Jimmy Ward

By BOB HIGH
Staff Writer

Editor’s Note: This story offers a peek at the special section coming in Thursday’s News Reporter dedicated to the men and women of the county’s Emergency Medical Services.

Two men drowned when a boat with three males in it overturned in the Waccamaw River near Pireway in December 1972. It was two days before Christmas.

The Tabor City Rescue Squad was called and responded quickly. Other rescue squads from the county appeared. The late Howard Stanley, chief of the Tabor City unit, directed operations.

One of the bodies (Dale Benton) was found when rescuers recovered the overturned boat Christmas Day. A piece of rope, attached to the rowboat, had wrapped around the 19-year-old’s arm.

The search for the second man went on for a week. Then, two weeks. Three weeks. A month.

Finally, on the 38th day – Jan. 30, 1973 – the second body was found and pulled from the cold, black water.

The second victim was Jimmy Ward, son of D. P. and Lela Mae Ward of Nakina.

Mother recalls son’s death

Lela Mae Ward went to the river every day searching for her son.

“Howard Stanley and I became very good friends. We were close,” she said as she recalled the events of 34 years ago.

Lela Mae, now 73, said she cooked a good country meal on Sunday, Jan. 21, 1973. She took the food to the river and furnished it to the rescue workers.

“Howard and I were sitting in the rescue crash truck on the river bank. I had known Howard before. He’s a distant relative of my husband’s.

“I asked him why couldn’t Nakina have a rescue squad. He told me what we had to do.

“Well, I let it lay there for a time. I had to find my son first. After he was found, I knew I had to do something. Other people in the community felt the same way. We could have our own rescue squad,” Lela Mae related.

A meeting on March 15, 1973, in the old Oak Forest school, birthed the Nakina unit. There was plenty of interest in the community.

Lela Mae has been a member ever since, except for nine months about 30 years ago. “I don’t run ambulance calls now. I’m too old, but I’ll drive to the scene of a wreck or whatever happens and help,” she pointed out.

Link to child

“I love it. I’m very happy to be a part of it. I feel like it’s a part of my child. It’s a link to him.”

James Donnie “Jimmy” Ward was born Oct. 5, 1942, the son of the late D.P. (Donnie Pershing) and Ruby Smith Ward of Nakina. Jimmy’s sister Bonnie Grey was born in 1946 after their father returned from World War II duty.

The next year Ruby Ward and her third child died in childbirth. Lela Mae Hawes celebrated her 15th birthday in early August 1948. Three weeks later she married D.P. Ward and inherited two children.

Lela Mae and D.P. had four more children – Pete, Shirley Price, Jane Harrelson and Wanda Jones.

Lela Mae, shelling the last of her butterbeans in the kitchen of her home along Pine Level Church Road, put down her pan of beans and related the following story:
“Jimmy and Bonnie are my children. I didn’t birth them, but they’re mine. Jimmy remembered his natural mother. He called her ‘Mama.’ He called me ‘Mother.’
No back talk

“He was never a problem. There was no back talk. He lived here with us, and he always told me when he went out where he was going and when to expect him back.

“I remember it like yesterday. It was foggy that Christmas Eve. They were going to go to a cookout at the ‘Ole River’ landing. They were going in a rowboat downstream from the Pireway landing. It’s about five miles by the river.

“The river was up real high. It was flooding out of its banks. There was plenty of water. I warned them (Jimmy, Dale Benton, 19, and 17-year-old Derry Thomas “Tom Tom” Ward) to be careful.

“Jimmy (now 30) was leaning against that doorway in this kitchen, right over there. He surveyed the whole room and he looked at me. ‘Mother, don’t worry about us.’
“I raised Tom Tom and his brother Freddie. Tom Tom told me they were paddling, trying to find the entrance at the cookout place. There’s a gnarl (hairpin turn) in the river there.

Climbed a tree

“They must have hit a branch of something in the water and the boat flipped over in the backwater. Tom Tom swam out to a tree, and he tried to find a way out.

