Reported by Kurt Laidlaw.

One of the less pleasant memories I have of Rimbach was my aborted trip to the Nürnberg Christkindlesmarkt with Kaipo Simpson in 1974.

Coming from warmer climes, I didn’t enjoy driving in snow and ice. Kaipo, on the other hand, was an expert at it (or so he told me at the time!). We set off in my Ford, with Kaipo driving, and were doing just fine until Kaipo hit a patch of black ice. Even then we would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the car coming the other direction. Kaipo made sure we didn’t have a head-on, but in the process lost control and we went into a spin.

The car left the road going backwards and hit a tree, which crushed the roof of the car down to the top of the front seat. Fortunately we were not wearing our seat belts or we would have been killed. I don’t remember much of what happened after that, but I’ve been told I crawled out of a space that was far too small for me to fit and was talking only in German for the next couple of days. (There were other couples following us in their own vehicles—the Sampsons and Haverlahs, I think.)

I ended up with a fractured skull and Kaipo broke his collar bone. The truly exciting part of the adventure was spending a couple of weeks in a German hospital. When we were finally transferred to the Army facility at Amberg, I still had broken glass in my hair, and had not been bathed since the accident (I bet I smelled, too).

The end of the story took place a couple of months later. I bought a bike to replace the car—thinking it would be safer. The first time I rode it down into town from my house, I lost the brakes. I tried to make it down the hill, thinking I would slow on the hill on the other side of town. Needless to say, I didn’t make it. I wiped out right in front of the HB, and ended up with another fractured skull—perhaps that explains some things.

Comment by Kaipo Simplson: Kurt’s version was pretty good for someone who had a concussion, but here is my version. I was pretty much in shock as well, so the real story lies somewhere in the middle of both of the stories.

We were driving that day en route to the train station in Furth im Wald to go to Nürnberg for the Christkindlesmarkt. We wanted to take the train because the roads were in pretty bad shape and we didn’t want to chance getting into a car accident. As Kurt said, he was from Northern California. What did he know of driving in snow? So I was. Ten years in Kansas City winter driving helped.

We turned that corner doing about 30k and hit some black ice and slid toward the shoulder where we hit the gravel and the tires got traction and turned us around, going sideways down the road (Kurt’s side, I think). I saw a car coming and somehow (I don’t know how) we spun around the oncoming car and ended up going backwards down the road and side ways off the road into a tree. The tree hit right above where Kurt and I were sitting. As Kurt said, if we had been wearing seat belts, we would have been killed. Kurt told me later that as we were going off the road he slid down into the foot well. I was smarter(?) — I passed out and woke up after we hit the tree.

When I awoke, the car was lying on the passenger side. I was standing on the passenger window (or where it was supposed to be) with my chest on the steering wheel. My right shoulder hurt, but I didn’t know why (broken collar bone). Kurt was calling my name and asking if I was all right. I said “yeah” and he said he could see a way out and he crawled out. I have no idea how I got out of the car. The German newspapers said that we had the first car accident on that corner where no one died.

We spent three days in a German hospital in Cham, then we were transferred to the military hospital in Nürnberg. In Cham, we were the new attraction. Germans came into our room all the time to see the Amerikaners who got hurt. Not only did Kurt still have glass in his hair when we left Cham, I still had glass in my underwear. Thank goodness the Germans used crumble glass back in those days.