The Kiss of Life How One Mans Courage Saved a Colleague and Created a Timeless Photograph

In the summer of 1967, a routine workday on a quiet Jacksonville Florida street turned into a moment that would echo through history. High above the pavement, electrical lineman J D Champion hung unconscious from a utility pole after making contact with a powerful live wire, his life suspended by a safety harness and seconds slipping away. Below, shock and silence gripped onlookers, but beside him another man moved without hesitation. Randall G Thompson, his coworker, climbed toward him, driven not by calculation but by instinct, knowing that delay meant death.

Balanced on the narrow pole and surrounded by lethal voltage, Thompson found Champion without a pulse and not breathing. With no ground beneath his feet and no margin for error, he began mouth to mouth resuscitation, pressing life back into his colleague while danger hummed all around them. It was an act of calm courage in an impossible situation, the kind of bravery that rarely announces itself and never asks for recognition. In that fragile space between loss and survival, training and humanity became one.