Mr. Baseball

WAUSA – A former Wausa High School principal who loved America’s pastime has passed away.

Dale Wamberg died on July 24, 2022, at the Good Samaritan Society in Bloomfield. He was 92.

Funeral services for Wamberg will be at 2 p.m. July 28 at the Evangelical Covenant Church in Wausa.

Wamberg became the high school principal and activities/athletic director at Wausa Public Schools during the late 1960s, according to his obituary.

Gary Lundberg of Wausa started teaching for the school district in 1965 and got to know Wamberg through working together.

“He was a guy who was not easily angered,” Lundberg said. “He could take so much stress and not get worked up.”

After 27 years of being the principal in Wausa, Wamberg entered retirement in 1994.

Lundberg, who retired in 2006 from teaching English and social studies, worked with Wamberg for several years.

“You could go down worked up about something – something wasn’t right in the classroom – and he’d sit there and give you his crooked little smile and sit back,” Lundberg said.

“Pretty soon, you’d be calmed down and get things straightened out,” he said. “He was a good guy to work for and with. I got along with Dale.”

Lundberg recalled Wamberg was a huge fan of coaching and playing baseball.

“Dale was a big baseball guy,” Lundberg said.

According to his obituary, a highlight for Wamberg in 1956 was playing baseball against pitcher Bob Gibson, an Omaha native who went on to star for the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Wausa Swedes were proud to beat Gibson in two of the three games they played.

Wamberg, a Wausa native, oversaw his hometown’s youth baseball program, managing and coaching Little League, Midgets and American Legion teams for many years, sometimes coaching five squads at once.

Lundberg remembered his stepsons Rick and Craig Umberger riding with Wamberg in his old orange pickup truck to youth baseball games.

“Our two oldest boys – they still remember riding in the back of that old pickup,” Lundberg said.

“A bunch of kids would ride in the back of that pickup,” he said. “He’d haul the kids to those baseball games.”

According to his obituary, Wamberg was still coaching baseball and pitching when he was 80 years old.

He figured he had thrown more than a million batting practice pitches and played or coached more than 2,000 games.

Wamberg spent so much time on the baseball diamond in Wausa that it was named after him.

Lundberg recalled he and his wife, Ruth, spending time with Wamberg and his wife, Mary Ann, after youth baseball games years before the Internet existed in the public domain.

“In those days, after the ballgames, we’d get together at somebody’s house and wait for the scores to come over the TV,” Lundberg said.

The Wambergs celebrated 62 years of marriage before Mary Ann’s passing in 2019.

“They were wonderful people,” Ruth Lundberg added.