I REMEMBER - Thanksgiving Day and the largest car wreck in the U.S.

It was Thanksgiving Day in about 1959.  My mom (Grace Whitlock at the time), my sister Sharon and I were heading down Hwy 80 to San Francisco.  We were traveling in a 1958 Chevy Biscayne (bright yellow) that my Mom disliked intensely.  My dad had bought this car with money we didn't have and then left the family and headed out to parts unknown.  We are in fairly dire straits financially, but Mom had decided to splurge a bit and take us to San Francisco to have Thanksgiving Day at Fisherman’s Wharf and trek through Chinatown. 

We were living in Folsom (near Sacramento) and departed early in the morning, so we could make the day of it.  It was a cold and crisp day, but sunny and cloudless.  We knew we were going to have a fantastic day.  We got dressed in our best Sunday-go-to-Meetin’ clothes and jumped in the car and off we went (note – there were no seat belts : The world's first seat belt law was put in place in 1970, in the state of Victoria, Australia, making the wearing of a seat belt compulsory for drivers and front-seat passengers/Wikipedia).

We started noticing fog.  The closer we got to the Bay area, the foggier it got.  By the time we reached the outskirts of Vallejo, the fog was so thick you could barely see a few feet in front of you.  Traffic slowed to a crawl.  We were mainly concerned about getting to San Francisco in a reasonable time, as this was supposed to be a day trip – down and back.

There was a new bridge in place at the Carquinez straits that had opened earlier that year, but there was still remnants of construction and lane widening about.  We were going about 15 miles an hour, following the taillights of the car in front of us.  Then he stopped.  There was a lot of crashing and metal grinding noises from the other east-bound side of the freeway.  Perhaps he thought he was on the shoulder, not in the slow lane.  Apparently he stopped to see if he could help with the accident occurring across the divider from us, got out and ran over to “help”.  Mom wanted to pull over and get off the freeway out of traffic, but we couldn’t see two feet in front of us.  It was worse out the side windows, because there were no headlights to cut through it.  We knew were close to the bridge, which meant close to the cliffs overlooking the Carquinez Straits (The Carquinez Bridge refers to parallel bridges spanning the Carquinez Strait, forming part of interstate 80 between Crockett and Vallejo, California. The name originally referred to a single cantilever bridge built in 1927, helping to form a direct route between San Francisco and Sacramento. A second parallel cantilever bridge was completed in 1958 to deal with the increased traffic – Wikipedia).

The car behind us stopped also and started honking his horn along with us to get the guy ahead of us to get going. That was about the time the first car hit the car behind us – shoving him into the rear of our car.  I will never know why people drive so fast in bad weather, but they do.  Then a pile-up started, one after another.  Cars were spinning out and crashing into each other.  It was an odd raucous symphony of tearing metal (cars weren’t plastic then – and gas was about 25 cents/ gallon) and blaring horns.  We could also feel the constant reverberation, as the cars behind and to the side of us got hit also.  We discovered later that one of the cars behind us had several bags of potatoes in their trunk and they flew out upon impact.  Cars were skidding around in the potato-strewn freeway. 

It seemed like it would never end.  The repeated shocks of cars crashing into each other got fainter and fainter as the cars continued to stack up behind us.  Soon, the fog lifted a bit where we were and we could see there was a huge turnout about ten feet away from us - enough to park all the cars involved in the accident.  We just couldn’t see it.  It could have been the edge of the cliff also. When it seemed safe to do so, Mom had us get out and run over to the turnout, to get out of the way of the automotive mayhem going on all around us. 

Between the car pile-up opposite us and the car wreck behind us, there were over 100 cars involved (according to an article published later in Popular Science, it was the largest car wreck in the U.S. at the time).  Miraculously, there were no fatalities.  About the worst injury was a guy who got out of his car and tried to run across the freeway, slipped on the potatoes and had his legs run over by skidding car.

