On a sultry July afternoon, my husband, Chub, woke me from a nap saying, “Helen’s on the phone.” She screamed “Walter Ray’s gone down in the lake. Come help me!” I dropped the receiver and said, “Call George Alton of the Red Cross -- Walter Ray has gone down in Helen’s lake.” I jumped in the car and sped toward Helen’s, six miles away. I traveled Fulton Gravel road with the gas pedal almost to the floorboard. Then reality set in.

I’d have two dangerous turns ahead: one near the Whittle place and the other at Olivet Church. I’d have to swim, and I was dressed for tennis! My bathing suit bag was in the car, so I reached to the back and got it. Out came a swim suit; off came my shirt and shorts. Off came my underwear, and, at that dangerous curve near Whittle’s place, I was stark naked. Once beyond that spot, I pulled and tugged till I was properly dressed to attempt the rescue.

Arriving, I was soon over a board fence, running into the lake. An inner tube was floating on the quiet water. Walter Ray’s older sisters jumped up shouting, “Out there ... on out ... farther.” When the girls yelled, “Right there!” I took cross bearings, sighting a line between a tree and a shed and then began what was to be a four-hour stint of diving and searching.

The lake dam had been made at the end of the ditch, and I realized that the non-swimming 9-year-old neighbor boy had gone down in the deepest part. Surface dives, one after the other, were getting me and I was soon too “winded” to get to the bottom and back for air so I stayed a few feet under and looked for shadows. Down underwater alone, I accepted the fact that Walter Ray lost his life about the time Chub woke me from my nap.

A couple of Red Cross swimmers arrived to help search, and Chub brought our canoe and kept it nearby where we swimmers could hang on for rest. Finally I went to shore, put my arm around the child’s mother, my good friend, and we cried together as I said, “Mae, it’s too late.”

The highway patrol brought a huge seine and a boat. They called back to Jeff City for grappling hooks. Men in the boat and canoe managed the ends of the seine, and two or three of us stayed in the water to go under whenever the seine pulled against something deep down. We always found it to be caught on tree stubs and other debris. Sometimes they pulled it to shallow water to release hundreds of fish so the next drag could begin. Cars lined the shore and cast eerie lights on the surface. An ambulance parked at water’s edge, and a neighbor walked the pond bank with a folded blanket waiting for recovery.

Patrolmen arrived with the grappling device, brutal looking thing with several big sharp hooks, to drag behind a boat. I’d taught my lifesaving students about such a device, had sketched it for them but had never seen a real one. About an hour later someone called out through the darkness, “Haul in the net.” In the eerie light, I saw the blanket cover the boy, and he was quickly loaded into the ambulance.

Chub and I sat up the rest of the night, thanking God for the safety of our toddlers and vowing to teach them water safety with renewed vigor. It’s that vow that prompts me to write about it today.