Were The Gods Looking Out For Me?
By James Donahue
When I look back over the time of my youth, I remember numerous times when I should have been killed. Yet miraculously I escaped alive, and except for one serious traffic accident that occurred during my college years, walked away totally unscathed. I have often thought that some force was looking over me during my reckless youth, assuring that I survived it. Even the accident may have been a blessing in disguise, as will be explained later.
My first near miss occurred when I was so young I was still riding a tricycle on the sidewalk in my neighborhood. While I am sure my parents put strict rules on just how far and where I could ride on that tricycle, I broke the rules one summer day. I rode across the highway on the invitation of young girl who lived across the street. I did not bother to look to see if anything was coming. Suddenly there was a loud screech of tires and the loud honking of a car horn in my left ear. I froze in my place. I looked up to see the chrome radiator of a car stopped a few feet from me. I peddled quickly on to the other side of the street, shaken but still intact.
A few years later after I was in grade school, the city dug a deep trench from about where our house was south along M-25 to a small settlement of homes on the other side of the golf course. The purpose was to lay sewer and later lines to service those homes. When construction workers went home at night, the children in the neighborhood found that trench, about five or six feet deep and two feet wide, was a great place to run through. It ran from our neighborhood for about a quarter of a mile to the other end. I don’t know what ever possessed me to do it, but one afternoon after getting home from school, I decided to do a solo dash through the trench. Somewhere in the middle of my run I heard someone above me yell “Hey…..Look out!” I stopped dead in my tracks just as a large iron pipe dropped into the trench right where I would have been if someone hadn’t yelled out. That worker lectured to me as I retreated. That was my last dash through the trench.
There was the near-fatal crash while riding with two high school chums in a 1949 Mercury. I was not driving. We were racing another car and hitting speeds clocked at 105 miles per hour and passing two slower moving vehicles just before coming to a dip in the road. Suddenly an oncoming car popped up out of the dip and it looked like we were about to perish in a head-on collision. The driver of our car tried to brake and slip in between the two cars we were passing, the Mercury skidded sideways out of control, hit the rear of the car ahead of us, then careened off the road and slipped between two large trees. It stopped upright in an open field. We all walked away from that crash without a scratch.
During my freshman year in college, I had a new roommate named Al who moved into my dormitory room after spring break. He was a Korean War veteran, enrolling in college on the old GI Bill. He came driving a new Ford Fairlane. It was painted pink, black and cream. I remember it as a gaudy looking car. But Al was proud of it and wanted to take me and another roommate for a ride. We were having an ice storm that night and the road was slick. As we headed away from campus on an ice-coated and crowned blacktop road, I suggested that we slow down a little. I had experience driving on ice and knew Al was driving too fast. He laughed at my concern, and just to prove his point, whipped the steering wheel. The car immediately skidded out of control and we crashed upside down in a ditch. The doors were jammed and we had a difficult time figuring out how to get out through a window. We could smell gasoline dipping down in the car as we wiggled our way out of the wreck. I worried that the car might go up in flames before we escaped it. All three of us walked away from that wreck without a scratch.
In my senior year I was driving a compact Renault. It was probably one of the first sub-compact foreign cars, other than the Volkswagen Beetle, appearing in America in those years. During the fall homecoming football game and dance, I invited Bernice Roggenbuck, a girl I had met in Port Austin the prior summer to be my date for the weekend. She was a Harbor Beach native but now lived and worked in Detroit. I drove half way to Detroit and met her in Williamston. She came by bus to meet me, rather than make me go through the difficult maneuvers of finding my way around the big city. From there we drove back to Mount Pleasant while sharing shots from a bottle of whiskey.
By the time we arrived on campus I was in no shape to drive. We had only a few blocks left to go as we headed for the hotel where I reserved lodgings for my guest. We didn’t make it. We collided with a full sized car at an open intersection. I found myself face down on the pavement, the car wheel on my right shoulder. People pulled the car off of me. An ambulance took us both to the hospital. I suffered a skull fracture and severe brain concussion. Bernice also was hospitalized for a couple of days. The accident changed the course of my life. While my physical injuries were minor, my brain was slammed around a bit. I couldn’t read and comprehend what I was reading well enough to return to college for another two years. The accident also helped defer me from the draft so I avoided the Vietnam War where I probably would have been killed. By the time I was fully recovered I was married and the father of a baby boy, so the draft board never called on me.
