Former football player honored by Ronan Chiefs
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In 1964, three days before his 25th birthday, Ronan High School graduate Eddie Peschel was severely injured in a car wreck, causing him to be in a coma for several months.
Doctors thought if Eddie ever came to, he’d be brain dead. But a loving family and dedicated sister didn’t buy into that diagnosis, and helped the former Ronan High football player rehabilitate when he awoke.
“My mom used gallon milk jugs to exercise him,” sister Patty Mikulecky said. Eddie showed determination and humor throughout the rest of his years before passing away Aug. 19 at the age of 75.
“He was my dearest, darling, bicky-bucky buzzard brother in the whole wide world that I loved lots a bunch,” Patty said. “And he called me his ‘wee weasel.’”
Patty recounted happy adventures of the siblings growing up in Ronan, playing in pep band together and floating an irrigation canal while imagining it was the Amazon River. Eddie, a 1957 RHS grad, was not only in band, but sang in chorus, ran track, served on the powwow club and was student body vice president his senior year. But his greatest passion was football.
“He loved football, even though he had a clubbed foot,” Patty said of her brother. “I don’t think anybody paid attention to his foot. He did anything and everything.”
Ronan Chiefs’ teammate Bob Brown, Eddie’s friend since second grade, said, “he was a pretty good kid. Yeah, he loved football. When I first knew him in grade school, he always carried a football with him.”
In 1957, according to Brown, the team went undefeated for most of the season, but ended up in second place. In the 1957 RHS yearbook, then-senior Eddie “willed” his “towering height to Victor Pavlovick.”
A page in the yearbook states:
“Eddie had more fighting spirit than any other player on the team.”
Knowing how much the football program meant to her younger brother, Patty contacted current Ronan High School football coach Jim Benn to ask if she could get a football for Eddie’s memorial service.
“She let me know being a part of the Ronan football program was a big deal to him,” Benn said. So Benn took it a few steps further and had each 2014 football player sign the ball. Benn found a helmet the team could no longer use, and decorated it with new Ronan Chief decals and added Eddie’s jersey number, 27, to the helmet.
Patty was tickled and brought the honoring items to Eddie’s memorial service, held Saturday at 2 p.m.
Coincidentally, the service started at the exact same time that the Chief’s 2014 football team kicked off their first game of the season. The team decided to dedicate the game to Eddie.
“We definitely will be thinking about Eddie on Saturday,” Benn said earlier in the week. “Honestly, it’s a really small thing, it’s just what we are trying to teach our kids to do. If there’s a chance to give back, make the best gesture you possibly can.”
