Doyel: Butler star Ted Guzek's legacy grows 46 years after he died in car crash
INDIANAPOLIS – A man can get lost in his thoughts on that stretch of Interstate 70 between New Castle and Fishers, especially this man. Especially on this day. Where does the man begin? With the moment he heard on the radio that he and his sister had essentially become orphans? Is that why those blue lights are flashing in his front yard? Is that why the police are knocking on the door?
The man could begin there, but he’d rather not. He’s looked back enough already, and besides, this is a day to look forward. He’s heading west on Interstate 70, toward his home in Fishers, after presenting his father’s case as a nominee for the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. He’d been emotional in New Castle, where presentations before the Hall of Fame electorate are limited to two minutes and his voice was breaking and dammit he doesn’t have time for this, not here, not now, but he’s talking about his dad. So it happens.
It’s happening again now, in the car, as he heads back to Fishers with the radio turned off. Alone with his thoughts, he’s hoping he did right by his dad. He has spent his whole life chasing something he’ll never get, one more “attaboy” from a father whose shadow as a Butler basketball player was so large, even in death, that it has followed the boy for almost 50 years.
He and his dad have the same name, you see: Ted Guzek.
Chances are good you know the name – Ted Guzek Sr. was a Butler All-American in 1957 – but you don’t know the story. Not this story, anyway. It’s a long story, and it goes farther than the drive from New Castle to Fishers. It goes to Bloomington and Michigan, to Florida and Boston.
But it crashes to a halt at a quiet intersection on the southside of Indianapolis, where on a good day one road ends at a cemetery.
On a bad day? All roads end at a cemetery.
Found their forever in 1974
The tree is gone, thank God. Somebody cut it down a few years ago, right below the ugly scar where the Volkswagen station wagon slammed into it.
Never mind what you read in the papers the next day about the driver of the station wagon on June 1, 1974. The police had it wrong, though in fairness to them, by the time they arrived, all four people in the Volkswagen were in the back seat. The front seat was gone.
So was Ted Guzek Sr., who had graduated in 1957 as the Butler’s No. 3 all-time scorer. Gone at age 39. He’d been driving, and was killed instantly. Also killed were Sally and Harry Shaner, neighbors and friends of Guzek and his wife, Peggy. The papers mistakenly reported that Harry Shaner had been driving. The crash scene was chaos.
Not 10 minutes earlier, the couples had left in the Guzeks’ station wagon from the Knights of Columbus Hall on East Thompson Road. The Southside Homemakers Club was having a scavenger hunt, and whatever they were looking for, the Guzeks and Shaners found their forever across the street from Calvary Cemetery, where Brehob Road ends at Sumner Avenue.
It was a terrible intersection then and no better today, with Sumner sloping steeply away from Brehob in both directions but no stop sign on Sumner. Guzek was heading west on Sumner, turning left onto Brehob, when a car heading east on Sumner – the police report said the car was traveling “at a high rate of speed” – crested the hill and slammed into the turning Volkswagen, smashing it into the tree.
The driver of the other car, a man prosecutors said was drunk – the driver, Charles Short, 34, testified that he’d had “no more than two beers” – survived with minimal injury. He’d be convicted of reckless homicide and involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to six months in prison for each charge.
The only person in the station wagon to survive, if that’s what you want to call it, was Peggy Guzek. Her heart wasn’t beating when paramedics arrived. She was revived on the scene, never to regain consciousness.
Peggy Guzek spent 2½ years in a coma before dying on Jan. 19, 1977. Doctors had removed her from life support shortly after the accident, but she lived another 30 months, most of that in a nursing home on the southside, where her children visited on Sundays after church, staring into her vacant eyes, holding her hand and feeling an occasional squeeze. Or was that an involuntary spasm? A cruel question for a boy of 10 and a girl of 8.
“When she passed,” says Ted Jr., “I was able to be at ease. Dad and Mom were together in heaven.”
Whatever happened to the children of Butler legend Ted Guzek? Life happened. Success. Winning – a whole lot of winning. Ted Jr. and Lee Ann Guzek were gifted in sports, just like their dad. They went to IU, where they were high achievers in the classroom, just like their mom. They became parents, good ones, just like the parents who raised them until June 1, 1974.
And just like the young couple who raised them starting June 2, 1974: Uncle Dan and Aunt Sue.
Bobby Plump giggles about Guzek, Hinkle
Listen, we need to back this story up.
Ted Guzek – the older one, the Butler star – was some kind of special athlete.
The son of a steel worker in Hammond, he used sports at Morton High to get himself and his brother Vern out of the region. Northwestern (La.) State wanted Ted so badly for basketball that it offered a track scholarship to Vern, 11 months younger but in the same 1954 class at Morton. They spent three days in Natchitoches, La., before the heat and mosquitoes drove them back to Indiana. Vern returned to the gas station where he’d been working in high school, and stayed there 55 years.
