Glynda Harris sits with Albert McMullen in his hospital room, where he is recovering from a broken bone.(Melanie Duncan Thortis The Vicksburg Post)

[12/18/03]Glynda Harris said it was the strained look on Albert McMullen’s face that made her stop to help him on the side of Interstate 20.

“My angel here comes by, and she went down there and changed that tire, a lot better than I ever could,” said McMullen, 75, in telling the story.

“It was the right thing to do,” said Harris, 44. “If you’d have seen his face, you’d have stopped, too.”

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving when McMullen, a lifelong resident of Vicksburg, was driving along I-20 near the U.S. 61 South interchange and had the flat.

He pulled off and started the process of removing the bad tire and replacing it with a spare, but it wasn’t going well.

Where gender rules say men normally stop to help women if anyone does that wasn’t a concern for Harris who said she just saw a person who needed help.

Things went well until McMullen, in turn, tried to help Harris finish the job by loading the flat in his trunk.

“I broke my hip in the meantime when I tried to pick up the tire and throw it in the trunk,” he said. “It throwed me instead of me throwing it.”

Harris said it was bad that she was “stopping to help him, and then he still got hurt. That’s just a bummer, you know?”

She said she was concentrating on tightening the lug nuts on McMullen’s spare tire and did not see him when he fell.

“It never dawned on me that he was fixing to actually try to pick (the tire) up,” Harris said, adding that McMullen made no sound and gave no call for help when he fell.

After he broke his hip, McMullen wanted to try to drive home by himself, but Harris wouldn’t let him. She stayed with him for about 45 minutes until McMullen’s wife, Dixie, could arrive, Harris said.

“She stayed with me, bless her heart,” McMullen said.

Dixie McMullen noted Harris’ name and reported her gratitude for the kindness Harris showed her husband.

“She actually picked him up and put him in that car,” Dixie McMullen said. “I’m not sure I could do any of that. I think it’s just great.”

Harris did suggest to McMullen an ambulance, but at his request used his cell phone to call his wife instead. Reached while shopping at Wal-Mart nearby, she arrived quickly. But Albert McMullen drove himself to his house before Dixie McMullen drove him to River Region Medical Center’s emergency room, she said.

This week, Harris visited the McMullens in the acute rehabilitation unit on the hospital’s West Campus, not far from where the story developed. She said it was her first time ever to stop and try to help someone she didn’t know.

“I try to be nice to people, but it’s not something I practice every day, stopping for strange people on the side of the interstate,” she said.

Harris, a Vicksburg resident since 1998 and an employee of Ryan’s restaurant, said she was reared by her grandmother in Selmer, Tenn.

“I’ve always respected elderly people,” she said. “I was raised that way. If that was somebody I cared about, I would want somebody else to do the same thing for them.”