I can’t find when those torches were first manufactured, but I have another memory (vague as well) that the movie “It Happened One Night”, released in 1934, showed some torches marking a highway detour–and they were small, not too bright, hurricane lanterns.

Like one of these.

I couldn’t imagine how the torches worked. All I could think of as a “torch” was the burning pitchy knot kind — you know, the kind carried by peasants when they storm the castle, and that couldn’t have been what was there. Thanks for taking time to research that and put the puzzle to rest, Left Field.

The story jogged something loose from the recesses of my very distant memory. I haven’t thought about it in decades, but from my very early childhood, I remember black spherical torches being used as highway warnings. That would have been in the early to mid 1960s. Even then, electric warning lights seemed more common, and the burning torches must have been giving their final gasp.

I found a picture on the internet.

It wasn’t that long ago that a wheel came off our stake bus on the way home from a regular monthly weekend temple trip (the stake runs the bus every month).Thankfully the bus had reached a built up area and had slowed down, but the sister sitting above the wheel was still injured. At least it didn’t happen at speed.

Not to distract from the post’s theme, but this made me think of a long-ago temple trip that affected my extended family. In early January 1958, my grandfather chaperoned a youth bus trip — including my own father and my uncle in the group of young men — from Boise, Idaho to the Idaho Falls Temple. About an hour out of town, the bus slid on the highway, turned completely around, fell over on its side and skidded along the ground for a ways. My uncle was thrown out of the bus, and my dad was cut and bruised, but both were all right.

My grandfather was thrown against the side of the bus, and collided with another man. His injuries were the worst of all 39 passengers on the bus — both lungs punctured and ten ribs broken. He was hospitalized for nearly a month, but eventually recovered. It’s still surprising to me that no one died in the accident. And my dad’s teenage journal remarks that the Ward eventually refunded everyone their money!

Even though I know these temple trips required much sacrifice and produced a lot of cohesion among Church members, I am still very glad my wife and I can zip in our car and be to our local temple in just a matter of minutes.