Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1965. Reporter makes news with heroic ice rescue

Edwin Holden had retired from the Navy and become a reporter only a few weeks before the afternoon of Feb. 14, 1965, when the police scanner in The Journal's North Kingstown bureau caught word that a boy was stranded on broken ice on Mill Cove in Wickford.

Holden stood at the edge of the cove near the end of Oakdale Avenue, where he could see Richard McElveen, 11, sprawled flat on a small ice floe. From his position, he could tell that the Fire Department's rescue boat, coming from the other side of the cove, was blocked from reaching the boy by a stretch of solid ice.

Holden took out his wallet, handed it to a bystander and plunged into the icy waters. Holden swam most of the way to the boy before he realized the water was only five feet deep and he could wade.

When Holden reached the ice raft, Richard was frightened and crying at first, but then worried that Holden was pushing him toward the opposite side of the cove and that he would not be able to get home. "Just lie still and we'll get you home," Holden told him.

After they reached the shore, the police took Richard and Holden to the dispensary at the Quonset Point Naval Air Station for a checkup.

Holden said afterward that he had given his wallet to a bystander because, a year earlier, all his credentials had been ruined when he dived into Narragansett Bay to save a drowning man.

So was Holden some sort of superhero masquerading as a mild-mannered reporter?

Probably not. During his career with the Navy, he had been in the frogmen, a forerunner of the Navy SEALS.

In August 1965, he became a bonafide hero, when Gov. John H. Chafee awarded him with a citation for heroism.