Gerald Lindsey:
CLASS OF 1960
Wallowa High SchoolClass of 1960
Wallowa, OR
Gerald's Story
Sledding Accident of 1958
This is the story of the sledding accident that occurred near Wallowa, Oregon in 1958. It is also a story of how miracles can occur in the worst of times. Many people, both believers and non-believers, do not think that miracles occur in the present day, just something that people believed happened thousands of years ago. With the logic and rationale of today, everything can be explained.
I believe that some miracles can manifest in what does not happen as well as things that do happen.
In the winter of 1958, I believe it was in February or early March, our sophomore high school class decided to have a sledding party. We planned to go up one of the old roads North of town that was not being used anymore. The snow there was about 6â deep and not packed down, which was just a little too deep to get any momentum to move your sled.
Keep in mind that we were 15 year olds in a small town. We certainly did not need any parental guidance. We knew what we were doing. What could possibly go wrong?
My mom insisted that we all go to church that Sunday, so I did not get out to the area until about noon. There was a teenager at the lowest level of the hill stopping all auto traffic. This did not surprise me much, but then I saw that people were not coming down on their sleds but were sitting on the overturned hood of an old car. The car hood was being pulled by a jeep. There were four kids to a ride. We all climbed into the jeep, which carried us back up the road for about a half a mile.
I thought that this was just a little beyond my experience and courage level, so I tried going down on my sled. As mentioned above, this did not work out very well.
When I got back up the hill, people were getting onto the overturned car hood. There were two girls and a guy. Room for one more. I still had my doubts about it but one of the girls was the prettiest and most popular girl in my class and she was saying, âCome on Gerald, sit right here!â Well, I wasnât very popular and there was a limit to just how much âgirlâ I, a 15 year old boy, could withstand. Besides, they had been doing this all morning without incident, so âWhat could possibly go wrong?â
For some inexplicable reason, I sat down facing backwards, away from the girls and the direction of travel. I remember that there was some commotion behind me, but not until later did I learn that 2 guys were kicking the girls off because they felt that it was their turn.Good thinking guys.
OK! Now we had 4 boys ready to rumble!
The jeep started out pretty slow but then picked up speed. I looked around a little, but the snow and ice kicked up by the wheels hit my face and I really was not enjoying this. I almost stuck my feet out off the hood and into the snow, which would have pulled me off the hood and into the snow. But then I thought âjust this one timeâ.
The hood not only went down the road but also swung from one side embankment to the other. We were going perhaps 20 to 25 mph. A lot of excitement for those that love speed at ground level.
I heard a lot of screaming so I chanced another look over my right shoulder. I swear, at that instant, all I saw was a big chrome bumper of the kind you would normally see on the front of cars of the â50s. The thought went through my mind, âIt couldnât be! We will be killed!â
OK! Now we have 4 teenage boys under or partly under the car. Being hit totally unprotected, by todayâs rational logic tells us that 2 or 3 or perhaps 4 boys would be killed. Not that day! No one was killed! OK! Well then there must have been some serious head injury, internal injury, or someone crippled for life - right? No! No! And No!
This is not to say that there were no injuries. There were injuries.
Take Warren âButchâ Groberg. He had what he called a âserious bruiseâ on his thigh. Perhaps he jumped at the last second. More about him later.
Take Darrell Thomas. The car ran over his left kneecap and broke his leg.
Take Jim Henry. I cannot explain Jim Henry. I have no reason to think that my classmates would have made this up but Jim Henry had a tire track going across his chest. No broken bones and no internal injury. Stayed in the hospital overnight for observation and sent home the next day.
Then there is me!
The next thing I remember, I was face down in the snow with the car on top of me and I could not breathe. I was vaguely aware that my left foot was somehow caught in the undercarriage of the car. I had two broken ribs and my diaphragm would not work. I could not breathe! I donât know why my spine was not broken. I could hear my classmates screaming and talking somewhere but I could not breathe. After a long time I thought âIâve got to breathe!â I tried short quick, shallow breaths and this kept me going.
I couldnât scream and I couldnât crawl out! Someone had to get me out. I listened to my classmates for several minutes. No one looked under the car. Then I heard something far more ominous than I ever expected.
