It was the fall of 1967.  I was almost 16, anxiously awaiting my next birthday so I could get my drivers’ license.  My two friends were in the front seat of the large Buick station wagon and I was sitting in the back, alone.  Jeff, the driver, was 18 and was to graduate that year.  Denny, in the front passenger seat, was 17, a Junior.  We were all driving home from high school, basking in the luxury of not having to ride the dreaded school bus.

We were driving on a winding, rural, Illinois blacktop, the road shiny and wet from a recent rain.  The Buick was almost new and it had a reputation among the boys in our neighborhood for the large and powerful 400 cubic inch engine it had under the hood.  You could scorch the rear tires on it by stomping on the accelerator and that placed it in high esteem among us, even though it was a station wagon.

The rain was starting again as we approached a steep curve on the road.  After the curve, there was a half mile of a straight road where there was the turn off for our neighborhood.  My older friends, including Jeff and Denny, often ran trials on their cars to see who could run the fastest at the end of a quarter mile on that straight piece of road.  When I got my driver’s license, I would do the same.

As we started in to the steep curve, Jeff shouted a boyish “Let’s goose it!” and stomped on the accelerator of the station wagon.  With that, that big car did something it wasn’t supposed to do.  It went into a big, ungainly spin on the rain slick road.

To this day, I did something that I still doubt I had the presence of mind to do.  I was sitting in the seat behind Denny.  It didn’t have a seat belt.  I could see that we were very likely going to go off the road soon and hit one of the many large trees on either side of the road.  I reasoned that the best thing for me to do was to lie down on the seat so that when we impacted, my body would be thrown into the back of the front seat rather than through the windshield.  I followed that reasoning and laid down on the seat with my head on the seat behind Jeff, the driver. 

The next thing I knew, the car had wrapped itself broadside on the passenger side around a tree in a ditch on the left side of the road.  My torso below the waste was trapped in the wreckage and I could not get out.  Broken glass was all over the place and my face had numerous lacerations and was bleeding.  My right arm hurt, but it worked.  Rain was coming into the car from the broken windows and was starting to soak me.  I could see and hear cars above us going by on the road.

Both Jeff and Denny had had seatbelts on.  They were not trapped in the car like I was, but they were both not responding to my yells and shakes to their heads and shoulders from the back seat.  I noticed that Denny had a large, blue black bruise on the back of his neck.  I tried for a number of minutes to arouse them but they were both definitely out. 

My next strategy was to start screaming as loud as I could to hopefully get the attention of someone driving by on the road above us.  I felt unseemly yelling like that, but the rain was continuing and the sun was starting to go down.  I was desperate.

It was getting dark when someone finally found us.  Soon after that, two tow trucks arrived and they slowly unwrapped the car around the tree.  Jeff was taken away in an ambulance.  I was taken away in another ambulance with Denny and his mother.

In the ambulance I learned that Denny was dead.  The bruise on the back of his neck was from a broken neck.  His mother cried and cried over Denny’s body all the way to the hospital.  I was numb and didn’t know what to say to her.

Jeff had had a concussion, but was otherwise OK.  I had a broken arm and a face that had been sliced up with window glass.  I was lucky to have survived as I had, considering where I was sitting in the car.

After one day at home, I returned to school.  I told my mother that I would need a doctor’s excuse to get out of gym class.  She felt that was ridiculous, with a cast on my arm and my scratched up face and so I skeptically agreed with her reasoning.

And it turned out, I did have to suit up for gym class because I didn’t have a doctor’s excuse.  And I did whatever calisthenics and exercises I could with my broken arm.  And that seemed to fit the tenor of the time, as the Vietnam War was in full swing and the gym teachers were preparing us to be tough in preparation to go off to war and serve our country.  And the gym teachers were not going to cut any slack to the budding geek, antiwar protestor that they could sense I was going to be.