The "Spark Ranger" ? Any Facts to Support This Story ?

[Ron Mastrogiuseppe]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/inside-the-life-of-the-man-known-as-the-spark-ranger/2013/08/15/947cf2d8-ea40-11e2-8f22-de4bd2a2bd39_story.html?hpid=z1

Subject: The "Spark Ranger"

• Inside the life of the man known as the ‘spark ranger’
  
• 
  
• 
  
• WRITTEN BYTom Dunkel
  
• PUBLISHED: AUGUST 15
  
• Dickey Baker is a son of the Shenandoahs: born, raised and firmly rooted. He talks country-slow, as if each sentence is
  
• a chess move requiring careful deliberation. “It’s a pretty place,” he says of the verdant meadows and mountains that surround him. “I’ve left a few times but always come back.”
  
• Baker — a hefty man with a ruddy complexion and pompadour gone gray — has been a Shenandoah National Park maintenance worker for 43 years. He walks to the rear of a cabin at the Skyland campground and gazes across the ruffled landscape he loves. Page Valley tosses and turns directly below. It’s a beautiful late May day, but Baker describes for me how very different things can be when thick clouds barrel in, cannon shots of thunder resound, and lightning fractures black skies. He flashes back to a tumultuous afternoon some 20 years ago.
  
• “I was painting the bedroom in that house,” he says, nodding toward the cabin next door. “I got to be honest with you. I laid on the floor between two beds. That storm actually scared me comin’ up the mountain that day.”
  
• Instead, a crack of lightning took out an oak tree by the maintenance shed just down the road.
  
• 
  
• I’ve come to talk with Dickey Baker about the legacy of Lightning Man. When Baker was a teenage employee, he crossed paths with Roy Sullivan, who died 30 years ago and undoubtedly is the most famous ranger in the history of Shenandoah National Park, if not every national park.
  
• Baker saw the tan ranger hat that Sullivan kept in his truck as a souvenir. It had two scorched holes where a lightning bolt supposedly entered and exited. “He used to haul it around with him,” recalls Baker, who also saw Sullivan’s wristwatch that got toasted black by another bolt.
  
• Forty-one years after his debut in the “Guinness Book of World Records,” Ranger Roy Sullivan continues to hold the dubious distinction of being struck by lightning more than any known person. Not twice. Not three times.
  
• Seven times.
  
• That’ll attract attention. In the early 1970s, Sullivan did an interview with expat British broadcaster David Frost and appeared on the quiz show “To Tell the Truth.” In 1980, Sullivan was featured in an episode of the TV series “That’s Incredible.” More recently, Discover magazine (2008) included him on its list of memorable survivors, along with the Soviet World War II pilot who bailed out of his plane at 22,000 feet without a parachute and the hapless sailor who endured being adrift at sea for 76 days in a five-foot raft. The Web site Cracked.com (2009) selected Sullivan as one of the seven “Most Bizarrely Unlucky People Who Ever Lived.” (Tsutomu Yamaguchi was named most unlucky, having been at ground zero when atomic bombs fell on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) In 2010 Sullivan’s misadventures were the basis of a humorous South African TV commercial for, of all things, energy-saving milk cartons. His birth-chart reading is posted on AstrologyWeekly .com in the heady company of Elvis Presley, Bill Clinton and Leonardo da Vinci.
  
• And surely he has to be the only National Park Service ranger ever immortalized in song. A Florida fringe band called I Hate Myself recorded “Roy Sullivan, By Lightning Loved” in the mid-1990s. It did not become a cult classic, perhaps because of convoluted lyrics such as this:
  
• Am I graced or grounded?
  
• Blessed or burnt to crisp?
  
• Through this mud, we’re impounded
  
• Is this bliss?
  
• We humans yearn for order and structure, taking comfort in whatever certainties can be found in a seemingly chaotic universe. But life misbehaves. What sense can be made of its twists and turns? Did Roy Sullivan have an explanation for his epic misfortune? Why him? Can the fickle finger of fate really be that preposterously unfair?
  
• 
  
• 4.15 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,
  
• 000,000,000,000
  
• — The odds of somebody being struck by lightning seven times
  
• 
  
• Dickey Baker points me toward an unmarked trail about 100 yards away. That’s where the Sullivan saga begins. Twenty-five minutes of hiking mildly undulating terrain brings me to Millers Head overlook and what remains of a fire tower; a 15-foot-by-15-foot stone foundation topped by a concrete platform. Back in the day, the tower afforded a panoramic glimpse of Page Valley. This was Sullivan’s perch during a vicious storm that pounded Shenandoah National Park in April 1942. Unfortunately for Sullivan, lightning rods had yet to be installed.
  
• “It was hit seven or eight times, and fire was jumping all over the place,” Sullivan told a reporter some 30 years later, reliving the moment.
  
• He decided to make a run for it.
  
• Bad idea.
  
• “I got just a few feet away from the tower, and then, blam!”
  
• Lightning burned a half-inch stripe down Sullivan’s right leg and demolished the nail on his big toe. Blood spurted from his foot, draining through a hole ripped in his boot sole.
  
