Up Till Now: The Autobiography

in a death, but we concentrated on their successes. The reality of television programming is that people don’t die on Tuesday-night reality shows.
    We saved at least 350 lives. That’s not an estimate, that was based on letters we received from viewers telling us that because of a story they saw on Rescue 911 they either were able to save someone else’s life or their life had been saved. We never anticipated that happening. This was a prime-time program on CBS; our primary objective was to save our jobs. So when we started getting these letters we were astounded. And very, very pleased.
    The first letter we received came from a family in St. Louis. On a very cold Tuesday in November 1988, they were moving into a new apartment. The apartment was freezing and they had great difficulty figuring out how to keep their furnace lit. The husband had spent the day transporting boxes from their old apartment as his wife and their four children unpacked. But as the day progressed she felt progressively sicker. Finally she told him, “You need to take me to the Emergency Room right now. I think I’m dying.”
    The Emergency Room was crowded and as her problem was not visibly life threatening this couple was told to wait. As they waited they watched a TV in the waiting room, which happened to be tuned to CBS. The second story we did that night was about a woman who suddenly and for no apparent reason got very sick. Coincidently this couple had been having problems with their furnace too, and her husband had been smart enough to call the gas company. A technician rushed to their house and discovered a potentially lethal carbon monoxide leak.
    The couple in that waiting room was stunned. The story had accurately described her symptoms. In a voice on the edge of panic she asked her husband, “You think that’s what could be wrong with me?” Both of them realized instantly that their four children were asleep in that new apartment. The husband raced home—by the time he got there three of their children were unconscious. The fire department rushed them all to the hospital where their lives were saved. As the doctor who saved them said, “In another half hour one or more of these kids could have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”
    It was miraculous. Nobody really expects CBS to save lives. But that was just the beginning. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch did an article about it, which got picked up and was reprinted around the country. And then we began receiving letters from people who had saved someone’s life by applying the Heimlich maneuver, which they had seen demonstrated on our show, or by using CPR as we’d shown it, or by picking up an extension cord that had been hidden under a heavy piece of furniture and discovering it was badly frayed. When we first went on the air I was told that slightly less than 50 percent of communities even had a 911 system—by the time we went off the air the nation was well on the way to almost 100 percent coverage. After we did several stories in which the person calling 911 couldn’t correctly identify the location from which they were calling, many communities switched to a more sophisticated emergency system in which the address came up automatically. Eventually we had documented more than 350 situations in which information from Rescue 911 had saved lives. Undoubtedly there were many more.
    Our stories came from police and fire departments, 911 dispatch centers, hospitals, newspapers, and viewers. It was impossible to meet these people, to do this show, without developing a tremendous sense of appreciation for what they do on a daily basis as well as satisfaction with the entire system. It works. When someone needs help, the system gets help there literally in minutes. It may well be the one government agency that delivers what it was established to deliver. Of course, there were many stories we couldn’t tell. One man, for example, managed to get his tongue stuck to the door on his freezer compartment and couldn’t get free. We had several stories about naked people who had somehow managed to become wedged into the space between their toilets and the wall and couldn’t get free. Several thieves got caught in chimneys, and I remember a pair of burglars who robbed a store then had to call 911 because the doors were locked and they couldn’t get out. We didn’t tell the true story about a local fire department that was called to help a squirrel whose head had gotten caught