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Nonfiction baseball writer ⁠Eric Vickrey⁠ comes on to discuss his terrifically poignant and inspiring book, ⁠Season of Shattered Dreams⁠, which recounts the deadliest accident in the history of American professional sports, the 1946 Spokane Indians’ tragic crash as their bus was passing over Washington’s Snoqualmie Pass.

Here are some highlights –

12:23-14:45: “No one from that [‘46 Spokane Indians] team is living, or anyone associated with the team. But there are some family members still around; I probably couldn’t have done nearly as thorough of a job without their input and the information they provided. For instance, Jack Lohrke’s son provided me with his military documents that told me what infantry and battalion he was in, so then I was able to kind of really dig into that and kinda track his movements throughout the war, which is how I wrote that first chapter about him. … And then a couple of family matters actually had scrapbooks of old letters and photographs and things that they saved and they were able to share those. And that was really cool ‘cuz I got to kinda get the players’ voices in the book even though they had passed nearly 80 years ago.”

22:29-23:55: “A very fine line to walk. I was able to reach I think 12 families of the 16 players involved, and they had different sort of levels of involvement and willingness. Some were very excited about the project. There were a couple family members who found it actually too painful to talk about even though it’s been this long, almost 80 years…but still were so supportive, I would say. And I got some very nice letters when the book came out from family members saying, ‘Hey, thank you for honoring our relative in this way.’ And that was kind of ultimately my goal of the book. … I certainly kept in mind as I was writing, like the chapter about the accident, for example, that family members would be reading these painful details. … It was just kind of pulling all the information together and telling this story accurately but in a respectful way.”

30:31-30:50: “It’s funny. Both of those guys [Milt Cadinha and Joe Faria] actually blew out their arms the following year, almost in the same manner, in the same way after throwing 200 innings over the course of a few months. So even though they weren’t directly involved in the accident, they were still significantly affected.”

39:53-41:21: “In Jack [Lohrke]’s case, he actually wore, for the first couple years after the accident at least, under his New York Giants uniform he would wear this red shirt that he pulled off the bus that he took with him that day of the accident. It was kinda his way of honoring his teammates, so he did that, but yet he never spoke about the accident. He was very reluctant to talk about it. … His [Ben Geraghty’s] dream was to manage in the major leagues, and so he continued managing in the minor leagues and that meant he had to ride the bus. So he was sort of reliving this accident over and over, and he coped with that by drinking heavily on bus rides. And ultimately that led to some health complications at a pretty young age. They both had very different ways of coping, and their lives took different turns.”

If you like what you’ve heard, be sure to check out Season of Shattered Dreams.

OTNB’s previous book specials, which featured Evan Ream and Brad Balukjian, can be found here and here, respectively.

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Music: “Who Likes to Party” by Kevin MacLeod.