Remember?

Set your time machine to October, 1987, Wednesday the 14th, to be precise. By that coming weekend, the predictions of television turning the world into a "global village" came true as the citizens from Boise to Bolivia tuned to CNN to see how little Jessica McClure was doing. At the age of 18 months, "Baby Jessica," as the news invariably referred to her, fell into a well in Midland, Texas, and was rescued after almost 60 hours down there. 

I remember it all very clearly because we had bought our first house earlier that year, and I was down in what would become the family room, rigging up a cable connection that no one needed to know about, you know what I mean? Just be cool.

So I got to watch a lot of the coverage and CNN was over it like sauce on a pizza, leading the media horde in beaming a signal all over the globe as the rescue took place.

Midland is Texas Oil Country, so the locals are not without experience with digging and drilling.  So, the initial plan was to drill a shaft parallel to the well where Jessica lay in wait, and then tunnel horizontally to reach her. BUT! Even though local oil drillers showed up to help, they couldn't, because the rescue field was all rocky.

It was a mining engineer who showed up with the way to go...waterjet cutting, which I figured was like some giant Water Pik. It took 45 hours to get the shaft and cross-tunnel done with his supervision. By then, rescuers could hear the little girl singing "Winnie The Pooh."

Years later, I was reminded of what happened next, when the tallest man in the world saved two dolphins by reaching his incredibly lengthy arms down their gullets to remove dangerous pieces of plastic that would have killed the fish and which no surgery could get to.  What happened was, a local guy - a roofing contractor named Ron Short  - volunteered to be lowered down the shaft. Short's unique qualification was that he was born with no collarbones, and therefore could work in tight spaces with his shoulders collapsed. 

But in the end, Paramedic Robert O' Donnell went down the hole, got Jessica from inside the well (she had one leg pressed up on her forehead all that time) and handed her off to another paramedic who took her to the surface.

All that was on live TV on a Friday night in prime time, as it happened, and to this day, although she has no memory of the events at all, Jessica McClure Morales still meets people who realize that, at the age of 39, she is still Baby Jessica, the girl in the well. 

"In a way I guess it happened the way it was supposed to," she once told People Magazine. "I was picked on because of it, but most people are kind and think what happened is an amazing miracle. It is. I don’t believe that any of it would’ve happened without God."

Then, and now.