History Matters: Early Scout illustrates organization's rich history in Utah

[fgoodwin]

History Matters: Early Scout illustrates organization's rich history in Utah

 

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_2960208

 

Ardis E. Parshall

Salt Lake Tribune

 

Utah's Boy Scouts have had a rough couple of years with forest fires, massive searches for lost Scouts and the untimely deaths of beloved sons. Although recent tolls have been heavy, the rewards, over time, have been priceless.

 

Tessie Dalebout turned 6 in the spring of 1912. On May Day of that year, as the curly-haired child skipped along the banks of Parley's Creek in Salt Lake City, she lost her footing and slipped into the turbulent waters.

 

The stream, swollen by melting snow, caught the tiny girl and tumbled her end over end. She was carried for nearly a block, passing under two bridges before some men who had seen her fall were able to catch her. They pulled her out and laid her on the bank. A crowd gathered around her still body.

 

Noticing the commotion, 15-year-old Louis Rosenlund ran to see what was happening. He saw that rescuers were using the old-fashioned technique of pumping Tessie's arms and legs in a vain attempt to restore breathing. Young Louis immediately took over from the adults.

 

He turned Tessie on her stomach and positioned her arms under her forehead to raise her nose and mouth off the ground. Then he knelt astride the child's hips, placing both hands on the small of her back. With a gently increasing pressure, he leaned into Tessie, pushing slowly, steadily upward to compress her abdomen and lower chest. Water gushed from her mouth.

 

Then Louis suddenly relaxed his pressure, and the natural elasticity of Tessie's body caused her chest to expand and air to fill her lungs.

 

Again and again and again, Louis applied firm pressure, forcing the breath out of Tessie's lungs, then relaxing his arms to allow fresh air to rush in. It took nearly 15 minutes, but finally Tessie began to breathe on her own. She was carried home to her grateful parents before any doctor arrived.

 

It turns out that Louis was a patrol leader in the Waterloo Ward MIA Scouts. On a recent Tuesday evening, Louis and his friends had learned the relatively new Schaefer method of artificial respiration. While not as sophisticated as today's mouth-to-mouth breathing, it was light-years ahead of the old sailors' trick of stimulating the lungs by raising and lowering a victim's arms.

 

The Boy Scout movement originated with Lord Robert Baden-Powell in Great Britain in 1909. It was brought to the United States in 1910, and an Episcopal minister organized Utah's first troop in Logan the same year. Louis' Waterloo Ward boys formed the first LDS-sponsored troop; organized during the winter of 1911-1912, it competes with the independent group raised by an 18-year-old Scout for honors as the earliest Salt Lake City troop. It's hard to be absolutely certain, but Louis' rescue of little Tessie is possibly the first case of a Utah life saved by Scout training.

 

Tessie soon recovered from her near-drowning. She grew up and married. When Tessie Dalebout Harrop passed away in 1971, having lived all her life in Salt Lake City, she was survived by her husband, a son, five grandchildren and a great-grandchild. They, and all of Tessie's descendants born since then, have good reason to thank the preparation that Scouting teaches.

 

Cool-headed Louis Rosenlund continued to support civic and fraternal organizations as he grew up. He worked as the Salt Lake City sales rep for a Minnesota paper company. The former Scout was never robust, however, and heart disease took him from his wife and two small children in 1931, at age 34.

 

Our Boy Scouts will cope with the lawsuits and relearn lessons of wilderness safety. We will remember Garrett Bardsley and Paul Ostler. And we will think of countless good turns, communities and lives bettered by Eagle Scout projects, and a noble line of boy heroes reaching back to the earliest days of Scouting in Utah.

 

Ardis E. Parshall is a Salt Lake City historian and writer.

[Kahuna]

Good to see a positive, and especially historical, item about scouting in any paper.

[EagleInKY]

Thanks for sharing a great story. I think this could be a great scoutmaster's minute when you are using a First Aid theme.

[jr56]

Thanks for sharing.

[jnthnhrrp]

I am taking a class from BYU on Genealogy and had typed "Tessie Dalebout" as a google search. She is my great grandmother, and I am one of her descendents from her only child, Donald Harrop. I really appreciate you telling this story. It's amazing to think that she was able to benefit from the skills young men can learn in the Boy Scout program. I never knew this story and don't even know if my other family members knew it. As part of genealogy work we need to document as much as we can. Are there any sources you could lead me to to find some documentation for this. Thank you again for writing this story. It was very inspirational to me and will continue to be for my family.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Harrop

[epalmer84]

Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer was an English physiologist who developed the Schafer method of artificial respiration.

 

http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/Biographies/MainBiographies/S/Sharpey-Schafer/1.html

 

Wilbert E. Longfellow was a commodore of the U.S. Volunteer Life Saving Corps, and an early proponent of swimming instruction and of the Schafer method of artificial respiration. Longfellow received the Silver Buffalo Award in 1929 for his work.

 

http://gso.redcross.org/WilbertLongfellow.php

 

Ed