“He was blue,” Thompson recalled. “I mean, gray-blue.”
As he bolted to the pole, the panicked 26-year-old struggled to recollect his emergency training while he prepared to resuscitate his unconscious colleague.
“You actually had to breathe in the mouth and make this thing work,” he said. “If you didn’t do it right, the stomach blew up and you weren’t getting any air in to the lungs. I was putting air in him as hard as I could go. And also trying to reach around him and hit him in the chest.”
Thompson was shocked when his modified CPR attempt produced miraculous results.
“And, all at once, he came to.”
In those days, you didn’t find every human over the age of 10 walking around with an iPhone glued to their hands, so the fact that there was a newspaper photographer standing nearby proved to be utterly serendipitous.
Rocco Morabito just so happened to be strolling past West 26th Street in Jacksonville when the heart-stopping rescue unfolded, and he snapped what would become a 1968 Pulitzer-Prize winning photo to be remembered for ages to come.
Thompson, however, refuses to credit himself as the world-class hero he has been named, saying that his act is no different than any other rescue story—a human helping another human in need.
If it weren’t for Morabito’s renowned photo, he knows his story would not have stirred a viral storm than spans half a century.
Kudos to this brave man for his bold courage and humble spirit. May we all hold same that humility and selfless longing to help our own neighbors in need today.
