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 Chester Allen Rockwood, 67, of Castle Rock was injured at the age of 4 in a freak accident with an axe in rural Lewis County in 1945. He's been searching for the truck driver who hauled him to safety ever since. Erik Olson / The Daily News
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Hunt for a savior, Part 1: Man searches for truck driver who saved his life in 1945
Saturday, July 5, 2008 11:32 PM PDT
By Erik Olson
Printable version
E-mail this articleChester Allen Rockwood has been missing four fingers on his mangled left hand most of his life. It’s the result of a freak accident the 67-year-old Castle Rock man suffered as a 4-year-old living on his grandparents’ Lewis County farm. Rockwood and his two brothers were playing an ax when they shouldn’t have been, and and the results were nearly fatal.
What Rockwood hasn’t missed is the opportunity to live. As a youth, he played baseball, basketball and football, and he even boxed. As an adult, he’s been working for Weyerhaeuser in Cowlitz County for 48 years. He’s run the power saw, climbed trees and done everything a full-fingered worker could do. He’s an avid fisherman, and he has the dexterity to tie his own flies.
In other words, Rockwood is not handicapped.
But he’s still missing something, and not just his fingers.
A good Samaritan stopped to help Rockwood after the accident, when the blood loss was reaching life-threatening levels, and whisked him to safety. Then the man vanished, and Rockwood never learned who he was, why he had stopped or where he ended up.
“When something like that happens, a guy saves your life, you wonder what happened to him,” Rockwood said.
So Rockwood searched, trying to find what was missing.
The accident
It was the late summer of 1945. Rockwood, then 4 years old, was living on his grandparents’ farm about four miles outside the eastern Lewis County city of Morton with his brothers, Leroy, 5, and Bob, 3. The family was poor, but the children didn’t know it at the time, Rockwood said, and the boys were always looking for something to do.
On this day, the game was cowboys and Indians, and the boys needed a fort. A rotten cedar tree stump, about 8 feet in diameter, would do the trick, but they needed to hollow out the dead wood and make it strong. That’s why they needed the ax.
The boys’ grandfather, James Rockwood, gave them an old wire ax that was dull as a spoon, but they wanted something that would actually cut wood. So they snuck into his shed and “borrowed” a few of his good, sharp blades.
“We wasn’t supposed to have the axes, but we knew where they were,” Rockwood said.
So they got to work. He and Bob were inside the stump, hacking away. Leroy was outside, chopping off the knots on the tree.
Whack. Whack. Whack. Another knot gone. Whack, whack... whump! Blood suddenly was spurting everywhere.
Rockwood said he didn’t feel any pain. He had crawled up from inside the stump, reaching for something to grab to help him get out. It happened to be the knot that Leroy was aiming for, and he sliced the four fingers of Rockwood’s left hand clean off.
“I told Leroy, ‘Now what you done?’” Rockwood said.
The boys ran to the farmhouse, Leroy’s shirt stained red and Rockwood’s tiny body losing a dangerous amount of blood. The fingers lay on the stump. (Later, Bob rescued them and was paid a nickel, Rockwood said.)
The boys’ grandmother was the only one home. She felt panic when she saw Leroy, then horror when she saw Rockwood, he said. She scrambled to tie a tourniquet on his hand to staunch the bleeding, then took off with the boys for the road to the hospital in Morton, four miles away.
The Rockwoods didn’t own a car. They lived a few hundred feet from U.S. Highway 12, the main thoroughfare cutting through the heart of Lewis County. In 1945, the majority of the vehicles on the road were trucks, and they didn’t pass very often. Rockwood started feeling tired from the loss of blood, and it was unlikely he’d survive the walk into town in his grandmother’s arms.
Then, 200 feet down the road heading east, a Mountain Auto Freight truck emerged, and Grandma sprang into action.
“Grandma jumped in the middle of the road. She wasn’t going to let the guy go by,” Rockwood said.
The truck pulled over, and the driver got out. He was young, tall and strong. He’d picked up a passenger on the way, and he scuttled the man into the back seat to make way for the bleeding child and his grandmother.
“He was a giant of a man, to me. He was just huge,” Rockwood said.
They soon arrived at the Morton hospital, this scared grandmother, a maimed child, his two brothers and the anonymous rescuer. The truck driver scooped Rockwood into one arm and barged through the swinging doors of the hospital with the other. He banged on the front desk, and he demanded attention, Rockwood said.
“He said, ‘Nurse, I want a doctor, and I want one now!’ ” Rockwood said.
And a doctor he had. Rockwood was whisked away to an operating room. The doctor asked him if he wanted to shave like a man, and he applied a foamy cream to his cheeks. The boy didn’t know it at the time, but the cream was a form of anaesthesia. So Rockwood slept.
He awoke a few hours later to find his hand bandaged. The doctors had taken his mangled hand and sewn the skin over the wound, leaving him with a thumb and two nubs where his fingers used to be.
On the bedside table, Rockwood saw something unexpected: two plastic containers used to hold Tinker Toys. One container was crammed full of the children’s building blocks. The other, however, held a bigger prize: 120 silver dollars and a note.
