The B Street Massacre

A true story about life

The B Street Massacre


My family lived in the town of McCook, Nebraska back in 1972 / ’73. This is about me and my best pal Doug, we were seventh graders then and were completely connected at the hip. Wherever he was, I was there too. Everyone on the planet should get the experience of having a best pal like Doug. He was the best a best pal could be.



My story is tragic and even somewhat gruesome. My memory of most of what took place is crystal clear to me. Other parts, not so much. I’ll tell you the story, but know that some of what you read will be second hand information. I cannot seem to pull up all of the memories. They simply are not there.



Doug and I weren’t big sports enthusiasts, but for some reason, we went to one of the high school basketball games in town on one particular Friday night. I’m sure there were some girls we had our eye on who’d said they would be there too. Because of that, the two of us most likely didn’t watch much of the game or know the final score at the end. 



It was customary then to go to Mac’s Drive-In down on B street after the games. The high school wasn’t far from there and as we exited the gym, Doug and I set out for Mac’s. There were some girls ahead of us as we walked (we were probably following them). Our showing off and their laughter kind of filled the night as we all walked along. There were probably NOT any worldwide issues being solved by any of us that night. Again, we were seventh graders and our job was only to act like idiots. My apologies to any seventh graders who may be tuning in...



The girls got out in front of us at one point as we detoured through a residential alley along the way. As they went through the alley up ahead, we could hear glass smashing against the concrete alley floor. The girls were grabbing glass items out of trash barrels as they went along and were smashing the bottles.  

Doug and I had indulged in this little activity before. It was fun, but we were trying to be cool so we weren’t doing it with them...that night. We would walk a few steps in the alley, hear a loud smash, then a resounding chorus of female laughter would follow. This would repeat many times along the way. That alley, those sounds, I remember all of it clearly.



It went on like that as we continued moving. Doug and I weren’t far behind so it was as if we were right up there with them. We might as well have been, but we were back just a ways, like twenty or thirty feet.  

Being the gentlemen we were, our job became giving the ladies some space to release the pent up aggression bottlenecking in their souls brought on by the hardships of adolescence. No need to crowd them. They had a task to do and they were very focused on getting it accomplished without any help from us.



As the alley became a street again, the girls disappeared around the corner. We then heard a voice. 



“What the hell is going on out here?” The voice was gruff, agitated and had an authoritative ring to it.



I remember digging my shoe into the alley for a good grip. I didn’t know which direction I’d be running at that moment, but I did know I would soon be running, and fast. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Doug’s.



“Don’t run,” he said calmly.



Doug’s world was completely different than mine in comparison. I was from a house with three kids, all within a few years of one another. Doug was born long after his older sisters. They had graduated high school and were on their own before Doug was even in the third grade.  

My pal's older sisters had friends. The friends they had were a wild bunch, many of them, and would probably have been looked upon as hippies back then. But they were tough hippies, and most of them were bikers.

Those friends of his sisters had taken Doug under their collective wing along the way and taught him a few things. They always looked out for Doug, like a little brother. These guys had a code they lived by and running from trouble wasn’t part of that code. Doug took all of their teaching to heart and did his best to live under the same set of rules.



“Don’t run? Come On!!! Let’s go!!! What’re you nuts?” I was poised, ready for take-off.



His grasp on my shoulder became tighter, “Don’t run, or they’ll call us “haulin’ a*s Todd and haulin' a*s Doug.”



“Oh yeah, the code,” I thought. “He’s right, we cannot run.” Doug knew the code by heart. I was only a wannabe apprentice.

The angry man came out his back door and approached us. He growled and coughed and hacked up something he spit out right at our feet. He was half dressed and was tightening his belt as he bellowed, “are you the ones busting up glass all over my alley? What’re your names? Who are you? Better yet, let’s just take a walk down to the police station and see what they have to say about it.”



I cannot speak for my best pal Doug at this precise moment, but the pucker factor in my own nether regions was pegging at about a ten right there. The scale only went to eight. Doug was actually smiling. I was not, but I knew my pal. He was smiling because he knew he was innocent and would have one heck of a story to tell later on. This was an opportunity to him.  

Of course we wouldn’t rat out our female friends when we got to the cop shop, but Doug knew we would leave the station innocent of all charges and could then proceed on to Mac’s with a great story to tell. This was the kind of stuff Doug lived for.



