I have not ever heard of before.

Eric Vickrey’s terrific book tells just such a story, and while it is about a terrible tragic event that almost no one today knows anything about, his storytelling brings an otherwise obscure story to life for modern readers.

On June 24, 1946, the minor league Spokane Indians baseball team’s bus crashed in Washington state’s Cascade mountains, going off the road and down into a steep ravine, killing nine players and injuring many others.

You do not need to be a baseball history nerd to be captivated by this story because Vickrey spends a considerable amount of the book outlining what happened before and after the accident and exploring the world of minor league baseball in the pre-war and early post-war era. His portraits of the people involved are compelling and based on personal interviews with family members and people who were alive at the time of the accident.

World War II completely disrupted and changed American society in many ways. It had a huge effecy on the major and minor leagues, first during the war, when so many players joined the military that baseball, while carrying on as an important form of entertainment for the folks at home, could not find enough able bodied players to keep the game alive at every level. And then after the war, with hundreds of players returning from military service, the game was suddenly crowded with players of all ages and experience. The Spokane Indians had several top prospects and former big leaguers arrive to play for them that season.

Vickrey explores the lives of three Spokane players in particular—Vic Picetti, Ben Geraghty, and Jack Lohrke—showing the impact of the war on players and their families as well as the challenges they faced in minor-league baseball, and of course, the terrible impact of the crash at the heart of the story.

Eric and I had an entertaining conversation about the players and people, and the tragedy that took place almost sixty years ago that hopefully now will no longer be a forgotten part of American baseball history.

Eric Vickrey is a lifelong baseball fan who enjoys researching and writing about the history of the game. He started as a contributor to the Society for American Baseball Research BioProject. His first book, Runnin’ Redbirds: The World Champion 1982 St. Louis Cardinals, was published by McFarland in 2023. In that book he records the story of the 1982 Cardinals from Whitey Herzog’s rebuild to the final out of the Fall Classic.

“Eric Vickrey has done tremendous research and gives us this well-written, gripping tale in remarkable detail.” — Marty Appel

Author website
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Jon Wlasiuk: An Alternative History of Cleveland

An Alternative History of Cleveland – Jon Wlasiuk – Illustrated by Libby Geboy – Belt Publishing – Paperback – 9781953368799 – 244 pages – paperback – $19.95 – October 15, 2024

This is a terrific book published by the very fine independent Belt Publishing (now part of Arcadia Publishing, a company that specializes in books about locales). Belt has long focused on books about the midwest, specifically the rust belt from which its name derives. One of its goals has been to dispel myths about the midwest and its places, not just for outsiders, but for the people who live there themselves who often do not realize the depth of the places they inhabit.

Jon Wlasiuk’s Alternative History of Cleveland is unusual and surprising. Based on the title of the book, I was expecting to be reading a Howard Zinn style political history of the city, but what Wlasiuk has done is to write a much more inventive, somewhat personal, and thoroughly engrossing narrative that takes us from the geological underpinnings of northast Ohio, through the comings and goings of indigenous peoples, and into the modern historic era, weaving together ecology, sociology, geography, arts and culture, to open our eyes to a place that so many have failed to fully comprehend. The theme throughout is that city and nature are thoroughly intertwined, and there are many people today working to make Cleveland a better place for people and nature to thrive together. Wlasiuk’s vision of the city and its environs is one that all of us can relate to, wherever we ourselves inhabit the earth. It’s a wonderful book I can highly recommend.

Talking with Jon about this book was rewarding and enjoyable for me – I hope you will feel the same after listening to this episode.

Jon Wlasiuk was born in northwest Ohio and earned a PhD in environmental history from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He has taught at colleges throughout the Great Lakes region, and now lives in the Slavic Village neighborhood.

Illustrator Elizabeth (Libby) Geboy was born and raised in Wisconsin, and lives in Colorado. Her illustrations translate favorite subjects in the natural world, specifically food, flora, and fauna into art.

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Belt Publishing

 

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Publishing Talks Interview with Jack David of ECW Press

I began Publishing Talks a number of years ago as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology. Most of these interviews originally involved the future of publishing, books, and culture, talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

Later this series broadened to include conversations to go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me on many levels. I have gotten to speak with visionaries and entrepreneurs, as well as editors and publishers who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues I have met or worked with during the many years I have been in the book business.

More recently, I’ve been talking to book folks about what is going on in publishing today, quite often about the changes in marketing and promotion that have marked all media industries as social media has overwhelmed traditional media, creating an extremely complex and constantly changing environment.

One thing is certain about publishing – there are no final answers, but there are many really important questions that we should be asking all the time.

ECW is a terrific independently owned and operated Canadian publisher, now celebrating its 50th anniversary. I’ve known Jack David, one of its co-founders, for a long time. He is a really smart guy, and notably has managed (with the help of partners and a great staff) to create a thriving independent publishing business across the five decades the book business has changed the most in its history. It is decidedly difficult to be a book publisher in any time and place, but I think being commercially viable for a half century and being based in a relatively small market country with a geographical spread greater than the US makes ECW’s success even more remarkable. ECW does things its own way, to its advantage, in the long run. Unlike most publishers, they publish their own audio books. And their list is built the old fashioned way – through the enthusiasms of its editors. There is much here to be admired and learned from, not just for book publishers, but for anyone interested in media in the modern era.

Talking to Jack about books and culture is always fun. Getting to talk to him about book publishing for this podcast was and is a distinct pleasure I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

Editor’s note: this interview runs longer than most (60 minutes)

Here is what ECW says about itself:

“ECW is Entertainment. ECW is Culture. ECW is Writing.”

Publishers Weekly recognizes ECW Press as one of the most diversified independent publishers in North America. ECW Press has published close to 1,000 books that are distributed throughout the English-speaking world and translated into dozens of languages. In the next year, we’ll release 50+ new titles and will continue to support and promote a vibrant backlist that includes poetry and fiction, pop-culture and political analysis, sports books, biography, and travel guides. Books by writers whose names you know and love — and by those who we’re very pleased to introduce for the first time. Who are we? After three decades, we still get asked about our name, those three little letters: ECW.

At first the acronym was self-descriptive: Essays on Canadian Writing (the name of the journal of literary criticism we started in 1974). But as the company grew and changed, our name, in our minds, also changed. We’ve heard the company called Essential Canadian Writing, Excellent Contemporary Writing, or, more recently, Extreme Cutting-Edge Writing. And these names have been, and still are, appropriate. But now we realize that each of those letters represents a particular strain of ECW Press’s diverse passions — Entertainment, Culture, Writing.

ECW Press

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