By Ronald Ahrens

A windy night of calamity in the summer of 1958 claimed the life of James George Russell.

As foreman of the overnight crew that started work on Friday, July 25, Jim rode the slip and was measuring the progress of the 250,000-bushel elevator that Tillotson Construction Co. had undertaken at Murphy, six miles west of Aurora, Nebr.

The wind caught Jim’s measuring tape, which was made of steel, and blew it into a 2.200-volt power line. The shock knocked him off the formwork, and the young man fell sixty feet. He died early Saturday morning, July 26, at the Aurora hospital.

We have found new details to go with an earlier post.

Born in 1936, Jim was fourteen years old at the time of the 1950 census. By then, William and Alma Russell had eight sons. The entire family was involved in elevator construction.

“We lived in Vermillion, South Dakota, but that summer I was in Aurora,” Dennis Russell recalled in a 2013 interview. “We were staying with Dad. I remember Mom taking that phone call.”

So many mothers had received similar calls during wartime. Now, thirteen years after the war’s end, Alma had lost her son to this accident.

Jim’s father William, born in 1900, had done construction of ammunition depots during World War Two. Known as Bill, he went to work for Tillotson Construction Co. after the War.

“He worked for them a long time,” Dennis said. “He left Tillotson’s and started Mid-States Construction Company with Gordon Erickson and another individual. I think he was a partner for a brief period and then ran jobs for them as a superintendent until his retirement.”

Bill retired in 1972, but he “always had fond memories working for Tillotson, I know that,” Dennis said. “I remember he was awful fond of Mary.”

Dennis recalled that, at his death, Jim had one year of law school remaining at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. He was married to Shirley, a nurse.

Our search turns up this obituary:

“When James George Russell was born in 1936, in South Dakota, his father, William Ruston Russell, Jr., was 36 and his mother, Alma O. Nelson, was 26. He lived in United States in 1949 and Vermillion, Clay County, South Dakota in 1950. He died on 26 July 1958, at the age of 22, and was buried in Vermillion.”

Jim enrolled in the university’s ROTC program. He and other South Dakota men received six weeks of training at Fort Riley, Kan. The training included weapons, tactics, and bivouac.

Ten months later, in May of 1957, he was commissioned second lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s Transportation Corps. We have no information on active-duty service.

The aerial photo at the top of this post was provided by Kurtis Glinn. It shows Tillotson Construction’s Murphy elevator, probably in the early 1960s. Note the ground storage of grain sorghum on the right.

“I was the manager at the Aurora Cooperative Murphy location in central Nebraska,” Kurt Glinn said. “I was told from the old timers in the area that were around when the elevator was built in the late-’50s [that an] accident happened there, shutting down construction for about a week.”

Our search turns up no photo of Jim Russell but we hope still to find one to complete a proper tribute to this man of obvious diligence and high character whose promise was cut short by a freak accident.