Blog on the Lillypad
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
 | The "Fatal" Bus Accident at BJU (circa 1981-82)
I worked as a student at Bob Jones University on Security. The Department was broken into two groups, the entry level "Night watch" foot patrols, who walked around and kept lock/unlock schedules; and the more senior uniform patrols. Uniform people were licensed by South Carolina Law Enforcement, and trained at least in First Aid and CPR, though many also went on to EMT training, which the university paid for. |
Uniform security paid the best of any work study on campus. Though still comparatively low, the rate was enough for me to meet my work scholarship debt each month with a little left over, which the school generously let me cash out during my senior year so that I had spending money.
Of course everybody laughed at us, just as all college campuses laugh at campus security. When I was there, the way to cope with being laughed at was to laugh at ourselves. The hardcore security guys who really believed this was some type of tough police work were called "Freds," and the mellower people were the Nerds.
The hierarchy was simple. BJU has a glassed-in gatehouse in the front of the campus, the Fishbowl, as we called it. The lowest level security people were the Gatehouse Watch (GHW), always a male, and the Assistant Gatehouse Watch (AGHW), usually a female. At that time, the girls on Security could only go as high as AGHW. Eventually, we learned every single thing about how to run a shift and were useful for training the men who would eventually outrank us. But there was no resentment. The men, for one thing, treated us with great respect and kindness. The only other role for the girls (AGHWs) during the regular year was to accompany the ambulance if it had to go to the girls dorms. By law, a woman had to be present for ambulance transit of a woman.
Normally, the GHW (guy) sat on the incoming side of the gate as traffic drove up the left lanes. He also manned the radio and wrote in the "blotter," which is the time keeping book that every shift keeps to document every action that took place.
The AGHW (girl) sat on the outgoing side, logging sticker ID's of people who drove off campus and answering the phones. In an emergency, if the GHW had to leave to go assist, the girl would take over the entire gatehouse.
Across from the Fishbowl sat the Campus View Apartments (CVA). Single faculty and a few married couple lived over there. BJU's entrance gates sat on Wade Hampton Blvd, and the incoming ramp and outgoing ramps were controlled by a traffic light on Wade Hampton. But alongside CVA, there was a road called a "dogleg" entry road. It was called White Oak drive, and according to all the signs around the redlights, people making a left off campus had to yield to people making a right onto Wade Hampton from White Oak drive.
Most of the complaints we got from towns people were because some dumb student from BJU shot down the outgoing ramp to get the greenlight and launched himself into a left turn onto Wade Hampton, almost killing a person making a right onto Wade Hampton from White Oak Drive.
We always apologized to the irate towns people for the bad driving habits of a few of our students. One of our uniformed men even wrote a letter to Doctor Bob III about it, telling him somebody was going to get killed. As I recall, that message made it to the chapel platform. I'm pretty sure that Dr. Bib did tell the students not to race that light and just yield to the people coming onto Wade Hampton from White Oak Drive.
Nevertheless, once or twice in my tenure, there were a couple minor accidents caused by students ignoring the yield sign and racing the green light.
One spring night when I was a junior or senior, our handy custodial guy, Hudson Blough, came driving up to the Fishbowl in his long custodial cart. It was a lightweight cart made over from a golf cart, with a longer bed in back to carry discarded washers or dryers. Lightweight metal struts had been bolted to it to support a rain canopy, but none was needed tonight. It's top speed with the foot to the metal was about 25 mph. Hudson had permission to drive it across Wade Hampton Blvd to White Oak drive and tasks around back in CVA when he did maintenance work over there.
My door was open on the outgoing side because it was a warm night. Hudson pulled up to say hello, and we chatted for a moment or two. Across the room, Darryl Butts, the Duty Officer, turned to wave and shout hello to him. The light turned, and Hudson gave a cheery wave and went down the off ramp. He crossed with the light and disappeared down White Oak drive enroute to the back of CVA.
Everybody liked Hudson. There were about a dozen kids in his family, and they all went (or would be going) to BJU. His parents were missionaries, and the kids earned money each summer working on fishing boats in Alaska, a trade they introduced to several other students at BJU. The Blough kids were uniformly nice and dressed in sturdy, neat, attractive and non-fashionable clothing. The popular kids liked them and the regular kids liked them and the lower caste of BJU's "repros" liked them. As the custodial guy, Hudson had the job of also seeing to the washers and dryers in the girls dorms, and he handled that sometimes-awkward duty well, smiling politely and saying hello to girls he knew as the chaperone went before him in the dorm calling, "Man in the Hall! Man in the Hall!"
Darryl and I sat and chatted for a half hour. It was a quiet night. The Bearcat scanner on my side occasionally muttered with calls from the police, but nothing was going on in Greenville. Bible Conference would be starting in a day or two, and a few buses from distant churches were already here.
I saw Hudson pull up on White Oak Drive across the street. The light on the ramps turned green, and he started across the wide street.
I heard the gunning of a bus engine as it roared down the ramp on my side. I saw it in the rear view mirror positioned over the AGHW post: a church bus, and he was ignoring the 10 mph speed limit. He was going to try to make the light.
It was one of those instances where half your mind says the worst can not possibly happen. And the other half sees that it will. I was at the door to wave him down, but he rushed past me without even seeing me.
