<font color="blueclass=small">( heard anything about that episode in your life before )</font>
John, I think I've probably posted information about that before. We had stopped at a stop sign behind another car, got a call on the radio of a burglar believed to be in a house not far off, so my partner took off, accelerated flat wide open, passing the car we had been behind as we cleared the intersection, had just shifted to second (manual transmission in a '65 Ford), still accelerating wide open, but got a little too far to the left, hit a big pothole at the edge of the asphalt (and we learned later, broke a tie rod), the car suddenly veered a little more left and head on into a big tree before he even had time to take his foot off the accelerator, so we went accelerating wide open at about 40 mph into a big Elm tree, and you know that tree didn't move at all. /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif
I can tell you that was the weirdest experience of my life. Of course, I knew we'd crashed and I knew I needed to find the radio microphone to tell the dispatcher, but I couldn't see or find it. Then I heard my partner asking if I could get out on my side; said his door wouldn't open. I told him I had to find the radio and he said he'd already done that. So I got out and he followed me out the passenger side door and I could then see that he had a terrible gash down the right side of his face and neck, I got the back door open and got the first aid kit from the back floorboard and opened it, but then couldn't see well enough to find anything. He sat down in the back seat and got a bandage out himself and was holding it against his face, and I realized that one leg was numb, wouldn't hold my weight, didn't hurt, but I knew I was going down, so I pulled myself up onto the trunk of the car and laid back against the rear window. It seemed that a siren rolled up beside us about then and I thought "man, they must have been close". I later learned they came from a long way off and when they arrived, they thought I was laid out dead on the trunk of the car because all my face and head were covered with blood. So the two officers in that car got us in the back seat of their car and away we went to the hospital.
By the time we got to the hospital, I knew my partner was in much worse shape than I, but he was more alert mentally. So while they were cleaning the blood off me, a clerk was asking questions for the paperwork, including asking me what my wife's name was. And I was stumped for awhile; talk about a weird feeling; I couldn't remember that gal's name at first, but finally gave a name and then was wondering whether it was the right name. /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif It was. And then an officer asked about going to get my wife to bring her to the hospital and about that time I remembered that she was almost 8 months pregnant, so I told him to not go get her or even call her.
When they got me cleaned up, I didn't even have to have any stitches; just little cuts all over my face and head, even cuts across both eyelids (later learned that my uniform cap was left stuck in the windshield and was cut all the way through that old thick bill, but it sure saved me). My back was badly sprained, both feet black, even on the tops of my feet from jamming into the floor, both hands swollen from hitting the dash, and I had a broad black band all the way across my lower abdomen from the seat belt which obviously slowed me down considerably before it broke. But I regained my senses enough to refuse to allow them to admit me; told them I was going home, so they took me home.
Unfortunately, my partner was in the hospital quite awhile; had to have one kneecap removed and had to have plastic surgery on his face. He eventually fully recovered, but never came back to work. He was a good officer, but a poor driver in emergency driving and had crashed once before on an emergency run and totalled another car that he hit, as well as a squad car, but fortunately with no serious injuries.
And this long saga actually is tractor related. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif While he was in the hospital, his roomate's father was some kind of big shot with John Deere and offered him a job, so he resigned from the police department and went to work for John Deere. I never heard from him again myself, but a few years later, someone asked me if I'd heard about him cutting one of his fingers off demonstrating a combine. So I don't know whether he stayed with Deere after that or not. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif
