Flashback Friday #45

Ben is dead.

Hello all, and welcome again to the stirring renditions of my past that I call "Flashback Friday". Most of the stories I relate here are fairly humorous to downright funny.

This isn't one of them.

Into every life some rain must fall, and this story tells of the first time I had a relative other than a grandparent die. When you are young, you don't expect your grandparents to be around forever. They look so old, but it is still a shock when they pass. (Now that I am a grandparent, they don't look so old.) It's even more of a shock when you are told that a cousin that is only six years older than you is gone.

I was going to post this story last week, but since it is such a rough time in my life, I chickened out,and went with the lawnmower stories instead. With Ben's only sibling, Eli, passing away Saturday from a massive heart attack at 55, this story begs to be told.

I was never really close to Eli & Ben, seeing that they were nine and six years older than me. But Gattabout was close, especially to Ben. Ben treated Gattabout like the little brother that he didn't have. When they went wading back in their creek, they would always take Gattabout with them (I had to stay with Mom because at age four, you just didn't go back to the creek). One time they weren't supposed to get wet, but they did. They built a fire to dry their clothes. Everything went as planned until Ben's socks caught fire. He told Gattabout not to tell. As soon as the got back to the house, Gattabout blurts out "Hey Aunt Bessie, guess what? Ben burnt his socks".

Ben had an avid love for auto mechanics, passed down from his dad, and my paternal grandfather. Grandpa had lost the fingers on his right hand (that's another post all together), but it didn't stop him from tinkering on cars. Ben was always by his side. He spent the summers in Westerville with my grandparents because grandpa had a large garage, and a full chest of tools. It was a tinker's delight.

When Ben got his driver's license, his goal was to have a hopped-up street rod. He loved the muscle cars that are so totally in vogue today. His favorite was an early seventies GTO (I can't remember the exact year). It was metal flake blue (which he did himself), and had a whole heap of engine under the hood. That car was his baby.

We got the call in 74 or 75 that Ben had been killed in a car accident. With his love for hot rods and horsepower, we figured he was driving too fast and wrecked. Then we found out that he wasn't driving, he was in the passenger's seat. The driver, a friend of his named Peter, was unhurt. There was a third young man, Ted, who was sitting between Ben & Peter in the front seat (this was before bucket seats were real big, almost all cars had bench seats). Where we come from, it is improper to ride one person in back with two in front and vise-verse. If there were three in the car, all rode in the front seat. Ted was in critical condition at the hospital.

We found out much later (after Ted came out of the coma he was in) exactly what had happened. Peter was driving on a gravel road at a speed that was in excess of a safe gravel road speed. He then crested a hill, and saw a one lane bridge at the bottom of the hill. With the car going too fast, starting to slide on the gravel, and a narrow bridge looming ahead of him, Peter bailed out of the car. The driver-less car careened rapidly toward the bridge. Ted hadn't been driving long couldn't control it from his middle seat, and Ben wasn't able to get control of it from the passenger seat. The car slammed into the bridge sideways, ejecting Ben, causing his neck to break. Ted suffered severe head injuries. Peter was brought up on several charges, but received a small sentence from a liberal judge. Gattabout told me of several attempts that were made on Peter's life, including someone shooting at him with a rifle as he went to check his mail.

Ben's funeral procession looked like a street rod convention. In today's prices, there was probably about two to three million dollars worth of street rods and muscle cars in attendance. There were more metal-flaked, hopped-up-engine, mag tired rides than you could shake a stick at. The Westerville police officer that kept Ben in line most of the time stood at attention while the procession passed the road that my grandparents lived on. They laid Ben to rest beside my grandfather,with my grandmother joining them about four years later.

It's never easy to lose a family member, even one that you're not really close to.