A few months ago, while in the hospital recovering from a serious motorcycle accident, Rick Gale remembers his doctor asking him those standard medical questions:
Do you have any allergies? Are you taking any medications? Do you smoke?
It was that last question that almost cracked Gale up. He replied, “You don’t know what I do for a living, do you?”
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In the Chronicle’s police reports on Sept. 9, the incident read like this:
“A 17-year-old boy needed medical help after someone caught him stealing from vehicles.”
That someone was Eddie Steinhauer, and the police report as printed doesn’t hold a candle to Steinhauer’s account of what happened on Story Street that night.
Long-time third-grade teachers Lynn Johnson, Jan Savko and Diane Thomas all retired at the end of the 2009-2010 school year, closing the textbook on 113 years of combined Belgrade teaching experience.
It was the winter of 1950. Earl Vining had only been in Korea for a few months, and already he’d been wounded twice.
“When they sent me back again, I knew I was going to get killed,” Vining, now 78, said.
Then, one day, a lieutenant popped his head into the hospital tent and asked the question that Vining credits with saving his life:
“Does anybody know how to run a bulldozer?”
I just got back from an interview for my next Backroads story, due out Monday. This will be the third Backroads in a row to profile a local veteran — the series is a lead-in to Memorial Day at the end of the month.
I interviewed Earl Vining, a 78-year-old veteran of both Korea and Vietnam. Earl is a talker, and reporters love talkers. The problem, though, is that you wind up with more material than you can possibly fit into the column inches allotted to your story.
I guess that’s why the journalism gods created blogs.
Anyway, here’s a story that Earl told me during our interview today.
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For my latest Backroads article, I visited for about an hour with World War II veteran submariner Richard Clower at the retirement community where he lives in Bozeman.