Friends rally around hit-and-run victim

Benefit planned today for Jerome Calcagno

By Sharon Nesbit

The Gresham Outlook, Nov 13, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

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.

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit