My attention has recently been diverted from radio as I have finally got started on writing a new book. I’ve started this work multiple times through the ages but have never followed through to printing. This particular calling happens around the 4th of July every year because that was the day when a family tragedy took place and spun off an alternate universe for my family as well as an unknown number of others.

In the early morning hours of July 4, 1978 a rollover Jeep accident claimed the lives of three close friends, one of them my fiancé’s twenty-three-year-old brother. Brenda and I were to be wed on August 25th of that year but roughly eight weeks earlier the life of her older brother, and my future brother-in-law, was terminated by this cataclysmic event.

I was living with my parents at the time and they had traveled to Michigan for vacation that week. I was home alone when the ringing of the telephone woke me from a sound sleep. It was Brenda, crying, asking me to take her to the hospital. Her Mom and step-father had received a call thirty minutes earlier about the accident and they had rushed to the hospital, leaving her home with her baby sister. She was certain her brother had been killed in an auto accident. After dropping her sister off with another relative we rushed to the emergency room only to discover that her brother was indeed one of the fatalities.

That kicked off the most difficult week of my entire life to that point. Relatives came to town, a funeral was quickly planned, and five days later that part was complete. The healing process might have started then, but I’m not sure it has ever ended. You don’t just get over something like this. Time helps, but it’s not a cure-all. We got married seven weeks later as planned, so those activities helped a little in changing the subject, but you never fully recover.

The seeds of the idea to create an “official” record of this event came years later as I noticed that whenever the family discussed that day, variations in the story began to appear. The family was aging and the details seemed to me to be morphing into more folklore than fact, and I thought it best to open that old memory chest, do a little extra digging, and document what actually happened that fateful day.

As I assembled notes I realized I was missing much of the story. And it was a pretty big story. There were five people in the Jeep that morning; three of them were killed. Oddly enough, or maybe not, the three boys who were killed were best friends. After the event, we couldn’t help but notice most of the photos my mother-in-law had on the walls of her home that included her son also included the other two who died that day. The three of them were inseparable in life, and now in death.

So the story is more than a single family’s. It includes many people whose lives would forever be changed. The headline newspaper account included that the victims had been partying, an all-night party, we assumed, since the accident occurred at 5am. It was a holiday and alcohol was involved. That much of this story is not in question. It was a foolish accident, one that we discussed for hours and days and weeks. Eventually, for years…

We have a long list of unanswered questions, but my brother-in-law would be 71 if he were alive today, and the number of eyewitnesses is shrinking with time. I was right there in the immediate aftermath of the event, yet I don’t know for certain whose Jeep it was, or who was driving. I know the names of four of the occupants of the Jeep, but not the fifth. We know where the crash took place but we don’t know where the party took place. We don’t know who else was there that night who skipped the early morning “joy” ride. My queries for the back story details eventually led to my being contacted by a literary agent, who connected me with a publisher who wants to print this forty-eight-year-old story.

I’m willing to do it because all the parents involved have since passed, and while siblings remain, including my wife, I will endeavor to tell the story as tactfully as truth will permit. Since this has become my next project, you may notice my brief absence from ham radio and know it’s a byproduct of other important work.

73 de Jeff