A health struggle has silenced Joe Kernan. His loved ones can't say enough about him.
Joe Kernan and his friends used to have euchre nights. Years ago, when fellow University of Notre Dame alumnus Dick Nussbaum was getting to know Kernan, and just learning the game, he found himself playing against the future South Bend mayor and Indiana governor, the political leader he would serve as a trusted legal adviser.
With the advantages of an experienced partner and good cards, Nussbaum the novice won. Losing didn’t sit well with Kernan, who said, “A gorilla could have played those hands,” an expression of the ravenous competitiveness that rec league softball opponents and umpires, golf partners — even fellow prisoners of war in Vietnam — have witnessed.
Kernan, a Navy flight officer, was shot down over North Vietnam in 1972 and spent the next 11 months in Hoa Lo Prison — the “Hanoi Hilton.” Tom Cuggino ‘68 recalls thinking that, if anyone could endure life as a POW, it would be Kernan, his former Notre Dame baseball teammate. “Because he’ll make some sort of a game out of it and beat them,” Cuggino says in a 2019 Legends of Michiana public television special.
Kernan organized little challenges among American POWs, testing skills like throwing pumpkin seeds closest to a wall, ostensibly meant to keep everyone’s mind occupied. Kernan occupied his own, as usual, with the dogged pursuit of victory.
He came up with a game to play against cellmate Lynn Guenther, an Air Force pilot, before they went to sleep. They would ask each other insignificant questions — trivia — another distraction from interminable days and nights in captivity. Arcana from The Guinness Book of World Records, which Kernan had pretty much committed to memory, became his competitive advantage. He deployed questions like: “What’s the world’s record for spitting?” Guenther, naturally, had no idea.
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