Taking a stand against drunk driving

Some friends and I have agreed to take a stand on issues dear to our hearts. I have never before blogged about THIS particular issue, but today I'm ready to rant about drinking and driving. Here's why.

This photo shows a wreck involving a car and a semitrailer truck. I'm sure it happens every day, somewhere in the world. But the day that most affected me was in May of 1964, before seat belts were regularly installed in trucks and cars.

My dad was an alcoholic. Not one who got violent, but one who got sappy and teary-eyed when he drank. He had lost his job ... again. So it was his first day on a new job. That evening a couple of young women went out drinking and apparently over-did it. They were in a part of town that was unfamiliar to them, speeding because a car was following them. The semitrailer had just been loaded with mail at the Terminal Station, which is today called "The Chattanooga Choo-Choo." The truck turned onto Main Street and had travelled only two blocks before the women's car shot out of a side street and hit the side of the cab. The car's driver had ignored the stop sign.

Picture this: truck hit from the right, jack-knifes to the left, coming to a stop on the corner of Main and Cowart Streets. The driver, obviously shaken, turned to the other man to express relief that they weren't hurt, but the man was not there! The shocked driver discovered the other fellow, not strapped in (remember, there were no seatbelts in the truck), had been thrown out when the impact flipped open the passenger-side door and then slammed it shut. The momentum of the truck careening to the left threw the other man out of the cab, and he was pinned under the wheels of the fully-loaded trailer.

That man was my dad. He was not the drunken one; that was the driver of the car. Two people died that night, my father and one of the young women. Ironic, isn't it, that he, an alcoholic, was killed by a drunk driver. He had quit drinking and was sober for the last part of his life, yet alcohol still managed to kill him. And there's another irony: Dad had grown up on that corner, where HIS father had had a meat market.

Drunk driving put my dad here: