Clarence Judd head-butts a pickup truck. Truck dies.

                              One cold February morning in Augusta, Maine, temperature a couple of degrees below zero. The sun was low behind my father, Clarence Judd,  as he stepped out onto route 202. He'd just gotten an ad from Clark Marine for his paper, the Wayne Mainer.  

                             Preoccupied as usual, his head deep inside the hood of his slate blue parka, breath steaming out, he never saw the truck. It was a Ford 150. Jimmy Devens, 34, two kids in grade school, running late, on his way to his part-time job as a mechanic, didn’t have time to step on the brake. His front bumper struck Clarence in the hip, shattering bones and knocking him high over the truck to land on the pavement behind. The truck bounded off the road, hit a sign, and stopped.They towed it to the junkyard.

                      Clarence had a fractured hip, three broken ribs, severe bruising, and multiple fractures in his pelvis. The orthopedist in Augusta said there was no point in operating. He was old. His shattered bones needed too much work, and he was too sick. Better to let him die painlessly in a cloud of morphine.

             I was working in London and it took two days to get a flight. “Don’t worry,” my mother, Cora said, “there’s really nothing you can do. Nothing any of us can do.”

             A 32 year old orthopedic surgeon at the Maine Medical Center in Portland heard about Clarence’s accident and wanted to try out a new idea—build a cage inside him to hold his bones together while they healed.

                      By the time I got there, metal rods stuck out of Clarence’s hip and the outline of another metal rod bulged low on his back. He had been on his feet for a moment that morning.

                    “You’re going to be O.K.,” I said.

                     “Of course, I am,” he said, managing a grin.

                     “It looks like you hurt.”

                      “I hurt, but the stuff they’re giving me takes some of the edge off.” The grin faded into a grimace.

                      “You have to let me do a story. For The Mainer.”

                      “On what?”

                      “On you. On your accident. It’s news: Truck Hits Editor. You need to let your advertisers know what happened to you. How come you’re not coming around, asking for advertising.”

                       He said O.K., but he wasn’t happy about it. I wrote it that night, keeping it as straight and simple as I could. Just the facts. Editor Hit by Truck.

                       The next morning he read it in one gulp and put it down. “Goddamn it, Bobby, I’m 82, not 83. I’ll write it.”

Cora & Clarence circa 1975

                       When I returned to Wayne in August, he came bustling out of the house, “Let me help you with your bags, Bobby.”

Tales of Wayne. The Bulls Story

As you come over the rise, you can see Mt. Washington100 miles beyond Lake Androscoggin   The road runs steeply downhill and bends to the right to follow a narrow stip of land between two lakes wherein lies the town of Wayne, Maine.  Cross a little bridge with the millpond on your left, and you are headed out of town.

 
              Years ago there was a comfortable bench outside the General Store for the  3/4 Century Club.  If you were over 75, you could sit, tell stories and tell the tourists they were headed the wrong way.  Chester, who said he was “somewhere North of ninety,” said he was “so busy I ain’t hardly got time to think. I’m the church sexton and I just got finished sweepin’ the church.  And I know I got something else to do. Whatever it is I know I got to do it.”

             Vern Lovejoy, who owned the General Store, decided that “what this town needs to perk it up is a baseball team,” and the Wayne Bulls were born. Vern got a deal on three uniforms so three of us had hats, three had shirts and three of us got to wear the Wayne Bulls pants.  I was fifteen and thought I had a pretty good fastball.  We played in the field behind the one room school.  Nice, hot, mid-July day. 

              The Augusta Bears (something like the guys on the left) were up first.  I struck out the first hitter, the catcher dropped the ball and the “hitter” ran to first.  The catcher picked up the ball and threw it into deep right field.. The runner kept going, rounding second.  Our right fielder, Paul Brown, had a great arm and threw a perfect strike to third, hitting our third baseman who was chatting with Lisa Crowell at the time, in the back of the leg.  The runner took off for home.  Bears 1- Bulls 0.

                    Bottom of the second, nobody on, Ezra Thompson, a hog farmer who must have weighed over 300 lbs. hit a long high fly ball deep into the sky and falling somewhere deep in the woods, never to be found.  It was slow going for Ezra, rounding first, wheezing, and slowing down.  When he got to second he sat down on the bag, “I ain’t gonna go another goddamn step.”

               Midway through the third we were down something like 7-1 and Vern tried to rouse the crowd of maybe six or seven wives and friends.  “I ain’t hearin’ much cheerin’” Vern called out.

               An ancient lady in black behind the backstop said, equally loudly, “you’re gettin’ plenty of cheerin’ for what we’re seein’”

               By the end of the seventh there was zero difference between my no-curve curve ball and my slow-ball fast ball. The final score was something like Bulls 2, Bears 19 although it may not have been that close.

               Somewhere in Wayne, hanging in a closet, there's bound to be a Wayne Bulls shirt from that game.