( From HistoricTalk)
One can never know when those CPR skills will be needed! This incredible photo, entitled "Kiss of Life", features two coworkers,
Randall G. Champion and J.D. Thomspon, utility workers out
performing maintenance on electricity lines in 1967. Champion accidentally brushed against a low voltage line and went
unconscious. His harness kept him from falling off the pole,
while his quick-thinking coworker below him climbed up and
gave him mouth-to-mouth. It was the photographer, Rocco
Marabito who had been driving past, who called for an
ambulance!
Thompson saved Champion’s life that day, and Rocco Morabito
won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for “The Kiss
of Life” in 1968. Champion lived another 35 years, surviving
another electrical shock along the way, before dying of heart
failure in 2002.
J.D. Thompson holds a copy of the photo that captured him saving a fellow electrical lineman’s life.
Retired photographer Rocco Morabito