JENKS, Okla. — The game of baseball has long been called America’s pastime, but did you know one hero of baseball was actually saved by a Bixby man during the Korean War?
On a very cold, Feb. 19th, 1953, the world of baseball changed, and it’s thanks to a Bixby's George Banasky, a Command Chief in the U.S. Air Force who came up on a U.S. Navy jet riddled with bullet holes and on fire. Without hesitation, Banasky said he went in to pull a man out of the burning jet. That man was baseball great, Ted Williams.
“I knew who he was I just didn’t know it at the time,” said Banasky.
Williams served as a Marine Combat Aviator in the Korean War in between his stints on the baseball diamond. Banasky said he later learned who it was that he pulled out of the jet. But he still remains humble about his heroic actions that day.
“Not many people know the story. We never bragged on it or anything like that. It was just something we would’ve done, anybody else would’ve done, we just happened to be there at the time."
Decades later, Banasky is getting a big thank you from Green Country with a commemorative wall at the Golden Sombrero restaurant in Jenks.
“I remember those pictures real well," Banasky said. "Those are my buddies over there, on the bottom left. Two of us are still alive."
He said seeing the pictures reminds him of that cold day in February 1953.
“He said thanks. That’s all he could say. He said thanks and then when we got him off the wing, the ambulance and fire truck was there and they took over and took him away. And so we didn’t think anything of it and the next day we said do you know who that was, and I said no, well that was Ted Williams. At least we done something really good."
That something really good allowed Williams to go on to be named one of the best hitters of all time. Banasky went on to have a 40-year career in the military and said regardless of who it was that he saved, he was just doing his job, and he wouldn’t change a thing about that day in 1953.
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