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

February 9, 2025 by David
Filed under Non-Fiction, WritersCast

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