Everywhere he went he was in water. He couldn’t get off the gnarl.

“He spent the night there, and the next morning he heard a motor. He climbed a tree so they could see him from the river.”

Lela Mae said there had been snow, ice and more snow and ice in the Nakina and Pireway communities during the time they were searching for Jimmy.

“I may not be as active as I was all those years, but I love it. It’s still in my heart. It’s Jimmy legacy, through me. I don’t think there’d ever been a mention of a rescue squad here before the drowning.

“I feel I sacrificed my young’un for us to have it, and I’m very proud of all that’s been done by so many people in the rescue squad.”

Another early member

Betty Long, now 66, is another early member of the Nakina unit. “The community really pitched in and helped. We had tremendous support,” she pointed out.

“The practical work in those early days was easy. We just used plain ole common sense. That’s one of your greatest tools, anytime. Instead of thinking what should I do, you just do it. You can’t stop and go to the textbook,” she declared.

“We have to make quick decisions, and we still do it that way,” Long said.

Betty said she went for years without a radio, and she finally got one in 2000. “I’d had a pager since the early ‘80s.”

She told about a rescue call she’ll never forget. A man was pinned up a power pole when he was electrocuted in Dulah. Malachi Stanley, Terry Ward and Betty went to that call. The victim had both legs and his left arm amputated.

Couldn’t raise funds

“He’s still living, and a marvelous worker in physical therapy and helps a lot of people put their lives back together,” she noted.

She also said Nakina was eligible for several grants in the early years, but most of them required matching funds, and the rescue unit couldn’t get enough money together to qualify.

Betty decided she’d be quiet when she was asked about a funny story during the early years. She chuckled, but didn’t betray other squad members.

Lela Mae Ward, however, remembered an early incident. “Me and Mabel Smith were taking a patient to McCain (hospital). We had an old ambulance that was wore out. We had to use plow lines to keep the rear doors closed.

“Mabel was driving and we were on (N.C.) 905 at the Nakina post office when the rear doors flew open. I was in the back with the patient. I started screaming for Mabel to stop.

“If you don’t stop you’re gonna lose both of us,” I hollered. “She finally stopped and we got the rope tied back,” Lela Mae related.

Diabetic coma

Mabel Smith is now in her 84th year. “I don’t know what people would do down here now without a rescue squad,” she said.

Smith knows firsthand the importance of trained people being nearby and able to respond quickly. “I was saved from a diabetic coma by the Nakina members.”

Smith also recalled how in the early years of the unit’s history she sold thousands of hotdogs at ballgames to raise $2,300 to buy stretchers.

Gray Long doesn’t like to talk about one of the most unusual things that happened to her on a rescue call.

‘Gray was an EMT, and she went with me on a call. It was at night, and I told her to drive. As we were leaving the building with the ambulance she hit something in the driveway,” her husband Guy volunteered.

Others drove around it

“She stopped and I got out. She had run over a cinder block that had been beside the driveway for several years. There were two or three of ‘em.

“All the other drivers made sure they missed ‘em, but not Gray,” Long said with a laugh.

Another unusual situation was the night Long was called to use a boat and rescue some people.

“It was about 20 years ago. I got a call at 4 a.m. from Avery Formy-Duval. We had a big rain and there was water over a private road just the other side of the Seven Creeks Bridge at Pireway.

“They needed a boat to get them out. Before I could get the boat and start down there I got another call from Avery. They had called back and wanted to know who was coming to get them.

“Avery laughed when he told me they didn’t want to be rescued when he told them it was me who’d have the boat.

“You know, I never did hear who those people were. We’d all like to have more calls like that one,” Long said with a smile.

Joe Jacobs, one of the original board members, recalls that first year. He was driving the old Plymouth station wagon used as the first ambulance.

“Somebody was in the back and hollered for me to drive faster. I told them I had it on the floor, I was doing 70,” Jacobs said with a laugh.

Much more of Nakina’s unit history will be included in a special section about all of Columbus County’s rescue squads to be published Thursday, Aug. 2.