Virginian-Pilot

DATE: Thursday, March 20, 1997              TAG: 9703200324

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LOUIS HANSEN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: SUFFOLK                           LENGTH:   98 lines




WOMAN THANKS SAMARITANS 50 YEARS AFTER BUS WRECK

Florence Osborne rode, semiconscious, in the back seat of a Depression-era jalopy at 35 mph on U.S. Route 58, the afternoon rain lashing the windshield as thick as the blood pouring from her right leg.

Next to her neck, she held the severed foot that had danced with handsome sailors and rollerskated on the roof of Schoen's Restaurant in Norfolk.

The 20-year-old was jostled painfully along the bumpy country roads as a stranger got her as fast as he could from the crushed hull of a Greyhound bus a mile outside the city line to Lakeview Hospital.

With such extensive injuries - her intestines and organs perforated with glass, her right leg amputated below the knee, and 172 of her bones crushed, splintered or shattered - she would not live more than three years, her doctors predicted.

That was 50 years ago today.

``I'm a miracle to be alive,'' said Osborne, now 70, from her native home in the tiny coal-mining town of Lorado, W.Va. ``I just didn't give up.''

So, on an anniversary turned golden, Osborne wants to say thanks. To Sam, the orderly who turned her in bed so she wouldn't get sores; to her physicians, Dr. J.R. Ellison and Dr. J.E. Rawles; and the townsfolk and friends who filled her room with so many flowers ``it looked like a forest.''

In a letter to The Virginian-Pilot, Osborne wrote, ``I'm a person who would love to thank Norfolk and Suffolk for helping me 50 years ago. . . .''

``Some of the people were so good to me,'' she said in an interview this week. ``I was all alone in a strange place.''

She wasn't supposed to have been on a Greyhound on March 20, 1947. She had wanted to take the Trailways bus to Norfolk from Greenville, S.C., where she was visiting her fiance, Jake Weatherly.

But Weatherly, a young Air Force recruit just days from a transfer to Texas, insisted that she take Greyhound, not Trailways.

The Trailways station was on East Plume Street, a city block from the Public Grill, where Weatherly feared his fiancee was going to meet another suitor.

``He thought I was out with some sailor,'' she recalled. ``He said if I loved him, I'd take the Greyhound.''

A dutiful bride-to-be, she agreed. She figured she could make it home in time for her 2 p.m. waitressing shift at Schoen's.

At 1:30 p.m. - with less than an hour left in her 72-hour ride to Norfolk - the bus driver fell asleep a mile and a half from the Suffolk city line, she recalled.

The bus drifted onto the shoulder at 35 mph, slammed into a parked truck filled with four tons of corn meal and ripped into a utility pole.

Osborne sat in the front seat on the right-hand aisle of the bus. ``The only thing I could remember was throwin' my hands over my face and sayin', `Lord Have Mercy!' '' she said.

The impact hurled her to the back of the bus, where ``they took me out by the emergency door.''

Another girl died in the accident, 11 others were less seriously injured. Osborne was in critical condition.

She spent 3 1/2 months in the little country hospital with 32 beds.

For the first 45 days, her eyes were taped shut to heal the wounds from the shards of glass. She was bedridden in a full body cast.

Friends and strangers sent so many flowers they overflowed from her room. The stranger in the slow jalopy came back to visit her. A local beautician visited her weekly to wash, comb and style her hair.

``They was wonderful, wonderful people,'' she said.

``Sometimes I couldn't speak, sometimes I couldn't move,'' she said. ``But I've overcome it.''

Not that Osborne didn't have enough to overcome before or after the accident.

The eldest girl of 14 children, Florence Mullins, her maiden name, grew up in the coal mining town of Lorado, a town of fewer than 1,000 residents. She never saw a school until she was 9 years old.

At 14, she ran away. Her father had arranged a marriage to a man twice her age, a proposal that sent Osborne running in her big brother's hand-me-down boots through the Allegheny Mountains and toward the coast.

She lied about her age to get waitressing jobs, and eventually worked her way to Norfolk.

``I never had a teen-age life,'' she said. ``I worked to stay out of trouble.''

Seven times married - although never to Weatherly - and a step-mother to 18 children, Osborne still works seven days a week caring for an elderly woman near her hometown. She sells Avon products and knits afghans, too.

Her longtime friend, Shirley Powell of Norfolk, said Osborne's strength never surprised her. ``She was headstrong and determined that she was going to make it,'' said Powell, who shared an apartment with Osborne for several years after her accident.

Her joints ache before rainy days, and she takes a couple of aspirin every morning, Osborne said. ``If I didn't have pain,'' she said with a laugh, ``I don't know what I'd do.''

Powell added, ``She never complains about being in pain.''

Except for an occasional readjustment to her artificial leg - it needs shortening as age steals her height - Osborne says she's doing just fine.

She saw a doctor last week. He said she had a bit of a cataract in one eye.

All things considered, she said, ``I think that's great.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Florence Osborne after getting out of the hospital in 1947. KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT TRAFFIC BUS



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