Mine’s a little weird, because he’s not famous, nor did I ever meet him, but perhaps you’ll understand once I tell you about him.
His name was Paul “Chip” Stotler . He lived in a town right near mine, and on July 29, 2005, he was driving to work, sitting at an intersection in the town of Avon, about 20 minutes from here, which I have personally been past maybe 35 times myself, on a road that gets an incredible amount of traffic at rush hour because it is the quickest way to get from my corner of the state to the Hartford area, where a lot of people work, but comparatively few live. That morning, as he was sitting waiting for the light to change, a man in a dump truck came down Avon Mountain, on the road that crossed the one he was on. This dump truck was owned by a reprehensible man named David Wilcox, who had a long track record of shady dealings and cutting corners at the expense of safety on his trucks and personnel to save a buck. Mr. Wilcox had sent this truck out that morning with an inexperienced driver, having not allowed its brakes to be properly repaired in some time, to navigate the quite steep (at least for this area) Avon Mountain.
On this day, the luck of all concerned did not hold up, and those shoddy brakes failed, sending the dump truck careening into a commuter bus and several cars and causing a 20-vehicle pileup that cost four people their lives. Chip Stotler was one of those people.
Now, like I said, I never knew Chip Stotler, or met him in my life, but I work at the newspaper that covers the town he lived in, and so we naturally did stories about him, and sought to know more about him. If you read the linked article, you’ll see that he worked with kids for a living, that he was a character and a funny person, with five little daughters who are aged four to nine years old now. Pretty standard stuff, when you’re in the journalism field; you sort of have to suck it up a little when you work at a paper, or else you just spend all your life depressed.
But there was a picture that his family sent us, as they were talking to us for the stories, of Chip in his driveway, sitting on his motorcycle, with those five little girls all around him – one sitting in front of him, two behind, and two standing on the ground, all bright blond hair and big smiles…
And I thought of my daddy, who rode a motorcycle throughout my childhood, and how I loved to ride with him, loved to put on the helmet and hug him tight and go racing down the windy backroads, and the injustice hit me like a ton of bricks, because it could have been my daddy, or anyone’s daddy, at that light, going to work – but it was theirs.
So, I mourn for him, and I mourn for his five little girls, who’ll never again be able to hug their daddy tight and fly down the backroads with the pretty colors whooshing by, whose daddy won’t be at their high school graduation, or their wedding, or the birth of their first child, because of the horrible, venal selfishness of one terrible man, who thought it was more important to save money on brake parts than to send a safe truck onto the road.
We just had to run a big “one year later” spread on Saturday about the crash, so he has been on my mind lately.
Whereever you are now, Mr. Stotler, I hope you’re at rest. It’s too much to wish for rest in the hearts of your little girls, but I hope they all hold on to the memories they have of you, the older ones telling stories, perhaps, to the littlest ones who can’t remember well on their own, and they never forget how much you loved them. And I hope that maybe, someday, an uncle or family friend takes them out on a long and winding motorcycle ride, and looks to the sky and says, “This I do in memory of you.”
All I have are words, but they’ll have to be enough for now.