The pathetic golf cart engine had propelled Hudson about a fourth of the way into the intersection, not quite in the bus's path. Then the bus, veering into a left turn, obscured my view of Hudson. The last I saw was that Hudson did not hear or see the bus. Then the bus was between us and I heard that incredible boom.
"Darryl!" I screamed. "Oh my God! It's Hudson!"
Darryl yelled, "Get Rescue 1," and he pelted out the door. I slammed the door on my side closed to cut the noise and ran to the radio on Darryl's side. "Rescue One 10-38 at Central. This is an emergency. 10-19 to Central!" I shouted. "All other units to Central." The radio base crackled to life and the phone started ringing as the "big guys" heard it over their scanners. Fred Davis (code named "George"), head of campus ancillary services, kept an ear on us when he could. And Bud Rimel, our Chief, was off that night but never far from his radio. I had to keep the radio open for the uniform men, especially the two who would come up in the ambulance.
"George, Chief, please 10-21," I asked them, diverting them to the phones. They affirmed, but I knew that Rimel would just come. He knew something terrible had happened.
Our white ambulance, Rescue One, with a response time of less than a minute, shot past on the outgoing side as I rang up the police and put Fred Davis on hold. Randy Rardin was driving, and he saw the bus out in the middle of the intersection. He went straight to it.
It was then that I realized that Hudson had been killed by being truncated at the hips, wedged under that massive bus. His cart was just that high, just enough to slide partway under, and I had heard the BANG when he'd hit. Or maybe he wasn't dead yet. "Oh God, please help Darryl to say the right thing and stay calm," I whispered. "Please be near Hudson so that he senses your presence." Big tears burst from my eyes, and a sudden reversal of the muscles down my throat made me gag. I very nearly threw up right there, but I made myself clamp down on the horror of it.
I finished the call to the police, made a quick, terse reply to Fred Davis, and was just starting the radio calls to tell nightwatch what they had to do to take up the slack, when the door closest to me burst open, and a slightly rotund, gray haired man---his skin so white it was blue-ish gray---bawled at me, "I've killed that boy! I've killed that boy!" A taller, darker haired man was actually holding him up. I found myself on my feet, and my first reaction was anger, but in a direct, composed voice I said, "Stop shouting! Go sit there. And calm down!" And I pointed to the back cubbyhole where we kept the extra caps, vests, and the coffeepot. There was a rickety chair there, and his friend helped him into it.
I gave out the schedule updates of the nightwatch guys, and somebody told me over the radio to get one of the nightwatch guys free to come up to the gatehouse, and I did that. The walls of the gatehouse were glass, and I waved cars up the ramp as they drove on campus, but traffic quickly slowed, owing to the bus out in the intersection.
Nobody was saying anything on the radio about Hudson. Two uniformed men on foot ran down the On ramp on foot, making for the bus. I was so busy I could not turn to look. Of course, the bus was between me and any part of the accident.
I sat in the chair and quickly entered what I could into the blotter. The man in the back on the chair was sobbing. Rotating lights out on Wade Hampton showed that the police were coming to seal off the intersection. Not five minutes had passed.
I started to pray again, just in case he was still alive. And I looked up in time to see Darryl on the near side, pushing the mangled remains of the cart, and Hudson on the far side, also pushing, his hand wrapped up on a handkerchief. They were talking cheerfully. I leaped up. Rescue One sped up the On ramp and tooted its horn.
I pulled the door open. "Hudson!"
He smiled at me. "You're not dead. Thank God! But how can you not be dead? I heard you hit the bus! You didn't see it."
"I---I just found myself standing behind the cart," he told me. "I didn't know the bus was there until I heard the bang. And I was standing behind the cart."
The rules said I couldn't hug him, but I almost did. I looked out the window at the destroyed cart. The struts were mashed down, the front crumpled down. It had, indeed, wedged under the side of the bus as I had thought.
The man in the back got his color back. He had run off the bus without looking to see the damage he had done, horrified (by the sound) at what his heedlessness had caused. He'd only seen the edge of the cart, mashed under the bus, as he'd been running around the front of the bus for help.
Hudson's hand was bleeding. That was his only injury. Darryl offered to run him up to the hospital, but he politely declined. It was not so bad, he said. So while the bus men and the nightwatch guy pushed the cart up the ramp and off to the side, Darryl got out the first aid kit and cleaned Hudson's hand for him and bandaged it, and I ran both sides of the gate.
Irritated, George radio'd up, and he was quite miffed when I told him that all was well. I suppose I seemed like a panic-stricken young woman to him then. But Darryl's story backed up my story, so I never got any guff from anybody. And Hudson's own account of not even seeing the bus (and I knew he hadn't) until it was all over added to the sense that we had seen what was certainly a fatal accident. And yet it hadn't been fatal. And just how Hudson had cut his hand was a mystery. Darryl said it was from the strut on the driver's side, but Hudson had no memory of grasping it or pushing off it.
In the coming years whenever I would see Hudson and his expanding family of good looking, sweet-smiling kids, I would say hello to him, and the inevitable, "Remember that night? I was so scared" always followed. And the joy, of course, that God had shown him such apparent mercy.
