Hero Shrugs Aside Honors From Gravel Plant Rescue

Ask Michael Radwich about his 1974 Malibu and he’ll regale you with tales of cranking up his pride and joy on a local stock car race track and how he hopes next year will be his big year.

Ask about the rescue that won him an award from the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission and made him a much-admired local celebrity and he is apt to roll his eyes, grin an engaging grin and emit a series of “Yeps” and “Nopes.”

“It’s all right, I guess,” he says.

A year ago, Radwich grabbed co-worker Scott Pierce and fought a desperate tug-of-war with a gravel grinder hungry to snatch both men into its rusty maw.

Today, he doesn’t know what made him risk his life for a man who was no more than a casual acquaintance. Nothing in his previous 23 years had raised the issue of what he would do if it came to a decision between standing aside or chancing death.

“I never really thought about it to tell you the truth,” he said in a recent interview from his modest apartment tucked behind the hardware store in this western Massachusetts town of 1,700.

“I figured I had to do something. I couldn’t leave him.”

Radwich still works at the gravel plant, and he still carries the marks of his actions, a bent and scarred left thumb he can wiggle only about a half-inch. Since he is left-handed, he had to teach himself to write again, and it will be a few more months before he can go back to his passion, stock car racing.

“My doctor says one crazy thing to another,” he said with a laugh.

The man he rescued has a little more to say.

“I’m just glad someone was there that was quick thinking. If he wasn’t there, I would have been killed. My arm would have been torn off by the shaft and I would definitely have been killed,” Pierce said.

“There aren’t enough words. ‘Thanks’ seems to be all right with him.”

The accident occurred Oct. 18, 1989, while the 21-year-old Pierce and Radwich were trying to repair the grinder, a large structure towering 80 feet above the ground that on a good day clanks and throbs as it spits out gravel and sand.

“He moved in to look at something. He had a shirt on that was unbuttoned and the tails came out and got wrapped up in the shaft and he reached in to try to pull it out and that’s when he got caught up in it,” Radwich recalled.

“He started yelling to shut it off and the switch to shut it off was down on the ground so I grabbed ahold of him,” he said.

After a third man hit an emergency switch on the ground, the two men fell back on the platform, Pierce with his left arm hanging on by the triceps, Radwich with his left thumb all but severed.

Both men have regained use of their injured limbs through operations and therapy.