EAST MACHIAS MAN, RALPH GILES FATALLY INJURED AFTER FALL FROM TRUCK IN ACADIA NATIONAL PARK - 1931

November 4, 1931


Ralph Giles, aged 22, the only son of Mr. and Mrs. Otis Giles of East Machias, fell from an Acadia National park truck Friday afternoon about 3;45, breaking his neck and dying in the Mt. Desert Island Hospital less than half an hour later.
The accident is one of the most tragic and terrible in the annals of the region.  Young Giles, in his third season of work here, had climbed aboard the truck scarcely a minute before the fall.  Willis Perry was driving.  Beside him in the cab was foreman Edwin C. Mitchell of the Park Road Construction crew.  Perry shouted, "Everything all right!"  Someone yelled, "Yes, go ahead."  This is the usual procedure to avoid accidents.
The truck moved forward but a few feet, with the motor in second gear only, for it had not gathered momentum sufficient for Perry to shift as he turned a curve.  A short ways up from the rear and almost instantly Perry, one of the Park's best drivers and most capable men, had stopped the truck.  As he glanced down he saw young Giles upon the ground and the wheel of the truck was against the boy's head, not, however, doing anything more than to move it slightly.
It was all too evident by the injuries boy's cries that he was desperately hurt and stopping for nothing save to raise him and gently lay him in the truck his comrades rushed him to the Mount Desert Island Hospital.  Dr. Ralph W. Wakefield, Government physician in this section being summoned.  But the boy was scarcely breathing, hospital officials state, when he was brought in and death took place within a few moments.
The men in the truck with young Giles say that he, like the rest were seated on the rails and that he started to stand and move just as the curve was reached.  He lost his balance, lurched and went head over heels, striking the ground with impact sufficient to snap a vertebrae in the back of his neck.
The Park officials were at once notified and the dead boy's family told of the tragedy by telephone.  Mr. Giles arrived in the evening from East Machias, and met by foreman Mitchell, at whose home he spent the night, and in the morning took the boy's remains to his home.
Young Giles made friends everywhere.  He was conscientious and industrious, winning the liking and respect of his fellow workmen and of those in charge of work where ever he was employed.  he was a young man whose life in his home town and here was such as to make him held in affection by all who knew him.  Besides his parents, he leaves two sisters, and he had made himself financially responsible for the education in high school of the younger sister.  The grief in his family is one of which the Park employees join and the shadow of his passing is already felt by them all.