British tank helps demolish city house

The Lawton Constitution ^ | February 19, 2007 | BY MITCH MEADOR

[Calpernia]

Retired Maj. Pete Bailey has been helping Gene Westbrook ever since the former Fort Sill drill sergeant got home from the VA hospital in Dallas in July 2004.

“He’s actually the first one who swung a hammer inside the house to help repair stuff,” said Gary Secor, past chairman of the Oklahoma Veterans Council.

Bailey was delighted to hear the Westbrook home had been selected as an Extreme Makeover: Home Edition project, and he was standing on the street corner Saturday when an excavator finished the job of reducing it to rubble.

“This just tickles me to death. That family deserved every bit of it,” said Bailey.

A native of Great Britain, Bailey emigrated to Canada in 1962 and the United States in 1964. He was in a British parachute regiment before coming over, and he served 22¢ years in the United States Army, starting as a tank lieutenant before getting a commission in field artillery. He was an adviser to the Nebraska National Guard at the time he retired out of Fort Sam Houston, Texas, in 1986. He had planned to go to work for an oil company, but it went under in the oil crunch.

Fortunately, he and his wife, Suzanne, owned a home in Lawton that they had purchased during one of their tours here, and Bailey came up here to work for Northrop.

Bailey is a member of Military Order of the Purple Heart Chapter 602, which made its first contact with Westbrook in July 2004. Since then, Westbrook has become a life member of the chapter.

“When he came back from hospital, I got some volunteers from Chapter 602, and we got (the Westbrooks) to give us a list of what they needed done in the house. For example, the front door wouldn’t latch properly,” Bailey said.

Somebody had to stand outside the shower door and hold it shut while somebody else took a shower inside, so the chapter fixed that. Members also rerouted the guttering so it would drain away from the patios and not cause a muddy mess.

“We completely gutted his woodshed and rebuilt it ... so that he could wheel his chair in and he could do woodwork,” Bailey said.

The chapter membership told the Westbrooks that any time they needed anything to just give them a call. Bailey said that when his wife heard about the Westbrooks’ second accident on June 10, 2007, she said,

“Why don’t you guys with the Purple Heart see if you can get his name submitted to Home Makeover?”

The board took the matter up at its next meeting and said, “Yeah, go for it.”

“I thought, ‘Well, I better go talk to the Westbrooks first.’ So I went down and talked to Gene and Peggy, and she said, ‘Oh! It’s already been started by Fort Sill.’ And that’s when I got in on that action.

“If Home Makeover had not come here, ... Great Plains AMBUCS were going to sponsor the building of a house for the family with donated monies and that kind of stuff. So it’s been a dual process. And now (the Westbrooks are) going to get the whole house free. I love it! If AMBUCS had had to do it, then some of their old furniture would have had to have gone back into the house. You just can’t beat this, not the way this happened,” Bailey said.

Bailey missed the actual drive-through on the demolition because he was at a Vietnam Veterans of America meeting, but he and Suzanne had driven by on their way back from dinner Friday night and seen the tank parked on the street. Being from Britain, he knew what he was looking at: a 1985 British Chieftain.

“I said, ‘Holy smoke! Looka there.’ I’d heard they were trying to get one.”

Saturday morning, the tank was backed into the Westbrook driveway and surrounded by a hundred people in white hard hats and blue Extreme Makeover: Home Edition T-shirts, chanting, “Tear it down! Tear it down!”

A crew member with a bullhorn told the crowd to back up to the opposite side of the street. A couple of crew members did a last check of the house and exited through an opening in the storm door from which the screen and glass had been removed.

Then the tank backed its way into the home’s converted garage, leaving a gaping cavern where a brick wall had stood just seconds before. Cameras were rolling as the vent sticking up through the rooftop tilted askew.

The spectators clapped and cheered. Ty Pennington of the show’s design team clambered aboard the tank in his bright blue hard hat and led them on.

After the tank had knocked down the first few walls, the three bulldozers and one excavator that were waiting in back took over. The excavator clawed into the roof like a hungry Tyrannosaurus while Lawton firefighters hosed down the debris to alleviate the dust problem.

Once the rubble was pushed to the street and hauled away, dirt work began Saturday afternoon. Barry Ezerski, who has volunteered to handle public relations for the project, said two to three feet of soil will be removed from the site — 600 yards of dirt in 40 truckloads — to lower the grade enough to make the new home more accessible to Gene’s and James’s wheelchairs.

Now that the old house is out of the way, Ron Nance’s The Oaks Development Company and more than a thousand local volunteers can get down to the actual task of building a dream home for the Westbrook family in partnership with the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition design team.

[Calpernia]

Fun Pictures!

    JEFF DIXON/STAFF
The crew of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition captures the moment as a 1985 British Chieftain tank makes a cavern out of the front bedroom of the Westbrook home at 6417 NW Euclid and then backs up to have another go.

    JEFF DIXON/STAFF
This excavator claws the former home of Gene and Peggy Westbrook’s family to pieces on Saturday, paving the way for ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to work its magic on what will be their new home.

    JEFF DIXON/STAFF
This 1985 model British Chieftain tank owned by Earl Tucker of Wallis, Texas, knocks down the first walls of Gene and Peggy Westbrook’s home at 6417 NW Euclid on Saturday.

[Calpernia]

Home remolding TANK style. Fun pics.

[SandRat]

General Patton Would be proud. Asking why not an American Tank but proud none the less.