Beep!! Beep!!! Eeekk!!!!

Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers and his page-a-day calendars always have interesting facts, statistics, or a clip about a bizarre incident.

Today’s calendar is no exception. It told of a truck driver in the United Kingdom that hit a small compact car and drove with it for two miles. The tiny car was wedged in of his semi and did not know it was there. No one was hurt or killed.

The story reminded me of an incident I was in back in 1967.

I worked at Sinclair Refining Company in Atlanta. Sometimes at lunch I would drive about two or three miles to a hamburger joint and sit in my car eat and listen to the radio – which is what I was doing in this event.

My car was a red Spits two-seater Triumph – I think it had Mark II on it. It was a nice day – I had the top down. I was sitting there eating my hamburger and listening to the music when I noticed a big dump truck was backing up – I haven’t noticed it before – and it got closer and closer… I started blowing my horn when suddenly WHUMP!!!
The truck’s big metal bed crashed over my car and was completely in my view with nothing else.

I was inches from big steel metal thing looking at me. The dump truck driver did not hear me beep the horn and begin to go forward and dragging my car and me with him. I blew and blew but the roar of the engine, I suppose, drowned out my little naked high pitched sounding “beep beep”.

A man, also sitting in his car in the parking lot saw the accident and ran out waving his arms at the driver. The driver stopped to see what he wanted. Saved.

My hood was warped and peeled upward. My windshield was broken. But the engine seemed fine. The driver just didn’t see me and admitted it. He called his boss and the boss told me he preferred to not make it official with the police and all…..(I wonder why).

It was many years ago and I am not sure if they furnished me some type of rented car or not. He had me take the car to a place he suggested and they had it back running looking new in about a week.

Although, I didn’t realize then, but not long after that the car had transmission problems which I think was probably caused by being pulled with the car in “park”.

To be continued.