2005, the only football number retired for the Thundering Herd. He died that year in a nursing home in West Virginia. In 2006, the East End Bridge in Huntington, West Virginia was renamed the Frank Gatski Memorial Bridge in his honor. Early life Gatski was born in 1921 and raised in Farmington, West Virginia. His father and grandfather were immigrants from Poland, and most of the men in his family worked at the nearby Number Nine Coal Mine Camp. Gatski started at center for three years on his Farmington High School football team, which played on a cow pasture with no scoreboard, bleachers or game clock. He worked in the coal mines during the summers, and went to work in the mines full-time during his senior year in 1939. Gatski was reserved and aloof, but he was also known as a graceful dancer. "I used to dance a lot in Farmington," he said in 1949. "But I like polkas better than jitterbugging." College and military career In 1940, Marshall University coach Cam Henderson offered Gatski a chance to attend the West Virginia school on a football scholarship. Gatski accepted. He joined the junior varsity team, where he was the starting center for a season before moving to Marshall's varsity football team in 1941. He started 17 games at center and linebacker beginning in 1941, when Marshall posted a 7–1 record. The team faltered the following year, falling to 1–7–1 as its best players went to serve in the military. Gatski enlisted in the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps before the 1942 season as America's involvement in World War II intensified. Marshall canceled its football program in 1943 as Gatski entered his senior year, and he was called to active duty and later sent with an infantry division to fight in the European theater of World War II. He went to England and followed American troops as they landed in Normandy and marched further into Europe. "I wasn't in any heavy fighting," he later said. He attained the rank of private first class. Gatski returned from duty in 1945, but Marshall had yet to resume its football program, so he enrolled at Auburn University in Alabama and finished out his studies, playing part of the season on the school's football team. "Marshall hadn't started back up, and I hadn't played football for two years," he later explained. "I didn't want to sit