Posted on 11/13/2002 4:41:06 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
FORT WORTH, Texas (Reuters) - It may work for Santa Claus and the singing chimney sweep in "Mary Poppins," but one Texas man found out that going down the chimney was no way to enter a home after he became wedged in the smoke stack.
Mark Vaughn was trying to help his family get back into their home in Fort Worth after they locked themselves out.
When his mother-in-law told him to get a locksmith, Vaughn said he got the idea of going down the chimney. His inspiration was the character of the chimney sweep played by actor Dick Van Dyke in the movie "Mary Poppins," which he had recently seen.
"What prompted me? I was watching the Dick Van Dyke movie a few weeks ago, you know the chimney sweeper movie," Vaughn told reporters Tuesday.
Vaughn said he thought he was going to make it all the way down the chimney, but he got stuck near the bottom. After about 30 minutes in the chimney, Vaughn realized he could go no further and yelled out for help.
His family called for the fire department, and as he waited in the shaft, Vaughn said his arms and legs went numb.
Rescue workers carefully dismantled the chimney brick by brick and after about an hour, they opened a hole large enough to free Vaughn.
"In trying to get the person out, you have to do a lot of manipulation of the brick and mortar, which can transmit a lot of injury to the person inside," said James Johns, a fire battalion chief.
A grateful Vaughn, his face black with soot, shook hands with the firefighters who rescued him and said the episode left him shaken.
Need we say more. Clearly the actual and proximate cause of this incident. No man worth his salt willingly and/or blindly does what his mother-in-law tells him to do.
Pookie & ME
Man learns hard way: Leave chimney to Santa
By Melody McDonald
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Wed, Nov. 13, 2002
FORT WORTH - Mark Vaughn said so himself. Sliding down his mother-in-law's chimney Tuesday morning wasn't exactly a hot idea.
It was "Stuuuuuupid!" the soot-covered man cracked to reporters after firefighters worked for more than an hour to free him from the fireplace. "She was telling me not to do it. But it looked like I could get in, you know what I'm saying?"
Most people might agree that, unless you're Santa, you just can't slide down a chimney without getting stuck. But Vaughn -- a 35-year-old entertainer-DJ-singer-wannabe-actor -- marches to the beat of a different drummer.
So when his mother-in-law locked her keys in her house just before 11 a.m., he decided to tackle the problem feet first.
"I slid all the way down, but the angle wasn't right," Vaughn said. "I couldn't move. I was trying to work it out. But I worked myself into getting stuck."
Vaughn's mother-in-law, who had wanted to call a locksmith to begin with, dialed 911.
Moments later, seven Fire Department units, including the technical rescue team, came screaming up to the house in the 4800 block of Westridge Avenue.
Paramedics brought out a stretcher in preparation for Vaughn's rescue. A mob of TV reporters flocked to the scene, angling for space behind yellow tape as neighbors griped at them to stay off their yards.
The obviously embarrassed mother-in-law kept her distance, making it very clear to fire officials that she did not want to hear her name or see her face on the news.
Next-door neighbor David Poindexter, 83, dressed in red plaid golf pants and a bolo tie, hobbled out of his house on a cane to see what all the fuss was about.
"I was in my house, and my wife came to the door and said there were firetrucks outside," said Poindexter, who, every now and then, had to be gently steered out of the way by firefighters. "My lord, half of the Fire Department was out front. They just moved in a couple or three days ago.
"I came out and discovered there was a gentleman caught in the chimney."
Like so many others, Poindexter watched wide-eyed as fire officials cut, drilled and dug their way through the rock and brick fireplace. Finally, a white and blue tennis shoe emerged.
Not long after, firefighters gingerly helped Vaughn, sporting a beard and silver earrings in both ears and dressed in black, out of the fireplace and into the yard -- where his mother-in-law was waiting.
After a brief yelling match between Vaughn and his mother-in-law -- in which Vaughn could be heard yelling, "Just be cool about it!" -- all seemed well again, except, of course, for the gaping hole in the chimney.
Vaughn declined medical treatment and spent the next several minutes shaking firefighters' hands.
"Firemen rock!" Vaughn later told reporters, adding that he wasn't even upset that they had nicked his finger a bit with a drill. "They were here to save my life."
He described his newfound freedom as being like, "Winning the lottery, man!" But he acknowledged that he had learned a lesson or two from his adventure.
"Listen to your mother-in-law. Don't climb down chimneys. And I probably need to lose weight."
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As Forrest Gump would say: "Stupid is as stupid does."
Yeah, but the more I read about it, this guy seems to have a good sense of humor about the dumb situation he got himself into. I like his style of dealing with it.
Yes, but like a typical idiot, he thinks people are laughing WITH him rather than laughing AT him.
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