The child had been submerged for at least 10 minutes. Her small body would descend a few feet below the surface of the cold water, while three feet up a metal chute, chaos ensued. Adults, including the girl's parents, were shouting and trying to retrieve their two-year-old daughter who had fallen down a narrow opening into the home's 10-foot-deep underground cistern. It was summer 1951 and only moments before falling, Frankie Bates and her two older brothers had been playing outside in the family's yard in Brooks. Frankie would end up being rescued by then 15-year-old Bob Wardle and after two days she'd make a full recovery. But in a turn of events in the years to follow, Wardle would be a speaker at her funeral. The bond wouldn't end at her death - the girl's son would discover years after the incident that he moved onto the same street as Wardle here in Cochrane. Wardle, who had heard the commotion from two blocks away, recalled the heroic event to the Cochrane Eagle nearly 70 years after it had happened. He was a full-time lifeguard that summer at the local make-shift pool - a dugout, crater-like hole filled with water. He recalls instinctively running over. "We were looking at cars in his dad’s garage and we heard screaming and yelling...We ran up and it was just chaos," he recalled . "There were women crying and screaming and men running around yelling. Somebody had tried to put a ladder down into the cistern." "When I got there, I remember yelling and telling them to get the ladder out," he said. "Two men grabbed it and pulled it and pieces of ladder went everywhere down into the cistern and all over the ground." Wardle decided he would have to go into the cistern to get the child. Two men grabbed Wardle by his wrists and lowered him down the chute into the dark cistern. "It was ice cold," Wardle recalled. There was a small pocket of air in the drum of the cistern where Wardle could breathe. It was pitch black and all he could do was feel around, first just searching a foot under the surface, then another few feet lower. On the third dive, he found the girl's seemingly lifeless body. "I remember I had to do a somersault underwater and plant my feet against the top of the cistern and push hard so I could get all the way down to the bottom. I remember going like this," he said reaching out his hand, "and there was this hair there. I was terrified because there really was a body down there." Wardle took the girl and swam to the air pocket for a breath and to announce to those above ground that he found her. He swam under water and pushed her up the chute. "Then two hands came down and lifted her up and then I set my wrists up and the two men grabbed my wrists and pulled me up," Wardle said. The girl's body was completely blue and lifeless. He worked on resuscitating the girl for the next 15 minutes when finally he heard a cough and then she was breathing and her colour was returning. In the years after the rescue, Wardle saw Frankie a number of times, the first of which during the following Christmas when the toddler came to his front door, wordlessly presented him a gift and then shyly marched back to her mother's car. "Frankie and I kept close all those years. At first, it was me going to see her and then going to her wedding. And then there was a shift in our relationship. She kept track of what was going on. I remember when my wife’s mother died and we had the funeral in Red Deer - who was there, but Frankie," said Wardle. "She always seemed to know, from then on, when we needed a visit. She’d drop in unannounced. It was a great relationship." The relationship furthered when Wardle's wife, who was working at a voting station in 2011, discovered Frankie's son, Michael Bates, was living on the same street as them after seeing his ID. But then, Frankie was diagnosed with cancer and in June 2017 she succumbed to the disease. "Two years before Frankie passed away, I asked her husband, I said, ‘Look I’m in my 80's, I would really appreciate if you and Frankie could say a few words at my funeral. It never occurred to me that it would be the other way around,” Wardle said. Wardle said he appreciated the unique relationship he developed and credits chance and his dad’s friend , Mr. Ingraham, who paid for him to take his life guarding courses all those years ago. “In many ways, it was a matter of chance. I happened to be on my day off, I happened to visit my folks and I happened to be looking at a car with my buddy close enough where we could hear the screaming,” Wardle said. “If Mr. Ingraham had not paid to get my training, that little girl would have died." Michael said he and his brothers and children have the appreciation that if it weren’t for Wardle’s actions, none of them would be here today. “There wouldn’t be me and their uncles and their wouldn’t be them,” he said referring to his children. “It’s really cool to be able to think that through and recognize that that’s the spill over effect. The one event itself is amazing but then it turns into a whole bunch of impact down the road.” Ellie Bates, Michael’s oldest daughter, chose Wardle to be her real life hero subject for a school project a few years ago. She even brought him into her class as a “show and tell” to explain how much impact Wardle’s actions had. “If my Nana had not survived this accident, 11 people would not be alive today,” Ellie wrote in her assignment. Wardle and Michael have organized a scholarship award to high school student starting this year in memory of Frankie Bates. The scholarship will pay the costs for all the courses necessary to obtain lifeguard certificate. “This is why this project is wonderful, because there’s going to be a continuous run of young people that are going to get the training that I had. And you never know (a drowning) can happen anywhere.” The official award is the Frankie Bates Memorial Scholarship Fund at the Calgary Foundation: The Bates Wardle Award. It will be presented to a high school student at the Cochrane High School award ceremony on June 7.
