Backdraft From the Past : Ex-Firefighter’s Memory of 1955 Rescue Sparks Reunion, Media Blitz, Medal

Walter Voegtli rescued his share of screaming children and panicked adults during his 32 years as a firefighter in St. Louis and El Segundo. But one baby and one moment stuck in his mind after he retired in 1978.

What became, he wondered, of the infant boy he snatched from a burning St. Louis apartment seconds before it exploded in a backdraft of flame more than 37 years ago?

When he decided to track down the answer this year, Voegtli, an El Segundo resident, didn’t realize that his nostalgic quest would turn him and the lucky survivor--now a 37-year-old man--into minor media stars.

In an emotional encounter aired live on St. Louis radio earlier this month, Voegtli and William Larry Jett, who now lives in Los Gatos, Calif., finally met again. The reunion, held as a publicity stunt for a firefighting attraction at Universal Studios, held some poignant surprises for Voegtli.

“After 37 years of not seeing that little dude, this was really something,” Voegtli said, his voice cracking with emotion several days after the reunion. “He and I both got out about five seconds ahead of a real, live backdraft. We nearly bought it right there.”

And for the first time, Jett learned how close he had come to dying in his crib.

“God, I was only 2 months old, so I didn’t know how extremely dangerous it all was until Walter told me,” Jett said.

The fire started in a back bedroom of the family’s second-floor central St. Louis apartment on Feb. 11, 1955, shortly after Jett’s mother had put him down for an afternoon nap, family members said.

Flames moved fast through the small dwelling, Voegtli said, so fast that Jett’s mother had time only to rush her 2-year-old and 3-year-old sons to the street before the whole top floor of the building was on fire.

As the desperate woman screamed for her 2-month-old baby, two firefighters tried to protect her by pushing her back out of the building. Voegtli, then a captain in the St. Louis Fire Department, heard her cries, dashed back inside the burning apartment and groped through the thick smoke, following the baby’s soft whimpers until his fingers found the slats of a crib.

“I grabbed for this little fleshy lump I saw, tucked him under my coat like he was a football, and I ran,” Voegtli said.

“As it turns out, there was only a margin of five seconds for that baby to live,” he said. “It exploded from thick smoke to all flame in an instant . . . just ‘Whoooohm!’ It singed my hair and the back of my ears as I got out that door.”

Brief accounts of the rescue appeared in St. Louis papers the next day, along with a photo of Voegtli smiling proudly behind little Jett and his mother. A year later, the Jetts appeared with Voegtli in a television spot that successfully fought a proposal to slow the speed that fire engines could travel to a fire.

Voegtli figured that was the last he would see of young Jett. In 1957, he moved to El Segundo with his wife and daughter to work for that city’s fire department. He retired as a battalion chief in 1978.

Through the years, however, Jett remained on his mind.

“I figured he might be a brain surgeon, he might be a bum, but I just wanted to know what happened to him,” Voegtli said.

Prompted by a nostalgic look earlier this year at the yellowed newspaper accounts of the rescue, Voegtli set out to find Jett. After months of searching on his own, including calling families with the surname Jett in St. Louis, Oklahoma City and Memphis, Voegtli asked the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to reprint its 1955 photograph of him and the Jetts.

Jett’s aunt recognized the picture and called her nephew in Los Gatos, a suburb of San Jose, to tell him that Voegtli was looking for him. The two men got in touch by phone, talked about the rescue and the ensuing 37 years, and struck up a friendship.

While the nostalgia trip was nice, neither suspected that anything more would come of it.

But after the Post-Dispatch ran a front page feature about Voegtli and Jett, a St. Louis radio station and Universal Studios decided it was time to bring them together again.

As part of the publicity for its new “Backdraft” fire scene attraction, the amusement park joined with the radio station to reunite Voegtli, Jett and Jett’s mother, Peggy Guilford, now a resident of Sonora, Calif.

In addition to the reunion, Voegtli was told there would be a “special surprise.”

“I figured they’d have Kurt Russell there, or something,” Voegtli said.

Instead, St. Louis city fire officials presented him with a gold medal of valor for the rescue.

“They told me they didn’t have any such thing for firemen back in 1955 and they wanted to give it to me,” he said. “I didn’t expect any of this. All I wanted to do was find the boy.”

That boy, now all grown up and working as a commercial painter, said he’s glad Voegtli came looking.

“Walter’s just such a nice guy. It’s just so neat to know him now,” Jett said.

The tale has prompted ribbing from his friends, who have noted Jett’s penchant for working on tall scaffolding and enjoying such hazardous sports as barefoot water-skiing and motocross racing. A bad break and ligament damage to one arm in a motorcycling accident nearly forced surgeons to amputate it, but Jett’s doctors eventually figured out how to save the limb, he said.

“(Friends) say I must give my guardian angel a workout,” Jett said. “I didn’t realize how early that got started.”