A Brief Return to Ann Arbor

I got back to Ann Arbor in late August. And yes, Guy was in an Air Force Tech School in Texas by then. Tried to get my old job back, but to no avail. So, I got a job painting apartments with a house painting crew. It paid about the same as I was making as a lab tech, but I didn’t like it as well. I didn’t have a car at the time. The Datsun had died, and I picked up a used, early 60s model Suzuki 250 to get back and forth to work. It was the cheapest solution at the time.

One Friday night after work, I decided to ride the bike to Lorain for a visit. While I was riding up the entrance ramp to I-23, a pickup truck came roaring up behind me and intentionally (I think) ran me off the road. Fortunately, I was wearing a leather jacket, boots, and a helmet. I got off the bike and let it slide down into the gully alongside the ramp. I went down and retrieved the bike. Everything looked OK, so I started it up and rode it up the steep gully side and back onto the ramp and continued on to Lorain. It was pretty chilly, and I rode with one or the other of my hands down on the cylinder head for warmth. I made it to Lorain in about 3 hours. I had a good visit and saw a few old friends while I was in town. Late Sunday morning, sunny and temps in the mid-60s, I started the bike up and headed north, planning to spend the evening getting ready for a long day of apartment painting on Monday.

While riding around in the Lorain/Elyria vicinity over the weekend, I noticed that my front end seemed to be shimmying from time to time. Thought maybe my front wheel had come loose during my adventure in the gully. But it checked out OK and was only a little annoying. Decided I’d get it looked at once I got back to Ann Arbor.

On the trip north, the ‘shimmy’ seemed to be getting worse. I stopped in Vermillion and checked it again, but the wheel was nice and tight, with no apparent problems. So I continued on my way. It seemed to be getting worse, and I stopped and checked it again in Toledo. Again, it was tight and seemed OK. Now, on I-23, it was becoming a definite problem at the higher speeds on the interstate. I was about to cross an overpass, ramp going to Jackson. I was hanging out over my handlebars, trying to see if my front wheel was actually wobbling or if there was some other problem. As I crossed onto the overpass, the concrete was gapped and raised for the bridge a few inches. A combination of my weight over the front end and the raised concrete wrenching my wheel caused the bike to flip forward. I saw the pavement racing toward my face and thought, ‘Oh, so this is how I end’…then nothing.

I woke up in the Emergency Room at the University Hospital in Ann Arbor to… “Give him to the interns for stitches; they need the practice”… then I was out again. My next memory was of waking up in a hospital room, and Dad and Mom were there. So, many hours had passed. I was there for a week, fitted with a neck brace, and visited by the local welfare agency to get me signed up to get my medical bills taken care of. After all, I was at the time a resident of Ann Arbor, MI. Of course, I had no medical insurance, neither my own nor through work… no union.

My injuries included: shattered 6th and 7th vertebrae, broken colar bone and dislocated shoulder, a hole in my right knee to the bone, and massive abrasions on my back from sliding down the highway on my back with the bike on top of me. My helmet had pretty much disintegrated. I was rather lucky. The doctor told me that mine was the first case he’d seen where the patient with my injuries was’t either dead or permanently disabled. The nerves in my back were messed up, and even though they mostly got back to normal eventually, there are still places where there is little to no feeling.

I walked out of the hospital a week to the day from my accident, even though my knee injury made walking very inconvenient. But, I also had a refillable prescription for Demeral, which made it all eminently bearable. The neck brace was to come off in ten weeks. So, I had to return for that. I walked to my Church St. room. Mom and Dad came up a few days later and took me back to Lorain. That was pretty much the end of Ann Arbor for me.

The bike was totaled, according to Dad, who had gone to see it; I didn’t. Turns out (best guess) the forks had been knocked out of alignment during my ‘gully adventure’ and continued to worsen as I continued to ride until I finally flipped it. At that point, it didn’t take much for the pavement to grab and twist it, sending me head-over-heels.

To Be Continued

–LE