Four days before Christmas

Here is what we know: Thomas Gregory, 17 years old, was driving his Ford to his family’s farm house four miles west of Sulphur Springs. His dad Judson Gregory, 45, a dairy farmer, was in the front passenger seat. Two of Judson Gregory’s grandsons, Douglas McCord and Mark Gregory, both age 2, occupied the back seat. Thomas Gregory steered the car off State Highway 11 onto the dirt road going to his home and drove it up the short ramp leading to the Cotton Belt Route railway tracks. At the apex, with the Ford centered on the tracks, the car inexplicably stopped. The time was 2:55 p.m., four days before Christmas in 1961.

I was on vacation from high school that Thursday and standing in for my dad as the newspaper’s local reporter. In the backshop, that day’s edition had just been locked up and was being placed on the press. Then the police radio atop the desk of Joe Woosley came alive. A train had struck a car on Highway 11 between Sulphur Springs and Ridgeway. Already we could hear the sirens of ambulances. Joe turned to me and Cody Greer, an advertising salesman who doubled as our staff photographer. “Get going,” is all he said.

Without asking, I knew the train involved, a local freight that ran each weekday from Mt. Pleasant (35 miles west of Sulphur Springs) to Commerce (20 miles east). It would be a short train doing maximum speed, which was 50 miles per hour. Those are all insignificant facts versus the larger picture but all I could focus on as Cody sped west on Highway 11. And I knew what I was about to see would not be pretty.

Just as we reached the accident, an ambulance sped away, headed toward Memorial Hospital. We were told by a highway patrolman it carried two young boys, one of whom, Douglas, would die en route. I asked who else was in the car. The cop motioned toward the vehicle a short distance away, its right (passenger) side crushed against the front of the locomotive. I walked to the driver’s side of the car and looked inside.

There lay Judson and Thomas Gregory, father and son, their heads thrown against the top of their seatbacks. They looked asleep. There was a lot of blood. I stared a few moments and turned away, unable to bear the sight. My god, I thought, right in front of the family farm. They must have driven across the railroad tracks constantly. A private road, it was protected only by the standard buckboard sign. How could this happen? So I went in search of the occupants of the train’s locomotive.

The diesel locomotive was designed in such a way that the operating compartment was near its rear. Its engineer could see everything on the train’s right side, its fireman opposite him in the cab could see everything on the left. That’s why fireman W. O. Philpot witnessed this living nightmare as it unfurled. He saw the car turn off the highway as the train approached, its whistle sounding. The Ford stopped short of the tracks. Then to Philpot’s horror, it began moving again. Keep whistling! Philpot shouted to engineer C. E. Shirey. The engineer began tooting the whistle short and fast. Then Shirey saw the front of an automobile pop into view on his side of the locomotive and stop. The collision occurred immediately afterward.

My story in the next day’s paper quoted police as thinking the car might have stalled. Such almost certainly was the case. The question I did not think to ask then was whether the Ford had a manual transmission. Today I’m surprised Woosley, upon reading my copy, didn’t ask me to call the police and ask. A relatively inexperienced driver like Thomas Gregory may have inexpertly used the accelerator and clutch and caused the car to sputter out at the apex of the climb to the tracks. I’ll never know.

I relate all this because the experience profoundly affected me. I had never encountered the aftermath of violent death, or death in any visible form. A year earlier, I had embarked on what would be a lifelong career as a journalist, anticipating a life of romance and excitement. We go where the action is. We man the front lines of news events.

But I hadn’t bargained on this. What I was unprepared for, and still cannot shake, is the shock of a family destroyed by a boy’s horrible misjudgment or clumsiness as a driver. Thomas Gregory was my age, and I knew him at Sulphur Springs High School. But there he was inside that car, gone. I couldn’t begin to imagine the grief overwhelming Gladys Gregory, wife of Judson, mother of Thomas and grandmother of  Douglas. And it had to happen almost at her doorstep.

I could not then and cannot now detach myself from scenes such as I saw that day. They stay with you forever. If you know a cure, share it with us.