Senior recalls lightning strike as a child

Virginia Brown will never forget a lightning storm she experienced when she was a little girl.

She was living in Hogeland at the time, a rural unincorporated town northeast of Havre. On July 2, 1945, Brown said that her cousin, Vera Hobbs, recovered from an illness. It was Hobbs first day out of bed and she wanted to go play down by the spring with her friends. Brown, Hobbs and a friend from school, Joan, went outside to play. They were all about 10 years old.

Hobbs led the pack, Joan was about 10 feet behind her and Brown brought up the rear. They could see a storm in the distance, but didn’t think much of it.

Bang! They were knocked unconscious. Brown doesn’t know how long she blacked out for, but only remembers when she came to.

“I lifted my head and Joan lifted her head and then Vera didn’t lift her head,” Brown said. Then a terrible storm came through the area.

“It was a frightening thing,” Brown said. “I was terrified.”

Brown’s cousin had been struck by lightning and died. Brown recalled that she didn’t see a flash or hear thunder before or after the lightning struck.

Not a day after recovering from illness, her cousin died. It was like fate didn’t want her cousin to survive, Brown said.

“How rare is that,” she said. The chance of being struck by lightning in one’s lifetime is 1 in 3,000.

Brown’s parents had a hotel and bar in Hogeland.

They drove Brown and Joan to the hospital in Chinook, 48 miles away. Doctor’s orders were to get bed rest. Brown recalled not feeling good, maybe from a headache, and that she didn’t want to stay in bed.

Her daughter, Karen Pickering recalled being told the story many times over the years. Pickering lives in Plains now.

Today, Brown lives at BeeHive Homes in Columbia Falls, where she recently recalled the lightning story and other memorable points in her life.

Brown continued to write letters to Joan after moving to Kalispell, where she graduated from high school.

She recalled that she interviewed Mel Ruder for English class. She doesn’t remember what she wrote about him, but said that she didn’t get to meet his wife, Ruth, who was in the back room at the newspaper office.

“I guess I passed the class,” Brown said.

She later moved to Great Falls, where she was a nanny, nurse aid and switchboard operator. While there, she met up with another childhood friend from Hogeland, Delores Newton.

Newton was dating Dick, a mechanic at the nearby Air Force base. They decided to put Brown on a blind date with another mechanic, Donald.

Brown recalled that they went on a double date to a drive-in movie theater. She sat in the backseat with Donald while Delores and Dick sat in the front.

She talked to Donald “a little,” but they were just friends, at the time. But, three months later they were married. They would have been married 60 years this summer. Donald died last April at the Montana Veterans Home.

As a young man, Donald was stationed in Madrid, Spain for three years. Brown went with him and they took their two children. Their youngest daughter, Pickering, was born there. Brown recalled that a concrete wall surrounded their home. In the evening, they listened to live music from the bar across the street.

Donald was also stationed in Vietnam for a year. Brown stayed home, alone with the kids.

Their other two children are Henry and Norma, who live in Plains now.

Brown has a room at BeeHive that looks out over the junior high athletic field. She said she watches the students play football.

But if the skies begin to darken and a storm rolls in, Brown is sure to stay inside.

The memory of what happened when she was 10 is still fresh after all these years.