Is this Ottawa's luckiest man? The nine lives of Mike Lecuyer

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Mike Lecuyer has plummeted 20 metres to the ground and been nearly crushed by a police car. He’s been thrown partway through a windshield and come close to drowning in the Rideau River. On one memorable, admittedly foolhardy, occasion, he tried to polish the hubcaps of a car he was riding in as it sped along the highway at 100 kilometres an hour.

To this day, he loves his cars, but it’s really cosmic horseshoes he’s collected over the years, as bad luck and questionable decisions have conspired time and again to open the doors to whatever afterlife might exist. On each occasion, though, Lecuyer has managed to avoid stepping through, surely over the long haul defying actuarial oddsmakers. He may be the luckiest person in Ottawa. At the very least, he is the city’s version of the cat that came back the very next day.

Lecuyer sat down with the Citizen last summer, at a picnic table in Vincent Massey Park, to describe a remarkable experience he’d had 50 years earlier.

On Aug. 10, 1966, he was 18 years old and finishing his second day on the job at the Heron Road Bridge construction site. He was atop the south span, shoveling wet cement alongside a Portuguese worker who spoke no English, when the bridge collapsed. Nine men died in the tragedy, but Lecuyer, who fell 20 metres, was miraculously not among them. Numerous steel reinforcing rods saw to that, slowing his descent enough as they cut through his head and right leg and tore his clothes to shreds. His left foot became so tangled in rebars that when he hit the ground, his leg remained suspended above him, ultimately aiding in his extrication.

“The cement was just pounding down on me,” he remembered, “and I didn’t know how long that was going to last. Have you ever played football, when the people pile on you? It felt just like that, but it was the cement dripping down.

“I fell 60 feet, but you didn’t notice it,” he added. “There was cement in my hair and my face and my nose and my mouth and my eyes, and I couldn’t see. All I could hear was this ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa…’ It was the reinforcing rods whipping back and forth, and every once in a while you would hear a ‘whack!’ And you knew what that was: It was hitting someone. It was like hitting a watermelon. It was a sickening sound.”




He escaped the cement, only to be nearly crushed by a police car when the officer driving it put the cruiser in drive instead of reverse. At the hospital, Lecuyer noticed the Portuguese worker with whom he’d been shoveling only an hour or so earlier. They waved, and Lecuyer saw that most of the left side of the man’s face was gone. “It makes you wonder,” he said. “Half an inch either way…” His voice trailed off.

Did he return to the bridge when construction resumed? He laughed at the question. “No. I got a job in the Water and Sewers department, with the city. That was high enough for me.”

And then he paused a moment, as if the fog and cobwebs of time were still clearing from his recollections. “Wait,” he exclaimed. “I did work on one other construction job,” and then he recounted another fall, this one from (just) a second storey, following an incident that, in retrospect, bore all the hallmarks of a bit of Laurel-and-Hardy slapstick, except that, at the time, it wasn’t funny in the least.

That story led to a third, then a fourth — both occurring on the same day — as the follies of youth seemingly gave him every opportunity to be driven to the morgue rather than the hospital. And yet.

Lecuyer simply shrugged at his luck as he recounted his stories. His listener that day did, too — mostly. The 50th anniversary of the bridge collapse was two weeks away; the other incidents he had described were extraneous to that story. Besides, who wanted to read about muscle cars fuelled by beer and bad judgment, or the perils of speeding ambulances?

Well, everyone, at least judging by the reactions of friends and colleagues to whom Lecuyer’s exploits were recounted over the next several days. And so an additional meeting was arranged, three weeks later at his home near Chesterville, to further discuss the brushes with mortality that followed the bridge collapse.

By then, though, other memories of (let’s call it) misplaced derring-do had emerged from deep within the layers of his cerebral cortex: the near-drowning, the late-night impromptu demolition derby, the car jack. That these events should all happen to one person seemed almost comically impossible. That he survived them all verged on the unimaginable. And yet the cat came back the very next day. The cat came back, we thought he was a goner, but the cat came back, he just couldn’t stay away.

Here are the lives of Mike Lecuyer, in his own words.



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“You’re young, you do these stupid things. You’re trying to impress the older crowd, or girls. Everybody thinks they’re invincible.

