Two St. Charles Sisters Injured Saturday As Car Goes Over Embankment

Two St. Charles teen-age girls remain in serious condition in Lee General Hospital here following an automobile accident early last Saturday morning.

Peggy Hall, 18, and her sister, Anita, 13, were injured when the car driven by their father, Otis Hall, skidded and went over an embankment just outside the corporate limits of St. Charles, while en route to Pennington Gap.

Peggy suffered a broken right hip and leg, and the younger sister, a badly mangled right leg.The father, driver of the '50 model Chevrolet sedan, escaped with minor cuts and bruises, and was released from the hospital after receiving first aid treatment.

.....Powell Valley News 1953, Pennington Gap, Lee County, VA


50 YEARS LATER
BY
PEGGY (HALL) HARBER
One rainy November morning late fall in 1953, I was anticipating my third day of work at my new job. This was the week before Thanksgiving and I was looking forward to the family get together, just a week away. Little did I know that God had other plans for me and my family.
En-route to Pennington from St. Charles as we rounded the curve just below the bridge to Wagner Town, the car slid and Dad headed over the bank. I remember my sister Anita screaming and saw trees as we headed over the bank.
That was the last I remember about actually wrecking.
The car made two or three rolls going down the hill and ended up in the water upside down on my sister and myself. I was pinned face down in the water from waist down. My sister was under the car with only her leg visible. My Dad was thrown out the first roll.
The seats were setting on top of the car which was actually the bottom of the car since it was upside down on top of us.
People in the neighborhood immediately started pouring out of their homes to come help or see what was going on.
The ambulance was there in just minutes since we were so close to Clyde Copeland's Funeral Home. They managed to lift the car off me, loaded me in the ambulance and were ready to leave, my Dad started saying, "Please help my daughter, please help my daughter." They told him your daughter is in the ambulance but he said, "The other one." They looked and saw Anita's leg sticking out from under the car.
A Mr. Ray Allen helped to pull her out from underneath the car. She had swallowed her tongue. They thought she was dead and said take the other one on to the hospital. Then Mr. Allen heard her gurgle in the water and realized she was still alive. Mr. Raymond Eagle of Benedict was close by, he had taken CPR classes. He pulled her tongue out and gave her CPR. They loaded her and my Dad in the ambulance and made it to the hospital.
Once there when they started to see just how bad the injuries were, they discovered Anita was knocked out and had a very bad mangled leg. The flesh was sliced out clear to the bone from just below her knee about six or seven inches long. It didn't bleed which presented another problem. By the next day it had set up gangrene, it took a couple of days to get that straightened out.
I had a broken hip and both bones below my knee were broken and one crushed. They thought that was the extent of my injurires because I was talking a mile a minute (anyone that knows me would say that was normal). I was in shock.
My Dad was sitting there in shock but except for a few scratches he was fine.
Next morning, Anita was awake and I was in a coma. After they got the infection stopped, Anita was on the road to a very slow recovery.
The visitors didn't stop.They had to put a sign on the door, "No Visitors", only family. That lasted about a week until I started coming out of the coma.
(Just a personal note: These people that say talk to them, they can hear you...I'm here to tell you that I didn't hear anything. Maybe I'm just different.) When I started coming to, all I can remember was Dr. Kinser, he asked if I knew who he was. I said, "Yes, you're the doctor with the stinky cigar." I can remember him in there before I went into the coma with his cigar and he still had it, maybe a different one. This was on a Saturday, a week after the accident.
They brought the machine up and x-rayed my leg and decided the thigh/hip area wasn't set right so these intelligent people decided to put weights on my leg. Here I am with all this pain, barely aware of my surroundings. So the next day on Sunday, they drilled a hole through my leg just above the knee and a pin through it, this and me awake. I may have been awake but anyone else in the hospital that was asleep would have definitely been awake after that. Good thing I had practice as a cheerleader in school. I sure did the yelling. I was only 18 years old but even I was too smart to do something like that.
They put a chain on the pin, put it across the bedstead at the foot of the bed and put weights on it to pull my bones into place. At this time, they didn't know if I were going to live or not so why torture me more? Anyway, it didn't work. The weights would pull me to the bottom of the bed,I would reach for the top of the bed and pull myself back. This was grinding the flesh in my leg and it kep getting worse, besides it set up infection.
After I was a little more aware of what was happening I noticed our room was so full of flowers it looked like a funeral home. The only ones I really remembered was a dozen yellow roses from an old boyfriend. One very special person said he wanted to send me red roses but was in Korea and it was impossible. The thought was worth a lot.
My sister Anita, who was 13 at the time, said what she remembered most was after we were allowed visitors, was all the nice looking guys that came to visit. She was in seventh grade at the time and her teacher, Mr. Pitts, came to see her several times and her classmates made up and bought her a teddy bear. Here he comes in carrying this big teddy bear. She kept it right with her. She had the bear after she was married and her husband had an accident. The bear was in the car and someone helped themselves. They had no idea of the meaning of that bear.
No one brought me a bear but the captain of the football team in Big Stone Gap who I had dated came to see me several times and always brought two or three of his team mates with him. They had left the cast on my leg from the knee down and I probably had the whole football team's autograph on my cast. These boys would come after football practice and usually got there about time for visiting hours to be over and the nurses always made them leave.
