The Syracuse Journal, Volume 28, Number 15, Syracuse, Kosciusko County, 8 August 1935 — Page 10

THURSDAY* AUG. fl, 1935.

—AND SUDDEN DEATH By J. C. Furnas. The following article, published in the August issue of The Readers Digest, is reprinted in the Syracuse Journal by special permission of The Readers Digest: Publicising the total of motoring injuries—almost a million last year, with 36,000 deaths—never gets to* the first base in jarring the motorist into a realization of the appalling risks of motoring. He does not translate dry statistics into a relity of blood and agony. Figures exclude the pain and horror of savage mutilation- which means they leave out the point They need to be brought closer home. A passing look at a bad smash or the news that a fellow you had lunch with last week is in a hospital with a broken back will make any driver but a born fool slow down at least temporarily. But what is needed is a vivid and sustained realization that every time you step on the throttle, death gets in beside you. Hopefully waiting for his chance. That single horrible accident you may have witnessed is no isolated horror. That sort of thing happens every hour of the day. everywhere in the United States. If you really felt that, perhaps the stickful of type in Monday’s paper recording that a total of 29 local citisens were killed in weekend crashes would rate something more than a perfunctory tut-tut as you turn back to the sports page. An enterprising judge now and again sentences reckless drivers to tour the accident end of a city morgue. But even a mangled body on a slab, waxiiy portraying the consequences of bad motoring judgment,

BUY SEASON TICKETS NOW! FOR THE ELKHART COUNTY FAIR GOSHEN, ANG. 77-31 Two persons may Attend Four Days asMi Five Nlghta for Only SLOO Tickets on Sate Here At THORNBURG DRUG STORE WAWJCKEE INN BACHMAN STORES

THE BIG STORE BACHMAN’S Syracuse Saves You Money Indiana Y 4 off on all white shoes for Men, Women and Children We Are Starting Our Blanket Club Plan A large in. part-wool blanket. Just the thing for winter comfort. Sold on easy payments. They are paid for before you realize is. Begin now. Buy two or three pairs. They will be greatly appreciated * within a few months. Potatoes, U. S. No. 1 size, peck 25c Monarch Gelatin, quick setting, all flavors, 4 packages _ .... 19c Glass Mason Jars, qt. size, doz 75c Monarch Coffee, fine, 1 lb. glass jar 30c Monarch Cake Flour, large box „ 25c New Grape-fruit Fresh Sweet Corn Cantaloup Quality Meats for less Heavy Chuck Roasts, pound 18c Brisket or Short Rib, pound .... 13c Fine Quality Veal or Lamb Chops CUBED STEAKS, pound JL 23c Comp lete Line of Cold Luncheon Meats. Order Your Dressed Young Chicken, for Saturday, • pound 29c

isn’t a patch on the scene of the accident itself. No artist working on a safety poster would dare depict that in full detail. That picture would have* to include motion-picture and sound effects, too —the flopping, pointless efforts of the injured to stand up; the queer, grunting noises; the steady, panting groaning of a human being with pain creeping up on him as the shock wears off. It should portray the slack expression on the face of a man, dragged with shock, staring at the Z-twist in his broken leg, the insane crumpled effect of a child’s body after its bones are crushed inward, a realistic portrait of an ■ hysterical woman with her screaming mouth opening a hole in * the bloody drip that fills her eyes and runs off her chin. Minor details would include the raw ends of bones protruding through flesh in compound fractures, and the dark red, oozing surfaces where clothes and skin were flayed off at once. Those are all standard, everyday sequels to the modern passion for going places in a hurry and taking a chance or two by the way. If ghosts could be put to a useful purpose, every bad stretch of road in the United States would greet the oncoming motorist with groans and screams and the educational spectacle of ten or a dozen corpses, all sizes, sexes, and ages, lying horribly still on the bloody grass. Last year a state trooper of my j acquaintance stopped a big red Hispano for speeding. Papa was obviously set for a pleasant weekend with his family—so the officer cut into papa’s well-bred expostulations; “I’ll let you off this time, but if you keep on this way. you won’t last long. Get going—but take it easier." Later a passing motorist hailed the trooper and asked if the red Hispano had got a ticket. “No.” said the trooper. “I hated ■to spoil their I party.” “Too bad you didn’t," said the motorist, “I saw you' stop them and then I passed that car again 50 miles up the line. It still makes me feel sick at my stomach. The car was all folded up like an accordian the color was about all there was left They were *l.l dead but one*of the kids and he wasn’t going to live to the hospital. Maybe it will make you sick at * your stomach, too. But unless you're a heavy-footed incurable, a good look at the picture the artist wouldn’t dare paint, a first-hand acquaintance with the results of mixing (gasoline with speed and bad judgment. ought to be well worth.your I while. I can’t help it if the facta are i revolting. If you have the nerve to J drive fast and take w chances, you | ought to have the nerve to take the I appropriate cure. You can’t ride an ambulance or watch the doctor working on the victim in the hospital, but you can read. | The automobile is treacherous, just as a cat is. It is tragically difficult to realize that it can become the deadliest mtasile. As enthusiasts tell you} it makes 65 feel like nothing at all. But 65 an hour is 100 feet a second; a speed which puts a viciously unjustified responsi-

