Monday, November 29, 1982
Daily Nebraskan
Page 5
6 A friendship among strangers 9 Driver drinks .
This is a tale of race in America.
A rainy night, two weeks ago.
Merry Russell leaves her job at a Chicago hospital and
begins to drive to her home in the suburbs.
Merry Russell is white; residents of the neighborhood
she drives through are black.
Trying to avoid heavy traffic, she turns onto a deserted
side street that is being repaired. Her car gets stuck and
she cannot move it. She gets out of the car and huddles
Roger Simon
near it in the rain, ft is dark and she does nofftiow where
the nearest pay phone is.
From down the street, a black man approaches. He is
about six feet tall and has short, grayish hair. He is wear
ing a tan trench coat. In his hand he is carrying a golf
club.
"What did I say to myself?" Merry Russell said. "I said,
Oh,s-.t.'"
Let us be frank. Many people have bad dreams about
such moments. We have all read the stories about white
travelers whose cars break down in black neighborhoods
and black travelers who break down in white ones.
"I make the drive all the time," Merry said. "It's a
notably rough, black neighborhood. But I've never been
afraid. Just cautious."
The street Merry turned down that day was not a good
choice. The pavement had been stripped away, leaving
sewers jutting up in the air. The roadway was just loose
dirt, rapidly turning into mud in the falling rain.
In trying to get down the street, Merry managed to get
the rear end of her 1973 Pontiac hung up on a sewer. Her
rear wheels were suspended in the air.
"1 got out and I thought there was no way I was going
to get out of there," she said.
Then the man came down the street carrying the golf
club.
All we know of the man is that his name is Cicero.
Cicero took a look at Merry and her car. "I'll be back
in a minute and help you," he said. Then he took another
look at her standing there all alone in the middle of the
street.
"Never mind," he said. "I'll help you now."
He put down the golf club and got a jack out of
Merry's trunk. He jacked up the back end of the car to
try and get it off the sewer. Then he tried a number of
things to give the rear wheels some traction.
"Try it now," he told Merry.
This is when Merry noticed she had left her headlights
on. Her battery was dead.
"I'll just try to get a tow truck," she told Cicero.
"Don't be ridiculous," he said. "They'll charge you
$50. Ill get my car and give your car a jump."
An elderly black woman approached, walking with
some difficulty because of her arthritus. "You really did a
good job with that car," she told Merry cheerfully.
She took Merry into her home so Merry could call her
grandmother, who was wondering what had happened to
her.
By the time Merry got back outside, Cicero was there
giving her car a jump. But it still wouldn't move off the
sewer.
So Cicero maneuvered his own car, an Oldsmobile
station wag$n, in behind to give a spush.
A young" black man named Af came over. He took a
look under Merry's front wheels and found they were
hung up on a sewer, too.
So Al got a jack and jacked up the front. Then he got
his hands and knees in the mud and put a bunch of rocks
underneath the tires. Then he drove the car off the sewers.
A few yards down the road, he got stuck in the mud.
Cicero, joined by two or three other black men who
had been hanging around, pushed the car until it was
freed.
"They never asked for anything," Merry said. "1
reached into my purse - by the way, the purse had been
on the front seat of the unlocked car all this time and it
was still there - and gave them what 1 had, which was
only $8 or $9."
Merry drove home.
She has told her story to a number of people, who
have received it with varying degrees of amazement.
"1 wanted to thank all those people who helped me,"
she said. "And I wanted to say that had someone broken
down in my own neighborhood, 1 am not at all sure they
would have been treated as well."
So it was a miracle?
"No," she said. "It was friendship. Friendship among
strangers."
(c) 1982, Los Angeles Times Syndicate
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Continued from Page 4
Wendy Muchman looked at the man. She had read
dozens of articles about drunken driving, seen dozens of
'television reports. She could think of only one thing: She
wanted to kill the man. She wished she had a gun so she
could kill him. For 24 years here brother had built a life;
now, with his impending marriage, the most important
part of that life was about to begin. Had Robert and
Wendy left their parents' house five minutes earlier, or
five minutes later, their car would not have been in the
path of Ronnell Reynolds' car when it jumped the
median. She wanted to kill him, but instead she walked
away from the room.
A woman came to the area where the Muchmans were
waiting. The woman didn't have to say much. Just two
words: "I'm sorry." :
These happen every day. Cars collide, drivers are
charged with being drunk behind the wheel, and lives are
changed forever. It's so common that no one considers it
to be a big deal. Usually it doesn't even make the paper;
this one didn't. Robert Muchman's parents went back to
their home, the son they had raised now gone; Wendy
Muchman went back to her apartment. This is how it
happens.
(c) 1982, Tribune Co. Syndicate, Inc.
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