Soon after word spread that a Penacook man named Duke had died, some of the legendary sports names from Merrimack Valley High School’s rich past – coaches, players, even a team manager – gathered on Google Meet.
They wanted to remember Duke, the superfan whose real name was Bill Duquette. He died earlier this month from COVID at the New Hampshire Veterans Home in Tilton, where a total of 28 residents had died as of Thursday. Duke was diagnosed two days after Thanksgiving and died earlier this month.
He was 83.
He’s part of an unfolding tragedy that has shown the lightning-quickness of COVID and its tricky nature, surging through a facility that’s trying to protect those who protected the United States.
In some ways, Duke was a man of mystery, with a fuzzy past and a quiet nature. He lived in Penacook most of his life, before moving to the Veterans Home about five years ago.
His role as athletic shadow gained traction more than 50 years ago. He attended MV games and practices, riding the team busses, sitting on benches as part of the team.
The sports community in the Penacook region adopted him, and Duke adopted them right back. No one represented the old saying, “I never miss a game,” better than Duke, because when it came to MV baseball and basketball, coaches said, Duke, well, never missed a game.
Ever.
“In small communities, you have a guy who has always been around the sports scene and everyone knew him,” said athletic director Kevin O’Brien, who coached boys’ basketball at MV for 17 seasons. “He was always with us, every game. I do not think he missed one game or practice during that entire time I was coaching, until he went to the Veterans Home.”
“We heard a lot of the Duke stories,” said Jason Smith, who played for O’Brien 30 years ago and now coaches nationally-ranked Brewster Academy. “Duke worked at Hoyt Electric and in the afternoon he’d say he had to leave for a baseball game and he’d get fired or quit. He had to go to the game.”
They were two of an all-star cast, brought together in impromptu fashion last week by O’Brien. He had heard about Duke’s passing from one of his former players, Mark Kimball, who teaches at MV, one floor above O’Brien’s office.
The graduates and former athletes hurried online, about a dozen in all, people in their 20s on up to their 70s. They were familiar names in this tight-knit sports community, 14 in all. O’Brien. Smith. Dave Anderson. Ray Bailey. Tracy Huckins. Carly Huckins. Cassidy Huckins. Brian Huckins. Bob Tewksbury. Mike Cassavaugh. Chris Irving. Paul Dean. Sean Wheeler. Kim Kenney.
Two major elements emerged: Duke’s unmatched, Lassie-like loyalty to the MV High School baseball and basketball teams, and Bazooka Joe Bubblegum. Duke loved chewing it. And, always, he had an ample supply on him. He’d give you a piece for different reasons. To boost your spirit. Or congratulate you. Or, simply, because he liked you.
And the ties in this community have always stretched and held like Bazooka Bubblegum. When describing the video gathering, former basketball manager Tracy Huckins said, “We kept it in the Valley. It was like an hour or so. It was fun.”
Tracy and the Huckinses played a special role here. Their sense of family extended from their homes in Penacook through MV High School’s hallways and fields and gym. Tracy mentioned “The Valley” several times. No need for ‘Merrimack.’ Not by insiders. Not by family.
A family that made sure to induct Tracy and the two other team managers – Heather Wormald and Julie Bartlett – into the school’s Hall of Fame for their work, which included the championship seasons of 1989, MV’s first basketball title ever, and ‘90.
Tracy, whose surname was Morin, married the late Dave Huckins, one of the most revered individuals in town, from a family revered as well. She’s taken over Huckleberry Oil, the business started by Dave.
Dave’s father and four of his uncles played at MV. Dave was a superstar in the late 1980s, helping MV win its first two titles. He coached his daughters to a state title, that team’s first ever as well. His death from cancer three years ago elevated his stature further.
Meanwhile, Tracy had already befriended Duke through her brother’s school athletics. She got to know him better during her time with the basketball team. Duke, in fact, lived on Huckins property on Route 4 for a time, rent free.
“Every day he’d go to Dunkin’ Donuts and stop in the Huckleberry office and visit me and the girls,” Tracy said. “He didn’t have much in life, but he would have given anything to anyone.”
