Here is a photograph from the Marion (Seaver) (Braithwaite) Hemphill family collection passed to me by Aunt Marion's daughter in 2000 after her passing.
Guess what happened here! Guess whose house this is! No, not mine...but it is the house that my grandparents built at 825 Harbor View Place in San Diego, and that my parents lived in from 1978 until my mother died in 2002. This event happened between 1978 and 1982, but I can't narrow the date at this time.
The house above is at the foot of a very steep hill (Lucinda Street). About 100 yards up the hill, a homeowner was having cement poured, and, when completed, the truck started down the hill, and the brakes failed. The driver managed to turn the truck about 30 degrees to the left before he hit the curb and the brick wall and smashed into the garage (full of stuff, and my father's pink Cadillac). That stopped the cement truck but ruined the Caddy. The driver was badly injured.
My father watched this happen in front of his eyes...he was in the den looking out the window (it's under the V in the roofline) and if the driver had not turned the truck a bit, it would have hit my father. My mother was in the kitchen and she would probably have been injured or killed too. The incident happened in about five seconds from start to finish. Someone (probably a neighbor) had the instinct to take a picture. My parents sent it to Aunt Marion, who put it in her album, and Marion's daughter gave me the album!
This made the local newspapers, but I can't find it in the San Diego Union on GenealogyBank. Perhaps it was in the Evening Tribune instead.
The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/12/not-so-wordless-wednesday-post-234.html
Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver
2 comments:
Very interesting posting. I'm glad you didn't go wordless. I would have wondered what happened. Perhaps you could have asked your readers to provide a scenario.
I lived two blocks down from there in the early 1970's on Scott St. I also lived in two different houses above there overlooking San Diego Bay in the early 1970's. Small world.
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