Ted Guzek went to Butler to play for Tony Hinkle.
Guzek wanted to play for Notre Dame, truth be told, but coach John Jordan had sent him a letter that summer – “We regret to inform you …” – so Guzek went to Butler and terrorized Jordan’s teams. As a sophomore he set the Bulldogs’ single-game scoring record with 37 points in a win against Notre Dame. The record fell when Butler played Notre Dame during his junior season, when Guzek scored 38 points and tipped in a Bobby Plump shot at the buzzer to win it.
“He was a great offensive player, there’s no question about that,” says Plump, who’s giggling because he’s about to tell on Ted for his defense. “I remember at the end of our junior year, Mr. Hinkle had us all at center court. He was wishing us well for the summer, and he said: ‘Guzek, see that telephone poll outside there?’ Ted goes: Yeah I see it. ‘Well, guard that this summer. If it doesn’t get around you, maybe you can play again next year.’”
Plump is roaring, because Ted Guzek wasn’t the only player Hinkle accused of playing, shall we say, indifferent defense.
“I’m not talking out of school,” Plump says. “I wasn’t very good on defense either.”
Guzek also played golf for Butler – after college, he won tournaments around the city – and spent his summers golfing at Lake Shore Country Club, where he’d flirt over the fairway fence with one of the lifeguards. That was Peggy. She was a Microbiology major at Purdue who worked at Eli Lilly in drug development until little Ted was born in 1963.
While it lasted, their life together was the stuff of after-school television. Peggy was a homemaker, president of the southside service group Tri Kappa, a volunteer with developmentally disabled kids at the Baxter YMCA. Ted Sr. was a teacher and coach, the vice principal of Meridian Middle School who had been named principal of the new Southport Middle School shortly before the accident. He took Lee Ann to the YMCA for swimming lessons. He shot baskets with Ted Jr. in the driveway.
“My dad was big in the neighborhood,” says Ted Jr. “When he’d get home from school, kids would come over and Dad would work with them on shooting. We loved it.”
The Guzeks were wonderfully corny, having a NuTone intercom system put into the house so Peggy could call the kids to dinner or play WIBC throughout the home. They had date nights, leaving Ted Jr. and Lee Ann with Peggy’s brother and sister-in-law, Uncle Dan and Aunt Sue Kritsch.
The elder Ted Guzek saved enough to purchase his dream car, a Buick Wildcat, but in 1974 with the country in the throes of an oil crisis, he was driving the Volkswagen to save on gas. They took that smaller car to the Knights of Columbus Hall on the night of June 1, 1974. The Southside Homemakers Club was having a scavenger hunt.
Ted and Peggy Guzek thought that sounded like fun. They partnered up with the Shaners, and headed west on Sumner Avenue.
Is this the phone call?
The radio was turned on in his room. Ted Guzek Jr. remembers that, that NuTone intercom piping WIBC throughout the house. The police were in the driveway, bathing his bedroom in blue lights. A knock on the door. Ted gets out of bed and runs to the door, beating the babysitter. A policeman asks if his parents are home.
No, says 10-year-old Ted Guzek Jr. They’re on a scavenger hunt.
Lee Ann had been asleep, but the knock on the door wakes her up. She walks into the living room, sees her brother at the door. Is he talking to … a policeman? Looks that way, but she’s barely 8 years old. She doesn’t understand.
“Go back to bed,” the officer gently tells both children, and Lee Ann returns down the hall. Ted Jr. would like to sleep, but he can’t. His bedroom is close to the front door, and people keep showing up. His grandparents. His aunt and uncle. Neighbors. There’s another police car in the driveway three doors down in their Hill Valley subdivision. The Shaners’ house.
Wait, what’s the radio saying on that intercom?
Three people tragically killed on the southside …
Out in the kitchen, someone shuts the radio off.
Now Ted Jr. is in the living room, and two priests are there. Everyone’s watching. One of the priests tells Ted Jr. what he already knows, that his father is dead. In shock, Ted Jr. responds: “I guess that’s life.”
Back then, he wouldn’t let people see him cry. Not at the funeral, not in front of strangers, not even when he overheard one relative telling another at the funeral that Peggy, his mom, had no brain activity. “She’s not coming back,” the relative said.
The morning after the accident, Ted wakes up in his bed. His Uncle Dan is asleep in his room, not wanting his nephew to be alone.
“All I can think,” Ted Guzek Jr. says now, “is that I’m not going to be able to shoot baskets with my dad anymore.”
He’s crying softly.
“Bear with me,” Ted Jr. says, and pauses. “My dad was special. He was really special.”
