October 2006                                                       The Megaphone                                                                 Page 4

The Boy Who Saved My Life

 by Julie (Stout) Crim

  I wonder . . . I do that a lot. This time I wonder about the difference in reality and presumed reality. Old SA would say one is true and one is not. If a fact is true or not, if you think it to be the truth, you react one way and one way only. Whatever we all think of as reality is truth at that moment in time. I want to tell you about the boy that saved my life and this is not just the rest of the story but the whole thing.

  I was about 13 or 14 when we lived on the south edge of town and had a large yard. Over to one side was a grassy field where boys and girls played tackled football. Every weekend and some weekdays would find kids practicing their skills as football players.

  Sometimes, shortly before dusk my dad might light a bond fire and we all would roast hot dogs and marshmallows. With full bellies, we’d start a game called Slips. It was a lot like hide and seek and involved a lot of running and hiding. On this particular evening there were lots of kids running around in the almost dark. There was a fence along the south side of the backyard that I called a chicken fence. The metal wire was big heavy squares, big enough to put a foot into when climbing over the top to get to the other side.

  A group on us was running and being chased by another group, when we all went over the fence. I suppose it was about four feet high with sturdy fence posts not far apart. I had climbed over that fence a thousand times. I had jumped over that fence at least a hundred times. However, this time was different. Maybe because it was so familiar I was careless or maybe I simply misjudged. Whatever . . . my foot caught at the top of the wire and down I went on the other side, SMACK on my front side!

  I clearly remember the air being forced out of my lungs until I lay there as though I was a flat balloon unable to move. I tried breathing in, nothing happened. I tried again and again and again, nothing. I knew I was in trouble, real trouble. I could hear the kids running around and yelling, laughing and talking but I couldn’t move. It was almost dark and they couldn’t see me laying there almost buried in the tall grass. 

  “Well, I’m done for now,” I thought. “This is it. This is the end.” It seemed like a long time passed and then a miracle happened. A pair of hands came to my rescue. One strong hand grabbed me by the waistband in back and the other grabbed the back of my shirt and lifted, shaking me like a rag doll. He rolled me over as I gulped air, gulp after gulp after gulp. “Are you all right?” he asked. I shook my head yes and he was off and running.

  It seemed like no big deal to him that he had just saved my life and later I was too embarrassed to mention it to him or anyone else. After all, it was dumb of me to get my foot caught in the first place and I was just a dumb kid.

  A few years later I put two and two together and came up with what really happened. I had heard the term, getting the wind knocked out of you, but it was a football term and we girls didn’t play football anymore. We were grown up; we were high school girls now. Boys got the wind knocked out of them, whatever that meant, but girls didn’t. I asked several boys if they had ever got the wind knocked out of them and they all said yes, describing it about the same. Gee, it was no big deal to them. So now I know what really happened to me that summer evening when I fell over the fence and I know my life was never in real peril. But at the time I thought that sweet boy had saved my life and in my reality he did. 

  It’s been about 54 years late in coming but Larry Courtney, thank you for saving my life.

Julie (Stout) Crim '57