JERRY COLE: One of Few Bay Cityans to Graduate U.S. Merchant Marine Academy

Find Out What I Found in My Shirt Pocket the Day of His Funeral

December 13, 2014
By: Dave Rogers

He was not one to brag about his athletic career.

He turned me down every time I suggested nominating him for the Bay County Sports Hall of Fame.

But I figure anybody who returned punts for a college football team and ran sprints in Madison Square Garden against top eastern competition has to have had something going for him.

Jerry Cole won a full scholarship to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, upon graduation from Bay City Central High School in 1953. Only a few Bay Cityans have ever attended one of the five service academies, requiring a Congressional nomination, and Alan Flood was the only other one from Bay City I knew who had gotten a marine engineering degree at Kings Point.

Jerry had been an early protege of legendary Coach Elmer Engel whose 22 years at the helm of the Wolves included several perfect 9-0 seasons and five state championships. In Cole's junior year Central went 8-1 and took its first Valley championship in decades.

He was fast and fearless. Fielding punts wobbling in the wind with a bunch of hefty bruisers bearing down to tackle you is not for the faint of heart. But Jerry was good at it.

I was a friend of his younger brother, Ben Cole, who attended the University of Michigan, became an engineer and sadly died young.

I lost track of Jerry after high school and he seldom returned to Bay City. Later I learned he had worked on Wall Street for a big brokerage house and then in the aerospace industry in California.

He had a big family, four boys and one girl, on the West Coast. In his spare time he earned a masters in business administration (MBA) degree at Southern California (USC).

The kids gave him the nickname "Bear," a moniker he carried home when he moved back here in the 1990s to care for his mother, Dursa. It was something of a big deal when he convinced Merrill Lynch to establish a downtown Bay City office with him in charge.

Shortly after he came back to Bay City Jerry was involved in setting up some community improvement groups, was active in business promotion and he was a member of the Bay City YMCA where he showed up for a workout nearly every day.

"He really loved Bay City," said son Darren, a producer and theater operator off Broadway in New York. "Jerry Cole was a very kind and gentle man," said his special friend Carolyn.

He was the most punctual and punctilious man I ever knew. I could call him any time and get an update on my stock portfolio, modest though it was. And he had accurate hand-written records ready when tax time came around.

Hell, I didn't remember when I had bought a stock or how much I paid, but he did. It was all written down and carefully filed away.

Jerry arrived as his downtown office at Cole Financial every day at 8:30 a.m., left for coffee at 9:30, lunch at 12, back at 1:30 and was off to the Y by 4:30.

He often met friends like CPA Bill Herrera and Doctors Mike Gruber and Tim Eckstein at the DoubleTree Hotel and he was a member of St. Boniface Church and the Saginaw Bay Yacht Club.

His cousin, famed pianist Kevin Cole, played the piano at his funeral, attended by close to 100 mourners on Saturday Dec. 6. His daughter Jennifer McIntosh, from Las Vegas, Bradley Cole, a television star from California, and some of his grandchildren, Greg Cole and Alexandra Cole, were involved in the liturgy.

In honor of his service in the U.S. Naval Reserve, where he held the rank of commander, the Bay County Veterans Council honored him after the Mass. Private family inurnment was at St. Patrick Cemetery.

At the wake at the Saginaw Bay Yacht Club I reached in my pocket of a shirt I had not worn for four years. Something rustled; a piece of paper. Ironically and somewhat scary I found a note Jerry had written me in 2010.

Somehow, call it fate, I had picked out a shirt that had hung in the closet I hadn't worn for four years to wear the day of Jerry's funeral that had a note from him in the pocket.

In his distinctive handwriting he had quoted a stock, Citigroup, which then was selling at $3.22 a share, recommending I buy 500 shares at a cost of $1,677.37.

Right now as I write this column -- no kidding I haven't looked until now -- I'm going to check the current price of that stock: yikes, $53.40 a share!!!

Did I take Jerry's recommendation and buy Citigroup at $3.22, thus becoming about $25,000 richer?

Take a guess.

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