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Roy Gaby was a truck driver for a trucking company in Houston, Texas. On the night of February 18, 1952, he was returning to Houston from Waco, driving a heavy truck-trailer with 14 wheels. A little «before midnight, he ran out of gasoline.
From a nearby house, he telephoned his wife: “Can you help me, dear? I’ve run out of gas.” Mrs. Gaby sighed, wrapped the baby up warmly and started to the rescue. In the family car she carried a supply of gasoline to her waiting husband.
On the way home Mrs. Gaby drove ahead of Roy. In the mirror over her windshield, she could see the great truck-trailer behind her.
A Bad Time
Suddenly, about ten miles from Houston, a speeding car came out of a side road. Mrs. Gaby was forced off the highway to the right. She looked in her mirror and saw Roy’s truck turn to the right, too. He was trying to keep from hitting the speeding car. Then she heard the crash.
The engine of the truck had struck a great tree, and the trailer had piled up on the cab. Roy was inside the twisted remains of the cab.
The driver of a passing car rushed into the little town of Fairbanks to get the highway officer, Don Henry. When Henry arrived at the scene, he decided to try to pull the engine and the cab out from under the trailer.
“We tied a wrecker to the front of the engine, hoping to pull it away enough to get Gaby out,” he said later. “Rut that idea was no good.
We added the power of a truck at the front of the wrecker. Finally, two more trucks were tied to the back, and they pulled in the other direction. But that didn’t work either.”
Then fire appeared under the truck. Henry stopped passing cars to get more helpers. They tried to open the cab doors with a crowbar, but the twisted doors wouldn’t move.
Henry climbed up on the roof of the cab and looked inside. The steering wheel was holding Gaby’s body against the back of the seat. His feet were held fast by the twisted pedals. The fire was reaching up toward his feet.
“I’ve seen many wrecks,” Henry said, “but I’ve never seen one more terrible. And I’ve never felt more helpless. I looked at Mrs. Gaby and the baby, then back at the burning cab. Only a miracle could help now.”
Out of the Night
At that moment, a big man appeared out of the darkness. “Can I help?” he asked quietly.
Henry shook his head. Nobody could help if three trucks and a wrecker couldn’t move the cab. And by the time the fire-fighting equipment arrived from Fairbanks, it would be too late. The big man, a Negro, walked over to the smashed cab, put his hands on the twisted door and pulled it off!
Everyone was quiet as the crowd watched the big man reach into the cab and tear out the burning floor covering. Then he put out the fire around Gaby’s legs with his bare hands.
“It was then that I saw his face for a moment,” said one of the men who were watching. “At first I was surprised to see how calm he looked. Then I understood what the expression on his face really meant—it was a cold fury. I had seen it before—on the faces of fighting men during the war.
“I remember thinking: Why, that man isn’t calm, he’s furious. It was as if he hated fire for some personal reason, deep down inside.”
No Time to Lose
Quickly the big man reached into the truck cab again. He pulled the steering wheel away from Roy’s body as though it were a piece of string. With his left hand on one pedal and his right on the other, he almost pulled up the whole cab floor to free Gaby’s feet.
But ‘the work wasn’t finished. Gaby still lay in the smashed, burning cab.
The man struggled to get into the cab beside Gaby, but the space was too small. He stepped back from the cab for a moment. The fire was growing, and he looked at it with fury. Then, bending his body low, he began fighting his way into the cab like a wild man.
At last he was far enough inside to rest his feet on the floorboards. He started rising slowly. “Dear God, he’s trying to push up the top!” a woman’s voice cried.
With his strong neck and shoulders against the smashed cab roof, he pushed—harder and harder.
“We could hear the steel give,” reported a farmer who had watched the rescue work. Henry added: “And he held that steel top up until we could pull Gaby out.”
Everyone rushed to take care of Gaby. No one remembered to thank the big man or even to ask his name.
Later, at the hospital where Gaby was taken, Henry told the newsmen: “The big man was the miracle we needed, but he simply disappeared as quietly as he had come. If I hadn’t seen it, I would never believe that one man could do a job that three trucks and a wrecker couldn’t do.”