The driver started the car and revved up the engine. I could only think âNo! No! No! No!â Then I heard the unmistakable sound of the driver moving the transmission into first gear! I thought, âThis is going to hurt! This is really going to hurt!â because I knew that the next step was that the driver was going to lift his foot off the clutch pedal and my left leg was going to be ripped off. I was going to die at age 15. There was nothing I could do about it! What was there to stop him?
But this didnât happen.
Warren âButchâ Groberg was one of the shortest kids in our class. He was a good kid but not someone you would have expected to take control of a situation like this. At the moment that the driver was going to lift his foot, Butch stepped in front of the car and said, in a very commanding voice, âWait a minute! Letâs see if everyone is out!â Only then did I hear my classmates crunch down in the snow and look for me.
Only recently did I ask Butch, via e-mail, what compelled him to do what he did at that time long ago. You might expect him to give a self-serving answer saying how someone needed to check. What he did say was âI donât have a clueâ!
âI donât have a clueâ and a life was saved! Mine!
For those standing on the sidelines, it was no big deal. For me, it was.
The students I named here are still alive and living not too far from where the event took place. Butch now has a PhD. Darrell lived in Alaska for many years but has now moved back to our hometown. Jim drove a truck for many years before someone bent on suicide crossed the center line and ran head on into him. Both vehicles were destroyed. Jim survived and is living in Idaho.
Iâm a retired Computer System Analyst with a gap between two ribs to remind me of what could have been.
The Hospital Stay
This story closely follows the story about the sledding party accident. As you might suspect, a couple of us were hospitalized. After I was taken out from under the car and transported to the hospital in Enterprise Oregon, the doctor examining me needed X-rays to see just what was broken. When he had me turning on my left side, I felt a great deal of pain but he took the X-ray. When I rolled back onto my back I could hear this strange bubbling sound coming from my chest. Iâm sure that everyone in the room could hear it. I asked the doctor what that sound was and he said, very calmly, âyour lungâs collapsingâ!
So now, I had two broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a damaged kidney, and I donât remember what else. But I was not in any great pain. I do remember sleeping the next couple of days on a sheet of plywood to keep my back straight. Now it was just a matter of time for my body to heal.
Darrell Thomas had a broken leg and a cast that went from his ankle to his upper leg. He was in a different room than I.
The first week was rather boring. Some of my classmates visited me one day. Warren and others that were in the accident were there, but I had few visitors. Sometime in the second week, the nurses moved Darrellâs bed into my room so that we would have someone to talk to. And Darrell really talked that first day, or at least an hour or so. And then Mother Nature took over and Darrell had to climb up onto a bedpan. Nothing-unusual here. He pulled the curtain between us for some privacy, and I picked up a magazine to read.
Not five seconds later, three high school girls walked past the foot of my bed and straight for Darrell! I didnât know any of them. Iâm thinking, âI wonder how Darrell will handle thisâ? I thought that they would make a U turn and head on out. But no! All I could hear was some chitchat and pleasant conversation. Darrell is handling this real well! After 4 or 5 minutes, Darrell pulls the curtain back to get me into to conversation but they do not take their eyes off Darrell â he is the handsome guy. They do not want to miss anything he is doing. Well, maybe not everything. He is setting there propped up with hands on both sides and the sheet pulled up to his waist.
This goes on for several more minutes when the girls notice that there is a nice typewriter on the floor at the foot of Darrellâs bed. They duck their headâs down and get really engrossed in examining the typewriter. This puts them out of sight of Darrell! He scrambles around trying to figure out how to get off the bedpan without them noticing.
Question: What is the political correct way of dismounting a bedpan when there are a number of girls in the room. I donât know either. Good thing that Darrell didnât know.
One of the girls noticed something going on and quickly looked up. Darrell immediately stopped what he was doing and went back to his poker face. She looks over at me with a suspicious look, thinking I must have been doing whatever was going on. I responded with a gentle smile.
Finally, they get bored with the typewriter and straighten up and continue their conversation. Actually, if I remember righ...Expand for more
t, it was the tall girl in the middle doing all of the talking. Darrell was strangely quiet.
