Weyauwega-Fremont High School will induct its second class of five former standout athletes into the Weyauwega-Fremont Athletic Hall of Fame.
Gilman Hertz, Jim Steinberg, Sue Brogaard, Jordan Baitinger and Don Chase will be inducted into the Hall during a banquet at 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 16, at the Hahn-a-Lula Resort & Supper Club, Fremont.
Banquet tickets can be purchased at the school office or First National Bank in Weyauwega.
Last year’s inductees, the first to enter the Hall, were Jack Wohlt, Jim Otte, Matt Rohde, Brianne Oehlke and Rich Tomaszewski.
The County Post West is running biographies of each of this year’s nominees leading up the banquet.
Gilman Hertz
Hertz, now deceased, starred in basketball, football and track in high school in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
A member of the Central Wisconsin Conference championship basketball team in 1938-39, he was an all-conference selection and the team’s leading scorer. He played end and back in football and placed in six events in 1939 and 1940 at the state track meet: high jump (second in 1939), long jump (third in 1939), high hurdles (third in 1939), long jump (state champion in 1940), high jump (state champion in 1940 with a state-record leap of 6 feet, 1/2 inch) and high hurdles (state champion in 1940). Hertz also led the track team to a first-place tie in Class C with Soldiers Grove in 1940.
Hertz also helped the senior boys to a third place finish in 1938 in the Waupaca County Softball League.
He received a track scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, where he won Big 10 Conference championships in three events, and went on to play semi-pro basketball and baseball.
Hertz was a U.S. Navy torpedo boat commander in World War II and later coached at Ripon College and Northern Illinois University. He was also the University of South Florida’s first athletic director from 1960-66 and chaired the school’s Athletic Department for 30 years.