April 20, 1944, 80 years ago: Elmer Gedeon dies in action in World War II. He was 1 of 2 Major League Baseball players lost in "The Big One."
Elmer John Gedeon was born on April 15, 1917 in Cleveland. At that city's West High School, he starred in baseball, football and track. His uncle, Joe Gedeon, was a major league 2nd baseman from 1913 to 1920, before he was banned from baseball for "having guilty knowledge" of the Black Sox Scandal.
Elmer would not be banned. He went to the University of Michigan, and kept going in all 3 sports, tying a world record in the high hurdles. Graduating in 1939, he was signed by the Washington Senators, and played 67 games as an outfielder for their farm team, the Orlando Senators of the Florida State League.
The Senators called him up in September, and he played 5 games, on September 18, 19, 20, 21 and 23: The 1st in right field, the rest in center field. He got 3 hits in 15 at-bats, none of them for extra bases.
He spent the 1940 season with the Charlotte Hornets -- which was the name of a minor-league baseball team before it was that of a World Football League team in the 1970s and an NBA team starting in 1988 -- batting .271 with 11 home runs. But that was his last professional season, as he was drafted by the U.S. Army, before the 1941 season started, let alone before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
On August 9, 1942, he was the navigator on a B-25 bomber which crashed into a swamp adjacent to an airport at Raleigh, North Carolina. He managed to get out of the burning plane, and, despite his own injuries, dragged another crewmate out, saving his life, although 2 others died. Gedeon was decorated for this, and was convinced he had used up his bad luck, and would return to baseball after the war.
But it was not to be. On April 20, 1944, Captain Elmer J. Gedeon took off flying a B-26 bomber from RAF Boreham, north of London, to attack a German position in Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise in northern France. His plane was hit, and he was 1 of 6 crew members killed as it crashed. He was 27 years old, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Gedeon is the subject of 2 weird coincidences. Both MLB players who were killed in World War II, Gedeon and Harry O'Neill, and the one who was killed in the Korean War, Bob Neighbors, played in the majors only briefly, during the 1939 season. And Gedeon's uniform number with the Washington Senators was 34, which would be worn after the war by Bert Shepard, the only major league player to play with a prosthetic leg.
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