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Lightning experiences
Monday, August 28, 2017
Track star Ray Search showing off his first McCook letter.
Ray Search Remembers
Recently the McCook Gazette ran an editorial about the number of people who are hit by lightning each year. The writer was pleased to report that there has been a marked decrease in the number of lightning fatalities in the last years, but the experts were at a loss as to why this is so. Maybe we’re just lucky, or people spend less time outdoors during thunder storms, or perhaps something else. Whatever the cause, it is a good thing.
People have different ways of looking at thunder storms. Most of us prefer to leave them alone, and it is gratifying that schools take those storms seriously and suspend outdoor games till the storm has passed. One fellow I knew, Ray Search, the long-time manager of the Fox Theater, and local historian, was fascinated by thunder storms, and far from being afraid of them, welcomed them like an old friend, and was convinced that being hit by a lightning bolt was the way he was going to leave this earth. I was with Ray one afternoon, not too long before he died when a sudden thunder storm came up. The thunder was so loud and so close that it was difficult to carry on a conversation. Ray went out on his front porch, looked up to the sky and said, “Okay, God, take me now. I’m ready to go.” Alas, Ray died quietly in his bed.
Perhaps Ray was a little too fatalistic concerning storms, but he had good reason. You see, five times Ray had been struck by lightning. Yet his usual vantage point during a storm was his front porch, or the doorway of his little cabin.
1. Ray’s first brush with lightning occurred when he was a boy, on his grandparents’ farm. A terrible storm had come up and grandmother worried that her cow was in a field far from the barn. Ray set out to herd the cow to safety. He had just crawled through a barb wire fence when a lightning bolt split the fence post right behind him. The jolt brought him to his knees, and a slight concussion left him dazed for a short time. But he proceeded to the house, with the cow to tow. He was grateful that at the last minute he had heeded his grandmother’s advice, and had put on an oversized pair f heavy rubber boots. Apparently, those boots gave him just enough insulation so he was not seriously hurt.
2. In the old St. Catherine’s hospital, Ray was visiting his wife, Helen, who had just delivered their first daughter, Fran. Ray watched a storm brewing through an open, but screened window, with his elbows on the window sill.
When the lightning bolt hit, just below where he was standing, Helen said that the electricity, following the wires in the screen, was broken into thousands of little bolts, all of which seemed to enter Ray’s body. When he turned toward the bed he was unable to raise his arms for several minutes. His face and torso bore the imprint of the screen wires for several days.
3. When Ray was the projectionist at the old Electric Theater, he and his assistant, Brad Enright were in the middle of a show, when a sudden electric storm came up. A lightning bolt struck the DeGroff building across the street, and then following a wire, entered the theater, burning up the projector between them. Both men were shaken, but unhurt. Perhaps Brad took that as a sign from heaven, for soon after that he gave up the movie business and began his studies for the priesthood.
4. Ray was the manager at the Fox Theater when a very noisy storm came up quite suddenly. This time a lightning bolt struck the junction box in the popcorn area of the concession stand where Ray was assisting in the bagging of popcorn. Again, Ray was shaken, but unhurt.
5. Ray was at home with his daughter, Fran, when a lightning bolt hit their house. The bolt knocked Ray to the floor, while Fran, standing only four feet away was unhurt. That same strike did, however, knock out most of the electrical switches in the house, plus the electric range, 9 fuses, and split the water pipe in the basement, exactly under the spot where Ray was standing. Ray was unhurt, except for a burn spot on his left foot.
Some years after Ray’s last rush with lightning, he was in Omaha undergoing some medical tests. The physician was mystified by Ray’s Cat Scan, which showed an unusual brain wave. When Fran asked if being struck by lightning could cause such a wave, the doctor was gleeful.
That surely was the cause, and thereafter he always referred to Ray as “Electric Man. He was fascinated by Ray’s brushes with lightning bolts, and on several occasions he came to talk with Ray about his encounters with lightning. Ray’s roommate at the time was a fellow recovering from heart surgery.
One afternoon, when a noisy summer storm arose, the heart patient insisted that he be moved to another room, away from this fellow who attracted storms and lightning bolts. Who could blame him?