There is sadness among members of the Herald family. One of our number, part-time staff photographer Mark L. Rigtrup, is in the Holy Cross hospital fighting for his life, after a highway accident.
He was hit by an automobile while doing his job – taking pictures of the wreckage of a three-car smashup in which a Provo girl was killed on the rain-slick road at Lindon Hill.
Action pictures are important in portraying the news to the reading public and Mark loves to take them. He likes being right where news is being made. He has the drive and the spirit of a news cameraman – with a bit of printer’s ink in his blood, if the term can be applied to a photographer.
You get pretty close to fellow staff members in this business of deadlines and news-hawking. Thus, the shock was severe when George McKinney, alert Orem ambulance driver, phoned Friday night that he’d just brought Mark to the Utah Valley Hospital with a head injury and both legs broken.
Waiting with Mark there in the emergency room made me thankful for good doctors… for X-rays that pinpoint the fractures… for hospitals, for men like George McKinney, who stayed right there as long as he could be of service.
It made me proud, too, of a courageous young man – badly injured – who could put excruciating pain behind him while be asked repeatedly about his wife Deana and his two little boys.
With typical diligence, Mark (both legs in a cast to the hips) phoned from the hospital the next day to make sure we got the pictures he took just before his accident. We did. And they were good – good enough for Page One.
Hours later he lost consciousness. He was taken to Salt Lake Sunday morning. He is still unconscious as this is being written.
There’s an air of sadness here at the Herald, all right, But we have high hopes, too. We’re pulling for you Mark. All of your friends are. And that includes a lot of people. – N.L.C.