The three of us began our trek to the police station. It was ‘right over there’ from where we were. All we had to do was walk a half block or so down to B street, cross it and there we would be, McCook P.D. 



Our escort MAY have been drinking a little before he snared us. His words were a little slurred and he wasn’t negotiating his steps very well. This was stacking up to becoming a great story. I could almost hear the wheels turning in my best pal’s head.



We got down to B Street. The short walk consisted of the old guy who collared us going on about how sick and tired he was of punks like us coming through his alley and destroying property. He was obviously inebriated and we both knew this was going to be so easy to get out of once we got in front of a cop. The pressure was off once we realized this and we exchanged a few smiles between us. What luck!! Being hauled to the police by a drunk with no evidence, no witnesses. Oh yeah, this IS going to be a great story for later.



We crossed the two lanes of B Street that were heading west. The spot where we crossed had no light. Cars were moving fast right in front of us. Doug and I were both most likely rehearsing our story for the police about how this “drunken fool” also forced us to commit the heinous crime of jaywalking against our will. I was pretty sure that carried the death penalty in Nebraska.



We made it to the median in the middle of B Street. This is where the story gets just a tad bit cloudy for me. You’ll understand why in a minute. Apparently, I was the first to step off the median to lead our trio on the final leg of the journey.

As I stepped off and into the street, an eastbound motorcycle appeared out of nowhere and he was coming right for me. There was no more than a car length between us when I saw him. The man on the bike saw me and made a split second decision. He knew I was a dead boy and he would probably be a very dead man if he didn’t act, and quick.

He immediately laid his bike down. We figured later he was most likely traveling at 35 or 40 mph. It all happened in a flash, or so I am told. The driver laid his motorcycle over and he went skidding on the pavement right past his bike, and right past me. The motorcycle, however, didn’t take the same path. The motorcycle drew a bead on me and came directly at me, on its side, skidding along the pavement, sparks a-flying. 



The front tire of the bike hit my legs, both legs, and sent me up into the air like a rocket. What goes up must come down. I did. At the very moment I came down, a four door Buick was in the next lane doing a similar speed. My trajectory from the motorcycle hit somehow put me on a collision course with the Buick.

When I came down, I didn’t even hit the street. The Buick hit me solid while I was still in the air and sent me careening forward many, many, many feet. The comments later involved statements with the term “sack of potatoes” in them.



I would love to tell you readers that I was so tough, I just got up, dusted myself off, looked at our captor and said, “So are we gonna do this thing or not? C’mon, I’ve got a burger over there with my name on it. Let’s get this show on the road. Close your mouth old man....and zip up your pants, we’re headed into the police station. Look alive!”



Yeah, okay, that didn’t happen. We got in front of the police that night, but it was them who came to us and not the other way around. I understand they poured out of the building and swarmed the scene just as they heard the crying tires, the busting glass...is there a J Frank Wilson song in here somewhere?



My 85 pound frame was transported by ambulance to the McCook hospital. Doug was allowed to ride along. The upstanding citizen who had suffered alI the horrendous property loss was led into the police station as we pulled away. He had some serious ‘splainin’ to do.



I learned later that they thought my back was broken and that I probably wouldn’t make it to the ER alive. I was unconscious. Most likely from when my head hit the headlamps of that li’l ol’ Buick. Buicks pack a good punch. You wouldn’t think so, but they really can mess up a guys day. They’ll darn sure cheat you out of a burger at Mac’s Drive-In, I know that much.



The story could end here, but there is a twist; a little add-on to the whole affair. As you well know by now, I lived. The ambulance diagnosis didn’t stick. For years later, I would try to replay the whole thing and do my best to remember.

I was especially focused on why I stepped off the median without looking. I mean, I had looked both ways every OTHER time I needed to cross traffic since the time I was four years old. So why my blatant disregard for the superior training I’d received on that night at that place? Every time I went back in my mind to the scene of the crime, I came up with a big fat blank. 



Then one day I was thinking it all through again. I’m 60 now and the time I’m referring to is in the past twenty years or so, maybe even the late 90’s. I’d been hard-stuck on this little memory for most of my life by this time. Anyway, I’m playing the whole thing out in my head.

I see Doug and I at the bball game. I see us leaving and following the young chicks, I see the alley, I hear the glass, the laughter of our sweeties, I see the old man, our prisoner’s march to B street and the trip across the first two lanes of traffic, yada yada. Then I go blank. No remembrance of what I was thinking as I made that near fatal decision to step into oncoming traffic. Nothing, nada, zilch.



