April 13, 1963 The Frances Hubbard Diaries

April 13, 1963

Saturday, mostly sunny, 50, turning cloudy and windy in the late afternoon.  I finished papering the living room and dining room. Kids cleaned up the lawn,  seemed quite spring like. Clifton and Wayne went to Catskill to look at cars.  Jimmy Briggs, Faulkie(?) and Stevenson (?) were killed about 1 am in Prattsville.

Comment:  Spring cleaning in full force.   Dad may be looking for a car to commute to Poughkeepsie for the new job.  Tragedy strikes as a car wreck claims 3 young boys.  Not sure the circumstances.  The Hubbard boys were amazingly lucky not to get killed.  I remember doing a couple of 360s at 90 miles per hour on Route 20 heading to Albany in that 1961 Ford Dad had.  And there were many more close calls in trucks and on tractors both for me and my siblings.

 I remember Wayne rolling  Doug's very cool, grey, 1954 Chevy and driving it home from Oneonta without a windshield on a very cool fall night.  It rolled so many times all the corners were rounded off.  

Another chilling story involved a woman driving her car along the Manorkill Road in the winter and she heard something start to drag underneath the car and thought she had picked up a snow or ice block.  She drove several miles home, looked under the car and there were a couple of dead kids under her car tangled up in the drive shaft and axles.    They had ridden a snow sled off a bank above the road and  hit underneath her car from the side without her noticing them.......Here is a picture of the '51 Ford that I sometimes used to drive like a maniac...only lucky people get old...