Lee Ann wakes up that morning and heads to her parents’ room, finding an empty bed. She walks into the living room, into a nightmare. Her aunt and uncle are there. They tell her what happened. What does a little girl do with the information that her dad is dead and her mom is in a coma? Well, this little girl is wired to be productive, to be dependable. Lee Ann’s been taking care of a neighbor’s dog, so she heads that way, goes inside her neighbor’s house to feed the dog, and falls apart.
The next month is a blur. Lee Ann swims for the Carefree Crocodiles in Greenwood, winning almost every race she enters. She plays in a youth softball league in Center Grove and is named MVP. Three weeks after the accident, his father dead, his mother in a coma and not coming back, Ted Jr. packs up for his annual summer at Culver Military Academy.
“All I wanted was my life to be normal,” he says, “and I’d gone to Culver the last two summers. I just wanted a normal life.”
The Culver kids slept in cabins, with a Major nearby. That was the cabin with the phone, and the ring echoes through the woods. Ted Jr. remembers lying in bed at night, hearing that awful sound.
“Is this the call,” he’s wondering, “that Mom just died?”
Winning races, chasing shadows
This story is a tragedy. You’ve seen that. You’ve read about the loss.
Now read about the victory, because it happened. It is still happening today.
“You figure it out,” Ted Jr. says. “You have to figure it out.”
They had help. They had Uncle Dan and Aunt Sue.
When the kids were younger, the Guzeks and Kritsches liked to spend time at Foxcliff Lake near Martinsville. Ted and Dan took the kids fishing. Peggy and Sue sat around the campfire. One night Peggy Guzek was telling her sister-in-law that she and Ted wanted to name the Kritsches as guardians of Ted Jr. and Lee Ann. You know, Peggy was saying: Just in case.
“I was taken off guard,” Sue Kritsch is saying by phone from Boynton Beach, Fla., where she and Dan have lived for years. “I remember saying to her: ‘I can’t talk to you about this, but you know I’d do anything for you.’ I was about to cry.”
The scavenger hunt was one week later.
The Kritsches raised the kids, took them every week to the hospital and then the nursing home to see their mother, attended their sporting events. They were the youngest adults in the parent section. They were 27.
“The fact that my aunt and uncle stepped up when they were 27 years old to take care of my brother and me – that’s pretty big,” Lee Ann says. “You talk about a change in your life, taking that on and not having kids of your own, and having a ready-made family? That’s big.”
Says Ted Jr.: “My aunt and uncle would never say this, but they had to live up to a standard that probably wasn’t fair because of what Mom and Dad were. There were a lot of people who had eyes on what they were doing: ‘Well, would Peg and Ted do things that way?’”
In 1979, Dan’s work in finance took him to South Florida, where Lee Ann ran track and set the Seminole Middle School 800-meter record in 2 minutes, 24 seconds. Ted Jr. played JV basketball at South Plantation High before becoming a star runner in the 800. In 1980-81 Lee Ann was lettering in four sports while Ted was the state’s dominant half-miler. Lee Ann, a sophomore, and Ted, a senior, were named the school’s top female and male athletes.
“They were competitive, just like their father,” says Dan Kritsch. “At dinner time, it was: Who had the better story? In the driveway, it was basketball.”
They’d run laps around the subdivision until someone quit. They’d shot-put the croquet ball. They’d see who could open a combination lock faster.
“They were competitive, which was good!” says Sue Kritsch. “That’s what got them through it.”
Both kids wanted to return to Indiana, and Lee Ann got there first, finishing her high school years at Culver Girls Academy, where she set scoring records in girls basketball. As a senior she was class president, female athlete of the year and winner of the Mary Frances England Award for humanitarian achievement. For her next trick, Lee Ann Guzek goes to IU, where in 1988 she helped organize the first Little 500 bike race for women. Her bike still hangs upstairs at Nick’s English Hut.
Lee Ann won at everything she did. She’s winning now, with three great kids – Marge, Mary and Drew; super athletes and scholars at St. Lawrence University, all of them – and the happy marriage and the great job at Procter & Gamble. Her parents’ death lit a fire in her that rages to this day, but Lee Ann Guzek Terhune isn’t one to look back, certainly not all the way back to June 1, 1974.
“Knowing that your time can come at any time,” she says, “you have to make it the best life, and don’t go gently. I was probably genetically predisposed to be that way, but I would say the accident heightened that sense of urgency: Be the best, live the big life, put it all out there.”
Ted Jr. put it out there, too. He earned a track scholarship to IU, ran for the Hoosiers and majored in Public Affairs. Married, four kids. He became vice president of North American sales and operations for Tyco Integrated Security, and now heads sales in Latin America and Europe for ClickIt Inc., a retail analytics company.
Ted Jr. is driven differently than his sister, chasing a shadow he will never catch.
“I will never get an ‘attaboy’ from my dad, and that’s probably why I’ve been climbing so hard,” Ted Jr. says. “You never get that.”
