The radio in the dashboard of Bill Jankowicz’s long haul truck was turned all the way up. He loved his truck, a 1945 K Model International. It was a two-ton big rig, running on six wheels with four-wheel drive, and carried whatever could fit into the seventeen feet of the attached free-floating closed trailer.
Doris Day was coming in loud and clear singing “Sentimental Journey” with the Les Brown Band. Recorded in 1944, it stayed at the top of the charts for a long time. It was still a favorite in December, 1946. It was one of Bill Jankowicz’s favorite songs. He knew all the lyrics—everybody did—and he often sang it when he was driving, even when the radio was off, but it was sure a lot better when he could sing along.
He had pulled out of the old battered barn behind his house in Stockbridge ten minutes earlier and was now driving south on State Road 55, just passing through the hamlet of Quinney, heading for Fond du Lac, when the tune came on. He thought it was a good omen to hear that song, especially at the start of his journey. He was a sentimental man and a family man and just liked singing the word sentimental over and over again. It sat well with him, although he wasn’t much for roaming but preferred to be at home with his wife and newly minted teenage son Billy Jr.
Bill was an independent trucker and, as such, his work required travel. Fortunately for him, the pay was so good that it made it easier for him to take the time away. This would be a good trip: it was a double load, something to haul to Denver, where he’d unload and then pick up something else and bring it back to Chicago. He could be back home in six days if everything went smoothly.
He had to load up in Chicago at six that morning. Leaving his place in Stockbridge a few minutes after midnight would give him plenty of time to get there for his early morning pick-up. He wanted to get onto Highway 41 going south out of Fond du Lac for a straight shot to Chicago, not quite a half hour from where he was.
Within the first ten minutes of his ride, in the darkest hours of this very dark night, Bill was thinking about the weather. For the night, it looked pretty good for trucking, despite the freezing temperatures. He had a good heater in his cab, and the windbreak covering his grill would help keep the heat under the hood stable. No blizzards were in the forecast into the week. All in all, it was looking like a pretty tame week for snowfalls—maybe it would be the first week in a month without snow, although it was a hard call to make with all the open space ahead of him in Iowa and Nebraska.
For now, the roads were dry and, for a change, free of ice, especially on the more heavily traveled roads in central Wisconsin. However, he didn’t assume it would be all smooth sailing. After all, it was winter in Wisconsin, and this was a bad one. He also had heard in the forecast that there was some wind out there, maybe gusting, and gusting could mean treacherous driving, especially for an empty truck driving through the snow-covered flatlands of fallow fields as far as the eye could see, although Bill was perfectly aware that no one could see very far at this hour of the night.
At the moment, his truck was empty, lacking the weight that gave him greater stability on the road. He’d have to watch it until he got to Chicago. Even so, after loading up, he knew he’d be driving across a lot of flatland and that usually meant a lot of wind, even when it wasn’t in the forecast. His starting point was Chicago, the Windy City, and thinking about that was enough to make him grip the steering wheel a fraction more firmly. Maybe his inner voice or a sixth sense spoke to him at that very moment because, just then, a gust of wind took a jab at his truck. It hit the side of his trailer with a solid blow, like a fighter working the bag with fresh arms. Bill took it. And he took another one moments later, just as hard as the first. It was the third jab a minute later that hurt the most, catching the tail end of the trailer and knocking the back right wheels slightly off the pavement onto the graveled and iced-over shoulder.
Bill overcompensated, steering his truck over the center line, fearful he wouldn’t be able to jump the back wheels back onto the pavement. At the instant he crossed the center line, he thanked his lucky stars that there was no other traffic on the road, behind him or in front of him. The back wheels made the jump back on, but Bill had yet to regain control of his rig. Just as he turned slightly to bring it back into his lane, another beastly punch of wind scored big and pushed his whole trailer sideways, shoving the front and back axels of wheels a full three feet toward the edge of the pavement. His cab shook furiously against the counterweight of the trailer.
Bill was in dire straits now and literally didn’t know which way to turn to get control back, when suddenly his truck ceased reacting to him at all, its tires spinning out in the unpaved shoulder, causing the side of the truck to slide into the compacted ten-foot snow wall that had been created by countless runs of snowplows that had cleared snowfall after snowfall from the highway over a period of many weeks. For a second, the truck looked like a big bobsled rounding a curve, its side pressed against the outside track wall by centrifugal force.
Then, suddenly, the cab lurched violently back onto the highway, the cab and trailer jackknifed, and the whole rig flipped onto its side, rolled over once, and skidded down the deserted highway in a trail of sparks for one hundred yards before coming to a grinding halt, at which point, it was straddling both lanes. Its driver was bounced around inside his cab like dice in a dice cup hoping for a seven or eleven on the first roll. He wasn’t lucky. Bill Jankowicz, dead at age thirty-eight. Just like that, on the same highway Connie and Carl were traveling. He had crashed just a bit beyond their turnoff.
This horrendous rollover was over within a matter of seconds. Bill’s fight to regain control of his truck had lasted less than twenty seconds. Five minutes earlier he had been as happy as a lark, singing “Sentimental Journey” with Doris Day, and then—pow!—his world was upended. It all had happened while he was heading southbound, only a mile south of Quinney, a couple of miles before Carl and Connie’s turnoff to Chilton. They would never see Bill’s truck as it lay across the highway. They would be turning off State Road 55 to go to Chilton two miles before the crash site. Someone else would discover the accident scene and Bill’s lifeless body.
Life is generally unpredictable—we all know that—and, of course, so is Death’s knock. And most of us know that our situation is the outcome of choices we make. What we don’t know is how often Death moves around us—how close it comes at times, almost stalking us in silence, cloaked in invisibility, lurking, sometimes getting within a whisper of our ear, waiting perhaps for us to make a misstep into a point of no return or take a miscue or have a sudden lapse in attention to our life force. Death is out there, although no one wants to think about that, of course. But it is out there, and often it comes suddenly, unexpectedly, and so fast that we’re in its deathly clutches before we know it. Bill Jankowicz is proof of that.
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A Love Story with a Little Heartbreak Page 13
