Jerry Krebs Was My Best Friend

Growing up in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, my closest friend was one Jerry Krebs. I was born on March 4, 1947 and Jerry on March 19, 1947. Gerard Allen Krebs lived at 19 Maolis Avenue, a quick bike ride from the Sheehan house at 361 Spring Street.

We met, as elementary students at the Sunset Avenue School. I don’t know why, but we had chemistry from day one. We were both extroverts, and enjoyed humor, and Jerry’s quick wit made most days well worth living, all the way through high school.

We had many things in common, as did others in West Bridgewater, specifically, siblings one year younger, like Mary and Margaret Mahoney and Bill and Barbara Miller. For Jerry it was his brother Ronnie and me, my brother Chris. Prior to high school it seems that most of our days were spent in trying to get free of these wannabee us’. The only time we allowed them to enter our circle of friends was to fill out a baseball or football team, when numbers showing up to play mattered.

As middle schoolers I remember brother Chris and Jerry and I arm in arm doing the “Yellow Brick Road skip” down Spring Street while singing “Three cool cats” over and over, until we got to Larkin’s (later Lawson’s and formerly Gordon's) Pond to ice skate or play “unprotected” hockey, or in fall, across the street from the pond to Bobby Fischer’s house to play “unprotected” football with other neighborhood titans, like Fred Willis and Pete Morrison. These guys were huge and usually the captain of each team, which really meant we ran behind them, sometimes holding onto their belts to make forward progress.

One winter day, brother Chris, Jerry and I happened to be doing the “Three cool cats” thing on River Street. The Town River had ice on it, and I heard a tan colored dog barking and struggling as he had gotten trapped on a small, slow moving, floating ice floe. Charging, but more like sliding down the embankment opposite the Canoe Club (once famous for hosting not only an actual canoe club, but big bands during the “Big Band” era and where mama and papa would take me in a couple of years to hear The Glenn Miller Band), I made a decision to save this, looking back on it, mutt. Chris would hold my belt, and Jerry would anchor the team that would make this a great day for mankind. I stepped onto the ice and immediately it broke under my massive 135-pound muscular athletic body. This started a disjointed non-domino-effect chain of unbelievable events. I began swimming toward the barking and frightened dog to grab and set him free, but he jumped into the water and easily made it to the other side and ran off into the sunset. Meanwhile, freezing below the belt, I noticed I was standing in a slow moving, “wicked” cold river, and was relieved to turn and simply stride quickly back to the other two heroes, and to the dry bank where this escapade had begun. NOT, those two were rolling on the embankment, uncontrollably, laughing, crying, screaming and giggling at what they had just witnessed. Some girls, our age, passed by and Jerry asked if they’d run up to Crowley’s Drug Store and call my parents to come and get me. Their call to my mother said, “hurry Mrs. Sheehan, your son has fallen into the river” that’s all. Ten minutes later my folks pulled up and took me home, mama, releasing every fearful thing about water that she had ever heard for the rest of that day. Later, Jerry, my friend and buddy called and asked for Lloyd Bridges, papa laughed, mama did not.

I called Jerry, Jez, it was short and easy to remember. Jerry was known by several other names, Maynard or Maynard G, was first, from the 1950 and 1960’s TV show “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”. Maynard G. Krebs, “You dirty, dirty boy” as Chatsworth Osborne Jr.’s mother would often call him.

Another, and better nick name for Jerry, was Benny. Jerry played both the clarinet and saxophone, both very well. He was in the West Bridgewater Band, and also played in a swing band at school, and in a swing/jazz group outside of school. His clarinet gained him the name Benny Goodman. I remember a picture of Jerry playing his saxophone next to our classmate, David Carlson, playing a giant bass saxophone. David was tall and Jerry was quite short and their respective instruments reflected that as well. The two of them, playing together is just one snapshot (in my mind) captured back in the 60’s, when sax came before sex.

As we entered out high school years, our friendship remained, but our interests began to veer in differed directions. Jerry’s music took him to new experiences while the game of basketball dominated much of my free time. Mama would frequently say she saw more of Jerry than she did me.

When we were together, it was often to do expeditionary missions to find girls, and find what things in that area might be good. These times would find us going to dances at St. Edward’s Catholic or South (Congo) Congregational Church in Brockton. We were naïve, but finally gave over our fears of dancing with a female, to picking ones to slow dance with, and to maybe start a family. LOL

Junior and senior years, Jerry and I moved further apart, not because our friendship was ending, but our interests took us toward what we would do in life. He and the Air Force and me, as it turns out, college at Cape Cod Community and marriage with children.

We slipped away from each other’s orbit, and life went on; getting together, once, to meet his wife, Gunda, whom, he met while in the service at Wright-Patterson AFB, in Ohio.

Fortunately, but also sadly, many years later, I became friends with Gunda on Facebook, and it was she who let me know that Jerry had passed on June 4, 2000. Gunda gave me some information on Jerry’s life, which only helped to strengthen the notion that one should keep close, those he calls friend. I am sad he is gone, but maybe my small memory clip will serve to show his children and friends just what a wonderful friend he was in his youth.

“Then I shall tell them, I remember you.”