Sometimes, Duke ate Thanksgiving dinner at Tracy’s and Dave’s. Christmas dinner was automatic. She organized a family car-pool rotation, involving her daughters, Carly and Cassidy, so Duke could watch as many Huckins-involved games as he could.
Yet, while Tracy knew some personal oddities about Duke, their family bonds, while strong, defied some normalcy. No one knew Duke. Not really.
“He never talked about his mom, and I knew he had one brother,” Tracy said. “But he was always close to our family. I brought him to games and Cassidy would bring him to Carly’s games.”
He lived in South Carolina for a short time, but Penacook was his home. He graduated from Penacook High School and served in the Army in the late 1950s. He worked at Hoyt’s and, presumably, a few other places. He married in his 20s but got divorced less than a year later.
Duke never remarried, nor did he have kids.
“I really didn’t know too much about him,” said former MV baseball coach Dave Anderson, whose name is synonymous with baseball in the Granite State. “He worked in different jobs in Penacook and his mom had a home near the old Boscawen fire station with him. She died and he had different apartments and he never had a car.”
Instead, Duke made it to games and everywhere else through the help of others. That was the standing order: If you saw this man whom O’Brien said looked like an unmade bed, always wearing a baseball hat and shuffling slowly, stop and offer him a ride.
“They saw Duke walking somewhere and they’d pick him up,” O’Brien said. “Sometimes invite him for a meal.”
Few had more experience with Duke than O’Brien, Anderson and fellow ex-MV baseball coach Ray Bailey. Their faces became part of their home court and ballfields. Same as Duke’s did.
He was just there, all the time, in the dugout or at court-side. He introduced himself immediately, to any new coach, and then let circumstances morph from there. Eventually, all knew Duke’s role, to high school sports and the village itself.
“Eventually you’d get it,” Bailey said. “I don’t want to say he lived for it, but I think he did.”
Bailey remembered his first year coaching at MV in 1980, fresh from UConn, where he captained the baseball team.
Each time a new employee was hired, someone from the front office would inevitably call O’Brien. A nice old man wanted to see him. Each time there was a changing of the guard in the office, the same thing happened. Soon, though, if you worked at MV, you were going to meet Duke. Then you were going to embrace him.
“Someone would say this disheveled guy wants to talk to you, and we had security,” O’Brien said. “This was after Columbine.”
O’Brien was passed the torch – the lifelong friendship of a unique individual – when he took over the MV boys’ basketball team in 1987.
MV made it to the state championship game in 1989. It was a moment in the school’s history that will never fade, the game in which Dave Huckins, injured in the semifinals and wearing a cast, whipped the crowd into a frenzy by waving his crutch above his head, sparking a come-from-behind win.
During pregame, a member of the NHIAA – the governing body of high school sports in New Hampshire – noticed a gentleman sitting on the team bench who was not listed on the official roster of players and coaches.
O’Brien says he had a choice: ask Duke to sit someplace else, or face the consequences. “Go ahead, I’ll face the consequences,” O’Brien recalled saying. “He’s not leaving this bench. You can fire me Monday if you want.”
Duke stayed, MV won, and two members of this Penacook family – Duke and Dave – added to their legacies on the same day.
“(Duke) could hear what I was saying to the NHIAA and he began to well up,” O’Brien said. “Duke didn’t say anything. He had that sheepish grin, he was a small man, and he reaches into his pocket and gives me two pieces of Bazooka. He normally gave me just one.”
Anderson had his own story. He met Duke in the late 1960s, after taking an MV coaching job. He left for Vietnam and was on leave, returning to Fort Bragg in North Carolina the next day.
Duke pulled him aside one day and gave him a religious medal to wear for luck.
“He told me to wear this and you will come home with it alive,” Anderson said. “I attached it to my dog tags.”
He came back to the states a year later and coached MV baseball for another 20 years, winning two state titles. He saw Duke soon after returning from the war. He had the medal around his neck.
“I told him to hang it back on his neck,” Anderson said. “He said, ‘You keep that,’ and he gave me a big hug and we went on with our lives.
“It’s the little things like that that you always remember.”