(Click and click again to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 3, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 6, 2024
Book salutes Spokane ballplayers who died in 1946 bus wreck
By Clay Eals
Knee-deep in ferns and brambles, clambering over bumpy ground between spindly alders above Denny Creek Road near Snoqualmie Pass, I’m following Eric Vickrey. On his phone, he eyes Google Maps to verify we’re treading the brush in the right direction.
The afternoon’s elements — warm rays of sunlight, crunches of bark beneath each footstep, even my scratched calves — evoke nature’s eternal cycle of life. Yet we are on a search for death.
More precisely, we seek a flat stretch where, on the rainy evening of June 24, 1946, a westerly Bremerton-bound bus swerved to miss an oncoming car along Highway 10 (today’s Interstate 90), careened 300 feet down a steep southside embankment, hurtled to a halt and burst into flames. The crash killed nine bus riders, all members of the minor-league Spokane Indians baseball team.
Based on a news report pinning the calamity 2.9 miles west of the pass, we find a place as likely as any for where the bus landed and burned. To Vickrey, it’s an “eerie” spot, but also peaceful, save for the surrounding hum of I-90 traffic.
Reaching the site provides a form of closure for the author of “Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, the Spokane Indians and a Tragic Bus Crash That Changed Everything,” released this year by Rowman & Littlefield.
The topic first hit book form in 2007 with the spiritually fictional “Until the End of the Ninth” (Beth Bollinger, Rooftop Publishing). But Vickrey, a physician assistant at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center who splits time between West Seattle and Port Townsend, took a wholly factual approach, exploring not only the wreck but also the victims’ stories and the long-term effects on survivors and families.
The deceased ranged in age from 18 to 31. Some were talented diamond prospects. Most had served in just-completed World War II. Their early deaths echoed that of Vickrey’s dad, who played high-school ball near St. Louis and died at 19 in a construction accident in 1980, when Vickrey was 1.
The Spokane players “just disappeared from the collective consciousness,” Vickrey says. “They were all looking forward to getting back to some normalcy. What got me interested was the baseball side of it, but as I researched it, I realized that it transcends baseball. There was so much more of Northwest and American history. It’s important to remember the generations that came before us, what they endured.”
This mirrors a sentiment I heard at a friend’s recent memorial gathering: “Death comes only when you are no longer remembered.”
For a little-known baseball team, Vickrey has foraged a verdant, venerable legacy.
WEB EXTRAS
Big thanks to Dave Eskenazi, Eric Sallee, Greg Nickels, Arthur Lee Jacobson and especially Eric Vickrey for their invaluable help with this installment!
To see Clay Eals’ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.
Below, you also will find a video interview of Eric Vickrey, a selection of news clippings from King County Archives, 2 additional photos and 8 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.
