Athlete.
Born at Rembrandt on 1 February 1916 to Josephine Nault (1859-1952) and Frederic Louis Genthon (1857-1941), he spent his childhood in Saint Boniface. His parents were early settlers of the Red River Valley. His mother was the great-granddaughter of Jean Baptiste Lagimodière and Marie Gaboury. His father was a fur trader at Moose Lake for the Hudson's Bay Company.
Genthon was educated at St. Charles Catholic School and St. Edward’s School in Winnipeg. In 1932, he began a career in baseball, playing for St. Charles, St. James, and the Canadian Ukrainian Athletic Club (CUAC). He entered the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1942, where he served on the high seas during the winter months and was transferred ashore to play baseball for the Navy during the summer months. His naval baseball career took him to Victoria and Esquimalt on the West Coast, and to Halifax on the East Coast. His love of baseball also led him to meet his future wife, Yolande Bourbonnais (1919-2013), at Kenora, Ontario during a game. They were married in Montreal in 1945 and went on to have seven daughters.
After returning to Winnipeg, he continued his involvement with baseball, pitching for Selkirk, Transcona, St. Boniface Native Sons, Sacred Heart, and on several rural teams, such as Fannystelle and Lundar, in tournaments. Along with Les Edwards, another Manitoban, he played for three months with the House of David, a religious group in Michigan whose long-haired, bearded baseball team toured throughout the US between 1914 and 1950, famous for its entertaining Harlem Globetrotters-style performance on the field. In 2000, Genthon was inducted into the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame.
He died at Winnipeg on 21 September 2006.
Birth registration [Michael Genthon], Manitoba Vital Statistics.
Obituary, Winnipeg Free Press, 25 September 2006.
“The religious sect that became baseball’s answer to the Harlem Globetrotters,” The Guardian, 21 September 2016.
“Michael ‘Mike’ Genthon,” Jones Family Tree, Ancestry.
“Mike Genthon,” Inductees, Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame.
This page was prepared by Lois Braun.
Page revised: 14 November 2022
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