Dick Siebert was coaching his third Gophers baseball team in 1950. It was less than a juggernaut, and yet it's instructive to look back at the multisport competitors and the Gophers that would achieve fame as high school coaches throughout the state:
Basketball star Whitey Skoog and football star Wayne Robinson, and coaches Duane Baglien, Tom Warner and Lloyd Lundeen, and several more, and Glenn Gostick, trainer and baseball statistician supreme.
Also on that team was senior Norb Koch, a righthanded pitcher who could top his teammates on a golf course and in war stories.
Norb talked his way in the Army Air Corps in 1943 at age 17 and became the operator of the 50-caliber gun on a B-24 heavy bomber.
He flew 29 missions, none more adventurous than a final one Aug. 9, 1945. The squadron had a Japanese naval base as a target when Koch saw a mushroom cloud in the distance.
"Nobody else had seen it," he said. "They thought I was making it up."
Koch's plane was hit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire. The pilot was struck in the rear end, started bleeding heavily and passed out. The co-pilot had a piece of shrapnel in his neck.
"I was called up to the front," Koch said. "The co-pilot was reaching to pull out the shrapnel. I said, 'No; if you take it out, you'll bleed to death.' So, he put me in the pilot's seat, told me what to do while still pushing the shrapnel into the hole in his neck, and we got back and landed the plane with a good bounce."