When it cleared and the police arrived, we were the only car able to drive away, as we hadn’t hit anyone and there was no damage to the front end of our car. Accordingly, it appeared to be our entire fault, for stopping on the freeway.  Fortunately, there were witnesses that also saw the original car that had stopped, drive away as the accident started in the west bound lane.  He had apparently been on the opposite side of the freeway, looking at the other accident and came running back when our side of the freeway started having collisions and drove away.

We did not go to San Francisco.  We did not go to Fisherman’s Wharf or Chinatown.  We did not have Thanksgiving the way we had planned in The City by the Bay.  Instead we drove back to our little house in beautiful-weather Folsom.  The grocery stores were closed for the holiday.  We had not stocked the pantry for Thanksgiving.  We became the Old Mother Hubbard poem:

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her poor doggie a bone,
When she got there
The cupboard was bare
So the poor little doggie had none.

There was however, in the back of our cupboard, a large can of Yams and a half bag of dried up marshmallows.  Note: dried marshmallows can be reconstituted and when baked on top of canned yams with butter…becomes a most delicious Thanksgiving meal.  

We were safe, warm and healthy.  A bit crunched in her rear-end, the poor old yellow Chevy could still drive.  Fifty two years later, times are much better and we have much to be thankful for.  It doesn’t have to be a big turkey on the table to be witness to the real bounty:  family, health and friends.  Happy Holidays.

Rlw

I REMEMBER...my sister, onions, turkey and cooking drama

my younger sister, Sharon, and her playful ways she would display her displeasure about me making simple, innocent, constructive suggestions about her kitchen habits.

The three times I recall of note are:

1- the time she and I were helping our Mom unload the groceries from the car. I had already brought in the onions and potatoes and Sharon (about two years old - I was about six) was putting them away in the bottom cupboard next to the refrigerator. On my second trip into the house I didn't see any potatoes or onions out so I asked her where she put them. She pointed at the cabinet and when I looked inside - as the poem says - the cupboard was bare. It is conceivable that she thought she heard a disparaging word (because the clouds were not cloudy all day) from me. Bereft of the proper words to cleverly hide the truth that she had just neatly poked them through a hole in the cupboard wall, dropping all the potatoes and onions to an impossible-to-get-to crawl space under the house, she just sunk her four teeth [two on top and two on the bottom, all in the front like a deranged beaver] into my shoulder blade and hung on until Mom heard my screaming and saved me. When a turtle does that you have to cut their head off to get them unhooked, but Mom wouldn't hear of it. It was just a suggestion.

2-We both survived and got a little older. We still had combined kitchen duties, possibly one of God's tests where what doesn't kill you, will make you stronger. It was Thanksgiving. We didn't have much money, so we were thankful for the turkey. Sharon was thankful for having an underachiever for a brother, so she could look really good compared to her sterling self. I was particularly thankful for the fact that I was the oldest child (by four years) and significantly bigger than my sterling sister.

Not being clever enough to avoid cleverly disguised, seemingly perfect set-ups (sibling harrassment opportunities), I came upon my sister, basting the family turkey, perched precariously on the open knee-high oven door in our 50's, bright turquoise, far-too-small, kitchen.

There was just enough room to squeeze behind her to pass through the kitchen. My sister had commandeered the opportunity to baste the turkey to a perfect golden brown and Mom had relegated me to taking the potato peels out to the trash. In retrospect, I probably could have gone around the kitchen, but the what-could-possibly-go-wrong temptation to casually, ever-so-lovingly, brush past her, took control of my body. As I squeezed behind her (I am absolutely confident I mumbled "excuse me") my "I am peeved with you showing me up to Mom all the time" knee reflexes must have jerked involuntarily and given her the the ever-so-slight shot to the back as I passed by.