“I was about 10 years old, and we lived close to the Rideau River, but every now and then we’d hike up to Black Rapids, where they would dock boats. They had locks there, and a set of waterfalls adjacent to the locks. Being younger, we would swim off the dock, and we’d watch the older guys swim below and above the falls, which we weren’t allowed to do. But of course when you get away from your parents, you’re allowed to do anything, as long as you don’t get caught.

“So we were getting brave one day and were going to go for a swim above the falls, but nobody was actually going to do it. Of course, I decided that I was going to do it. I got under the falls and it was really neat, watching the falls go over you. You’re standing on this cement ledge that’s all covered in moss. And I’m inching my way over to where there’s a hole where you’d dive into the falls … it’s sort of eroded. And just as I got there, I lost my footing and slipped back onto the cement. I got the wind knocked out of me and I fell into the water. So I couldn’t breathe and I’m in these waterfalls, turning in circles, end over end. I couldn’t catch my breath — I couldn’t do anything. I figured I was going to drown right there. But luckily, one of the older guys had seen what happened, and he came over and reached in and grabbed me by my bathing suit and managed to pull me out. When I got back to my buddies, the first thing I said was, ‘Don’t tell my mother.’”




“Then when I was in my early teens, one of my buddies had his licence, so he took his father’s car — it was a little four-door Austin or something like that — and we were driving west of Ottawa, just cruising along. And for some reason, I decided I was going to hang out the back window and take a rag and polish the hubcap, as we were driving 50 or 60 miles an hour down the highway.

“So I was doing that. I was mostly out of the car, but I had my feet on the floor. But the floor mats let go, and my feet kicked up to the roof of the car. Luckily I kept my legs and feet rigid, so they would stop me from falling out. But here I am hanging out — just about falling out — and I tried to grab ahold of the door, but couldn’t get my hand up quite far enough. I had a hold of the handle, but then I thought, ‘Geez, if I open the handle, the door’s going to swing open and I’ll be all over the asphalt. So everybody’s screaming and my buddy’s honking the horn. But he managed to pull over and they got me back in the car.




“Do you know Capital City Speedway? We used to go in there when I was 16 or 17. We knew the owner at the time, and his son would go with us. And we’d unlock the gates and get in, and we’d drive these old cars around and wreck them. We’d pick them up for like $20 or $25, and take it up. And we’d have our own little demolition derby. There’d be half a dozen of us in a half dozen cars. We’d do this on the access roads behind the track, in the boneyard, they called it. And we thought, ‘This is fun, but we’re not getting up any speed.’ So we took the cars out on the track a couple of times, and it was fun, but we didn’t do any demolition. So I came up with this plan.

“As you come out of the pits, the asphalt, the cement, is divided, and there’s this V with a big row of tires. And they had this old ’55 Chev, I think, that wasn’t running, but I figured someone could push me in it and I would drive into those tires, head first. That was my plan. It sounded great.

“So I’m steering and my buddy’s pushing me, and he starts going faster and faster and faster, and I’m going, ‘No, that’s too fast, too fast.’ But he wouldn’t let up. He thought it was funny to go faster — maybe 30 or 40 mph. We’d only planned on doing 10 or 15.

“So I got in the backseat, and I’m leaning over the front seat, steering with one hand. I figure that as soon as I’m going to hit, I’ll duck in behind the seat. So I let go of the steering wheel and get down on the floor, and — kaboom! — I hit the tires and the car bounces over onto the track and spins around backwards. Everyone’s laughing, but when they look in the front of the car I’m not there. They thought I flew out. But then they hear this muffled, ‘Get me the f— out of here.’ I’d ended up going through the backseat and into the trunk. Whatever possessed me to do that, I don’t know. I thought it would be great fun.

•​

“I think the bridge was the next one. I was 18 and working at Bob Rafter’s Shell station. Everybody in Carleton Heights worked there. He liked to have 10 guys service each car. And a lot of the guys from Gaffney Construction, who were building the Heron Road Bridge, would come in, and this one guy, Clarence Beattie, was telling us about some possible jobs there. We were making maybe 50 cents an hour at Rafter’s, and construction paid a lot more — $2 or $2.50 an hour.

“So my first day of work on the bridge was Tuesday afternoon, the day before it collapsed. I was working on the north span that day, but the next day, Wednesday, at about three o’clock, I was told to go work on the south span. And maybe a half hour later, I saw these 4x4s start to roll, and then suddenly — boom — the bridge collapsed.

