1946 Good Deed Rewarded : Heroes: After 46 years, former Boy Scout gets medal for saving friend’s life. The two are reunited in Maryland.

Some said the 15-year-old was a genuine Boy Scout hero for rescuing a drowning friend from Maryland’s Patapsco River, but the Scoutmaster was not about to tout his own son for the Honor Medal--it wouldn’t look right, he thought.

So the Scoutmaster put away the application for the medal, one of the highest national awards the Boy Scouts give, and the only recognition that David J. Bastien received for his bravery on that warm Sept. 3 morning in 1946 came from his buddies: a tin amusement park game token attached to a bit of colored cloth.

David J. Bastien, now 61, grew up and raised his own family and accumulated a passel of scouting badges, ribbons, pins, patches, certificates and trophies.

The rewards of nearly five decades of scouting crowd the walls of a room in his home, pack the pages of loose-leaf books, decorate the chest of his tan uniform shirt.

Now a new award sits on his coffee table--the Honor Medal.

After Bastien’s father, Ernest, died in March 1990, Bastien’s daughter, Vicki Bastien Schaal of Pasadena, Md., was looking through her grandfather’s scouting folders and stumbled across the old Honor Medal application.

The information was all there, including the handwritten testimonial letters that Bill Hoffman, the 10-year-old victim, and six other boys had written after the rescue.

“I went out too far and there was a drop,” Hoffman wrote. “I fell in and was going under the three (sic) time. When David Basstin (sic) he saw me drowning. So he came and grabbed me by the arm. And pulled me to shore.”

With Bastien’s grudging cooperation--”I don’t like to brag about it,” he said--his daughter and a friend, Genie Smuck-Posner, put the material together and sent it in June to the Advancement Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Four Rivers District.

“I thought the basis for it (the medal) was very sound,” said John Walker, chairman of the committee. “I thought it’s too bad he didn’t get the recognition for it at the time he performed the action.”

Walker sent the application with his recommendation to the Boy Scouts’ national headquarters in Irving, Tex., which issued 52 medals of honor in 1991.

On April 13, Bastien was awarded the Honor Medal in a ceremony in Millersville, Md.

And Bastien and Hoffman were reunited for the first time since Hoffman’s family moved away from the neighborhood in 1948.

Bastien, who is retired from AT&T;, telephoned Hoffman, now 55 and a truck driver living in Glen Burnie, Md., guessing that the name in the phone book might be the person whose life he saved so long ago.

The two men sat in Hoffman’s living room by the coffee table where Bastien had placed the Honor Medal, right next to the makeshift heroism award that his buddies gave him as a joke decades ago.