How long ago has it been? I wondered as I tried to remember the details of a decades-old nightmare.
When the phone rang and I heard the tension in my 80-year-old mother’s voice, I knew the news coverage had gone statewide.
Most people will not remember this, but at the beginning of the school year in 1976 a similar accident happened in Hancock County.
A tractor-trailer rig going full speed rear-ended an MRDD bus that had stopped on U.S. 30 to drop off a client in New Stark.
The bus, which was carrying four people, flipped over. One was killed instantly, another died later from his injuries, and the bus driver was seriously injured. Another client was presumed dead until he was amazingly revived by a nurse on the scene.
I know about this because my younger brother, Billy, was the one revived. We are still amazed that he lived.
My mother worked at Blanchard Valley Center and had decided to let my brother, a client, ride the bus home that afternoon while she stayed late for paperwork. He loved the bus.
At a time before cell phones, she had arrived home to find my father and sisters waiting to tell her about the accident, then screaming when they saw that Billy was not with her.
In a whisper this week, Mom remembered arriving at the hospital. “There were so many ambulances.
“It affected a lot of people. I don’t know how we got through all that, but it did draw us closer to God,” she said.
Today, Billy seems to have no memories of the reasons for his scars, but he still talks about the ambulance ride. He told my parents that Grandma rode with him to the hospital, which is amazing because Grandma had been dead for 10 years.
Today, when he hears a siren, he says that Grandma is going to help someone.
I was in Italy at the time of the wreck and didn’t know about it for weeks. I remember frantically trying to get an overseas phone line at the NATO base when I got Mom’s and Dad’s letter. By the time I got back into the country, my brother was out of the hospital and the healing had begun.
I know that the two young men who died in the Hancock County accident are not forgotten. Billy and Mom quietly talk of them in hushed tones.
On Jan. 7, when the news of the accident reached the residential center where my brother now lives, the administration shut down all bus transport out of respect for those who had just died.
“The wreck brought back so many memories and they felt so bad for those families,” Mom said.
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