The man who had a heart attack and drove his car into a dentist’s office yesterday is still hospitalized but doing much better today, according to a family friend.
Author and historian Ron Tyler, former director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, is resting, eating, sitting up, and has no serious bruising or broken bones after his ordeal, said Morris Matson, a docent at the Carter museum.
“They can’t find any after-affects,” Matson said. “He had a blackout but all the tests that have been run show no evidence of internal damage. It was a miracle.”
The miraculous part was having a group of health professionals ready to spring into action.
“The dentist office does cosmetic surgery so they had a triage team there,” Matson said. “If he’d been at home working on one of his books [when he had the heart attack] he might have been lying on the floor until somebody found him.”
Matson said Tyler has no recollection of the crash.
Tyler resigned from the Carter in April with plans to spend more time writing and researching history. He has published about 25 books, including Nature’s Classics: John James Audubon’s Birds and Animals and Visions of America: Pioneer Artists in a New Land.
