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Stratton’s Local Hero Pregnant housewife receives Carnegie award for bravery
Stratton’s Local Hero
Pregnant housewife receives Carnegie award for bravery
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by Brian Swartz
William Luce, who lived in Flagstaff before growing up in Stratton, will never forget Alice Scribner, the 39-year-old housewife who saved him from drowning when he was 11 years old.
Bill was born in Anson to Kenneth and Lucille Luce. The family later moved to Flagstaff on the upper Dead River, and Kenneth worked in the woods, cutting pulpwood.
Planning to dam the Dead River to impound water for hydroelectric facilities farther south on the Kennebec River, Central Maine Power acquired all the property in Flagstaff and neighboring Dead River Plantation and started building Long Falls Dam in 1948. When the new lake flooded Flagstaff, “we moved to Stratton and settled beneath Bigelow Mountain,” Bill said.
Near the South Branch of the Dead River lived Kenneth E. and Alice D. Scribner, married in 1936. Kenneth pumped gas at a local filling station, and Alice cared for the growing family.
Loggers stacked pulpwood on frozen streams during the winter. “When the ice melted, the pulpwood floated down the rivers to the lake,” Bill said. “Pulpwood would often wash up” on the South Branch shore.
In spring 1953 “I fashioned a raft with four-foot sticks of pulpwood and took some boards and nailed them all together to make a raft on the South Branch,” he said.
On Saturday, May 16, Bill was playing near the river with Randy Scribner, about age 13. A friend named Terry had fashioned a boat from boards but did not caulk them. He pushed off from shore and the boat started sinking with him still aboard.
“It was kind of a cool day,” so Bill had donned a sweatshirt, a jacket, and jeans. “The ice maybe had been out for a couple of weeks. The water was extremely cold.”
Terry shouted for help. Stepping onto his raft, Bill “poled out” into the river toward the boat. Then “my pole stuck in the mud” about 30 feet from shore; the raft flipped, spilling Bill into water seven feet deep.
“Normally I was a pretty good swimmer, but I had so many clothes
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on, it weighted me down,” he remembered.
“I kept going under, and I finally went under and didn’t come back up.”
After sending his little sister running home to get their mother, Randy Scribner ran to the blacksmith’s house, where “as luck would have it, his son [Donald Tiner] was home on leave from the army,” Bill said.
Three months’ pregnant with daughter Melissa, Alice Scribner ran about 200 feet from her house to the riverbank, took off her shoes, and dove into the river where Bill was last seen. She first felt around for him with her feet, then looked beneath the surface; there he was, floating three feet down!
Alice brought him to the surface. Despite the cold now numbing her body, she swam while towing Bill to a log boom. Alice “got me up over a boom log,” Bill said. “I was regaining some consciousness, but it seemed like a dream.”
(cont. on page 40)
William Luce of Stratton stands beside Alice Scribner as she displays the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission medal awarded to her for saving Luce from drowning in the South Branch of the Dead River on May 16, 1953. (Courtesy of William Luce)
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(cont. from page 39)
Still partially in the water, Alice clung tightly to the boom and Bill. Arriving about 10 minutes later, Don Tiner went onto the boom and brought Bill to shore. Alice climbed from the river. Arriving firefighters used a resuscitator to help Bill breathe easier; when he was fully conscious, they hustled him to the Scribner house, “stripped me naked, left a little blanket around me, and fed me warm milk and whiskey to warm me up,” Bill recalled.
Kenneth Luce was in a boat out on Flagstaff Lake, “trying to get a boom around the pulpwood” floating there after the spring thaw, Bill said. Residents “went out on the lake” and told Kenneth what had happened; he hustled into Stratton and took his son home.
Lucille Luce was cleaning a summer residence on an island at Chain of Ponds. “She knew nothing of it [the near drowning] until she got home, probably around suppertime,” Bill said.
Alice had sore muscles and caught a cold, but neither she nor Bill came out the worse for wear. Lucille Luce soon wrote to U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith about Alice’s bravery. Smith contacted the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission about the incident; investigators arrived in Stratton “and interviewed me and the other children that were involved and Alice,” Bill recalled.
The Carnegie commission soon cited Alice for her bravery (citation 387842870) and mailed her a letter “to tell her she had been awarded $500,” Bill said. The Scribners “lived in an old, old farmhouse, and she bought a house intown, in Stratton.
“By the mercy of God, she saved me,” said Bill. “I had my life; I didn’t lose it by drowning.”
The Luces later moved to Winthrop after Kenneth developed heart trouble, but Bill stayed in Stratton until Lucille turned ill. He joined the family in Winthrop, which “to me was a very big town, and Augusta was huge. Never seen so many big buildings in my life.”
Bill “joined the Navy out of high school” and “made a career of it. It was the light of my life. I got to do many things that many people [his age growing up in Eustis] haven’t done.”
A medical corpsman assigned to Marine units during his first four years in the Navy, Bill said that “by the grace of God I didn’t go to Vietnam.” He went to Antarctica instead, and “the penguins didn’t shoot me.”
As for Alice, “I got to see her in her later life,” Bill said. “It was never brought up about my drowning, but it was always a happy time visiting with her.”
Edward Scribner died in 1987. Alice died on August 30, 2001; she and Edward lay side by side in the Stratton Lower Cemetery in Eustis.
“It’s not about William Luce,” Bill said. “It’s about Alice Scribner and what she done. It was a heroic deed,” and “because of her I had my life.”
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