bility on brakes and human reflexes, and can instantly turn this docile luxury into a mad buH elephant. Collision, turnover or sideswipe, each type of accident produces either a shattering dead stop or a crashing change of direction —and since the occupant—meaning yon—continues in the old direction at the original speed, every surface and angle of the car's interior immediately becomes a battering, tearing projectile, aimed squarely at you—inescapable. There is no bracing yourself against these imperative laws of momentum. It’s like going over Niagara Falls in a steel barrel full of railroad spikes. The best thing that can happen to ydu—and one of the rarer things—is to be thrown out as the doors spring open, so you have only the ground to reckon with. True, True, you strike with as much force as if you had been thrown from the Twentieth Century at top speed. But at least you are spared the lethal array of gleaming metal knobs and edges and glass inside the car. ’ Anything can happen in that split second of crash, even those lucky escapes you hear about. People have dived through windshields and come out with only superficial scratches. They have run cars together head on, reducing both to twisted junk, and been found unhurt and arguing bitterly two minutes afterward. But death was there just the same—he was only exercising his privilege of being erratic. This spring a wrecking crew pried the door off a car which had been overturned down an embankment and out stepped the driver with only a scratch on his cheek. But his mother was still inside, a splinter of wood from the top driven four inches into her brain as a result of son’s taking a greasy curve a little too fast. No bloodno horrible twisted bones just a grayhaired corpse still clutching her pocketbook it her lap as she had clutched it when she felt the car leave the road. On that same curve a month later a light touring car crashed a tree. In the middle of the front seat they found a nine-months old baby surrounded by broken glass and yet absolutely unhurt. A fine practical joke on death—but spoiled by the baby’s parents, still sitting on each aide of him. instantly killed by shattering their skulls on the dashboard. If you customarily pass without clear vision a long way ahead, make sure that every member of the party carries identification papers—it’s difficult to identify a body with its whole face bashed in or torn off. The driver is death’s favorite target. If the steering wheel holds together it ruptures his liver* or spleen so he bleeds to death internally. Or, if the steering wheels breaks off, the matter is settled instantly by the steering column’s plunging through his abdomen.

