Another August Afternoon, Long Ago, Still Very Much in Memory

My Mom, me, and that 1955 Pontiac. 
Don't ask me why I'm wearing what looks
like a waiter's jacket. I would have 
been 15 or 16 in this photo

Yesterday afternoon, I was driving on Route 128 – the circumferential expressway that wraps around Boston – and saw an overhead electric sign flashing the statistic that, in 2024, there were 6429 accidents in Massachusetts involving teenage drivers and 117 fatalities.

The message was aimed at teens; encouraging them to drive responsibly. But it struck a respondent chord in me; taking me back to another August afternoon 59 years ago.

In the summer of 1966 – the time between my junior and senior year at Miami Springs High School, I was working at the Burger King on Arthur Godfrey Road in Miami Beach.  On Tuesdays, I had the early shift – be at the restaurant at 8 a.m. to open up, and work until 2 p.m. 

August 16 started as just another day.  I was driving my mother’s hand-me-down 1955 Pontiac Chieftain, 3511 pounds of post-war Detroit automotive supremacy.  At work I scrubbed the broilers and loaded the shake machine.  I picked litter from out of the fringe of landscaping and then went to work on the counter at opening time.

Crandon Park in the 1960s

At 2 p.m. I was out the door, reaching for my car keys even as I punched my time card.  On those early shift days, I had one goal: to get to the beach as quickly as possible.  Miami has many beaches (including one just a mile east of the Burger King) but, to me, there was only one ‘real’ beach - Crandon Park.  But my path was not a direct one.  On that day as on so many others that summer, I planned to pick up the girl I was dating, and so my route took me first to a neighborhood near the Tamiami Airport on S.W. 107^th Avenue.  Thanks to the five-year-old Airport Expressway and the four-year-old Palmetto Bypass, plus luck with the drawbridge on the Rickenbacker Causeway, my circuitous, nearly 30-mile trip through Greater Miami took less than an hour.  We were parked and on the beach before WQAM’s 3 o’clock news.

The only thing I remember about the beach that day was that we had less than an hour before storm clouds began moving in from the west.  By a little after 4, we knew it was time to leave.  Having had only a little over an hour on the beach, we packed up and headed west, back across the Causeway and out Bird Road.  Somewhere along the way, it began raining.  A little before 5 o’clock I had dropped off my date and needed only to make the final trip back home through what was now a pounding, mid-summer south Florida rainstorm.

The site of the crash. I was
just four miles from home.

The Palmetto was my only real option: the lone alternative was 97^th Avenue, a two-lane gravel road that snaked through the swamp north of the Tamiami Trail.  With the rain coming down hard, I got on the Palmetto and started north.  In 1966, the Palmetto was a four-lane divided highway with a wide median strip, and with interchanges only on the eight-mile section south of Okeechobee Road.  The Palmetto had neither guard rails nor a center barrier – just that wide strip of grass.

I would have been at roughly N.W. 20^th Street when I felt my car lurch left.  It was odd that I would be hydroplaning because I had replaced my two front tires only a week earlier (using up an entire paycheck to do so).  Because of the rain and heavy traffic, I was traveling perhaps 35 miles an hour.  I tried to correct for the lurch but, by then, my front left wheel was off of the asphalt roadway and into the mud of the median strip.  The deceleration of one quadrant of the car caused the back end of the car to rotate counter-clockwise.

The Palmetto Bypass
under construction in
1960. No guardrails,
just a wide grass median

In the absence of guardrails, my car began a lazy spin across the median – probably thirty feet between the north and southbound lanes.  That probably slowed my forward momentum somewhat, but when I reached the southbound lanes, I still was traveling at least 25 miles per hour. 

My rotation had me pointed north when I reached the left, southbound lane.  There, I struck, head-on, a 1961 Ford Galaxie (curb weight roughly 3800 pounds) which was likely traveling, in the rain, at 40 miles per hour.

The Pontiac lacked seatbelts.  All I could do was brace myself, hands on the dashboard and feet against the firewall.  I remember the impact and its sound (exactly like the one in the movies).  Remarkably, I was uninjured, as was the driver of the other car (who was wearing a seatbelt).

