midwest refugee

Farm Accident Kills 92-year-old Man in Rockland

La Crosse Co., Wis. — A couple of seniors, ages 82 and 92, were farming last week when the older of the two (not pictured) was accidentally run over by a tractor and killed.

According to the sheriff’s department, the men were attempting to attach a brush mower to the back of a tractor; the 82-year-old was behind the wheel of the tractor, and the 92-year-old, on foot, was connecting the tractor to the mower.

A brush mower is a relatively heavy-duty piece of machinery that can function as a lawn mower, and is sometimes attached to a tractor to be pulled through rugged fields and farms to clear tall grass and other foliage. In this case, two men who, in retrospect may have been slightly past their prime for operating such machinery, were attaching the aforementioned brush mower to their tractor when the accident happened.

Are you with me so far, people from large coastal U.S. cities?

OK. So the driver’s foot accidentally slipped from the clutch, and the tractor abruptly reversed right over the other man. The 92-year-old was pronounced dead on the scene.

When a loved one dies, it is an unquestionably morose time for the bereaved, and it can often be difficult to comfort those in mourning. Nevertheless, this has to be one of the most remarkably dignified ways for a nearly century-old Wisconsin farmer to leave this earth. 

In fact, it ought to be recorded in a history book somewhere.

Please know that my sympathy goes out to his surviving family and friends. If there is some sort of plane of existence after this life, I hope he makes his way there peacefully and quickly.

Dwight Armstrong has died of lung cancer at the age of 58.

To jog your memory, Armstrong was the guy who bombed Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970 to protest the Vietnam War, killing physicist researcher Robert Fassnacht, and managed to stay on the lam for seven years after that before he was apprehended.

Today Dwight’s brother Karl, who was also party to the same crime and released from prison in 1980, owns a juice cart in Madison. In the warmer months, as he has for nearly three decades, the cart is on a pedestrian mall at the edge of the campus, a few blocks from the rebuilt Sterling Hall, where a plaque honors Mr. Fassnacht’s memory.