“I fell 60 or 65 feet, and the only reason I survived is that my foot got caught on a piece of rebar, so I could eventually pull myself out. That and the fact that I wasn’t knocked out. It was just luck.”




“Two years later, I was in a bad car accident. A couple of buddies and me had spent several hours frequenting bars. The Ottawa House, the British, the Standish, the Chaudiere. We ended up at the Chamberlain Hotel in Aylmer, and we were there for quite a while.

“It was dark when we came out, and we were driving back on the lower Aylmer Road in my buddy’s new 1968 Super Bee. There were three of us. We were doing at least 120 mph. The speedometer was buried. And there was a car in front of us, a Volkswagen, I think, with only one taillight. So Mike went to pull in and pass it on the inside, but he lost control in the loose gravel, and the ditches there are quite deep. We flew through the air and sheared off a telephone pole about eight feet up — cleaned it right off with the side of the car.

“The car spun around and then flipped end-for-end seven times before stopping on its roof in the ditch. I went through the windshield, but my knees got stuck under the dash, and so I came back inside the car and was knocked out and thrown into the back seat. All three of us were, which was a good thing, because the roof was flattened down to the front seat. The only place you could have survived was in the back. I was cut on the side of my face and my neck. We had to climb out the pie-shaped window in the back, which wasn’t very big.



“An ambulance came, and it was taking us to the hospital when I heard the driver yell, and we got T-boned by this big old Buick or Oldsmobile. Another ambulance came and took us to the hospital. And there had been another big car accident previously that night — some people actually died — and so when the doctor came in to see me, he looked like a butcher, all covered in blood. So that was something.”




“That same year, I worked on another construction job, working with the electricians. Highland Park high school on Broadview Avenue. I figured, ‘How hard could that be?’ So I was on the second floor one day, securing conduit, and, just like you’d see on TV, this guy came toward me carrying one of those planks they use for scaffolding, maybe 16 feet. He goes by me then whips around and catches me right in the butt and off I go, second storey. Luckily there was just all dirt there. But still, I was freaking. I went after him with my hammer. He kept saying, ‘I’m a-sorry, I’m a-sorry,’ and I kept saying, ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you.’ But all his buddies got around him and calmed me down.”


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“Then there was the time I lived in Chesterville and wanted to paint the house. I was up out front, on a ladder with my paint brush and a can hooked to the ladder, painting a bedroom window on the second floor. And I made the cardinal sin when you’re painting: You never lean over. So I’m leaning, I’m leaning, and I didn’t know it at the time, but there are different grades of ladders, going from the cheapest to the most expensive. And I had the cheapest, and it’s bending in the centre. And I’m leaning, and all of a sudden the ladder flips. Well, I’m white-knuckling on that ladder, and it does a complete 360 … no, wait, it was a 540, on one foot. It’s sliding over, and I think, ‘OK, I survived the first one, but I’m not going to make it through the next one.’ But then it slides and stops at the frame of the second window, with me on the inside, jammed against the house. I didn’t even drop my brush or spill any paint. I managed to creep down, but on the inside of the ladder. All I could think was, ‘I hope my neighbours didn’t see this fool.’”




“The most serious one was when I was working on my car in the garage. The kids were young and we were about to go on a holiday down east. I had a big Chevy station wagon. It was all packed and ready to go, and the muffler blew on it. I wanted to save some money because we were going on holidays, so I decided to change the muffler myself. So I backed it into the garage, got out the bumper jack, jacked it up and took the back wheel off. I slid under the car and was reefing and banging and trying to get the muffler off. At some point, I decided to take a break, and I was just laying there when I heard this crackling noise. I looked over and saw that the bumper jack was starting to fall forward — I forgot to brace the front wheels. And the bumper jack is digging into the cement — that’s what was making the noise.

“So I slide out from under the car just as it comes down and the drum goes right into the cement. And there was an upright support post in the garage, and when I slid out I banged my head on it, and kind of knocked myself out. It was a loud noise, and so my wife, who was in the house, heard it and came running out to the garage and the car is down on one side and she looks around and all she can basically see is these legs sticking out of the fender well, and she figured, of course, that I was crushed. And so she starts to scream and runs in to call for help, and her screaming kind of brought me around. Then when she found out what I had done, well, she went up one side of me and down the other. All because I was in a hurry to get going on my holidays.”

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Mike Lecuyer.


bdeachman@postmedia.com

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