A familiar face will be missing from the crowd this Hog Days. The Hog Days committee co-chair and longtime committee member, Larry Flannery, won’t be attending the festival this year. Instead, Flannery will be home recuperating after a Monday night fall from a rickety ladder landed him in the hospital.
Flannery said the unfortunate accident occurred on Monday at 10:41 p.m. He can be so precise about the time, he said, because a security camera located in his garage where the fall happened, immortalized the entire episode on video.
A decision that will “haunt him for the rest of his days” led him up a ladder that evening, in spite of the fact that just about a week earlier, Flannery had taken a tumble from that same ladder and bruised his shoulder.
Flannery said he had just gone out to the garage to deposit some Hog Days related materials into his car when he noticed a small box of Christmas decorations had somehow fallen from the garage rafters. Rather than place the box on a bench and tend to it later, Flannery said he made the fateful decision to put the small box back into its place.
“I’m always trying to stay on top of things but this is one time I kind of overdid that concept,” said Flannery.
Box in hand, Flannery climbed up the six-foot ladder and was near the top when the whole thing collapsed, sending him plummeting to the ground.
“The rest is history,” he said.
His phone was in the house so Larry crawled on his hands and one knee inside, feeling pain the entire way. Rather than call 9-1-1, Flannery, who worried about passing out, made the decision to call his best friend, Tony Ramos.
Ramos is one of Flannery’s closest friends and rushed to Flannery’s house and accompanied him to the hospital. He even stayed with him in the emergency room for hours in spite of Flannery’s insistence that he go home to his wife and two children.
“It really moved me,” said Flannery. “I give most of the credit to Tony who took over and made sure everything was ok.”
Flannery’s injuries include a broken hip, which was broken cleanly in two places. But those clean breaks, Flannery said, meant he didn’t require surgery and on Friday, he was expecting to go home.
This Hog Days will be the first Hog Days that Flannery hasn’t been downtown assisting with preparations and details since 2003, but he said he’s not worried that his absence will create any difficulties for the committee.
“Honestly, I haven’t given it all that much thought. Hog Days is a community event. I am just one of the caretakers of it. It will go on and be just fine,” he said, although he will miss out on the fun.
Of course, Flannery will be reachable by phone for his fellow committee members and his friend and fellow committee member, Janie Metscaviz, joked that he’ll “still be barking orders.”
One concern he does have is that there won’t be enough volunteers to turn out to run the pork chop barbeque.
“We’ve had 71 Hog Days and people ask how long we’ve had a problem recruiting volunteers. Seventy-one years,” he joked.
Flannery is a patient at OSF St. Francis in Peoria and currently working on getting back on his feet. In spite of the pain, he was able to get out of bed on Thursday and take several steps with the assistance of a walker. He’ll need to learn how to do small things such as putting on socks with a broken hip, so he is undergoing physical therapy which will continue with home visits until he can do outpatient therapy.
“As long as I follow instructions, my body should heal in four to eight weeks,” he said. “By Christmastime, I could be back out shoveling the sidewalk.”
One thing he probably shouldn’t be doing is going back up a ladder anytime soon.
“Me and ladders aren’t getting along very well,” he said.
At the very least, Flannery said he will be purchasing a new one.
