April 25, 1978.....That's a day I will never forget. I had been the Sports Director at WDEF-TV since February and had spent the night before visiting with my mentor, the late Monte Hale. Monte was the "Voice of the Nashville Sounds" and the Sounds were playing the Chattanooga Lookouts at Engel Stadium. I had done the 11 p.m. sports and then drove home to Whitwell, Tennessee as I did every night. My wife Shelia had already gone to bed as her day as a teacher at Whitwell High School started early.
It had been storming around the area that night and as I settled into bed, lightning was dancing around the sky.
I thought nothing of it as I drifted off to sleep. Suddenly, around 2 a.m., Shelia sat up in the bed and woke me to tell me, "I think the house is on fire." I looked around and saw nothing but darkness. Knowing her as I did, it was nothing new for her to wake me up from time to time seeing "bugs flying around with flashing lights on them" or hearing "a bad wreck on the highway". They always turned out to be nothing so I told her the house was not on fire and go back to sleep. But she persisted. She made me get up and go to the other end of the house and check. I did and, when I looked out on the back porch, I saw the orange glow.
Lightning had apparently struck the switch box which was located on our screened in back porch. It didn't appear to me to be a huge fire yet, so I told Shelia to call the fire department while I went out on the porch to fight the fire. I filled a big bucket with water and opened the back door. As the door opened a huge flame basically grabbed the bucket out of my hands and tossed it on the floor. The porch was actually totally engulfed. I turned, ran into the bedroom and told her to "get out now."
Unlike me, she had a plan to grab a quilt that my grandmother had given us and a Bible that was given to us by my parents when we were married five years earlier. I put my pants on and ushered her out of the house and into the night. I was barefoot and shirtless but I remembered my baseball card collection that I kept in boxes under our bed. I turned to run back in the house to get them, but by then the house was totally engulfed, spreading from the back porch to the front of the house. In other words, our older remodeled home was now nothing but a huge fireball lighting up the night. I always said that God woke us up and spared our lives that night, because there is no way Shelia could have seen the flames that were beginning to grow on our back porch. Thankfully she persisted and I listened.
We lost everything, except what we were able to carry with us as we escaped the flames. As the Whitwell Volunteer Fire Department valiantly fought the fire to no avail, we stood and held each other and cried. Within a few minutes, it was over. Our house was completely gone and so were all our possessions. One of our possessions that burned was a vacuum cleaner that worked less than half the time. Shelia turned to me and said, "If that vacuum survived, I would toss it back in the fire." We had a good laugh and as the sun came up on Spruce street we saw our house in total ruin.
My biggest loss was my baseball card collection. It was worth close to $10,000 in 1978. In fact, I had three vintage Mickey Mantle cards that were worth 500 bucks each back then. But now, I had nothing. Later that day, we went through the ashes and found a ring that was basically undamaged. We found a few other things including our marriage certificate that was charred around the edges but still intact. While digging through the ashes, I suddenly found it. One lone baseball card that had survived the flames and tremendous heat. Like our marriage certificate, it was charred around the edges; worth nothing to anyone else but now, worth everything to me. It was a 1962 Hank Aaron card. Hank was one of my very favorite players and that card is now in a trophy case in my Hixson home.
Yes, I do miss my baseball card collection but I stopped grieving over it years ago. The most important thing is that we survived and turned that horrible event into a life-changing moment in our lives. Praise God!
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Randy Smith can be reached at rsmithsports@epbfi.com