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FeedWally Thomas' Car-Through-Garage Stunt Featured in Worldwide Media
Edit ModuleWhen 91-year-old Walter “Wally” Thomas backed a 1998 Isuzu Rodeo through a garage door May 31 to fulfill his unusual bucket-list dream, none of the family and friends watching the stunt could have imagined how much publicity it would get.
Wearing a helmet and accompanied by his grandson Andrew Thomas in the passenger seat, Wally throttled the Isuzu into reverse and intentionally crashed through the garage door, something he always dreamed of doing.
The Woodstock Independent sent a reporter and a freelance photographer to the site of the stunt, the Hill Street home of Nick and Jamielynn Wedoff, who offered their one-car garage as the setting for the garage crash. The Wedoffs, longtime friends of the Thomas family, plan to demolish the structure this week to build an addition on their house.
Since that fateful crash, Wally’s story has gone viral.
“It just blows my mind,” Wally Thomas said June 5 as he worked alongside his son Ken in his Bunker Street garage to restore a 1955 Chevrolet. Wally had just answered a media call from a Minn
esota station that morning and talked to a reporter from Canada the day before, he said.
“It’s unbelievable people take to that type of story,” Wally Thomas said.
Wally’s wife of 70 years, Dorothy, 90, added, “It wasn’t a murder story or a kidnapping. It was something [Wally] wanted to do, and I think people enjoyed it.”
In addition to an article and photograph published in the June 3 edition of The Independent, freelance photographer Alex Vucha sold a 50-second video of the event to Captured News, a media distribution company in Chicago that sells photographs and videos to newspapers, television stations and digital news sources.
CBS-2 Chicago was the first to purchase the video, followed shortly after by Chicago’s WGN Morning News show. One by one, more media outlets bought the video, and others, such as The Washington Post and People.com, aggregated The Independent’s article.
“It’s astonishing,” said Vucha, 24, who has been working as a freelance photographer for two years. Vucha only began taking news videos for television stations one month ago, so he was delighted by the video’s success.
“I’ve been blown away by the reaction,” said Vucha, a Woodstock High School graduate who is now studying criminal justice. Vucha used two GoPro cameras and one tripod holding a video camera to shoot the stunt.
By midweek, the Associated Press sent its own reporter to Woodstock to back-cover the story, and purchased video footage taken by Tanya Thomas, who is married to one of Wally’s grandsons. That video had 212,000 hits online as of Friday, according to Ken Thomas.
A Google search June 5 for “Woodstock Man Backs Car Through Garage” revealed more than 300 articles. Stories and videos have been published in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, The Daily Mail in London and the Huffington Post, and footage has been aired on Good Morning America, The Today Show, Inside Edition and more.
Dorothy Thomas said family and friends from throughout the country have seen the footage, which has prompted a flood of telephone calls.
Wally Thomas always had an interest in cars. He owned four gasoline stations in Woodstock over a 50-year time span including the Thomas Mobil station at 315 Madison St., now home to a Shell station. Many years ago, he and his son competed in demolition derbies at the McHenry County Fairgrounds. Now he spends much of his time working in his four-car garage to restore old vehicles such as a '55 Chevy, an old Ford Galaxy 500 convertible and custom-built Thomas Flyer, retrofitted from an old U.S. Post Office Jeep.
After sharing his longtime car vs. garage door dream with his granddaughter, Becky Goers, a physical education and driver’s education teacher at Woodstock High School, the grandchildren got to work helping Wally fulfill his wish. A few times during the planning process, though, some family members wanted to cancel the event.
“Some of the grandkids were afraid Grandpa would get hurt,” Dorothy Thomas said.
Wally’s grandson, Andrew Thomas, who works as an accident reconstruction officer for the McHenry County Sheriff’s Office, found the old Isuzu, which was already slated for the junkyard. Grandson Brian Thomas found the garage of longtime friends, the Wedoffs.
For his part, Wally Thomas said he has no immediate plans for a follow-up bucket-list stunt.