Just as it had every time before, my mind skipped over the actual impact, the trauma at the scene and the ambulance ride. My memory took me from the median in the middle of B Street straight to the hospital. As I pondered it for the ten thousandth time, I just let it flow, like I always had. I can see my friend Doug standing in the ER by my cot and the nurses and doctors all around me there with him. I can see...wait a minute, WHAT? What was that again?



All those years. I had replayed that whole entire night, including the scene in the ER, in my head and never once had I picked up on the absurdity of it. If I was laying on the cot, and the people were all around me, how was I getting a bird’s eye view of all of this from the ceiling in the corner of the room? What have I been missing? Is this a...? No, this isn’t what I’m starting to think it may have been. That stuff happens to other people, not me. No way.



After thinking it through now for many years, I am convinced I had an out-of-body experience in the emergency room that night at McCook General. There is no other explanation in my mind as to why I would have that vantage point in my memory of it all. I had envisioned it all from that vantage point, just the same, since I was a twelve year old.

Did I actually die? Did I flatline? I don’t know. In those days, you entered hospitals mangled on one end of the building and you were delivered to your parents on the other end a few days later, relatively scab free. No questions were asked like the big one, “Did he DIE at any point in there?”



My head was swollen up like a watermelon and neither eye would fully open without assistance, but in those days, your mom and dad just signed the papers and whisked you home, no questions asked.  

I mean, they had to get it all done quickly without a lot of Q & A, for crying out loud. The grass in our yard was getting really long and that mower wasn’t going to go out and mow it all by itself. It needed an operator. It took me and a guide dog to do it, but the grass did get cut and life got back to normal in a hurry. Only in America. It is refreshing to have memories like this one.

Okay, there was no guide dog. They used toothpicks to hold my swollen eyes open so I could mow in nice straight lines. Who am I kidding? I apologize for exaggerating. They weren’t toothpicks, they were nails.



So we don’t know if I died. But I know for certain I was up under those ceiling tiles watching the whole thing that night. I know this because of the detail in the room, like who was there and what they were doing. I wasn’t a believer then. I am now. Not because of what happened, but I am a believer.

Did I see God? Was I offered a second chance at life on earth until the rapture? Was I given instruction on how to conduct my life from that point forward? I don’t know. Maybe. There is just no memory in there for any of that. Not even one of a bright and glowing light.



The actual injuries? It turned out my back wasn’t broken. Neither was my neck or my ribs or my legs, arms or hips. I broke two bones in the harrowing ordeal; my skull and the pinky finger on my right hand.

My skull healed, sort of. For some reason if I try to quack like a duck, it comes out as moo. Not real sure what that’s all about. And the pinky finger. Well, that has been an ongoing problem.

The pinky wasn’t able to regain full mobility. It bends the wrong way and has been like this since I was twelve. I am handicapped by it in two very obscure ways.  

One, I cannot correctly hit the semi-colon on a qwerty keyboard. That requires assistance from other digits. Second, when I stick my hand up in the air for any reason, that pinky juts straight out and looks as if I broke it just yesterday. It isn’t pretty. It frightens the children.



All kidding aside, I believe my story needs an ending so I’ll leave you with my picture of heaven. One day I will go there. I will process through and be led to an area where there are millions, even billions of people. There will be joy and singing and glory to the King at the highest level.  

In my mind I will be standing there and the massive crowd will part. Then, standing in front of me will be my King, my Savior, Jesus, Yeshua. 



He will approach me and ask me to not be afraid of this place. He will tell me that He knows me and has known me all throughout my life whether I believed in Him or not. He will tell me that He was with me through every hardship I endured, every tear I cried. He will tell me that He did everything He could for me; even pose as a doctor and cure my broken body as it laid limp on the table when I was but a boy. He will tell me that He healed my body that night and that I was there with Him, as a witness to it all.

He will tell me that He healed all of my broken bones, including my severely concussed head, all of them, except one. He will then reach down and grab my hand. He will lift it and say, “I saved this one for today.” He will then touch my gnarled pinky and make it instantly whole again. Whole again like every other soul among the throngs that are gathered around us.

The angels will start singing again. Jesus will then wrap His loving arms around me and tell me He will never leave me or forsake me. Ever.



This is a true account. The ending was made to be part of it for Jesus and His glory. I believe these things here at the end, but you do not have to. I hope you liked the story.