By no means do all head-on-col lisions occur on.curvee. The modern death-trap is likely to be a straight stretch with three lanes of traffic—li>e the notorious Astor Flats on the Albany Post Road where there have been as many as 27 fatalities in one summer month. This sudden vision of broad, straight road tempts matiy an ordinary sensible driver into passing the man ahead. Simultaneously a driver coming the other way swings out at high speed. At the last moment-each tries to get into line again, but the gaps are closed. As the cars in line are forced into the ditch to capsize or crash fences, the passer* meet, almost head on, in a swirling, grinding smash that send* them efroming obliquely into the others. A trooper described such an accident—five cars in one mess, seven killed on the spot, two dead on the way to the hospital, two more dead in the long run. He remembered it far more vividly than he wanted to - the quick way the doctor turned away from a dead man to check up on a woman witE a broken back; the three bodies out of one car so soaked with oil from the crankcase that they looked like wet brown cigars and not human at all; a man, walking around and babbling to himself, oblivious 01 the dead and dying, •ven oblivious of the dagger-like ilirvtr of steel that stuck out of his streaming wrist; a pretty girl with her forehead laid open, trying hopelessly to crawl out of a ditch in spite of her smashed hip. A firstclaas massacre of that sort is onlj a question of scale and numbers—seven corpses ■re no deader than one. Each xhattered man, woman or child who* went to make up the 36,900 corpses chalked up last year had to die a personal death. A car careening and rolling down a bank, battering and smashing its occupants every inch of the way, can wrap itself so thoroughly around a tree that front and rear hampers interlock, requiring an acetylene torch to cut them apart. In a recent case of that sort they found the old lady, who had been sitting in back, lying across the lap of her daughter, who was in front, each soaked in her own and the other's blood indistinguishably, each so shattered and broken that there was no point whatever in an autopsy to determine whether it was broken neck or ruptured heart that caused death. Overturning cars specialise in certain injuries. Cracked pelvis, few instance, guaranteeing agonising months in bed, motionless, nerhans

THE SYRACUSE JOURNAL

crippled for life—broken spine resulting from sheer sidewise twist—the minor details of smashed knees and splintered shoulder blades caused by crashing Into the side of the car as she goes over with the swirl of an insane roller coaster—and the lethal consequences of broken riba, which puncture hearts and lungs with their raw ends. The consequent internal hemorrhage is no less dangerous because it is the pleural instead of the abdominal cavity that is "filling with blood. Flying glass—safety glass is by no means universal yet—contributes much more than its share to the spectacular side of accidents. It doesn’t merely cut—the fragments are driven in as if a cannon loaded with broken bottles had been fired in your face, and a sliver in your eye, traveling with such force, means certain blindness. A leg or arm stuck through the windshield will cut clean to the bone through vein, artery and muscle like a piece of beef under the butcher's knife, and it takes little time to lose a fatal amount of blood under such circumstances. Even safety glass may not be wholly safe when the car crashes something at high speed. You hear picturesque tales of how a flying body will make a neat hole in the stuff with its head—the shoulders stick—the glass holds—and the raw, keen edge of the hole decapitates the body as neatly as a guillotine. - Or, to continue with the decapitation motif, going off the road into a post and rail fence can put you beyond worrying about other in - juries immediately when a rail comes through the windshield and tears off your head with its splintery end — tiot as neat a job but thoroughly efficient Bodies are often found with their shoes off and their feet all broken out of shape. The shoes are back on the floor of the car, empty and their laces stil neatly tied. That is the kind of impact produced by modern speeds. ,

But all that is routine in every American community. To be remembered individually by doctors, and policemen, you have to do something as grotesque as the lady who burst tho windshield with her head, splashing splinters all over the other occupants of the car, and then, as the car rolled over,, rolled with it down the edge of the windshield frame and cut her throat from ear to ear. Or park on the pavement too near a curve at night and stand in front of the tail light as you take off the spare tire—which will immortalize you in somebody’s memory as the fellow who was mashed three feet broad and two inches thick by the impact of a heavy duty truck against the rear of his own car. Or be as original as the pair of youths who were thrown out of an open roadster this spring—thrown clear—but each broke a windshield % post with his head in passing and the whole top of each skull, down to the eyebrows, was missing. Or snap off a nine-inch tree and get yourself impaled by a rugged branch. None of all that is scare-fiction; it is just the horrible raw material of the year's statistics as seen in the ordinary course of duty by policemen and doctors, picked at random. The surprising thing is that there is so little dissimilarity in the stories they tell.

