Friends rally around hit-and-run victim
Benefit planned today for Jerome Calcagno
contributed photo / Gresham Outlook
Jerome Calcagno mows a lawn at the mobile home park where he lives.
Every morning Jerome Calcagno, chief lawnmower of his mobile home park at 201st Avenue and Sandy Boulevard, walked across Sandy Boulevard to the Stagecoach Saloon to drink a morning cup of coffee as Melissa Coates opened the place for the day.
Coates recalls the morning of Oct. 29 was “rainy and crappy and dark.” Someone came into the bar/restaurant to say that someone had been hit on the road.
“I knew it was Jerome,” says Coates, a Wood Village resident. “I just knew it was Jerome.”
She fought her way through the tangle of people and emergency vehicles to where he laid on the street. She dropped to the street to sit with him.
“He told me he just wanted to go home,” she remembers. “But they moved his leg and there was blood everywhere and I said, ‘You’re not going to go home, sweetie.’ ”
Calcagno, 79, a member of a large Italian farm family, is still at Legacy Emanuel Hospital & Health Center. He spent four days in intensive care. His glasses are gone. His right leg broken, his left leg lacerated.
He suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has had two triple heart bypasses.
Coates describes him as a “real John Deere freak.”
No one can guess when he will be able to return to his home in the Sandy Boulevard Mobile Villa where he mows nearly everybody’s lawn.
And no one knows who hit Jerome Calcagno on Sandy Boulevard just before 7 a.m., just east of 201st Avenue. The driver of a dark maroon sedan sped west after the accident. A surveillance camera across the street captured a dim picture of the scene. The sedan likely suffered body damage and is missing a radio antenna. One was found three feet from Calcagno’s crumpled body. So far, neither the hit-and-run vehicle or the driver has been found.
But the Stagecoach Saloon has not forgotten its early-rising customer.
Coates and the customers of the Sandy Boulevard hangout plan a benefit from 5-9 p.m. Saturday, offering live music and a $3.50 spaghetti dinner. (The regular price is raised a dollar with the extra money going to help Calcagno with expenses, including new glasses.)
Donations are coming in for a silent auction.
Likely the fuss will embarrass Calcagno. Though Calcagno has a learning disability, he has always made his own way and was self-sufficient, says his cousin Suzan McKenzie of Gresham.
“He is a kind-hearted person,” she said. “I remember he raised rutabagas. I always wondered why anybody would want rutabagas.”
He farmed with other family members in East Multnomah County and the Parkrose area. After a long first marriage, he married twice again. Both of those unions were unsuccessful.
In retirement he took up mowing lawns, and nearly every lawn in his mobile home park has known his touch.
Gresham police say a small black two-door vehicle also is seen heading eastbound passing the suspect vehicle just seconds after the collision.
Investigators with the police department’s Traffic Unit would like to speak with the driver and/or occupants of the black car.
Anyone who saw something suspicious in the area between 6:50 and 6:55 a.m. is encouraged to call the Gresham Police tip line at 503-618-2719 or 1-888-989-3505.