To: IC720 who wrote (1486906 ) 9/17/2024 11:54:07 AM From: Wharf Rat 1 RecommendationRecommended By
Respond to A village raising a child...Greene, Bob , Wall Street Journal , Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. . 17 Sep 2024: A.13 It was around dusk in Springfield, Ohio. This was late spring in 1990. I was passing through town and heard some music. A local festival was going on. I followed the sound of the guitars to City Hall Plaza. People were listening to the band, eating carnival food, drinking soda pop and beer. In a large reflecting pool on the plaza, children were splashing about. The water was maybe 6 inches deep. The band was loud, the crowd happy. And then I saw it: a woman running up to a police officer and, alarm in her voice, saying: "A boy is missing!" He had been in the reflecting pool, she said, and other children told her they couldn't find him. The officer walked to the edge of the pool. Some items of children's-size clothing were on the pavement. A child pointed to a line of fountains spurting into the air. The rest of the pool was shallow, but the wells surrounding the fountains were three or four feet deep. More officers arrived. I saw one jump into the water and start feeling around the bottom. There were shouts for the other children to get out. Most people at the high-decibel festival were looking at the bandstand, unaware anything was wrong. Officers reached desperately into those wells around the fountains. A woman -- the child's mother -- was sobbing, telling an officer that her son was 3. The cops in the water kept searching beneath the surface. And then another officer came running. In the arms of someone next to him was a 3-year-old boy, soaked, pure fear in his face. The officer said: "Ma'am, a man named Rodney Bowman pulled your little boy out." Having reunited mother and child, the police reminded her not to let him out of her sight in big crowds, and the festival went on. I stayed the night in Springfield, and the next morning I was able to find where Mr. Bowman lived. He was 26, a restaurant manager in town. He told me that he had come to the festival with his wife and daughter, and as they arrived, "we saw these kids wading in the pool. I saw some arms sticking out of the water. It didn't make sense -- the water was so shallow. "But then I saw the child's head. It was under the water, and then it came up and disappeared. He seemed like he was trying to scream, but he was swallowing water and he couldn't." With all his clothes on, Mr. Bowman said, he jumped into the water. Someone in the heart of his hometown was in trouble, and someone had to help. "I grabbed him and I pulled him out of this well where the fountains are," Mr. Bowman said. "It was like there was suction pulling him in." The child was trembling, terrified: "He was too afraid to cry. I carried him out of the water." Springfield is in the headlines this week for unhappy reasons. But for more than 30 years, whenever I have heard the city's name, I think of that evening when someone needed a stranger to care, and the caring stranger, without hesitation, came to the rescue. It happens every day in towns all over this country, and seldom does it make the news. --- Mr. Greene's books include "Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights." Credit: By Bob Greene
