(The following appeared on the St. James Plain Dealer website on August 6.)
ST. JAMES, Minn. — To this day, Richard Priest remembers the 1951 railroad collision between a passenger train and a freight train that he was supposed to be on.
Working for the railroad, Priest was staying over at his sister’s house in Minneapolis, waiting for a call so he could ride a train back home to St. James. He had just stepped out for 30 minutes, when the call came. His sister said he could make the train, but railroad rules said they had to talk directly to the worker.
When it turned out that the train he missed was involved in a head-on crash with a passenger train between Lake Crystal and Mankato, Priest considered himself lucky. He was one of the crew who cleaned up the mess, and said he couldn’t imagine anyone surviving that wreck.
Missing the train turned out to be a big event in Priest’s life. He was a school teacher at the time, and when he moved to Las Vegas in 1959, he became an influential teacher in the system. In 2001, he had a school named after him.
But he keeps thinking back to that crash. For more than 50 years, he has been wondering who was the person who took his place. Now that he is retired, “I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit,” he said.
“I was a young guy with three kids. I was struggling to get by,” said Priest. The crash did provide him with work for the rest of the summer, cleaning up the train wreck.
With his own success, Priest wondered if that fated train crash, which allowed him to fill his own dreams, may have ended someone else’s dreams. “I wonder if someone was looking out for me,” said Priest.
The St. James Courier newspaper report stated: “The impact of the two trains as they collided hurtled a steam locomotive, two diesel engines and eight box and oil cars off the tracks.”
“I can’t even describe the carnage,” Priest remembered.
The engineer of the freight train was killed, and the engineer of the passenger train severely injured. But it turned out that Priest didn’t need to worry about his replacement all those years. The Courier listed two brakemen, the position Priest would have taken, on the freight train. R. P. O’Leary of St. Paul, and Loren Batzlaff of St. James were both treated for minor injuries the day of the crash, and released from the hospital.
While no information on O’Leary was found, Batzlaff still has distant relatives in this area. They remember him as a nice guy, who had one or two daughters. According to one relative, he may have moved to Florida years ago. If anyone in St. James does have information on Loren Batzlaff’s life, Richard Priest would still like to know.
After being informed that his replacement did not suffer any debilitation injuries, Priest let out a big sigh of relief. “Thank you very much for looking into that for me,” he said. now he can rest easily knowing that his luck did not deprive another on that fateful day.