Police: Hit-Run Victim Lived Two Days Trapped in Windshield of Woman's Car

Back when I was writing a newspaper column for a chain of mostly-Indiana small-town rags, a couple of my columns struck a funnybone now and again. One covered the fairly boring local convention of a local cheerleading camp, which I presented as a warning to the public that a dreaded gang of animal-woershipping cultists [Lions, Bears, Lady Tigers, etc.] had descended on the town and that local residents should keep their pets indoors lest they be sacrificed to the revenous beasts; the local junior college was not amused.

Likewise, when an area symphony orchastra conducter gave his farewell performance, I described the concert as *a gang of thugs and neer-do-wells with a variety of instruments reported assaulted one Carmina Burana, with their leader described as a foreign-looking [he was a Brit] man weilding a stick. I carried that on for about 10 paragrafs before explaining; and the boss thug requested [and got] a framed and autographed copy of the piece, it having appeared after he'd returned to Great Britain in search of fresh victims.

I similarly picked on Indiana University music professor Harv Phillips and his world-known gathering of tuba players who annually don Santa Claus suits and perform Christmas Carols with the tuba [an instrument for which there is no known sporting purpose and should be limited to only playing ten notes] and a Halloween performance of the old Lon Chaney silent motion picture the Phantom of the Opera which I suggested was all the local film group could afford. A few similar references crept into other more serious columns, as when I rewrote the information from a politician's press release that he *was throweing his hat into the ring... to include the further addition of *if he can find one to buy or steal anywhere, as he has not been seen wearing one in public in quite some time....*

That one came back to haunt me. I was called as a witness to testify as to that politicians reputation for truth and veracity in a libel case, and was prepared to state under oath that a local minister had described him to me as the sort of fella whose dog didn't necessarily believe him when he whistled for dinner....

But I did catch he-double-toothpicks over one. We had a boarding house explosion in a neighboring town explode, with various stories spreading as to the unannounced cause and considerable speculation as to what might have caused the blast, a story which I headlined as *Roomers are Flying in Boarding House Blast....

One of the victims died in the hospital later that week, and the line lost any lightness or humour it held for me as it did for the family members and friends of the victim. As for the homeless guy in Texas, do you know what the last thing was that went through his mind when the driver struck him? [You seen her photo, by the way?]

Uh-huh. The windshield.

-archy-/-

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