Imagine you’re a Lineworker 20 feet up on a utility pole. You have your harness secured but then you reach over and your hand touches live current. It runs through your body looking for a way out and finds it at the bottom of your foot. Pain, tingling, and numbness happen all at once and then your heart stops.
This is what happened to Randall Champion in 1967. Luckily two people were there to save his life. J.D. Thompson saw his co-worker dangling from his safety harness and knew something very wrong had happened. He rushed up the pole and tried to perform CPR. At the time CPR included mouth-to-mouth along with compressions. With both of them hanging off a pole compressions seemed out of the question so he gave mouth-to-mouth until he felt a slight pulse. He unbuckled Champion’s harness and carried him down.
The other person there was Rocco Morabito, a photographer. On his way from another assignment, he looked up and saw Champion hanging. One account says Morabito took out his camera, took a shot, and then called an ambulance.
Randall Champion survived the ordeal and lived another 35 years and as of 2017 J.D. Thompson was still alive.
Rocco Morabito won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for what is now titled “The Kiss of Life.” Morabito served in World War II as a ball-turret gunner on a B-17. The longevity for a crew on a B-17 bomber isn’t very long but he survived 34 combat missions. The most interesting thing I found on Morabito was how he summed up those 34 missions. With only 17 words he said, “I went in the Army Air Corps and when I was discharged came back to the Journal.”
J.D Thompson downplays the incident saying if it wasn’t for the picture, his rescue would have been no different from many that took place routinely.
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