It’s hard to find a surviving accident victim who can bear to talk. After you come to, the gnawing, searing pain throughout your body is accounted for -by learning that you have both collarbones smashed, both shoulder blades splintered, your right arm broken in three places and three ribs cracked, with every chance of bad internal ruptures. But the pain cant distract you, as the shock begins to wear off. from realizing that you are probably on your way out. You cant forget that not ev«n when they lift you from the ground to the stretcher and your broken riba bite into your lungs and the sharp ends of your collar bones slide over to stab deep into each side of your screaming throat. When you've stopped screaming, it all comes back—you're dying and you hate yourself for it. That isn’t fiction either. It's what it actually feels like to .be one of that 36.000.

And every time you pass On a blind curve, every time you hit it up on a slippery road, every time you step on it harder than your reflexes will safely take, every time you drive with your reactions slowed down by a drink or two, every time you follow the man ahead too closely, you’re gambling a few seconds against this kind of blood and agony and sudden death. Take a look at yourself as the man in the white jacket shakes his head over you, tells the boy* with the stretcher not to bother and turns away to somebody else who w’nt quite dead yet. And then take it easy. oRECEIVES APPOINTMENT _ Mrs. Phyllis Auer ha* received the appointment of visiting nurse out of Washington, D. C, and Baltimore, for the Women’s Benefit Association, the women’s organization of the Mabcabeee lodge. She will go to Washington the first of the month c Man comes into thw world naked and with nothing on him, and in a short time everybody has something

SIDE LIGHTS Insurance against twins and even triplets is becoming more popular in England. The dome of McDonald observatory in Texas is painted with aluminum paint and Is visible 80 miles. By special ordinance, Minneapolis. Minn., prohibits the driving of red automobiles through its streets.

DID YOU KNOW THAT— Some West Indian centipedes are a foot long. An Englishman, one Jonas Banway. Invented the umbrella. The American flag Is the third oldest of the national standards. Last year stamp taxes were paid on more than 125,000.000,000 cigarettes. During 1934 people in the United States purchased approximately 645,000.000 Incandescent lamps. If you had the foresight to preserve your calendar for the year 1907 it would be correct for the present year as well as for 1918. 1929, 1946. 1957, and 1963. and so on. While there is* only about $6,000,000,000 actual cash money in circulation In this country the total bank deposits are around 547.000.000.000 and bank loans reach 150.000.000,000.—Pathfinder Magazine. WISE WORDS The whole praise of virtue Iles tn action.—Cicero. The only way to have a friend is to be one.—Emerson. Many are possessed by the Incurable Itch of writing.—Juvenal Evil, once manfully confronted, ceases to be evil. —Carlyle. No man was ever written out of reputation but by himself.—Bentley. While the world lasts, fashion will continue to lead it by the nose.—Cowper. If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows be Is a citizen of the world. Come what come may. Time and the hour run through the roughest day. —Shakespeare. ACROSS THE WAY The artistic glories of Rome are unmatched In the world. A post-graduate course In bagpipe playing has been started in London. Queensland. Australia, has 355,646 apple trees, according to a recent census. Bulgaria has decreed that all judges and other court officials must wear uniforms. Change In districts in Scotland will compel some pupils to travel 14 miles to school Passenger automobiles Imported into Sweden last year numbered more than twice those of 1933. Prague. Czechoslovakia, has decreed that cats be classed as “luxuries" and a special tax be Imposed on them. FROM EVERYWHERE Industrial production in Norway In creased 7 per cent last year. There has been 23.000,000 pounds of maple sugar produced in Canada tn the last few yean. Upward of 5.000 ships pass through the Suez canal annually, tot.«’!ng more than 30,000,000 tone The coastal section of South Carolina. once a heavy producer of rice, quit commercial production about 20 years ago. Both the drivers of the British train that recently set up a world speed record of over 100 miles an hour were over sixty yean of age. ! The tribal council at the Cherokee Indian reservation in North Carolina has voted to build a home for aged and Infirm member* of the tribe. SIDE SUPS To be aeen of men, wear spats. Who wouldn’t like to farm if Ms food didn’t depend on it! Disbelieve In aa many propositions as you believe in and you’re safe. In 1857 the hard time* only lasted the 12 months; but they ware harder. Only thing that reconciles one to the bad breaks be makes are the bad breaks that others make. ~ There is a misguided notion that all a boy needs to keep his hands clean Is soap. Plenty of hot water la equally Important. INDIANAPOLIS MAN FINED Frank Donovan, Indianapolis, wasfined $6 and costa in the court of Justice Jess Shock on a charge of public intoxication. Unable to pay the fine and coats he was committed to the county >ll. Coats in the case totaled $12.90. Donovan was aneat-