“I wish I knew his name,” said Mrs. Gaby. “He was a giant.
His Name
The man’s name was Charles Dennis Jones, and he was big. He was more than six feet tall, and he weighed about 220 pounds.
He had been sent out on the highway to change the tires on a truck. On his way back to Houston, he had come upon the wrecked truck-trailer.
The next morning the whole city of Houston was wondering who he was. Newspapers throughout the United States published the story. But Jones didn’t even tell his wife and children about the experience.
The man he worked for, C. C. Myers, began to wonder about it when he saw Jones walk away from a group of workmen who were talking about the rescue of Gaby. Myers remembered that he had sent Jones out on the highway the night before.
Quickly he found a picture of Jones in his office and rushed to Don Henry’s office. “Yes, that’s the man,” agreed Henry. And Myers knew immediately how Charles Jones had found the strength to fight the fire and lift the roof of the cab.
The Reason
One December night 14 months before, Jones had come home to the little house where he lived with his wife Mildred and their five small children. Under one arm he carried a little Christmas tree and a single string of electric lights for the tree.
The past year had not been a happy one for Jones and his family. His mother had died, and then Mildred’s mother had died, too. There were doctors to pay and all the costs of death. But eight-year-old Evelyn Carol, his oldest child, wanted some real lights for the Christmas tree. And he brought them home. He was strong and healthy, and could work 16 hours a day instead of eight. Twice the hours of work meant twice the amount of pay. And they had a house of their own, all paid for.
Mildred left for church, where she was singing that evening. Jones put the children to bed. As he undressed, he wondered if he should risk leaving the tree lights burning. He decided he would; they were electric lights and would be safe. Evelyn Carol wanted to surprise her mother with the lights, and he had promised to leave them on. Then he went to sleep.
Mildred was still not home when Jones woke up. He was sure that he was having a bad dream, with the smell of smoke and the sound of fire. Then he heard a child’s voice cry out.
Fire Everywhere
At once, he got to his feet in what seemed like a world on fire. He fought his way through waves of smoke until he found the five children. He threw each one out the open window to safety, then jumped out himself.
The neighbors came. Mildred came, too, running through the darkness, crying his name. Then Jones heard a man’s voice—perhaps it was his own: “No, no—Evelyn Carol, come back, come back!” And the child’s answer: “But I must get my Christmas lights!” Then Evelyn Carol, in her little white nightdress, ran back toward the burning house.
Later a neighbor told how the men couldn’t hold Jones back, how he had rushed after his child but hadn’t reached her. As he neared the house, the roof fell in. Jones was thrown to the ground by a piece of falling wall. The neighbors pulled him back out of danger.
The next morning, for the first time in ten years, Charles Dennis Jones did not go to work. Everybody at the Robertson Company knew why he hadn’t come. But what could they do to help him?
Before nine o’clock, the men in the Robertson workshops and offices had decided what to do. They gave money, put it in a box and took it to Charles Jones at noon. In the box Jones found $765.50 and a paper with the names of the 84 men who had given the money.
The next day, friends at the company where Mildred had once worked sent $80. A stranger sent $16 by mail. One family gave a bed, another a boy’s coat. It seemed that everyone wanted to help the Jones family.
Before long, Charles began to work on a new home. He wanted to have it finished before the new baby came.
You could understand why he would always hate fire.
A Special Memorial
As a memorial to Jones’s heroic rescue of Roy Gaby, a Houston businessman began to collect money for an annual scholarship that would send a worthy Negro student to college.
And so it came about that, in their new house, Charles and Mildred received a group of citizens who told them about the Charles D. Jones Scholarship. Jones was wearing hist old blue work clothes when he heard about the memorial scholarship. His wife stood beside him, and his children, too. He didn’t say a word, but his eyes filled with tears.
Finally, one of the visiting citizens spoke. Somehow Charles must say something for the newspapers. Would he explain the one thing that nobody understood? How had he been able to pull off the steel doors, put out the fire with his bare hands and raise the smashed top of the driver’s cab?
Charles Jones looked at the silent group around him and said, simply:
“A man doesn’t know what he can do until another man is hurting.”
