Comfort to Spare (V)

Seems unfeeling somehow to see the story of Aunt Gertie's death wedged in there amid the headlines of the Sheboygan Press, just one of many stories--front page, at least, but having to wrestle readers' attention away from a sale of damaged timber, a lumber yard fire all the way across the state, and/or President Truman asking Congress to pass a civil rights law. Besides, it was Armistice Day, November 11, 1949, and Grandma Dirkse, then 56 years old, already had reason to lament: in France, her only brother, Edgar Hartman, had been killed in "the war to end all wars."

But there is the story, second column, a bit more than half way down--"Miss Dirkse of Oostburg Dies in Crash."

I'm guessing that she's "Miss Dirkse," on the front page as well as on the second, because she was an elementary school teacher whose students knew her and likely spoke of her as such. Here's the continuing story from page 6. 

Once upon a time, highway 141 was the most efficient thoroughfare to get from Milwaukee to Green Bay. Today, it's I43. After I graduated from college, I lugged sod balls up the inclines created for an endless series of interchanges. Back then, 141 hugged the shoreline of Lake Michigan, ran right past Oostburg and into Sheboygan. Today that little two-lane road honors a greatly forgotten past--"Sauk Trail Road."

Lakeshore fog still quilts the lakeshore at times, as it must have that night. Somewhere amid the few stories I know of Aunt Gertie's death, I heard something that Mom never forgot--that her parents, Harry and Mabel Dirkse, didn't want their youngest daughter to go to wherever the four of them were bound that night on that seeming double-date. Whether or not her parents warned her is probably immaterial, although if they didn't, I'm thinking my grandpa would have lamented his not speaking up--you know, "maybe if I only had." But Aunt Gertie wasn't a kid. She was 24 years old. 

If you have read closely, you'll note, as Press readers would have, that, because of the density of the fog that November night, the driver was travelling on the wrong side of the road. His being over there, according to authorities, was the reason for the accident. The Calvinist in me is certainly willing to grant you that 24-year-olds are not, across the board, without their share of sin; but even with what little I know about the accident or the others in that car that night, I honestly don't believe that the driver's being on the other side of the highway was a result, somehow, or inattentiveness or inebriation. If there's one aspect of the story that was often repeated, it had to do with fog, even the authorities said so.

My sister, who is older than I am and remembers seeing her Aunt Gertie's body in the coffin in my grandparents' dining room, says that somehow she remembers hearing that the man driving was not the owner of the car because the man driving knew the way to wherever the four of them were going. 

None of them were not kids--one couple was married--and they'd come from staunch Dutch Reformed families. For better or for worse, it's not easy to find some villain to blame, even the cops claimed it had to be the thick fog.

On October 11, 2002, 53 years later, ten people were killed and some three dozen others injured in one of the most horrific traffic accidents ever recorded, an accident that piled up 40 cars and trucks on I43. That grisly mess occurred in the morning, in deep lakeshore fog, just eight miles north of the place where the accident that night took place, the accident in which my Aunt Gertie was the only passenger in the car to be killed--November 10, 1949.

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(more to come)