Written by Jim Farfaglia
Each January, as the new year begins, I like to look back on what events took place fifty years ago. Google makes the national and international search easy. A half-century ago, in 1971, we saw Disneyworld opening in Florida, the voting age lowered to 18 and Russia successfully launching the first space station. In the world of music we were introduced to the songs of James Taylor, but lost the voice of Jim Morrison. Movie theatres across our country were showing The French Connection and A Clockwork Orange. Locally, 1971 was notable because it saw the founding of the Oswego County Search & Rescue Team.
I’m not sure I would have ever known about our county’s search and rescue team if I hadn’t learned about it while collecting stories for the Fulton Library’s Memoir Project. The Project seeks to archive important events in the city’s history as remembered by the people who lived them. Through the Project I met folks like Steve Ives and Barbara Bartholomew, who helped form Oswego County’s search team. Once I heard the story of why and how the team began, I knew I’d found a story that deserved to be told.
I’ve always been drawn to real life situations where a problem or challenge is turned into something of value, and that certainly was the case with the catalyst for our county’s search & rescue team. The need for such an emergency organization was the result of a tragedy that took place 150 miles from Oswego County, in the Adirondacks town of Newcomb, New York.
It was there in July of 1971 that eight-year-old Douglas Legg, who was vacationing with his family on their estate, wandered off from their property and disappeared. Within hours, hastily gathered search parties began combing the dense forest around the estate. Those searches continued, sometimes by up to 1,000 people, for days, then weeks. Douglas was never found.
How could a boy just disappear, with no trace? Part of the searchers’ challenge was that a half century ago, there were no organized search and rescue teams in New York State; in fact, there were none throughout the eastern United States. It was only to the west, in the Rockies and the mountains of California, that teams were just starting to formalize. Here in Upstate New York, efforts to find someone lost fell under the responsibilities of the police or firefighters, whose job training often did not include methods for conducting organized searches.
The loss of Douglas Legg was a tragedy of the cruelest type and local media covered the hope that turned into despair day after day. Following this from his home in Fulton was Bart Bartholomew. Bart had always been a community minded person. “If Bart saw a need, he wanted to be part of solving it,” his wife Barbara Bartholomew told me when I was gathering information about the search and rescue team. “The more he read and heard about the loss of little Douglas Legg and the failed efforts to find him, the more he thought about the need for professionally trained and qualified searchers.”
Bart wasn’t alone with his concerns. Joining him were Hugh and Jeannie Parrow, both of whom grew up involved with scouting and outdoor life, and Steve Ives, who, though only 22 years old in 1971, had already spent a great deal of time in the forests near his Volney home, including one day when he himself got lost and disoriented in those woods. When they learned that Bart was planning a meeting at his Fulton home to discuss what could be done to organize search and rescue efforts, they showed up.
In total, about a dozen Oswego County men and women committed to forming the original rescue team. Within just a few months, the group, aptly calling themselves The Pioneers, was training on weekends and weekday evenings, developing reliable methods to conduct a search. They didn’t have long to train. Soon, word spread through Central New York, and then all of New York State, of a professional team dedicated to finding those who’d lost their way.
The fledging team traveled wherever they were needed and soon Oswego County Pioneers found their energies and abilities stretched thin. Once they realized they could not keep up the pace of traveling statewide to conduct searches, the team took another innovative leap by offering training in search methods and invited concerned parties from all over our state. These trainings became standard, other teams were formed and the groups started working cooperatively, eventually forming the Combined Federation of Search and Rescue Teams of New York State in 1973.
Those trainings continue today, as the Oswego County Pioneers gets ready to celebrate its 50th anniversary. They still lead or co-lead trainings so that new searchers can assume roles that longtime Pioneers have done. Here’s how one of SAR’s recent recruits, Leonard Redhead, who was trained and joined the team in 2015, describes his experience with the team:
“SAR has been a way to give back to my community. It’s always a great feeling to ‘find’ someone who is lost or missing, and reunite them with their family and friends. Any time the call goes out, I always remember one important piece of advice I learned in training: respond to calls as if it’s one of your own loved ones who is out there missing.”
To write the full story of The Pioneers, I met Leonard and others at one of their search and rescue trainings. Along with talking with dozens of people who tirelessly give their time when someone goes missing, I was also given access to the meticulous files the team keeps of the hundreds of searches they have conducted. Each story, so personal to the families of their missing loved one, reminds me of the catalyst that started the Oswego County Search & Rescue Team, who fifty years ago took the bold step to turn a tragedy into a triumph. Congratulations to them all!
To read the full story of our history-making search and rescue team, check out my book, “Pioneers: The Story of Oswego County’s Search and Rescue Team.” Copies are available at the river’s end bookstore in Oswego or by contacting the Search & Rescue Team. Profits from the book support the team’s work.
