Morrisville's Christmas Miracle

I usually find J.D. Mullane's columns annoying, but this one is a feel good story about Morrisville that's refreshingly free of his usual subject matter.

Morrisville's Christmas miracle

Miracle rescue

Dec. 25, 1958, dateline Morrisville. The wire services reported the miraculous rescue of Carol Scheese, who had fallen into the icy Delaware Canal on Christmas Eve.

Posted: Thursday, December 22, 2011 6:00 am | Updated: 1:05 am, Thu Dec 22, 2011.

Morrisville's Christmas miracle By J.D. Mullane Calkins Media, Inc. | 0 comments

Carol Kenny should be dead. She knows this. She knows the date and place and manner of her ending: Dec. 24, 1958, in Morrisville, in the Delaware Canal, of drowning.
She said it’s a miracle she’s alive, and you wonder. The amazing events occurred in a span of about five minutes. A stranger’s premonition. A car into the water. The blasting horn. The teenage boy in the right place.
“It was miraculous,” said Kenny, 55, who lives in the Elderberry Pond section of Levittown.
In 1958, she was Carol Scheese. She was 2 years old and lived on Hillside Avenue. On that bitter cold Christmas Eve, she was playing outside, bundled in a pink snowsuit. She wandered from her minders, through a towpath gate, walked onto the frozen canal, and broke through into 5 feet of water. She was drowning.
Of this, she has no recollection, but newspaper stories, which she keeps, carry details.
“It’s a strange story,” Carol said, “but Mrs. Lambert was the strangest angle.”
That would be Hazel Lambert, a housewife. At the moment Carol dropped through the ice, Mrs. Lambert was a half block away when she was overcome with inexplicable dread. She told reporters in 1958 that she felt strangely compelled to drive to the canal, which is when she spotted “two tiny hands bobbing up and down.”
Attempting a rescue, Mrs. Lambert drove her car onto the ice, but it crashed through, trapping her inside. She leaned on the horn.
“The Taylors heard it,” Carol said.
The Taylors — Glenn, 15, and his father, George. They had stopped at George’s parents’ house on Hillside Avenue when the blaring horn drew their attention.
“My father was on the phone and he looked out the window and said, ‘Let’s get down to the canal, something’s wrong,’ “ Glenn Taylor recalled.
“We got there and the lady was in her car screaming that there was a baby in the water. I saw Carol’s pink suit. She was face down, and the real problem we saw was that if she slipped under the ice, she was gone,” he said.
Glenn retrieved a pole and, in a seated position, shimmied over the ice. He snagged Carol with the pole, lifting her head above the ice and water. Reaching, he pulled her to his lap, and shimmied back.
“I thought both of us were gonna go through the ice,” he said.
He and his father rushed Carol to Mercer County Hospital.
“I was in the back seat and I had the baby across my lap. Her breathing was so shallow. I picked her up by her feet and shook her and a lot of water came out of her,” Glenn said.
Doctors gave Carol a 50-50 survival chance, and credited Glenn’s lifesaving technique with keeping her alive. The next day, Carol recovered.
The wire services made it a national story. Even The New York Times sent a reporter.
“The phone rang every 15 minutes for a couple of days with reporters wanting to talk to us,” Glenn recalled.
Then the story was forgotten, but not by Carol Kenny and Glenn Taylor.
“My parents told me when I was about 8, and they never talked about it again,” she said.
Glenn said the events of Christmas Eve 1958 haunted him.
“It left a mark, deep inside. Things would trigger the memories,” he said. “I wondered, ‘What happened to her?’ ”
Carol wondered about him, too. Last October, she decided to find out.
He was a Pennsbury kid, and on a hunch, she figured he had graduated in 1961. She was right. Coincidentally, the Class of ’61 was having its 50th reunion in Washington Crossing that month. A classmate agreed to pass her phone number and email address to Glenn.
“I was floored when I got it,” he said. “I called Carol. We talked for an hour. All I wanted to know was did she have a good life?”
She did. Three children, two boys and a girl. She and her husband own a lawn service.
Taylor has been married 43 years, and has children. He is retired and living in Greensboro, N.C.
They have not seen each other since that Christmas Eve. They are working on a date to meet in the new year.
“I guess you could say the planets aligned correctly that day,” Glenn said. “Everything fell into place. If one thing didn’t happen as it did, it would have been a very sad Christmas.”
Carol is grateful for the 53 Christmases she’s had because he was there.
“On the phone, I thanked him for saving my life,” she said. “When I see him, I will give him a big hug.”