The Highway Patrol showed up.  I was asked if I needed to go to a hospital and I said ‘no’.  More troopers showed up – the accident likely backed up southbound traffic for miles.  Around 6:30, I was given a ride home and told I was lucky to be alive.  The trooper explained to my mother what had happened; that I had lost control of my car in the rain.  The car was totaled but, fortunately, there were no injuries.  The sole indication that something had happened was that I had a trickle of blood caused by a puncture wound on either knee.  I don’t remember my mother being angry; she was likely happy that I was still alive.

The next morning, August 17, I couldn’t bend my knees.  My mother took me to our family doctor.  He took one look at my knees, listened to the circumstances of the injury, and said I had likely torn cartilage in one or both knees.  This being decades before knee replacements or arthroscopic surgery, all he could do was wrap the knee and prescribe complete bed rest.

The morning after that, two state troopers knocked at the front door.  No citations had been issued at the accident scene and I thought I was about to be handed a stack of tickets for stupidity.  Instead, they asked that I take them through the accident (likely the reason I remember it so well all these years later).  They asked questions about the “lurch” and how I responded or tried to respond.  Then, one trooper said the tires looked new, and asked how long they had been on the car.  My mother produced the sales receipt, which they asked to keep to make a copy.  After an hour, they left and said they would be in touch.  All I knew was that I was relieved to not have a citation I would be working until October to pay.

By now, word had gotten around that I was confined to bed, and a stream of visitors came to cheer me up.  I celebrated my 17^th birthday that way.

On Monday – this would have been August 22, I had a different visitor.  He was from an insurance company, though not from State Farm, which was my carrier.  He was sorry to hear about my accident and wanted to “clear the record”.  My car, he said, was worth $250 and I had likely incurred another $100 in doctor’s bills (the amount was considerably lower, but neither I nor my mother said anything).  He produced a legal document.  In return for $350, my family would hold the tire company harmless in my accident.  My mother signed.

Through the Miami Springs Police Department, my mother would learn that the state police had not just assumed this was a case of a teenager not knowing how to drive in the rain.  My front left tire had more or less exploded, and new tires weren’t supposed to do that.  They contacted the tire manufacturer for an explanation, and the tire company (I have no idea which one it was, and the paperwork disappeared long ago) got out in front of the problem – by getting me to sign away my legal standing.

A '56 Chevy BelAir. Mine definitely
did not have whitewall tires.

I got a 1956 Chevy BelAir out of the deal.  Later that week, my doctor pronounced me healed.  It was too close to the start of the school year to go back to work.  It turns out, of course, that I wasn’t really healed.  The accident had torn out a chunk of cartilage from my knee, leaving behind an imperfect fit between my femur and tibia.  Within a few weeks, I would hear a distinctive “popping” sound when I walked.  Almost sixty years later, I still can occasionally hear that click.

All teenagers believe they are immortal and I was no different.  Of course, I had walked away from an accident that could just as easily have killed or crippled me.  I did not at first perceive that I had been given a gift.

With each passing decade, though, I look on that afternoon as a turning point.  Through whatever cosmic force you believe is responsible for such things (including luck), I walked away from a crash involving more than 7,000 pounds of metal going from 60 miles per hour to an instantaneous stop that could ended my life a few days short of my seventeenth birthday.  And, had it not ended my life, it could have left me crippled.

But I came away with a “pop” in one knee, an appreciation for life, and a need to make a difference.  When I look back at what I have accomplished, the business career end of things disappears in a puff of smoke.  In the great scheme of things, it makes not a whit of difference that, for 35 years, I helped companies do something or other.  Writing 16 books that amuse people (and even give them something to think about) and speaking about gardening from a spouse’s point of view is a better contribution.  The volunteer work I have engaged in since my retirement – including being the ‘healthy control’ in clinical studies that take up a lot of my time these days - has also given me a sense of purpose because what I am doing directly helps other people.

Betty, far left, receiving National Garden
Clubs' Volunteer of the Year award

But the single most important thing I have done with my life is to help and support my wife, Betty, to be the incredible person that she became. I freely acknowledge I got much better at being a supportive spouse when I retired from that corporate world almost 20 years ago. Especially during the last five years, I can finally say I’ve earned my keep.