While in the hospital I was in a room with Jack Long, one of the owners of Long and Wetzel, an oil well servicing business located in Mount Pleasant. Jack and I hit it off and before I checked out, he offered me a job in the spring if I didn’t return right away to school. I took him up on the offer. He put me to work on a light line truck, cleaning paraffin out of oil wells in the Jonesville area. There had been a new oil strike in the area and it was a busy place, with new drilling, pipe fitters, and pumping wells all over the place.
Before I went to Jonesville, however, I worked a week or two with Ted Case on some jobs in the middle section of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. He trained me. My job was to shut off the well head, open the cap, attach a long pipe, then scale that pipe on welded iron steps, and drop a heavy iron sinker into it. The sinker had a steel brush on the lower end. The top end was attached to a light wire that passed through a rubber plug, over a pulley and then down to the ground. Once in place, we opened the well, then stood in a shower of warm crude spraying through the tiny hole in the rubber plug and “spudded” the brush through the paraffin. Paraffin is a wax like substance in crude oil that tends to collect on the walls of the iron pipe as the crude cools while flowing up from deep in the ground. It has to be cleaned regularly or the wells plug completely off. We sometimes worked on one well for hours until we brushed the well clean. It was a hard and dirty job, but I liked the work.
The last job I did in that area with Ted was on Easter Sunday. We were both upset that we had to work that day and I cannot remember why it was so important. It was a cold rainy miserable day we were working in mud up to our ankles. When we broke for our lunch at noon and climbed in the truck cab Ted attempted to start the engine and turn on the heater to get us dried out and warm. The engine coughed and suddenly we saw smoke. We realized our truck was on fire and we were set up on a wire at a partly opened and spitting oil well. We carried a fire extinguisher on the truck and it was on the passenger’s side. Without thinking I jumped out of the truck, grabbed the extinguisher, handed it to Ted, and he extinguished the fire. Later he asked me how I was able to get the fire extinguisher off the truck as I did. Because of possible theft, he said the device was locked in place. In order to get it free it had to be unlocked and Case had the key. We found that in my excitement I had broken a steel pin that locked the extinguisher in place. It took some kind of superhuman strength to have done that. I later tried to break that pin and never could do it again.
Ted and I checked into a motel at Jonesville the day we were sent there from Mount Pleasant. We worked together all that week. That weekend I drove to Detroit to see Bernice. By this time we had been writing and we had enjoyed a few dates. I checked into a low cost hotel located about a block from her apartment and spent the weekend. When I got back to Jonesville I found the motel room we were living in a wreck. There was plywood over the windows and doors. There was no sign of Ted. When I inquired I learned that some thugs ravaged the place and beat Ted so badly he was in the hospital. It seemed that he had been seeing someone’s wife or girlfriend in the area and the boyfriend came to get revenge.
I was next assigned to work with Ted’s brother, L. V. “Corky” Case on the same kind of rig. This truck was a larger one with a four wheel drive transmission and designed to take us places where most other vehicles won’t go. And we went through some very tough places, even though shallow lakes, to get to some of the wells we worked on.
One day we set up at a well that was so choked with paraffin that we could not get a normal sinker with even the thinnest of our brushes to break through. To solve the problem, we decided that we had to use an extra-long and extra heavy weight. That involved attaching a second pipe on the first, and then hoisting a very long sinker weighing well over a hundred pounds high over my head before dropping it into the pipe. I had by then acquired quite a bit of strength on the job and succeeded in lifting that sinker over my head. But in putting it into the pipe, my oil-soaked gloves let it slip and it dropped all the way to the well-head with a hard thud. Those well heads were made of cast iron and Case and I both expected the head to blow. It it had happened, I probably would have been killed at my perch high over the well-head. Miraculously, it didn’t happen.
Somehow I survived all of the mishaps, went on to finish college, met Doris, got married, and we raised our family. But all of that is the rest of my story.
