<b>Remembering Buck Gros</b>
Last year, Bill Wallace ’42 had occasion to be reunited with his former Millbrook baseball coach, Buck Gros, after many years. Buck, who passed away soon after their visit, was a Millbrook dad (W. L. “Bucky” Gros ’64), a coach, a hockey referee and a baseball umpire from the early years of the school through the 1970’s. The following is a wonderful remembrance of a Millbrook coach by one of his players.
I was anxious lest he not remember me. He’s now 93 years old and 62 years had gone by. Sixty-Two years!
John Flanagan, who put us together, had given me no clues as we sat in Copperfield’s awaiting the arrival of Buck Gros. Buck and Bill just might just sit there and have nothing happen, two strangers in the wrong place too late.
His wife, Connie, came in first and sat at their regular table in the sunny corner of the familiar family restaurant on Route 44 a few miles west of the Millbrook village, their village. Then came Buck, walking slowly as representative of two hip operations, wielding a tall cane with a ski-pole strap, and sharply dressed in country brown tweeds that included the shirt and the tie.
After he was seated I came over and sat down. As we shook hands he said clearly, “They still call you Butch?”
Well, no they don’t – not in 62 years. I was Butch Wallace back then because, like so many so sensitive undersized schoolboys, the compensation is assertiveness. Thank you, Buck, for Butch.
Buck Gros a townie who drove up to the school in the afternoons for a few years in the late 1930’s to help out with the teams, was my baseball coach and therefore my hero. I was between 14 and 16 years old, a catcher of limited ability but unlimited enthusiasm.
We spent a delightful half hour in Copperfield’s piecing together the bits left over from those brief years at the small, new and fragile little school out by Lithgow so long ago. I rolled out the names of the 1940 varsity team’s infield, Patterson, Evans, Gentes, Colt and said that as for the outfielders I just put hands over my eyes whenever a fly ball went out there. Would they catch it?
Gros grinned. “Chub Hazzard would,” he said, citing a teammate, a local Millbrook lad killed in World War II as was Davey Evans.
I was depreciative about our baseball teams. We were not great. “How about Lonnie Kinney,” said Buck.. “HE could pitch.” Orson (Lonnie) Kinney, Jr. was Millbrook’s best athlete of my time, alas bounced by The Boss for smoking cigs down at the other barn.
As we spoke, time erased. I noticed those piercing brown eyes—no wonder he’s shot a thousand wing birds, hit a thousand curve balls, called a thousand fouls. And those big ears. My Buck back again for a moment in Copperfield’s.
To remember/appreciate Werner (Buck) Gos you have to be an old schoolboy like me or else someone attuned to the inner Millbrook, the village of not-rich people born and bred there.
My attention comes through John Flanagan, the night editor of the Poughkeepsie Journal and a man of entrepreneurial talents who, for example, take care of the car-parking arrangements for any big do Millbrook School might have. I live in Connecticut but have New York friends, the Brennans, whose weekend place 90 minutes from us is in Salt Point, tangent to Millbrook. Flanagan keeps the Brennan place going and since John and I are newspapermen we’ve never stopped talking.
A few years ago, during a forum, John said “We had a great ball player in this town.”
“Buck Gros?” I asked. Maybe John flinched—understand that newspapermen are never startled. Flanagan’s history of Millbrook then flowed.
Gros was the son of an emigrant German forester who came to Millbrook to help manage the estates early in the last century. Buck ran a nursery business in town for about 30 years and then a shooting preserve, a pheasant farm called Tower Hill. The late Pete Bontecou ’40 of the Millbrook Bontecou clan was his upland game companion and buddy. “We went everywhere together,” Buck told me. “He had the money and I had the time.”
Gros was also a superb athlete, a skilled second basemen for the MIllbrook town team of the old Hudson Valley semipro league, and after that a high-school basketball official for decades. “The pounding—up and down the courts—got my hips,” Buck said. No regrets.
“When you come up again, please call.”
I will.
