When My Mother Learned to Drive or Adding Insult to Injury

The story so far: It was 1975. My father was drunk. My father drove his car through a doctor's waiting room.There. Now you are all caught up.As a reporter, I write a lot of stories about a lot of people. As a reporter in a small town, I write a lot of stories about a lot of people that I know, because in a small town, everybody knows everybody, or at least it seems that way. So if you read this paper, and I assume that you do since you are reading it right now, then there is a good chance you have read a story or two about someone you know. It is one thing to read a story about someone you may have heard of but never actually met, like Miley Cyrus or Henry Kissinger. It is quite another to read about a friend or family member.Reading how your father got arrested after destroying a doctor's office is a profoundly strange experience, even 47 years later.The doctor was in an examination room in the back, treating a patient at the time. The good doctor told a reporter for the Omaha World Herald, “Suddenly there was a loud noise, like a bomb going off. Then I saw a light from a circuit breaking.”So the doctor came out to see what had happened and his waiting room looked like a bomb had gone off.All but about three feet of the car was inside the waiting room. Remember, this was the seventies. Cars were a lot bigger in those days. I can't actually tell you what kind of car my father had. I was eight, after all. I knew the difference between Lego and Duplo, but the difference between a Volvo and a Caddy was lost on me.According to the embarrassingly detailed report in the Omaha World Herald, the crash destroyed a wall separating the waiting room from a patient room. The crash left broken glass, splintered boards, parts of the ceiling and other debris scattered all over the floor.A police accident investigator estimated the total damage to be $4,000. That was back when $4,000 was a lot of money.And beneath that debris was a little old man and his little old wife. There had been an elderly couple waiting to see the doctor. One minute, they were reading six month old issues of Time Magazine and the next minute they were buried alive.“It's miraculous those two weren't killed,” the doctor told the World Herald reporter. “The chairs they were sitting in were completely mangled.”Nevertheless, they did survive. The couple were excavated from the ruins, loaded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital.To understand what happened next, I have to explain a little about how ambulances have evolved over the years. Don't worry. I won't get too technical.These days, one ambulance normally holds one stretcher and, therefore, one patient. If you have two patients to transport, you need two ambulances. There are good, practical reasons for this. Not exposing one patient to another's icky germs, for a start. Then there are space considerations. EMTs can provide a lot more care than they could a few decades ago. There are a lot more life-saving gadgets than there used to be and they all take up a lot of room. Plus, laws about road safety (seat belts and the like) as well as health care privacy, make one patient, one ambulance a wise guideline, legally speaking.Can you get two people in an ambulance these days if you really had to? Beats me. I'm no expert.What I do know is, back in 1975, the ambulance that showed up to take that poor old couple buried alive by my father's drunk driving carried two stretchers and, therefore, two patients. The stretchers were stacked one on top of the other, like bunk beds. The lady was loaded onto the top. The man, the more seriously injured of the two, was placed on the bottom.Now here is something else you need to know about ambulances in order to understand this story. You may already be aware of this. Ambulances go fast. Really fast. That is kinda the point. That's why they have those loud sirens and flashing red and blue lights. If you are on the road and you see and hear and ambulance approaching, get out of its way (just a friendly reminder).So on this day, that ambulance went flying down the streets of downtown Omaha, carrying its precious, battered cargo to a hospital. The ambulance took one turn a little tight.So tight, in fact, that it hit a curb.The ambulance bounced.The stretchers inside bounced.The upper stretcher, holding the lady, jumped loose from its track and came crashing down onto her husband in the lower stretcher.The story in the World Herald the next day reported the couple “in serious condition.” This was not quite accurate. The lady wasn't hurt all that bad, really. At least, that is what my folks told me, though they may not have been the most reliable of sources.On the other hand, the man was banged up pretty bad. He would eventually recover. The good news for him was, once he recovered, he was in for a big payday. For, you see, there was only one go-go bar in all of Omaha that was insured by the famed insurance company, Lloyd's of London, and it belonged to my parents.As for my father, he got arrested.…to be continued

Donnabelle M. Gerhardt

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