By James Donahue
When I look back over the time of my youth, I remember numerous times when I should have been killed. Yet miraculously I escaped alive, and except for one serious traffic accident that occurred during my college years, walked away totally unscathed. I have often thought that some force was looking over me during my reckless youth, assuring that I survived it. Even the accident may have been a blessing in disguise, as will be explained later.
My first near miss occurred when I was so young I was still riding a tricycle on the sidewalk in my neighborhood. While I am sure my parents put strict rules on just how far and where I could ride on that tricycle, I broke the rules one summer day. I rode across the highway on the invitation of young girl who lived across the street. I did not bother to look to see if anything was coming. Suddenly there was a loud screech of tires and the loud honking of a car horn in my left ear. I froze in my place. I looked up to see the chrome radiator of a car stopped a few feet from me. I peddled quickly on to the other side of the street, shaken but still intact.
A few years later after I was in grade school, the city dug a deep trench from about where our house was south along M-25 to a small settlement of homes on the other side of the golf course. The purpose was to lay sewer and later lines to service those homes. When construction workers went home at night, the children in the neighborhood found that trench, about five or six feet deep and two feet wide, was a great place to run through. It ran from our neighborhood for about a quarter of a mile to the other end. I don’t know what ever possessed me to do it, but one afternoon after getting home from school, I decided to do a solo dash through the trench. Somewhere in the middle of my run I heard someone above me yell “Hey…..Look out!” I stopped dead in my tracks just as a large iron pipe dropped into the trench right where I would have been if someone hadn’t yelled out. That worker lectured to me as I retreated. That was my last dash through the trench.
There was the near-fatal crash while riding with two high school chums in a 1949 Mercury. I was not driving. We were racing another car and hitting speeds clocked at 105 miles per hour and passing two slower moving vehicles just before coming to a dip in the road. Suddenly an oncoming car popped up out of the dip and it looked like we were about to perish in a head-on collision. The driver of our car tried to brake and slip in between the two cars we were passing, the Mercury skidded sideways out of control, hit the rear of the car ahead of us, then careened off the road and slipped between two large trees. It stopped upright in an open field. We all walked away from that crash without a scratch.
During my freshman year in college, I had a new roommate named Al who moved into my dormitory room after spring break. He was a Korean War veteran, enrolling in college on the old GI Bill. He came driving a new Ford Fairlane. It was painted pink, black and cream. I remember it as a gaudy looking car. But Al was proud of it and wanted to take me and another roommate for a ride. We were having an ice storm that night and the road was slick. As we headed away from campus on an ice-coated and crowned blacktop road, I suggested that we slow down a little. I had experience driving on ice and knew Al was driving too fast. He laughed at my concern, and just to prove his point, whipped the steering wheel. The car immediately skidded out of control and we crashed upside down in a ditch. The doors were jammed and we had a difficult time figuring out how to get out through a window. We could smell gasoline dipping down in the car as we wiggled our way out of the wreck. I worried that the car might go up in flames before we escaped it. All three of us walked away from that wreck without a scratch.
In my senior year I was driving a compact Renault. It was probably one of the first sub-compact foreign cars, other than the Volkswagen Beetle, appearing in America in those years. During the fall homecoming football game and dance, I invited Bernice Roggenbuck, a girl I had met in Port Austin the prior summer to be my date for the weekend. She was a Harbor Beach native but now lived and worked in Detroit. I drove half way to Detroit and met her in Williamston. She came by bus to meet me, rather than make me go through the difficult maneuvers of finding my way around the big city. From there we drove back to Mount Pleasant while sharing shots from a bottle of whiskey.
By the time we arrived on campus I was in no shape to drive. We had only a few blocks left to go as we headed for the hotel where I reserved lodgings for my guest. We didn’t make it. We collided with a full sized car at an open intersection. I found myself face down on the pavement, the car wheel on my right shoulder. People pulled the car off of me. An ambulance took us both to the hospital. I suffered a skull fracture and severe brain concussion. Bernice also was hospitalized for a couple of days. The accident changed the course of my life. While my physical injuries were minor, my brain was slammed around a bit. I couldn’t read and comprehend what I was reading well enough to return to college for another two years. The accident also helped defer me from the draft so I avoided the Vietnam War where I probably would have been killed. By the time I was fully recovered I was married and the father of a baby boy, so the draft board never called on me.