This was 50 years ago. I was twelve and she was an evil, evil (did I say evil yet) eight years old. I have this painfully vivid memory of her involuntary Sarah Bernhart [Quote from Wikipedia: "Much of the uncertainty about Bernhardt's life arises because of her tendency to exaggerate and distort. Alexandre Dumas, described her as a notorious liar) acting skills kicking in. As I gave her the quite innocent knee-to-the-back love tap, she instinctively screamed loudly, fell backwards, flinging the turkey, the roasting pan, drippings, etc. across the floor, skidding to a greasy stop at my Mom's feet. No amount of protest on my part could properly explain the huge injustice I received as my clever little sister, writhed on the floor, in the turkey bastings, crying and screaming that I had viciously kicked her in the back. You are probably thinking, geez, it has been fifty years; get over it. You weren't there to see the Mona Lisa smile creep across her face as I was dragged off to the dungeons to be flogged. Note: We ate the turkey anyway. I ate mine standing up.

3. Somehow, we managed to bury the hatchet (just not in each other) and we lived on to another day later that year to combine our fine-tuned culinary skills to make a birthday cake for our Mom, while she took a nap. After all, Sharon had mastered pancakes and I had beaucoup (dj. Many; much: beaucoup money. n. pl. beau·coups also boo·coos or boo·koos. An abundance; a lot.) merit badges for cooking over an inverted coffee can in the wilderness.

We had the cake mix, we had a two part angel-food cake pan, but obviously, had no clear recipe to follow. We were practically valedictorian scholars, and so, boldly moved forth to surprise Mom with a homemade cake. Wrong mix. Wrong pan. No sense of time. After the pan suffered in the oven for about twenty minutes with the only heat coming from just the oven light-bulb, we realized our error. It was quite obvious what we had to do. If a person only had so much time to go from point A to point B and you had gone too slowly in the beginning - the obvious solution would be to go faster with the remaining time you had left, so you would arrive at point B at the right time. The same principal could surely be applied to cooking. Not noticing that half the batter had leaked out of the two-part pan onto the old style, non-self-cleaning oven bottom, we cranked the heat up to broil, to make up for lost time and proceded into the family room to watch "American Bandstand" - with forever young, Dick Clark.

Boy did Mom truly get a cake surprise for her birthday. This was before smoke detectors. I am still not sure if that was good or bad. When charred-cake black smoke
finally filled the house (except where we were in the lower-level family room with the sliding wood door closed) all Hell broke loose with Mom screaming for us to get out of the house, as it was on fire.

It, of course, wasn't. Just the cake - permanently baked and embedded into the pocked, porcelain interior of that poor oven -was a tad over done. I thought for sure my co-cook and I would share the blame on that one, but as I was the oldest (with a fire safety merit badge, no less) and the one that originated the cooking dilemma math formula, once again, I remember bearing the brunt of the responsibility.

My sister and I have lived long enough to fondly remember these childhood traumas with a bit of humor (and much Merlot). Sharon is one of my best friends now and may have slightly different, but deranged, versions of these stories. However, since this my blog, she will just have to start her own, and post her own version, won't she?

I REMEMBER - Cancer 1 Year Later

...one year ago today I was in Vancouver on my last vacation for awhile. I had been diagnosed with Tonsil Cancer and had started my first Blog; Robert Welton: Another Day in Paradise. "On May 29, 2008 I was diagnosed with Tonsil Cancer. I created this blog to share my thoughts and sequence of events for family, friends and others that are experiencing the same "Inconvenience in Life." I have been blessed with a great life full of wonderful experiences, a caring family, a fabulous wife, outstanding children, good friends, and satisfying careers. Each day is truly: Another Day in Paradise."

A lot has happened since then - with Radiation and Chemo and a very difficult recovery period. I have much to be thankful for. Life is almost back to the "normal" that was a year ago. I am 20 lbs. lighter and have a significantly altered view of our most precious commodity...time [the interval between events].

I have everything I ever wanted and have been everywhere I ever wanted to go and experienced just about all a person could hope for. The statement that one "can only go as high as they have been low" is relative to my life, in that I have had my share of lows, but also an abnormal amount of "highs". This Cancer experience was a new low, but has produced some extraordinary highs and inner observations. I sincerely appreciate the wealth I have amassed in family and friends, especially my wife Lise and my sister Sharon.

My bank account of Love is overflowing...and that is the best part of this latest bit of education in life.