• Strike One! Only six more to go.
  
• A George Washington University statistics professor once calculated that the odds of somebody being whacked by lightning seven times is 4.15 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
  
• That’s a lot of zeros. And they don’t come close to putting the Roy Sullivan story in proper perspective.
  
• 
  
• 
  
• Lightning strikes are text messagesfrom Mother Nature: fast, furious and frequent reminders of who’s boss. The typical bolt lasts less than a half second. It is 1 to 6 inches in diameter, spans nearly five miles, and can pack a punch of 100 million volts. Earth gets peppered billions of times a year, with lightning killing an estimated 24,000 people annually. Roughly 40 of those victims will be Americans. Raw, unrestrained power of that magnitude captures the imagination. Dozens of ancient societies conjured up mythic figures who brandished lightning bolts. The Norse had Thor. The Egyptians, Typhon. The Chinese, Lei Tsu. The Greeks, Zeus. Across cultures lightning became regarded as an instrument of a vengeful God, His joke’s-on-you way of settling scores with sinners.
  
• Benjamin Franklin broke the spell of what John Friedman, author of “Out of the Blue: A History of Lightning,” calls “theological meteorology.” In June 1752, Franklin conducted his kite-flying experiment, proving that lightning was nothing more than a gigantic electrical charge and, therefore, inexorably drawn to the metal key dangling on his kite string. As brilliant as Franklin could be, he neglected to patent his invention. Poor Ben. By 1870 some 10,000 salesmen were hawking lightning rods in the United States, according to Friedman’s book.
  
• Post-Franklin scientists studied lightning and, over the centuries, discovered that the phenomenon amounts to a gigantic floating battery. Cumulonimbus clouds reach heights of eight miles, with temperatures varying as much as 100 degrees within. Rain, sleet and hail are produced simultaneously. High winds whip everything into an unstable stew. On a subatomic level, agitated particles collide like bumper cars. Some particles become negatively charged, others positively. As a rule, the positive particles rise toward the top of the cloud. Negative ones sink to the bottom. The two extremes act like polar-opposite terminals of a battery. When electrical transference occurs between them, a visible flash results. Lightning!
  
• About 90 percent of lightning is inter-cloud fireworks that never reach the ground. The other 10 percent — what we see and run from — takes place on a grander scale. Lightning shoots downward (on occasion upward, if the cloud happens to be more positively charged than the ground) to achieve circuit neutrality. Thunder is owed to the lightning flash giving off millions of volts of electricity, which superheats the air to more than 50,000 degrees, five times the temperature of the sun.
  
• Most people are struck nowhere near the mother cloud. At NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., the protocol is for pilots to stay 70 nautical miles away from the periphery of a storm. For good reason. Lightning wreaks havoc with the body’s delicate wiring. Mary Ann Cooper, professor emeritus of emergency medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has studied strike survivors for three decades. “It causes chronic pain and causes brain-injury, post-concussion-type symptoms,” she says. “You and I can filter out distractions and still focus. One of the things we see with lightning and electric[-shock] patients is that ability is scraped off.”
  
• 
  
• 
  
• Roy C. Sullivan
  
• Death by cardiac arrest is the worst scenario. Other potential effects run a wide and unpredictable gamut. Consider these injury reports filed by members of Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors, a North Carolina-based support group that held its annual meeting recently in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Cheryl, hit while phoning her husband to warn him about a storm: petit mal seizures. Mike, hit while golfing: completely paralyzed but slowly recovering. Rachel, hit once indoors, once outdoors: no lasting effects. Geneva, hit once indoors, once outdoors: headaches, chronic pain, digestive problems, fatigue, sensitivity to barometric pressure. Angela, hit three times: severe neuropathy, chronic pain, digestive problems, aphasia, apraxia, frontal lobe damage, short-term memory loss and post-traumatic stress disorder.
  
• Then there are the Twilight Zone cases such as Nina Lazzeroni, an Ohio woman who turned into a walking circuit breaker after being struck in 1995. Lights inexplicably flick off when she passes street lamps, billboards and parking lots. As she told author John Friedman, “They come back on after I leave the area and turn off again if I return.”
  
• Florida is the lightning capital of the country, recording 468 deaths between 1959 and 2012, according to National Weather Service data. Texas is a distant second with 215. Maryland reported 126 fatalities and the District only five. Virginia had 66, tied for 26th place with Kansas. Yes, the “Spark Ranger” had a job that put him at greater-than-average risk, but current and former Shenandoah National Park staff can’t think of a visitor or a ranger struck in the past 17 years, and probably much longer.
  
• The collective knowledge about odds-beating, death-defying Roy Sullivan appears to be spread thin, even among those in the know. He preceded the science community’s interest. “None of us working in lightning ever met him,” Cooper says. NASA engineer Bruce Fisher has been on hundreds of research flights through the wildest of thunderstorms but can offer only this tidbit about Sullivan: “I heard he had lightning rods on his four-poster bed.”
  