No, but you get this: On a speaker phone in South Florida, the Kritsches are listing the accomplishments of Ted and Lee Ann – the sports records, the college achievements, the professional careers, the great children – from memory.
“We’re both so proud of the kids,” Dan says. “We’re so proud they didn’t let all this stuff beat them. They got stronger. It took a lot of courage to do what they did.”
'My parents never left me'
The tombstones are small, the size of shoeboxes, room enough to say one thing – the most important thing – about Ted and Peggy Guzek.
Father, it says on Ted’s stone.
Mother, it says on Peggy’s.
Ted Jr. goes to the Holy Cross and Saint Joseph Cemetery from time to time, telling his parents about the life he has carved out, the normalcy he craved. He found it with an IU coed named Maeve Lynch, whom he met during his final month at IU. He tells his parents about his wife and their four kids: two boys, two girls, how older daughter, Lindsay Guzek Panah, is a doctor in Boston. How his older son, Teddy, once drilled a full-court shot – 90 feet – at the buzzer of a Broad Ripple JV game. He tells them about his younger children, Paige and Matthew, and about family meals at Thanksgiving, how Ted Jr. is happiest when surrounded by family.
“That’s what makes life good for me,” he says. “I’d love my dad and mom to see what their grandkids turned out to be. That’s the hard part.”
Ted Jr. visits the accident site from time to time. It’s barely five minutes from his parents’ gravesite, across the street from Calvary Cemetery, where the Shaners are buried. If the intersection of Sumner and Brehob is where his parents spent their last conscious moments on earth, he wants to see it.
Not Lee Ann.
“I’ve never seen it,” she says of the intersection, and she has been to her parents’ gravesite maybe four or five times. “I don’t dwell on that piece of it. My philosophy is: I believe my parents have never left me. I don’t have to be in a certain spot to see them. I truly believe I talk to them, and there’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of my mom, dad, grandparents, aunt and uncle, and my brother. They’re always with me. I tried to understand what they did and who they were, but my thing, maybe, is in moving forward to try to live the legacy they set out for me.”
Ted Jr.’s thing is different.
“My brother is what I would call the historian,” Lee Ann says. “He knows more about my dad in his fingertip, his little pinkie, than I do.”
Indeed, while life took Lee Ann to Michigan out of college, where she works as a senior executive for Procter & Gamble, Ted Jr. had to be in his parents’ home state.
“I always knew I’d come back to Indiana,” he says. “I just wanted to get back to where my mom and dad were from. I wanted to be closer to them, to their friends, to people who know who I was.”
Ted Jr. has talked to paramedics who were there the night of June 1, 1974. He has knocked on the door of the house with the tree in the yard, wondering what they remember from that night.
Story grows, 46 years later
Over the years, Ted Jr.’s need to know more about his dad led him to discover this: Not only was former Hammond Morton star and Butler All-American Ted Guzek not in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, he’d never even been nominated. Ted Jr. fixed that, calling his dad’s former teammates for information, getting a letter from Bobby Plump, and presenting his dad’s case to the Hall of Fame electorate in September.
His dad was to be inducted Wednesday. The ceremony has been postponed because of the coronavirus threat, but Ted Jr. did right by his dad; Ted Guzek Sr. is going into the Hall of Fame.
Where Ted Jr. has failed, if that’s what we’re calling it, is in his quest for video footage of his father. He has never seen his dad play, not in games anyway, only in their driveway on the southside. He doesn’t know how Ted Guzek Sr. looked in his prime, winning over Tony Hinkle during a tryout – this was legal, back in the day – by shooting all of 11 shots in an open gym. No need for a 12th; Hinkle had seen enough and offered him a scholarship right there.
Ted Jr. doesn’t know what it looked like the day his dad went 13-for-13 against Michigan, setting a single-game Butler record. He’s never seen his dad on the offensive glass, earning the nickname “The Snake” from teammates for his ability to slither between defenders for rebounds.
“That, to me, is a dream – to see him play just one time,” Ted Guzek Jr. says. “I’d love to be able to show my kids.”
Kids, he said. Not grandkids, because this story of love and tragedy, of family lost and found, didn’t include any grandchildren for Ted Jr. or Lee Ann. Not yet.
But as you’ve seen, the story of Ted and Peggy Guzek didn’t end on June 1, 1974. Like a pair of pebbles tossed into a river, the ripples spread. They are spreading still, 46 years later, and it happens as fast as this: Ted Guzek Jr. and I are talking by phone, some last details for this story here, and we hang up. Ten minutes later, Ted sends me a text:
BTW while I was talking to you my daughter went into labor.
Soon Ted is on a plane to Boston to meet his first grandchild, a baby girl named Quinn Maeve Panah. The first great-grandchild of Ted and Peggy Guzek.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.