POOR RELIEF INCREASED The 1936 budget for the commissioner's court was approved by the Kosciusko county commissioners prior to adjournment of the August session. The budget is approximately $40,600 higher than that of 1935, totaling $162,359.25. Poor relief is increased $23,000 and the cost of the general election expenses added an other SII,OOO to the new budget. The other increases are scattered through the budget. Poor relief in 1935 was placed at $40,000 and is now $63,000 although a special appropriation for this year was made by the county council a few weeks ago, totalingsls,000, making a grand total* for 1935 of $55,000. Among the important items in the 1936 budget which will be submitted to the county council in September are: Salary for township assesors, $2,695; registration supplies, $2,400; clerical help, $950; poor relief, $63000; county home, $20,140; expenses of care for inmates at the state institutions, $5,000, and appropriations for both the Kosciusko County Fair Association and the Mentone Livestock show, - $2,000. Noble Blocker’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. J. F. Blocker of Gass City; and his brother Carl Blocker and family of Marion, are guests of Mr. and Mrs. Noble Blocker this week. The hen believes in advertising, but a cow never blows her horn. A boy gets more experience than comfort out of his first cigar. 0 Talk is cheap only when you are using your neighbor’s phone.

Notice! Notice! GOOD BEER Sandwiches Dinners CHEERIO TAVERN MILFORD. Dancing With RHYTHM BOYS Every Wednesday and Saturday Nights .Until Further Notice. DOOR CHARGE 16c.

Meat Specials for Saturday Jewel Shortening, lb.> 15c (A Pure Vegetable Compound) Sweetbreads, Calves, lb 45c Leg of Lamb, lb .... ... 35c Brookfield Sausage, pkg., , -20 c Rolled Rib Roasts, (Swift’s) lb. .. .... 34c A Full Line of Tasty Lunch Meats Swift’s Branded Beef is Always Quality Meat, and is Labeled for Your Identification. WE HAVE DRESSED CHICKENS KLINK’S

□AI UKUAi GROCERY SPECIALS ‘ FIG BARS, pound, 10c PEANUT BUTTER, large jar 15c SALAD DRESSING, quart, 25c VINEGAR, HEINZ, pint, :.... 10c PORK & BEANS, large 15c can ; 12c COCOA, HERSHEY’S, pound can 15c BOLENE, can, 20c WASHING POWDER, STAR, 25c pkg. 20c SALMON, PINK,, 2 cans L 25c APPLE BUTTER, Large Jar, ...... 18c RED BEANS, Large Can 10c FRESH VEGETABLES and FRUIT Sweet Corn, Peas, Beans, Celery, Head Lettuce, Egg Plant, Cucumbers, Green Peppers, Cauliflower FREE LAKE and TOWN DELIVERY SEIDER*S GROCERY

Miss Priscilla Rhode, daughter of Mrs. Garnett Latham, returned home, last Thursday, after spending several weeks on an eastern business trip with her father. p Bob Strieby and Keith Cripe were Rochester visitors, at. the J. H. Flemipg home, Sunday.

NU-ENAMEL One Coat Covers—No Brush Marks Fine for. Walls, Woodwork, Stoves, Sinks, Bathtubs, Etc. It Costs Only To Paint Your Car With NU-ENAMEL ED FIEDEKE CO. 11# So. Main Goshen, Ind.

Grieger’s FANCY GROCERIES Phone 15 Free Delivery CASH GRAPE NUTS 17C Package - _ - JELLO - 10 c 3 packages POST WHOLE BRAN 0c Package _ Dated for Freshness Special 26c g} POUND Makes Delicious fentC Iced Coffee TAPIOCA, Minute 9c Package _ MACARONI, 17C 2 pound package 1FLOUR, 19c 5 pounds ____________