• 
  
• 
  
• Just as with Dickey Baker, Sullivan’s existence was circumscribed by the Blue Ridge Mountains — the difference being Sullivan never ventured into the wider world. He was born in February 1912 in Greene County, the fourth of Arthur and Ida Bell Shifflett Sullivan’s 11 children. The Sullivans and Shiffletts were well-established mountain families. They hacked a living from the soil and kept their distance from genteel society.
  
• Like many “hollow folk,” as academics dubbed mountain inhabitants, Roy Sullivan didn’t graduate from high school. Instead, he got a thorough grounding in the outdoors, hiking the ridges and woods around Simmons Gap. He claimed to have once shot 30 rabbits in a single day as a boy, selling them for 25 cents a head. In his early 20s, Sullivan joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. It had just started the dirty work of building Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park. Part of his job entailed demolishing the homes of neighbors forced to relocate so the forests could be returned to pristine condition.
  
• Sullivan hired on with the park’s fire patrol in 1940. Forest Service ranger Franklin Taylor, who recalls fighting one fire in which “Mr. Roy” — as Taylor still respectfully refers to him — advised the crew, “If a storm comes up, you all get away from me.” Sullivan later became one of three rangers responsible for monitoring the 40-mile stretch from Swift Run Gap to Waynesboro, the southern terminus of Shenandoah National Park. William Nichols supervised him for five years. “He was uneducated but a very intelligent man,” Nichols says. “He loved telling a story. In a word, he was a character.” But a gracious one. Sullivan readily shared his practical expertise with colleagues who held college degrees; he was able to easily identify assorted trees, even in the dead of winter, when they’d been stripped of their leaves.
  
• Sullivan may have related to trees better than he did women. He had four wives. It’s unclear if all those unions were legally consummated, but genealogy records indicate that in 1932, at age 20, he took the hand of Martha Herring. They had a son, Roy Jr., who died in 1996. On the heels of Martha came Madeline Shifflett (1943) and Vinda Blackwell (1953). In March 1962, Sullivan married Patricia Morris, an Augusta County girl. She was 19. He was 50. Tongues wagged, especially when they had three children.
  
• Says Frank Deckert, who was a Shenandoah park ranger from 1968 to 1971: “We used to kid him that he’d get recharged with the lightning strikes and have another kid.”
  
• After his harrowing experience at Millers Head fire tower, Roy Sullivan enjoyed 27 years of uneventful skies. That streak ended in July 1969 near milepost 97 on Skyline Drive. It was rainy but sticky-hot. He was driving in the southbound lane, negotiating tight S-curves, when lightning blasted two trees on that side of the road, then deflected into the northbound lane and took out a third. In between, the bolt passed through the open windows of Sullivan’s truck. His wristwatch got cooked, his eyebrows fried. Any hair not protected by his hat was burned off. Sullivan lost consciousness, and the truck rolled to the lip of a deep ditch.
  
• Strike Three occurred exactly one year later: July 1970. Pat and Roy Sullivan were living in a house trailer on the western fringe of the park at Sawmill Run. Roy was tending his garden one afternoon. Lightning suddenly streaked out of a relatively clear sky, pulverizing a power transformer near the trailer, then smashing into his left shoulder and sending him airborne. A month later Pat got dinged, for the first and only time, while she was standing in the front yard.
  
• Following in Sullivan’s electrified footsteps, I’m uncertain if there’s a pattern developing. Does each strike get progressively more dramatic and harder to swallow? Or am I being city-slicker cynical? There’s no denying, however, that Strike Four takes the Sullivan narrative to a new level.
  

 

[Duncan Morrow]

I spent a lot of years as a public affairs officer and answered questions about Roy Sullivan several times. I've talked to Roy. I've talked to doctors who treated him, I've talked to people who had access to park records of the strikes that occurred on duty (the truck wreck, for example). I've talked to the Guiness Book of Records people, who satisfied me that they had done due diligence before certifying Roy's record. Could I prove it? No. Do I believe it. Yes.

Duncan Morrow

--
--
View all the postings by visiting our homepage at:
 
http://groups.google.com/group/parklandsupdate?hl=en
 
To join the Park Land Watch group email Rick Smith: rsmit...@comcast.net This will allow you to post your messages to the PLW Group.
 
Membership is free
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "parklandwatch" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to parklandsupda...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Bill Wade]

As superintendent in SHEN from 1988 to 1997, questions about this "legend" came up from time to time. I never personally looked into any of the records of all this, but conversations with some of the "old-timers" in the park led me to believe that there is little question that Roy was hit several times, but there was skepticism about whether some of the later ones were true or staged for the purpose of adding to the notoriety that Roy was clearly enjoying by that time. Best put I guess is there doesn't seem to be any clear evidence that even the later ones didn't happen.

Other rumors were spawned from all this. One I heard not long after I got to SHEN was that after being struck by lightening seven times, Roy died when an electrical appliance ended up in the bathtub with him. How was never explained but I assume it was a fabricated version of how he actually died – by gunshot – purportedly by his wife but never proven I don't think and some say suicide. 

Bill Wade

5625 N Wilmot Road

Tucson, AZ 85750

Home/Office Phone = 520-615-9417

Cell Phone = 520-444-3973

Fax = 520-615-9474