Out of the blue comes an email from Larry Studdard. If you qualify for a senior discount at the picture show, went to high school in the area and paid attention to the sports pages of that time, you need no introduction.
Larry was a star athlete, a quarterback for the Lee High Generals and a sprinter on the track team. He went to Georgia Tech on a football scholarship and was a wide receiver for the Yellow Jackets. Before all that, though, he was a quarterback for Warren “Oop” Swoope at Joe Cook Junior High.
Larry was trying to find Oop to tell him what a positive impact he’d had on his life. I expect there are many others, who feel blessed to have had Oop as a coach. Count me among them.
Larry included with his email an account of a 1962 hunting trip he took with his brother, Vernon; his father, Vernon Sr.; his father’s brother, Wayne and soon-to-be brother-in-law, Bilbo Davis. With the help of a borrowed feist, they were hunting squirrels in Kolola Springs.
What happened on that December afternoon has become an oft-told piece of Studdard/Davis family lore.
As Larry describes it, squirrel hunters fan out and walk through the woods until the dog picks up a scent and starts barking. Once sighted, the squirrel does its best to escape by jumping tree-to-tree or taking cover while being shot at by the hunters below. Such was the case for one particular squirrel that took refuge in a hole in a black gum tree. Wounded, dead or unscathed? The hunters didn’t know.
Ignoring warnings from Vernon Sr. and Wayne, Bilbo, then 30 and in prime physical shape, declared he was going to climb the tree and retrieve the squirrel. Up he went.
The accident
Bilbo reached in the hole, grabbed the squirrel by its tail and tossed it to the hunters below. Turns out, the creature was not dead. Startled, Bilbo lost his grip.
Bilbo hit the ground with a sickening thud and lay lifeless. As he was losing consciousness, he heard one of the men say, “Oh my gosh, he’s dead.”
When Vernon Sr. began to press on Bilbo’s chest, 12-year-old Larry elbowed his father aside and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, a procedure he had learned months earlier as a Boy Scout.
Writes Larry:
“I kept forcing air into Bilbo as hard as I could … gasping for air myself as adrenaline rushed through me. …Bilbo was turning pale. His eyes were rolling back. (Maybe he was dead.)”
Larry paused for a moment and put his ear against Bilbo’s mouth, straining for evidence of life. Bilbo mumbled something Larry wasn’t able to discern. It was not until that night when the boy was in bed reliving the events of the day that he understood what Bilbo was saying: “Don’t stop.”
“I blew as hard and long as I could. The explosive sound of Bilbo involuntarily inhaling, exhaling and screaming with pain in one effort remains, along with my four children’s first cries, the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.”
The first words out of Bilbo’s mouth: “I’m not dead.”
The challenge now was getting the patient to a hospital without injuring him further. The elders dispatched Larry and Vernon to the homes of relatives, who lived nearby to call an ambulance and get blankets, flashlight and an ax to cut trees for a stretcher. Vernon went to the home of his Uncle Wayne and Aunt Dottie, where his two sisters, Evelyn and Bilbo’s bride-to-be Dee, waited for the hunters’ return.
“All I could think was that Bill had been shot when Vernon told me there had been an accident,” Dee said last week. “I was hysterical.”
Angels
As the boys ran back to the hunters with supplies, a black pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road. Two strangers got out; one of them said, “Where’s the man that’s hurt?”
“I don’t know who they were or where they came from,” said Dee. At that point, Evelyn had made a single phone call, to her mother, a nurse, who had called an ambulance.
One of the men walked up to Dee, who was still in hysterics and slapped her across the face. “Shut up, you’re not helping anyone,” he said.
Meanwhile, the brothers were sprinting their way through the woods back to their hunting party, stopping every so often to yell to them for orientation. By now, it was dark. Another hurdle the hunters would face was a taunt barbed-wire fence between them and railroad tracks that offered an unobstructed to the road.
As they were moving the critically injured Bilbo (internal bleeding, three ruptured vertebrae and a broken shoulder) to a makeshift stretcher, the two strangers, one of them a large man, the other short, both reeking of alcohol, arrived at the accident site. When the older Studdards explained they were going to evacuate Bilbo through the woods rather than try to cross the barbed-wire fence and go down the railroad tracks, the two strangers, who thought otherwise, took charge.
At the barbed-wire fence, the shorter man produced a pair of simple wire pliers and snipped the fence as though it were kite string. “The wires snapped with a loud boing, like a fiddle string…,” Larry said. “We were all amazed by his strength.”
All the while keeping the stretcher level, the two strangers took Bilbo down into a ditch and then up a 12-foot-high incline. The men laid the stretcher on the ground between two sets of railroad tracks that crossed Cal-Kolola Road and disappeared as suddenly as they had come.
By then, other relatives who lived nearby, along with an ambulance, had arrived. The black pickup truck, which had been blocking traffic in front of Uncle Wayne and Aunt Dottie’s house was gone.
Elton Thomas met Davis and the Studdards at Columbus Hospital. Thomas, a surgeon, told Dee her fiance would probably not make it through the night. Bilbo’s chest cavity was filled with blood and virtually every internal organ had been dislodged.
Repaying kindness
Bilbo spent 12 days in Columbus Hospital. Miraculously, no surgery was performed. Twenty-one days after the accident, Bilbo, wearing a half body brace he would wear for four months, was able to walk under his own power, albeit slowly, down the aisle to stand beside his future wife, Dee Studdard.
This December they will have been married 54 years. They have three children and 12 grandchildren.
An account of Larry’s heroics appeared on the front page of The Dispatch the following week. Other newspapers picked up the story. Accompanying the report was a photograph of 12-year-old Larry in coat and tie standing next to the hospital bed of his future brother-in-law.
Larry, 66, is president of a construction-consulting firm in Roswell, Georgia. He is convinced his brother-in-law’s saviors, the two unnamed strangers, were angels. “Who carries a set of common wire pliers in their back pocket?” he asks. He theorizes the alcohol was God’s way to humble his father and uncles, who were Southern Baptist deacons.
To this day, those two angels have never reappeared. Should they inhabit temporal bodies, they might be proud to know the man they helped save is full of life at 84, an avid and generous gardener and woodworker, who has spent his life repaying their kindness.
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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