After about four weeks with my leg getting worse all the time, there was an orthopedic doctor from Knoxville came in to see me. After looking at my x-rays, he decided that I needed to have surgery. So in a couple of days they loaded me in an ambulance and headed for Knoxville with my Mom right by my side. My Dad stayed home because he had to work and there was another sister JoAnn at home who would have been 15 at the time. Anita said after they left with me, she sat there and cried because she was by herself and too, she didn't know what would happen with me. She said Dad let JoAnn play hooky and stay there with her for a day. Anita was getting better each day but she was out of school for six weeks and her wonderful teacher Mr. Pitts just marked that six weeks off, didn't have her try to make it up. Probably just so thankful she was alive.
In the meantime, we made it to Knoxville, again with Clyde Copeland.
This grinding of the flesh in my leg had set up infection. Once they did the surgery which consisted of cutting down to the bone in my hip, thigh, knee and leg below my knee and putting pins in, they said they had to wire some in my lower leg. I went into shock on the operating table, almost didn't make it off alive. It was touch and go for several days.
I remember I was freezing and realized they had ice all around me. My temperature was so high I guess they were afraid I would catch something on fire. I was begging for cover so I could get warm.
What I didn't know and at that point didn't care, they thought they had lost me. My Mom called my Dad and told him I wasn't going to make it. If you remember, "in the Olden Days" you had to go through the operator to make a long distance call. Well, with the towns of St. Charles and Pennington being so small and everyone knowing everyone, the operator listened in because the wreck was big news. It even made it on the radio, a lot of it because it was two young girls.
My Mom telling my Dad I wasn't going to make it and the operator listening in, by the time it got out, they had me dead. Everybody has to add a little to the tale. After a few days when they got the infection taken care of and my temperature down and "finally got me warmed up", my Mom got to go home and sleep in her bed instead of a chair beside my bed. Our pastor's daughter worked there at Baptist Hospital, she was in nursing school so she kept tabs on me and let them know how things were going.
Now that I was better and they saw I was going to live some of the nurses told me that they actually thought it would be better if I didn't wake up because they didn't think I would make it and didn't like seeing me suffer. I have had some depressing Christmas in my time but that was the worst ever. Christmas Eve was always the fun time at our house.
I lay in there and cried and cried. I felt like I was the only person in the whole world. The girls, "student nurses", came around Christmas Caroling. That made it worse.
Christmas Day the rest of the family had to do without Christmas dinner because my Mom and Dad along with our pastor were there loaded down with gifts. I could have cared less about the gifts, it was family I wanted to see. They managed to make it down every weekend. Back then it was a really long drive to Knoxville. No interstates.
Naturally I kept wanting to go home but I couldn't move my leg. The doctors kept working with me and told me when I could lift my leg off the bed I could go home, not before. That was one of the hardest things I ever tried to do. I worked and worked. Finally they came in and I barely got it off the bed and I made them keep their promise. After all, they didn't say how high.
So back comes Cyde Copeland along with my Mom to take me back home. Our little house in Monarch never looked so beautiful.
Right away visitors started coming. It was so great to see people that didn't have on nurses uniforms and coming at me with a needle.
This was January, with help from my family I could get from bed to chair on my crutches. Probably within a month I could make it outside and sit in the swing on the porch. No one can begin to understand what a treat that was. I hobbled around on those crutches for most of a year. The bone below the knee where they had to wire it was so soft it took a long time to heal so I couldn't put weight on it. About a year later things were pretty well back to normal. I was walking and job hunting and Anita was now a "pretty Freshman" in high school.
After two years passed I had to go back to the Baptist Hospital in Knoxville to have the pins removed from my leg by the same doctor that performed the surgery before. I was working for Blue Diamond Coal Company in the office in Bonny Blue. The doctor knew I had no insurance. He didn't charge me one cent. Some people do have a big heart.
Anita is now married to Adrian Reasor and living in Smyrna, TN. She had quite an experience. She was helping her husband and his sisters with an estate sale after his parents passed away. This gentleman and his son showed up and they were talking. He asked her who she was, then asked her if she knew Odas Hall. He said, "I pulled his little girl out from under a car years ago." All she could do was grab him and cry. It was the Ray Allen that she credits along with Raymond Eagle for saving her life.
Belive me, that guy got some good buys that day!
At the time of the accident Mr. Harber was across the hall from us in Pennington Hospital. He wrote and told his son Bob about me dying. No one ever told him any different. Bob and I had gone out a few times when he would come in on leave from the Air Force and I did my Patriotic Duty and wrote to him.
We ran into each other at our high school reunion in 1986. He thought he was seeing a ghost. There we took up where we left off 30+ years back. We are now working on our seventeenth year of marriage.
(Norma asked how many happy years have you been married? I told her 3, but married almost 17.)
You never know when God is working in your life. We were both alone and feel we were destined to be together. God works in mysterious way.
In 1992, I managed to break that same leg again, both bones just below the knee. We had built a new home and I was climbing and ended up on the floor with a heavy oak table on top of me.
Anyone needing lessons on crutches, I've had lots of practice!