American Decades
The Benny Hooper Incident
Boy Falls in Well.
For twenty-four hours in May 1957, seven-year-old Benny Hooper was a national celebrity. He fell into a twenty-one-foot-deep, ten-inch-wide well being dug for irrigation by his father, and he was trapped. Manorville, the Long Island, New York, community where he lived rallied to his support, along with the East Coast news establishment, as construction workers, firemen, policemen, and a physician worked feverishly over a daylong period to save Benny's life. The drama was covered by over one hundred news reporters and over forty television and radio broadcasters. Both the New York Times and the New York Daily News used airplanes to get the pictures they needed. Nineteen and a half hours into the ordeal, Dr. Joseph H. Kris, attending physician, admitted that there was little hope. But he was wrong. Five hours later a construction worker lifted Benny out of the well. Billy Graham, who was conducting...
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1950's Medicine and Health
