CRASH OF '71

I tried to go for a run the other day. We had been experiencing strange weather: cold one day, warm the next...rain, sun, etc. Limping, I returned to the house after just a few blocks. Weather changes do a number on my hip. I suffer from the effects of avascular necrosis of the femoral head, brought on by a childhood case of Legg-Calve-Perthes disease, where the blood supply to the ball joint of the hip is cut off. The hip starts to die, and eventually collapses.

It is particularly acute if you suffer some sort of trauma to the hip.


My dad scandalized some of the church folks when he bought a convertible. It was a sweet ride: a bright red Volkswagen Karmen Ghia. But not everyone at the First Baptist Church of Sedalia, Missouri was ready for their pastor to be tooling around town in a ragtop. I mean, it was 1971, and the culture was being destablized enough by ungrateful little punks like John Kerry questioning the wisdom of war in Southeast Asia, and hippies like John Lennon telling us to imagine no religion. The last thing we needed was to see our preacher in a little German car with the wind in his sideburns.

Well, the public indignity was short-lived.

A few months after he bought the Ghia, Dad and I drove down to Thayer, on the Missouri-Akransas border, to see my grandparents. We had a nice visit, and on the way home we took highway 63 from West Plains to Willow Springs. The top was down and the wind was a sedative. I unbuckled and fell asleep leaning against my dad.

When we came to the dogleg turn near Pomona, an approaching car crossed the centerline and headed right for us. There was no escape on the right; the truckstop entrance offered a blunt abutment. Dad tried to swerve to the left to avoid a head-on collision. No good. The oncoming driver corrected at the same time. We met in the middle, with the other car catching the right front of the convertible, peeling my side of the car like a tin can. If I had been sitting upright, I would have taken the force of the impact.



The paramedics said if Dad hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, he would have been thrown 50 feet out of the car and killed. But, since seatbelts in 1971 only covered the lap, the same restraint almost cut him in two. When the ambulance arrived, they saw he was in a life-threatening condition and loaded him up for transport. Either they didn’t see me crumpled up under the dashboard, or there wasn’t room for both of us in the ambulance...or maybe they thought my injuries were superficial and that I should just shake it off and walk to the hospital; but for some strange reason, they took off without me. That’s right. Six years old and they left me in the ditch.

Enter the stranger. He was driving a big Plymouth station wagon, and he didn’t like the looks of that situation one bit. Without training, permission, or hesitation, he grabbed my semi-conscious body, stuck me in the back of his wagon, and took off for Ozarks Medical Center.

The stranger was apparently accustomed to lending a hand. The car was mostly full of day-laborers. Nobody wanted them fulltime, so he hired them when he could. And they were black. And it was Southern Missouri in 1971. My world was pretty white.

When I woke up in a strange car, with four strange black men staring down at me, and fire shooting through my legs, I screamed like a motherfucker.

I’m sure we made quite a sight: a 1965 Plymouth Valiant Wagon barrelling down the road toward West Plains — breaking the law, carrying outcasts, and crying out for deliverance. I can just hear the stranger, hunched over the wheel of his renegade ambulance, muttering, “The last shall be first. The last shall be first.” Giving the finger to all the doctors, the bigots, and the careful standersby that would rather watch from safety than dive elbowdeep into the shit. He was a man of faith.

His faith delivered me to the hospital, where I stayed for a week or two.

After our odd separation at the scene of the accident, Dad demanded that we share a room. At first the nurses weren’t going to allow it, until he took a break from spitting up blood and threatened to kick somebody’s ass with a bedpan.

The stranger came to visit once. We thanked him, but over time we were preoccupied with our own recovery and forgot his name. His faith gave way to our reality, as faith so often does.

Although I never saw him again, he recently reentered my life.

(Stay tuned for Chapter 2)