It Happened One Day

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It was during the holidays, and I was probably around 11 years old or so. At the time we lived in Illinois and we were visiting with my grandparents and extended family in Milwaukee, WI. When we stayed there, my dad would park his van in the alley in front of my grandpa's garage since on street parking at night had rules during the winter to allow passage by street plows in the case of winter events. At some point it was decided a beer run was needed, and my grandpa had his car parked out front due to an earlier errand. It had to be put away anyway. My dad and I piled into the car with grandpa and we went to Dino's, which was the local liquor store. They got their beer, and I got my pretzel stick they always gave to kids there. When we got back, dad got out to move his van so grandpa could put his car in the garage and was going to open the door—back then he had a manual door. It was taking longer than expected, so I turned to see what dad was doing only to see him with his hands against the back of the van walking backwards. Apparently, the van had slipped out of gear into reverse, and when my dad walked behind it, he thought it just slipped into neutral. His effort to stop the van was futile. He walked back a few more steps, lost his footing and suddenly slipped out of sight under the van. Being an Astro mini van, there was little ground clearance, and he was crushed underneath as his coat snagged onto one of the underbody parts and he was rolled several times, and his legs were run over by the tires. He survived, but the ordeal could have been much worse. When the van stopped, held only in place as it rested against the garage across the alley by being in gear still, his head was inches from the back driver's side tire. Had the van been able to move forward, his head would have been run over. He spent several days in the hospital with a bruised heart from being compressed several times between the ground and underbody, a collapsed lung and other injuries. As a kid, though, it had to be one of the worst days of my life, and watching my dad slip under that van and seeing his head by that back tire saying repeatedly, "Please, don't move the van," are images that will forever haunt me.