For a few years, Sue and i worked at St. Charles High School. She was a jack of all trades serving as an English, Journalism and Drama teacher. During her stay at SCHS, a strange and funny event took place and she wrote a story about it that was on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and picked up by the Associated Press and printed in newspapers all across the United States. Indeed, there was a question about it on a syndicated game show.
Jean Mudd, an English teacher at SCHS was sponsoring Mark Twain days and a part of that special event was a scheduled frog jumping activity. Mrs. Mudd anxiously awaited the arrival of the frogs, and as the date for the event drew closer, the frogs had not arrived. It was incredibly cold in St. Charles at that time and it was discovered that the frogs had been left in the outside mailbox over the weekend. In opening the box, 42 frozen frogs were found. They had been exposed to 3 nights of sub-freezing weather.
They were immediately taken to Dan Odom's first hour biology class and his students gathered round as Odom worked feverishly to revive them. Frogs are cold-blooded animals whose body temperatures adjust to the ambient temperature.
Odom immersed the frogs into a cold-water bath and into progressively warmer baths as they began to show sings of movement. Then in an act of rare heroism and servanthood, he applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to four of them and the back pressure-arm life method of resuscitation to the remainder.Mrs. Mudd said it was a rare sight to see the 6-foot-5 Odom "bending over all these little limp frogs and coaxing them back to life."
In the end, not one frog was lost and none seemed to worse for the ordeal when put through their paces. Now that was truly a different kind of serving.
The question on the game show was this: "Can you give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a frog?"
By the way, Dan Odom and I were the sponsors of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at St.Charles High and we had the largest huddle in the state of Missouri.
3 comments:
This is a great memory. Thanks for reminding me of that day and the story that resulted. I still remember those poor frogs resembling frozen frog "bricks" when they were first discovered.
Oh my gosh! :) That is SO funny!
Mouth to mouth for a frog....
Now that's something I've never heard!
I can't believe he saved all of them. :)
Great story!
Too cool that it made it on a game show!
John, don't know if you're reading these comments or not. I was a student at SCHS at the time, and remember this pretty vividly. Your account of it is the only thing I can find about this on Google. I'm going to go back and find my yearbook article and try to post it somewhere.
BTW, my sons both attend(ed) CHS. One's still there :-)
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