THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 27, 1996 TAG: 9606260004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: PATRICK LACKEY
LENGTH: 67 lines
If national heroes were raindrops, we'd be having a drought.
Neither presidential candidate would make an ideal role model, let alone a hero. Sports stars lost luster when sportswriters took to writing the truth.
In the absence of national heroes, we need local heroes more than ever.
As chance would have it, there's a national organization in Pittsburgh, Pa., that seeks out heroes in order to recognize and reward them. Since its founding in 1904, the organization has recognized 8,005 heroes in the United States and Canada, including 146 Virginians, 30 of them from Hampton Roads.
Industrialist Andrew Carnegie formed the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission after learning of an engineer and a miner who entered a collapsing mine in an attempt to save others but were killed along with 176 other men and boys.
Police officers, firefighters and military personnel usually don't qualify for the Carnegie award because they are paid to take risks and do good. The rescuer must knowingly put him- or herself at risk. The person rescued cannot be a near relative. If mothers who rescued their own children were eligible for Carnegie awards, women would dominate the list. As it is, 90 percent of the heroes are men.
The youngest hero was 8, the oldest 80. The poorest hero was flat broke, but some were wealthy. One was a utility company CEO. One of every five heroes was killed.
There are no common denominators among the heroes, except that they were altruistic and brave - two qualities we all should hope to have. Most risked their lives in water or flames.
The commission's executive director, Walter Rutkowski, said he is altruistic but not brave. A few years ago he was eating at a lunch counter, two stools down from a young woman, when a man grabbed the woman's gold necklace and attempted to flee. Rutkowski watched, frozen, he said, as the woman caught and tackled the thief and recovered the necklace.
He may be too hard on himself when he says he is not brave. Who knows what he would do if a life were at stake. None of us knows for sure what we would do if we saw someone near death.
In Hampton Roads, two distant relatives named Spruill drowned in separate attempts to save others. On May 24, 1992, Teddy Spruill of Virginia Beach, a 31-year-old farm hand, saved a 32-year-old woman in the Atlantic Ocean but was carried to sea himself. Jeffrey M. Spruill, 20, of Norfolk, died in an unsuccessful attempt to save a man from frigid waters.
In both cases, the Spruills were safely out of dangerous water but entered it at great personal risk to try to save others. They did not put themselves first and everybody else second. They were unselfish to the point of risking everything for others.
It seems to me that there is another class of hero: people who are not necessarily brave but who certainly are self-sacrificing.
The teacher who reaches into her own pocket to buy materials for her students - isn't that person a hero? A man who tutors students one night a week - isn't he a hero? Chesapeake's Fannie Threet reared basketball great Alonzo Mourning and took more than 100 kids off the streets and into her heart and home; she's a hero in anybody's book.
Perhaps it's a parent's duty to be on the lookout for all kinds of heroes and to bring them to the attention of children.
Ideally, of course, the parent is a hero, an everyday example of sacrifice to help others.
And, the parent often can look to the morning paper for stories of heroes and read them to children.
The parent says, ``Look what this person did? You could do that some day. You could help others.''
We all need to aim high, and heroes reveal what surprising heights are possible. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB