THE EASTER DAY CAR WRECK

  Dad is in the above picture and Mom is in the below picture on the far left.

THE EASTER DAY CAR WRECK

The memory that supersedes all others during our growing-up years happened on Easter Day, April 2nd, 1961. We hadn't lived in Mt. Vernon very long. We had already attended church, ate our Easter dinner, then headed for our great-grandmother’s funeral in Benton still in our Easter clothes. All 10 of us were in the car. Casey was 2 and Jamie was 4. The two oldest, Linda and Sharon (Rosser), were in 8th grade, Butch/Billy (Rosser) and I were in the 7th and the twins, Carolyn and Marilyn, were in the 4th grade. As we were traveling Rt. 37 south and approaching Benton, my sister, Linda, was showing me a school picture of Vernie Wittenbrink and then BAM!! The next thing I knew the car was rolling and rolling, us with it.

Three teenage girls had been joyriding and passed on a combination hill and curve and came right toward us. Dad swerved and thought they would miss us, but they didn’t. They hit his side. The passenger side door in the front flew open during one of the rolls, probably the first. Mom and Casey, who had been sitting in Mom's lap, flew out of the car. I personally believe an angel carried them safely away from the car. What usually happens in rollover accidents is that the door opens, the passenger falls out and the car lands on them. It could only be by the grace of God that it didn’t land on Mom and Casey. Marilyn and Jamie were also in the front seat but stayed in the car while it rolled. The rest of us were packed in the back seat like sardines which meant we could hardly move around and our injuries were minimal. Cars had no seat belts or safety glass back then. Car seats for little kids were not required.

I remember my first concern after the accident was, of all things, the car radio. It was still playing upbeat music from the crashed car and while we were all traumatized. I was so angry with that radio. I thought it had a lot of nerve. I couldn’t wait to turn it off. Then someone came running to me and said that Mom was hurt bad and might be dead. We all survived the crash, but Mom didn’t fare as well as the rest of us. She landed on her back, specifically her shoulders, still holding Casey, who was fine. The wind was knocked out of her and she appeared to be dead. When we got to her, her eyes had rolled back into her head. Within a few minutes she regained consciousness and said she couldn't breathe. Mom’s shoulders were crushed and she had cracked ribs. We were all in a state of shock, trying to make sense out of it all, even wondering if it was really happening.

The ambulance took Mom to the hospital and Dad rode with her. The state troopers probably took the rest of us. I was in too much shock to remember for sure.

It just so happened that Mom’s sister, Virginia, and her family were on their way to Mt. Vernon to visit us, not realizing we were going to a funeral. They passed the accident after we had gone to the hospital and just knew when they saw the car that most of us would be dead. They went to the Benton Hospital where Mom was taken. Grandpa Overturf, ironically, was making a similar journey to our house and he too ended up in the waiting room at the hospital. Granny and a few other relatives and friends soon showed up. Granny didn’t get to attend her own mother’s funeral and neither did other relatives who came from there.

Most of our backs were wrenched in the wreck. Butch had a broken nose and Dad had a limp in his left leg for the first day or two.

On a humorous note, four-year-old Jamie Jo stayed with family friends, Shirley and Walt Denton, the first night after the wreck. While Jamie was there, the Dentons noticed a red streak running down her leg from one sore to another. They immediately grabbed her up and rushed her to the emergency room in Benton. The doctors and nurses gathered around her leg trying to figure out what they were looking at, with the first thought being blood poisoning. Then one doctor called for a wash cloth with some soap on it. The red streak washed right off. The Denton's little son, Scottie, had drawn the red streak on her leg with a crayon. He connected the dots.

God intervened several times that day, one time being that the doctor who repaired Mom’s shoulders knew exactly what to do because his wife had suffered similar injuries in a car accident and he had studied the issue. The doctor set Mom's shoulders without using pins and she had full use of her arms again, including playing the piano, but not for the six weeks that both arms were in a cast.

The state troopers who investigated the accident happened to be friends of Mom and Dad’s because they were co-workers with our then uncle, Andy Muzzarelli, also a state trooper. One of them said that being packed in the car like sardines was one thing that saved us. The other thing that saved us was that we were riding in an old, heavy Packard car. That’s all we could afford in the age of the new lightweight cars, but being poor and being many is what saved our lives. If our cousins hadn’t come to live with us, there wouldn’t have been as many and the outcome might have been different. God really does work all things to the good.

There were so many “ironies” that day, but I now know it was God doing His thing. He didn’t stop the car wreck from happening, but He and His angels were involved in so many aspects and helped us get through it. Mom wanted nothing more than to raise her eight kids and God refused to let the devil take that opportunity away. If the devil had his way, our spiritual lives would have turned out altogether different because Mom was our greatest spiritual influence.