Sometime in the late summer of 1962 when I was 9, I had an accident with a lawn mower and lost the tip of my right ring finger. I managed to do this not with a motorized lawn mower by sticking my finger in the opening to clear out a stick, no I did this with one of those safe human powered push lawn mowers that my father had purchased at an auction sale for $2.
My dad and neighbors used to work together to put up corn silage into silos or in our case a board lined cement bottomed trough. All of the farmers would trade work days with each other to harvest the corn silage. One of the farmers owned corn silage chopper, a big blower that sent silage up 50 feet or more into a vertical silo, and special silage wagons. The other farmers would hire him and put together a crew of neighbors to harvest the silage. It was a working community party like atmosphere sans alcohol until all the work was done for the day. A supply of coffee and sandwiches was always available.
Anyway, seeing how the silage chopper would cut the corn stalks into tiny pieces, I thought, “I can do that with this old push lawn mower”. I tipped the lawn mower upside down so the cutting blade was up and the rotors would spin past the cutting blade. You could roll the wheels on either side and it would spin the blade really fast. The harder and faster you spun the wheel the faster the rotary blade spun. I would take a corn stalk and feed it into the spinning blade with the other hand. It worked pretty well, making a corn stalk silage like mess on the floor of the garage where I was doing this.
Everything seemed to be going quite well from the point of view of this nine year old until a cow on the other side of a nearby fence snorted and startled me. My corn stalk feeding hand went into the rotary blade. It didn’t hurt but was a little numb so I just shook it assuming that I had just banged it a little. Thats when I felt the blood spatter on my face and looked at the injured finger. My tiny little finger bone was sticking out the end and I was missing some finger.
I don’t remember if I went screaming into the house or just went into the house. Let’s face it, I was nine and my finger bone was sticking out – I was screaming. My mom just about fainted. But my sister Janet who was in her early years of studying to be a nurse wrapped it in a fairly clean dishtowel and put some ice on it. Mom was too freaked out to drive so Janet drove me to hospital. Mothers should never have an opportunity to see their children’s bones.
My doctor put me under anesthetic, (ether in those days), trimmed the bone, pulled the remaining skin over the end. To this day the finger nail that was remaining curves over that ancient wound. My daughter called it the “Marble Finger” because it was round like a marble. He put several stitches in the end, wrapped it with gauze, a small aluminum cast, and taped it up. A couple of weeks passed before I went back to have the stitches removed.
For some reason they kept me in the hospital overnight – probably because ether is a really dangerous and wretched anesthetic. By some freak of cosmic fate one of my grade school buddies Jimmy P. who was our next door neighbor a mile south of us was also injured that day. Jimmy had been riding his bike and fell into a very sharp piece of steel attached to their corn grinder for cow feed. He needed several stitches over his eye, and they put us in the same hospital room over night! They gave us each a little card board coin bank and put a whole 50 cent piece in each one! That was big money for a nine year old. We had a great time recovering from our injuries that night. Jimmy bragged that he had more stitches than I had. They fed us ice cream and orange Jello. We were almost able to sleep. I’m not sure how well mom slept.
Toad Aweigh 