Now remember, Darrell got onto the bedpan for a reason. You cannot deny Mother Nature for very long. The girls had been there for about 20 minutes, more or less. I do not know how Darrell did this, but about here is where he actually had the BM. I am guessing because this is where he had a loud, well the term used then was âbreaking windâ. Now sitting on a bedpan is pretty much air tight, but it is not sound proof. But the sound is more of a hollow, metallic, echo that is just there and you cannot tell where it came from. The tall girl jumps up and says, âWHATâS THAT!â Now what is Darrell going to say? âI just farted in my bedpan.â No way! Silence.
Here is where I came in to help my friend. I said, âIt probably was a car outsideâ. Now this is plausible. It just happened to be a time where there wasnât a car moving in a ten-block area, but it sounds reasonable â to a guy. But not this girl! She gave me another look and then walked over to the window. She looked left, she looked right, and very slowly said, âI donât think it was a carâ. I responded with âyeah, yeah, it was a carâ. She turned around shook her long hair as if to say, âGet out of my hairâ. I could tell that she thought I was lying. She then walked back, sat down and continued talking to Darrell. (What is it with these teenage girls?)
Well, they had been there for 25 minutes, more or less. Darrell had spent all of this time propped up with his hands, one on either side. This cut the circulation out of his hands and they began to go to sleep. I knew this because he began to bang the fingers of his right hand against his cast. Iâm thinking âyou are finished now â they will know if you have to lay downâ. Well, I began to laugh a little, and Darrel started giggling. The girls just got up and left.How rude! As soon as they got into the hallway, we both just busted out laughing.
Darrell pulled the curtain and finished up what he was doing. A minute or so later, a man steps into the room and demands to know whatâs going on. He was in street clothes, so I donât think that he worked for the hospital. We told him what had happened. He could have been just someone visiting someone in the next room, but on thinking about it, I think he was the dad of one of the girls who drove them to the hospital. They would have told him about the crazy kid in the room that laughed without reason. If this were the case, I would have given anything (at least another rib) to see the look on their faces when he told them.
Darrell went home a few days later. I spent three weeks in the hospital and then another week at home before I went back to school
If you know them, please thank them for 30 minutes of entertainment during a bland hospital stay. This is not to discourage anyone from visiting the sick or injured in the hospital. Just call ahead OK.
Later that year (1958), while I was washing my hands in the upstairs bathroom, I suddenly could hear this high-pitched ringing in my head. Tinnitus! No known cure! It has never stopped and I have it today. This was the beginning of the deterioration of my hearing.
Meeting and Marrying Maria
Graduation 1960
I graduated from Wallowa High School in 1960.
Oregon State Forestry - summer 1960
I worked for the Oregon State Forestry in the summer of 1960 fighting forest fires. Our crew also cut up some dry logs with a two-man crosscut saw and chopped the sections into firewood for the rangerâs stove for the winter. The wood-burning stove was his only source of heat.
J Herbert Bates â 1 year â 1960-1961
After the fire season, I got a job at the J Herbert Bates Sawmill in Wallowa. I had various chores there, but the one I had the longest was to stack lumber off the planer chain. This was for the night shift, which was from 5:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. The mill was about a mile from home, which I walked to and from, winter and summer. I saved as much as I could with hopes of using it for my college education.
EnrÃquez children - February 17 1961.
My family received Portland Oregon Journal and around the middle of February 1961, I saw the picture of the Enriquez children in the paper. This was shortly after Feb 17, when they arrived in Miami. They were lined up, youngest (Angel) to oldest (MarÃa). For some strange reason, I felt then that I would meet this family and would marry MarÃa, who was 15 at the time. It was not a âhopeâ or a âwishâ, just a statement of fact. I then thought that this was crazy to think about marrying a 15-year-old girl, and besides, she was in Miami, where I would never in my life be able to visit. Up to that time I had seldom been out of Wallowa County. Miami may as well have been on the other side of the world. So I put this thought out of my mind. Forget it! My most important goal was to get an education.
