My Father and Donnie Osmond

My Father and Donnie Osmond

Way back many years ago, about 1975, my sister really wanted to see Donnie Osmond in concert. He was going to be at the Omni in Atlanta, Georgia for one night only and my cousin Barbara was able to get tickets to the event.

The big day came and my sister was so excited she could hardly contain herself. My father was going to stay in town and run our Western Auto store while the rest of the family went to Atlanta.

A few hours before it was time to leave, my father and one of our shop employees went out to install a television antenna on the roof of a house. 

My father came back to the store limping and told us he had fallen from the second rung from the bottom of the ladder and jammed his knee. 


He had a bad knee from when he had dropped a heavy cash register years ago, so we did not think too much of it.

He sat in a recliner at the store and had me bring him readings from the registers just before we left. He counted the money, too. 

He sat in that recliner for several hours before it was time for us to leave for Atlanta. Finally, we left.

We met my aunt and my cousin at their house in Norcross, Georgia and soon left to take my sister and my cousin to the concert. We went to a store called Treasure Island. Treasure Island was owned by J. C. Penny.

While at Treasure Island I bought a one hundred twenty pound barbell set. This weighed forty more pounds than I did. 

I could not find any employee to help me load it into the buggy, so I laid the buggy on its side and scooted the box of weights into the buggy. Then, I used the bar as a pry bar to get the buggy back up on its wheels.

When I got to the car I rolled the buggy up to the trunk and sort of laid it down in the trunk and slid the box out of it.

That night, after we picked up my sister and cousin from the concert we went back to my aunt’s house and my mother called my father at home. 


This is what he told her:

As soon as we were safely out of town he had one of our employees, who was also an EMT, call the Iva Rescue Squad. 

The Iva Rescue squad backed an ambulance up to the door of the store and took him to the emergency room at the Anderson Memorial Hospital.

They took X-rays and discovered he had broken his leg. His femur was broken in the most painful way a bone can be broken. Instead of breaking across the leg, it had broken up and down the bone and basically split apart.

My father knew that if my mother knew he had really fallen from the roof of the house and had fallen into a rose bush she would not have left him in Iva and would not have taken my sister to the concert. My sister would have been heart-broken.

My father sat in a chair for hours in extreme pain with thorns embedded in him just because he loved my sister so much that he could not bear to see her disappointed.

The doctor told my father he could not come home. My father could be very persuasive. Finally, the doctor agreed to let him go home if there was someone there to care for him.

One of our shop employees, Marvin, was there with him when we got home. 

The pain was so great that just stepping on the floor near him made my father wince with pain. 

My father was not a baby and he often endured intense pain and “took it like a man.” But this was so bad he would tell me, “Don’t walk so heavy.”

It took my father months to recover, but finally he did. He sucked up the pain for hours just for my sister. I guess he felt she was worth it. After all, she was his only daughter.

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