Journal of Sacred Work

When and how are crisis behaviors learned? Childhood experiences are early teachers. 

Balboa, California, Summer, 1951 Dad and I (pictured in 1949) strolled with my little sister along its beach. Suddenly, "lightning" struck. A pair of unconscious teens was being dragged from the water.

A crowd gathered. The boys, blue-faced, were dropped on towels. 

“They’ve drowned,” someone said. 

My seven-year-old heart was racing. Was anyone going to do anything?

Everyone just stood there except one.

“Watch out for your sister!” Dad ordered. Racing forward, he cradled one boy, then looked up at the crowd.

“You,” he commanded another adult. “Take the other boy and copy what I’m doing.”

The startled man obeyed.

No CPR back then. My father used the “Holger-Neilsen Rescue Method.” Riveted, I watched him turn the dying boy onto his stomach, lean his own body weight forward, and push down rhythmically on the boy’s back. No response.

  “Keep at it,” dad called to his partner. So the other man persisted.

  Amid the thundering crisis, lightning struck again. The dead boy coughed up volumes of water, and opened his eyes.

   “Okay?” dad asked raising him up.

   “Yes,” he sputtered.

A miracle! I thought. Death into life.

The other boy was still “out.” Dad rushed over, eased the other helper aside, continued life saving to complete a second miracle.

Without dad, the boys would have died.

—

The lightning of that crisis struck the crowd equally. In the trailing thunder only dad stepped forward. Only he found the courage to lead.

Head of the Hollywood YMCA and already my hero, he had shared other stories of life saving. I had never seen him do it.

Many freeze in post-crises thunder. My father showed me, again, what leadership looked – including with his final act that day.

“Let’s go, kids” he said, leading us offstage.

As we walked away, I studied the bystanders. No one patted my hero father on the back. He did not need that. 

Humility, common in caregivers, rare among leaders, needs no applause.

-Erie Chapman, III