EOC 1961-1962
I used some of my savings from the sawmill job to attend Eastern Oregon College in La Grande, Oregon. This was an interesting time, as it was the first time I had really been away from home and not at all like Wallowa High School. But the classes in my major, physics, were not too difficult and I adapted.
J Herbert Bates â 1 week
In the summer of 1962, I went back to work at the sawmill. After one week, the union went on strike. Since my dad was active in the union, I thought that it best not to be a âstrike breakerâ. I found a few other part time jobs, one of which was in the âpea harvestâ, but I made very little money that summer.
EOC 1962-1963
I still had enough money saved to attend EOC for another year. However, it required my working part time at the college washing dishes. This year I met a girl named Victoria. She was an exchange student from Puerto Rico. One interesting note here is that she did not want to get very far from home so when she went down the list of colleges and saw, âEastern Oregon Collegeâ, she thought that it must be somewhere along the eastern seaboard â right? She signed up and then went home to find out where Oregon was. It was a shock to her but she decided to stick with it. The lesson here is to look before you leap or take on a new adventure! Iâm glad she did. She was the first true girl friend. However, after the year was up, she moved to New York and I never saw her again.
U.S. Forest Service - Mount Adams
In the summer of 1963, I worked for the US Forest Service at the Gifford Pinchot National Forest southwest of Mt Adams in Washington State. There were few fires that summer, so our crew decided to climb Mt Adams, which rises to 12,276 ft above sea level and is snow-capped year round. First time I had climbed a snowcapped mountain but as far as mountain climbing goes, it is a fairly easy climb. No ice axes, no crampons, and no ropes. Just one guy following another. The view atop the mountain is spectacular to say the least. We could see north beyond Mt Baker and south past the Three Sisters in Oregon. Mt St Helens was very close, and we could look down on the top of it. Even then, there was something strange about Mt St Helens.
As we came down near the tree line, we turned around and looked back where we had gone. We noticed 4 canine animals about 150 yards or more back on the ice, running from right to left in our view. They paid no mind to us. I didnât believe that wolves were in Washington at that time but I said âwolvesâ. I watched them until they went out of sight, then I turned around and found that my crewmates had vanished. When I made it back to the car, they said that they were worried about me. Thanks guys!
I must mention that this was the summer we planted trees. With a metal tray holding about 30 seedlings, we would sink a âhoedigâ up to the handle, pull back to show a little space, place the seedling into the hole, stomp the ground to push out any air that might dry the roots. Take three steps and repeat. To keep up, each of us had to plant at least 500 seedlings a day. I remember planting seedlings in a clearing somewhere when we heard that JFK had been shot. Our crew boss said, âGet back to workâ.
That year I continued to work up until Thanksgiving.
Living with Dale & Iva â Portland State College
My brother, Dale and his wife Iva, invited me to stay with them for this school year. I had missed the fall quarter, but transferred my credits from EOC to Portland State College. I changed my major to Math. They lived near Gresham where Dale taught school. For the winter and spring quarters, I caught the bus into Portland 5 days a week to attend classes. This saved me a lot of money.
U.S. Forest Service
At the end of the school year, I took a bus up to Hood River and called the Willard Ranger Station to see if they would come and pick me up. The ranger said that he would, but could I walk across the Columbia River to the Washington side, which I did. This summer was not remarkable other than a crewmate and I walked to the top of Mt Adams. But this time, just to the false summit.
Move to Portland â Hotel
This school year, I moved into Portland to better find part time work. The only place I could find to live was a cheap hotel that I donât need to describe. Finding part time work was not as easy as I had hoped, but I did work as a âday laborerâ. I continued to look for another place to live and finally found an apartment two blocks from PSC. This was a shared apartment where the current boarder was looking for someone to split the rent.
Move to Apartment â Mansour Behesht Nejad
The other boarder was an Iranian named Mansour Behesht Nejad. He was older than I and I was never convinced that he was enrolled at PSC. There was only one bedroom so the manager moved a cot into the area between the kitchen and the living room. Not ideal, but I didnât intend to spend much time there anyway.
I believe that Mansour was not always on the up-and-up but â OK, he was a pathologi
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