By Dave Hoekstra
On the afternoon of May 10, Thunder was planting mums in the front yard of the couple’s modest blue-and-white bungalow in south Milwaukee when a car driven by a 74-year-old man jumped the curb. “I heard a screech and looked up,” Thunder said. “In slow motion I saw this car coming at me. I don’t remember being hit.” The vehicle severed her left leg between the knee and ankle and pinned her to the ground.
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Cindy Szwalkiewicz, 41, lives around the corner from Lightning and Thunder and witnessed the aftermath. “When I got there her leg was on the opposite side of the car,” she says. “One neighbor took off her belt and made it a tourniquet. We all went and got ice to try and save her leg. She was incoherent. I thought she was going to be gone.”
Yet in less than three months, Lightning and Thunder were performing again. Thunder was so eager to come back that she defied doctor’s orders and, two weeks after a July 6 skin graft, went in her wheelchair to meet Lightning at a church festival where he was performing solo. “I cheated. I showed up at Saint Veronica’s,” she says. “I was not in good shape. I could only spend a half hour there. I was very sick. He had done a full set and I arrived. Everyone stood up and cheered.
Lightning’s father poured molten metal for a living, but he was also a jazz guitarist. “My mother worked for Globe Union. They made car seats and automotive products,” he says. She died of a heart attack recently. He doesn’t know where his dad is.
They’ll never be able to meet Cline in this world, but their dream is to connect with Neil Diamond. “His camp is probably aware of this,” Lightning says. “That is a goal. To meet the man–before one of us cooks. Because last year I had a heart attack and angioplasty. I’m 48.”
In late May local bands and sound men staged two benefits at clubs in Milwaukee and a fund was established at the Tri City National Bank there. In total the couple has received more than $5,000 in donations. “We’re comfortable for the next month and a half,” Thunder says. “After that, we’re looking at trouble.”
