By Jeff Balch
In his late 20s he’d been even hotter, winning a few thousand dollars in punishing swim-bike-run events. Back then he was still living in his home state of New Jersey, working for Crum & Forster Insurance, which sponsored him. “It was a pretty good setup,” he says. “I’d train in the morning, work a half day, and train some more in the afternoon.” Most professional triathletes begin as bikers or runners, but Boub was a swimmer first, holding Metro New York collegiate records in the 200- and 400-meter butterfly and achieving Division III All-American status.
“He looked in real pain, hurtin’ bad,” says Shirley Kesmar, who with her husband runs Don’s Landscaping Company, just east of the bridge. “His bike was mangled. He wasn’t bleeding so much, but the way he moved and the way he was holding his shoulder, I thought right away we should call an ambulance.” Boub didn’t like the idea, but Kesmar persuaded him.
The next few days and months weren’t easy. “I had never really been hurt before,” Jon says. “I hit an opened-up car door once, and slid out a couple times on curves, but never really got anything worse than road burn.”
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“Jon’s not a complainer, and he seems to have a high tolerance for pain,” Nancy says. “But you can imagine the frustration. I mean, when I met him he was working out two or three times per day, and then all of a sudden he can’t do anything. I think he’d thrown himself into triathlons even more in Illinois than back east–it was kind of a social outlet. And when you’re used to having that outlet for energy and it’s taken away–well, there was disappointment. He was like a bull in a cage sometimes. Grumpy, surly. I gave him massages. He’d stay mad that he wasn’t getting better quicker.”
“Jon was the first to talk about a legal claim. He was pretty sophisticated in claims–we’d discuss it, but he was handling it. Then sometime in the summer of ’93 we started talking about my getting more involved. He thought Wayne’s adjuster had been sounding encouraging but had maybe just been stringing him along. I think we were already into July at that point. It was that delay that led to the first problem, the statute of limitations problem.”
Patterson: Was it standard procedure to warn roadway users of construction work that was being done on the bridge?
