CWA Everyday Hero: AT&T Tech Puts CPR Training to Work

Bobby Click was fixing a phone line in a Vidor, Texas, back yard on a sweltering June afternoon when he heard a commotion coming from the family's above-ground pool. A little girl, black and blue in the face and not breathing, had been pulled from the water.

In a split-second, Click threw off his tools and ran toward the girl and the hysterical adults holding her. The CPR training he gets every three years from AT&T kicked into high gear.

"I can't remember everything that happened," Click, a member of CWA Local 6139, said. "It was so emotional. I know I grabbed her and I laid her on the ground and I started CPR."

Meanwhile, fellow technicians and Local 6139 members, Mark Ferguson and David Clifton, called 911 and helped keep the homeowner and neighbors calm. "Just as the ambulance arrived, she began to cry, and that's what I was hoping for," Click said.

Medics told him and the child's mother that the little girl wouldn't have lived if someone hadn't immediately given her CPR. "If you had asked me, how do you do CPR on a child, I probably couldn't have told you," he said. "But it all came back to me. Training gives you the courage to act."

It also helped him stay calm -- until it was all done. Then "I was shaking all over," he said. "I drove to my daughter's home right down the street because I just had to hug my two little granddaughters," who are 1 and 2 years old.

Click, a technician for 33 years with AT&T, received an award from the local ambulance service, Acadian, at a ceremony that included the girl and her family.

He's uncomfortable being called a "hero" but is happy to speak out to persuade others to learn CPR. "I'm just a person God was able to put in that situation," he said. "It's blessed me probably as much as that family, to be able to do something like that. I think everyone should know how to do what I did."