The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Jack Lohrke started his minor league baseball career in 1942 at age eighteen when he signed with the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League. After seven games he was sent to Twin Falls, Idaho, in the Class C Pioneer League. He hit .271 as the team's third baseman and won the team's MVP award. He wouldn't play baseball again until after returning home from World War II.

The train that took him to ship off to war derailed. Three people were killed and many others were severely burned by steaming water that passed through the train car. Lohrke escaped injury. This was his first brush with death, and not his last.

Lohrke was in the Army's 35th Infantry Division during World War II and fought in the Allied invasion at Normandy in the summer of 1944. At the end of that year, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. On four separate occasions, a soldier next to Lohrke was killed. He survived each battle uninjured.

On his way home to Los Angeles, Lohrke was scheduled to fly on a military transport plane. Before takeoff, he was bumped off the flight by a colonel who took his seat. It would have been his first plane ride and as it turned out would have been his last. It crashed less than an hour after take off in Ohio, killing everyone on board, including the colonel.

In 1946, he restarted his baseball career playing with the Spokane Indians, a Class B team in the Western International League. Lohrke was batting .345 when the team left on a road trip for Bremerton on June 24th. When the team stopped in Ellensburg for lunch, Lohrke got a message that he was being promoted to the triple A team in San Diego. The message had been sent from the team's business manager through the Washington State patrol. Now Lohrke could continue on with the team to Bremerton and take a train back to Spokane, or make his way back on his own. He said goodbye to his teammates and hitchhiked to Spokane.

The team bus continued on without him toward Bremerton. Around eight o'clock they were on highway 10 at Snoqualmie Pass when the driver saw headlights coming at him from their lane. The driver hit the brakes, but with the slippery road conditions the bus slid through the guard rail. The bus fell 300-500 feet down the mountain. Nine of the fifteen players died in the accident. It is still the deadliest crash involving an American professional baseball team.

"When the bus took off ... I bummed a ride back to Spokane." Lohrke said in a 1990 interview. "When I got there I found out both my roommates had been killed."

Lohrke hit .303 with San Diego and was selected by the New York Giants in the Rule 5 draft. In 1947, he played one hundred and two games for the Giants at third base, hitting .240 with 11 home runs. One of those home runs was the team's 183rd home run of the season which broke the major league record set by the 1936 Yankees. Lohrke would play seven years in the major leagues before finishing his baseball career in the minors as a manager of the Tri-Cities team in the Class B Northwest League. After retiring he worked in security for Lockheed Missile and Space Company in California. At the time of his death in 2009, at age eight-five, he was survived by his wife Maire whom he'd been married to for sixty-one years. They had six children, ten grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.