THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 29, 1994 TAG: 9407270125
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 08B EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
Mikki Jacques could fill a book with the strange things that have happened to her.
There was the time a family of opossums moved in under the hood of her car. She didn't notice until she'd driven them around town a few days.
She was struck by lightning once in the 1950s while she was talking on the phone. The bolt came through the telephone lines.
Around the same time she was zapped by an electric milkshake machine. ``I had wiring in my stomach from surgery and electric appliances used to get me all the time then,'' said Jacques, 60.
Well, the wire's been out for years. But Monday, July 18, Jacques was jolted again.
``I was cooking lasagna and the smell was thick in the house. My grandchildren are visiting from Oklahoma City and just that morning my grandson, who's 8, said to me, `Grandma, it's boring here. There's nothing happening,' ''she said.
It was 4 p.m. Jacques' husband, James, had just called from work in Portsmouth to tell his wife it was storming there and that he was on his way home.
``I told him it was storming here, too, and when I got off the phone I told my granddaughter to come over by grandma to the kitchen counter because she was standing at the sliding glass door watching the storm,'' Jacques said. Her home is on Weymouth Court in Timberlake and backs up to Holland Road.
Seconds later, lightning flashed and lifted Jacques' granddaughter off her feet.
``I grabbed her and told both the children to go in the living room and start praying,'' she recalled.
Jacques' son, Scott, came home minutes later and tried to calm the two youngsters by taking them upstairs to play with a computer and to watch a television kept in a closet.
``When he opened the closet door, smoke came out,'' said Jacques. Her son figured the television had been damaged and carried it out to the garage.
Then the doorbell rang.
``There was a young man outside ringing the doorbell and looking in the window. He was just driving by on Holland Road and, God love him, he had to go all the way around to get to the front door. He asked me if I knew the house was on fire,'' Jacques said. ``The kids both started screaming.''
Jacques' son popped briefly in from the garage to find out what the commotion was about when another man walked in the front door and asked if Jacques had called 911.
``Then he disappeared. I have no idea who either one of them were,'' she said.
A third stranger, an off-duty fireman, stepped in and dialed 911. The excitement didn't end when the fire trucks arrived. By then, Jacques herself was missing, looking for her son who she thought had gone back upstairs.
``The firemen were yelling for me to come down and when I did I found my son out back containing the fire with the garden hose,'' she said. ``He's my guardian angel.''
Jacques' house had been struck by a lightning bolt that blew a hole in the side of the house and started a fire in her attic. It also surged through three TVs and a stereo. Firemen stopped the blaze and put a temporary patch on Jacques' roof.
``Things always happen to me,'' Jacques said. ``I almost lost my husband two years ago. They said he'd be a vegetable but he's back at work. And once I got a newsletter from my prayer circle in Missouri. All it had on it was my name and 707. No street, no state, no ZIP, nothing. Strange, isn't it?'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by CHARLIE MEADS
Kim Jacques, left, and her brother Jeff were visiting their
grandmother Mikki Jacques when the lightning struck the roof of the
Jacques home.
by CNB