“This is to further educate the fella, because he’s going to have a hard time in life with one hand.”
The gift, Rockwood learned later, was from the mysterious truck driver, who vanished shortly after making the delivery. As Rockwood grew older, the questions built in his mind.
Who was this man? Where had he gone? Where had the money, a sizeable amount in those days, come from?
And how could Rockwood find him, thank him and tell him that his injury hasn’t been a handicap at all?
The search
Years passed. Rockwood figures he was better able to adjust to the injury because it had happened when he was so young. He was born left-handed, but he learned to do most things with his right hand.
Still, life wasn’t easy. Rockwood’s parents had divorced, and he bounced from his grandparents’ farm to his mother’s home to his father’s home. He finally ended up in a boarding home while attending Mark Morris High School in Longview. He graduated in 1959.
During his teens, Rockwood began making his first tentative overtures to find his Good Samaritan. He called Mountain Line Freight with a faint description of a tall man who drove trucks in 1945. No dice. He called the union. Same result.
Then, just after he graduated, Rockwood hired a private detective, who followed some of the same steps and yielded the same results. The trail had gone cold.
Rockwood began working at Weyerhaeuser. He got married, started a family, divorced, then married again. The questions remained, but Rockwood had no hint as to where the truck driver was or what he was doing. The quest moved to the back of his mind, but Rockwood kept his hopes up.
“You just never give up looking,” he said.
A chance encounter
It was the fall of 2007. Wind storms were blasting through the Northwest, and Weyerhaeuser employees were kept busy processing all the downed logs. Rockwood was working 12-hour shifts, and he was coming home tired.
One night, his wife of 30 years, Sheila, wanted to go out for ice cream. Rockwood resisted at first. He was tired, it was late and it was too cold outside for ice cream, he told her. But she insisted, so he agreed to take her to the Shari’s restaurant in Kelso.
Little did he know that this chance trip would give him the biggest break of his 62-year search.
At the restaurant, Rockwood ran into his ex-wife, Julia, whom he hadn’t seen in years. The two had maintained a decent relationship, so they got to talking about their lives.
The ex-wife said her sister and her husband were at a table in the restaurant and suggested Rockwood go say hello.
Oh, no, he said. They probably don’t remember me. I haven’t seen them in 30 years, and I don’t want to bother them.
She insisted, and he relented — but not without playing a little joke first.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked the couple, Jessie and Larry Robbins, sitting at the table.
No, they said. Sorry.
“Well, what if I gave you a hint?” he said, coyly. And he revealed his disfigured left hand.
“Allen!” Jessie said.
So the three got to talking, catching up. Jessie and Larry had been living and working in Ketchikan, Alaska, in the southeast corner of the state, and they were in Washington for a short vacation to visit her sister.
Then Jessie told a strange story. While at a logging camp in Alaska, she’d run into a friendly, elderly man, and they struck up a conversation. He had grown up in Centralia, and she grew up in Randle, about 50 miles away in East Lewis County.
The man knew the territory well, she said. In fact, he told her one of the weirdest experiences of his life happened while he was hauling freight from Chehalis to Morton in the 1940s.
The man happened upon this frantic old woman holding a bleeding child who had cut himself with an axe, so he picked them up and hauled them to the hospital. Then he got back in his truck and finished his delivery. He never even got the family’s name.
Rockwood couldn’t believe his ears. His little trick with his hand, his chance encounter with Jessie must have triggered her memory of another chance meeting of her own. After six decades of wondering about his savior, was the search over?
“Jessie, I think that was me,” he said. “Do you remember his name?”
She couldn’t. Rockwood pressed her for details, what he looked like, what else he had told her, anything. But she couldn’t pull anything more out of the conversation she’d had in the early 1990s.
Finally, Rockwood gave up and bid the couple goodbye. It wasn’t a total loss, he said, because he’s garnered a location, which was more than he’d had before. Ketchikan, Alaska.
As his back was turned to leave, Jessie called his name.
“I remember,” she said. “Frank Hughes.”
Then the details came pouring out. He’d lived in Alaska a long time, but he had been planning to move, she said. His wife had fallen ill, and the doctors told him to bring her somewhere closer to better medical care. Somewhere closer to ... Portland, she said.
In fact, he’d moved to Long Beach, Jessie said. She remembered that because her sister lived near there, in the Longview area.
Frank Hughes. In Long Beach. Now Rockwood had a name and a place, and it was within driving distance of his home in Castle Rock.
But questions remained. Was Hughes still there? How could he afford to leave 120 silver dollars for a child he didn’t know? Would he still remember this incident from so long ago?
And, worst of all: Was Hughes still alive, or had he died before Rockwood could thank him?
Coming Monday in Part 2:
Rockwood now has a name for the man who saved him. But can he find Frank Hughes?
Kelso Resident wrote on Jul 6, 2008 12:31 AM:
Zucchini wrote on Jul 6, 2008 8:07 AM:
chick3k wrote on Jul 6, 2008 4:01 PM:
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