While in the hospital I was in a room with Jack Long, one of the owners of Long and Wetzel, an oil well servicing business located in Mount Pleasant. Jack and I hit it off and before I checked out, he offered me a job in the spring if I didn’t return right away to school. I took him up on the offer. He put me to work on a light line truck, cleaning paraffin out of oil wells in the Jonesville area. There had been a new oil strike in the area and it was a busy place, with new drilling, pipe fitters, and pumping wells all over the place.
Before I went to Jonesville, however, I worked a week or two with Ted Case on some jobs in the middle section of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. He trained me. My job was to shut off the well head, open the cap, attach a long pipe, then scale that pipe on welded iron steps, and drop a heavy iron sinker into it. The sinker had a steel brush on the lower end. The top end was attached to a light wire that passed through a rubber plug, over a pulley and then down to the ground. Once in place, we opened the well, then stood in a shower of warm crude spraying through the tiny hole in the rubber plug and “spudded” the brush through the paraffin. Paraffin is a wax like substance in crude oil that tends to collect on the walls of the iron pipe as the crude cools while flowing up from deep in the ground. It has to be cleaned regularly or the wells plug completely off. We sometimes worked on one well for hours until we brushed the well clean. It was a hard and dirty job, but I liked the work.
The last job I did in that area with Ted was on Easter Sunday. We were both upset that we had to work that day and I cannot remember why it was so important. It was a cold rainy miserable day we were working in mud up to our ankles. When we broke for our lunch at noon and climbed in the truck cab Ted attempted to start the engine and turn on the heater to get us dried out and warm. The engine coughed and suddenly we saw smoke. We realized our truck was on fire and we were set up on a wire at a partly opened and spitting oil well. We carried a fire extinguisher on the truck and it was on the passenger’s side. Without thinking I jumped out of the truck, grabbed the extinguisher, handed it to Ted, and he extinguished the fire. Later he asked me how I was able to get the fire extinguisher off the truck as I did. Because of possible theft, he said the device was locked in place. In order to get it free it had to be unlocked and Case had the key. We found that in my excitement I had broken a steel pin that locked the extinguisher in place. It took some kind of superhuman strength to have done that. I later tried to break that pin and never could do it again.
Ted and I checked into a motel at Jonesville the day we were sent there from Mount Pleasant. We worked together all that week. That weekend I drove to Detroit to see Bernice. By this time we had been writing and we had enjoyed a few dates. I checked into a low cost hotel located about a block from her apartment and spent the weekend. When I got back to Jonesville I found the motel room we were living in a wreck. There was plywood over the windows and doors. There was no sign of Ted. When I inquired I learned that some thugs ravaged the place and beat Ted so badly he was in the hospital. It seemed that he had been seeing someone’s wife or girlfriend in the area and the boyfriend came to get revenge.
I was next assigned to work with Ted’s brother, L. V. “Corky” Case on the same kind of rig. This truck was a larger one with a four wheel drive transmission and designed to take us places where most other vehicles won’t go. And we went through some very tough places, even though shallow lakes, to get to some of the wells we worked on.
One day we set up at a well that was so choked with paraffin that we could not get a normal sinker with even the thinnest of our brushes to break through. To solve the problem, we decided that we had to use an extra-long and extra heavy weight. That involved attaching a second pipe on the first, and then hoisting a very long sinker weighing well over a hundred pounds high over my head before dropping it into the pipe. I had by then acquired quite a bit of strength on the job and succeeded in lifting that sinker over my head. But in putting it into the pipe, my oil-soaked gloves let it slip and it dropped all the way to the well-head with a hard thud. Those well heads were made of cast iron and Case and I both expected the head to blow. It it had happened, I probably would have been killed at my perch high over the well-head. Miraculously, it didn’t happen.
Somehow I survived all of the mishaps, went on to finish college, met Doris, got married, and we raised our family. But all of that is the rest of my story.