It was Friday, December 6th, 1963; (exactly 2 weeks after President Kennedy was assassinated).
Our school day ended at 3:15PM; always did throughout my junior and senior high school years. (While in recent times our local high schools are released at 2PM, the school day begins much earlier now than when I was in school).
As it had for literally dozens and dozens of years, the old bell rang out its daily blessing, (and believe me the end of the day was considered a blessing to all but the most studious of Summerlin’s students).
My friend, David, and I hurried out of the classroom, stuffed a couple of textbooks and other miscellaneous papers and pencils in our lockers, and hurried down the covered, outside hallway to catch Bus 149. We’d rode that bus for as long as I remember, though I would be hard pressed at this juncture, to tell you the driver’s name, or even his or her gender. But I expect that particular individual has long since gone on to their reward; (or lack thereof).
Our buses parked adjacent with Broadway, one of Bartow’s major streets. There was a stretch of asphalt, perhaps thirty feet wide and a hundred feet long, which paralleled the street. Every weekday, twelve or fifteen buses rolled up about 3PM and parked in perfect rows, empty for the moment, but ready to receive the teaming masses of loud, and sometimes obnoxious students, eager to get home.
Just as David and I reached the end of the covered walkway
… it happened.
Suddenly, slightly diagonal and to my left, I witnessed a car leaving the road. The front end slammed against the back bumper of a school bus, hitting it a glancing blow. I stood there transfixed, having just stepped onto the bus tarmac. So like those nightmares in which one feels incapable of moving, I stood there speechless. David stood as immobile as I.
And rather than stopping, the car accelerated and gathered speed. As the late model automobile neared my friend and me, one option presented itself. And while what was occurring around me was far from humorous, I knew I had to “get the heck out of Dodge.” But I wasn’t going alone. Not by a long shot.
When the vehicle was eight or ten feet from us, I grabbed David’s right arm and jerked him away from the trajectory of the automobile. The vehicle passed so close, I sensed the change in air pressure, and I might easily have touched it. We would have been its first victims.
I immediately turned to follow the car’s progress. It had transcended the pavement now, and was rushing headlong through a long strip of grass which bordered the tarmac. What I saw now both amazed and confounded me. The front end of the vehicle plowed into a fellow student, and he almost seemed suspended in midair a moment, before crashing against its windshield.
If I live to be 103, I shall NEVER forget the events of that day. I witnessed everything, at least everything I had any intention of witnessing, since in the space of a few seconds, I had reached a momentary, though very conscious decision to avert my eyes from those things which were happening around me.
The entire affair was over in less than a minute, but it may as well have been a year in terms of its cruel impact on countless human beings. As I discovered later, approximately 15 students were struck, plowed under, and/or dragged by the wayward vehicle. It has been reported that one young man pushed a couple of girls out of the path of the car, and subsequently dragged across a stretch of pavement.
As it the facts played out, an elderly lady had been driving her husband home from a doctor’s visit. He had contracted a terminal illness, and no doubt, Mrs. F. was naturally distracted from the task at hand.
As she lost control and slammed into the rear of the school bus, one mistake compounded into another, and instead of braking and bringing the vehicle to rest, she engaged the accelerator.
“Edward” was the only fatality. The other students sustained varying degrees of injuries, including broken arms and legs, but all experienced “full recoveries.” Yet I think the psychological and emotional impact of that event was geometrically greater than any physical trauma my classmates endured, and resides with them a half century later.
My mother has told me that as I walked into the house that day, my normally dark complexion seemed several shades lighter, and without so much as a word, she knew something terrible had occurred.
As a substitute teacher, I have the opportunity to serve in numerous primary and secondary schools in our district, and I occasionally teach at my alma mater. Sometimes I share the events of that long-lost day with my students. Sometimes I don’t. But when I do, I am so often met with the sense that it has been too long, and my pupils are altogether unable to relate to my story, and I think it simply passes over their heads.
And I think they’d rather employ their time with cell phones and I-pods and pop magazines, and all that other peripheral stuff that fills up an adolescent life, than consider anything so ancient as a story that has no relevance to them, though it occurred within feet of where they now sit.
But there are those among us who will never forget, and there are those among us who will recite the story again, and I like to think there are still those among us who have taken time to memorialize that day in a genre, (such as the written word) which endures.
Nonetheless, I can only wonder whether this account might be the last surviving, full account of that terrible day, and if by chance it is, I am glad I am given the opportunity to entrust it to you, and leave it to your care.
By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "Snapshots". Copyright 2005.
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