As a lifelong journalist, I’m always going to be partial to newspapers. After all, my paycheck throughout my professional career of 31 years came from newspapers where I held various positions.
And, in past articles, I’ve described how a newspaper is important because of weddings, births, obituaries, high school sports reports and so on.
This example I’m going to provide, however, is somewhat different than anything I’ve ever written about or even imagined until about a year ago.
Since January, I’ve been working on the Baker family tree and as last winter was waning, I spent a lot of time researching my heritage.
One of the things I couldn’t pin down was the story of how my uncle Leo Dean Baker was killed in a car accident near Hazelton in 1946.
Since that happened 79 years ago, there have been three conflicting stories about his accident and death and more conspiracies regarding it. Even though I’m retired as a journalist, I still considered it my obligation to the family to get the real story about what happened.
One of the stories told of him passing away in a Minot hospital, another said he ran off a curve north of town and yet another indicated his accident occurred southeast of Hazelton. Still another theory was that someone was chasing him when he ran off a road.
Basically all my parents ever told me was that Leo (my dad’s brother) was killed in a car accident. My five siblings and I really didn’t know anything beyond that. As a result of that, I set out in January to find out what really happened.
Newspaper style interviews, reading previous family history stories, and looking through family obituaries didn’t turn up a single clue on what actually happened.
Last week, there was a breakthrough and as you may have guessed, yes, it came from a newspaper article from June 13, 1946 on the front page of the Emmons County Record in Linton.
With assistance from the North Dakota State Historical Society archives, I was able to obtain the official historic document that told of my uncle’s accident which nullifies any other rumors that may have been floating around out there.
As it was described in the article, Leo Dean Baker, 24, was at a dance in Moffit with some friends. The dance ended and a party was started later in Hazelton, 14 miles south. At some point, Leo got into a friend’s car and drove off. His friends assumed he was just driving around Hazelton, but he didn’t return.
The article didn’t indicate whether he was drinking or whether he may have gotten into an argument with someone or had a disagreement with a girlfriend. That part, we’ll most likely never know. The police report, as said by the Emmons County Record, said he drove away from the party.
The rest was investigated by the Emmons County Sheriff’s Department. He left town traveling north at a high rate of speed. After several miles he encountered a curve and upon realizing what was happening, he locked up the brakes indicated by deep gouges where the wheel tracks were discovered.
He was thrown from the vehicle and declared deceased at the scene at 1:25 a.m., on June 9, 1946. The sheriff stated there wouldn’t be an inquest because there was no reason to indicate foul play was involved. Apparently my uncle Leo acted alone which caused his death, just three years after his brother Bert was killed in World War II in the Aleutian Islands.
The article also describes in detail what happened as a result of the investigation, which at times became graphic in nature. As I read the article I could only imagine what my grandparents must have felt when they read the same article, even though they were aware of what happened before it was published.
Conflicting stories nullified, conspiracies debunked, the facts as they happened, pinned down to set the record straight for the family tree. All the questions were answered from a newspaper article, yet another reason why newspapers are so important.
