From the Daily Breeze: El Camino College cross country coach Dean Lofgren: From life-saver to life-changer
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By Scott Reid, Orange County Register
Dean Lofgren had just turned 18 when he and his EMT crew rolled up first on the scene of a gruesome multi-car accident at the intersection of Seal Beach Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway in Seal Beach in the summer of 1976.
"People had been thrown out of the cars, adults, children," Lofgren said recently. "I remember children having severe lacerations and bleeding and I remember just how robotic it was for you. It's an immediate triage you do in your mind, and you're going to the most needy of individuals from the life saving (standpoint), yeah, it's very quick. And I just remember being numb to the crying and the screaming of everybody involved. And you have to be. That's part of the reason I got out of the EMTs was because of the business, you just kind of lose that human compassion in some ways, because you have to do your job.
"I was interested in the life-saving aspect. I enjoyed the positive impact you could play in an emergency setting, but you start getting numb to the human sorrow."
Lofgren could put his brain on autopilot. The problem was he could not turn off his heart.
By August that summer Lofgren had left the ambulance company. A few years later he would get back into the positive impact business.
Life is a series of intersections. Most we pay no attention to as we speed through them, confident of our destination. Other paths are less certain. There are wrong turns and red lights. And there are Seal Beach and PCHs.
And sometimes, if we're lucky, we pull up to an intersection, a crossroads, to find someone who points us in the right direction even when we don't realize that we're lost.
For parts of five decades, generations of runners have found Dean Lofgren, the life saver-turned-life changer, on the El Camino College campus, at the corner of Crenshaw and Redondo Beach Boulevard in Torrance, the most important intersection of their young lives.