Ted Radford Jr., a local paramedic, grew up immersed in scouting, with his dad serving as a scout master, and the younger Radford eventually earning his Eagle Scout award and later, as an adult, serving as a scout master.
Along the way he, like millions of scouts across the nation, read the monthly magazine Boys Life, a publication which carried a monthly column detailing the exploits of a Scout somewhere in the nation who had been awarded the Medal of Merit. Those medals are rarely awarded, and only to scouts for showing unusual bravery, or coolness and calm, in the face of an emergency. Oftentimes, those Medal of Merit winners had saved a life with their actions.
“I always wanted to meet someone who had one that medal,” he said recently. “I thought that would be so awesome.”
Little did he know that he would get that opportunity — and the medal winner would be his son, who may have saved his dad’s life with some quick thinking after a chainsaw accident.
The incident took place on Christmas Eve in 2019, in the backyard of his aunt, Tabatha Mauldin, cutting up a tree which had fallen .
“I was just cutting firewood, something I’ve done since I was 8 or 9 years old,” Ted Radford Jr. said. “The saw just kicked back on me…wrong place, wrong time.”
“I don’t remember exactly now, but I I think I was either trying to split another piece of wood or was stacking wood,” Trae said of the incident. “Me and my stepbrother, we were kind of talking and working, then I heard a pop, a loud pop, and my Dad started screaming.”
The running chainsaw, when it kicked back off the wood, sliced into Ted Radford’s arm, right below the shoulder and down along the bicep, opening a wide and deep gash. The blade also nicked his chest, chewing through his clothes and into his skin.
Trae, who was 13 at the time, ran over to his dad immediately, and while he said there wasn’t as much blood as he was expecting, he saw the wound was severe.
“I knew he needed help,” Trae said.
“I looked around, grabbed the cleanest rag I could find, I gave it to him, he did the best he could with that to stop the bleeding. I ran …to my aunt’s house.”
Once inside, he had his cousin call 911 while he explained to his aunt what had happened. They grabbed some towels and a few belts, then ran back outside, where they used the towels to apply pressure to the wounds and used the belts to apply a tourniquet to slow the bleeding until paramedics arrived. The EMS workers rushed the older Radford to the hospital, where he underwent surgery.
“It was pretty severe,” Trae’s dad said. “Luckily I avoided the bone, and didn’t get any major arteries, but I had some vascular damage, smaller tendon damage. It was very very fortune it wasn’t worse than it was.”
Still, the loss of blood at the scene could have have had tragic consequences had Trae not sprung into action, falling back on training he’d received at home and in the scouts. He said some of his Scout training was the reason he acted without panic.
“We have the first aid merit badge in scouts,” he said, explaining that part of earning that badge is practicing on mock victims handling wounds just like his dad received. While doing it for real is a little more tense, it was simply following the steps he had already practiced.
His dad was able to come home late that night to spend Christmas with his family, but the story didn’t end there.
For his actions, Trae was nominated for the Medal of Merit, something only a handful of youths in Scouting receive each year.
In October, during a ceremony at one of the Troop 553 meetings in White Plains, Trae received a surprise.
“My Dad actually presented it to me,” Trae said. “It was a pretty big surprise, it’s a really cool medal to earn, it’s real nice to have that feeling, that you helped out somebody.”
But his Dad kept one secret from Trae — the fact that the episode would be featured in an upcoming edition of Scouts In Action, a monthly column in Scouting Life Magazine. Then one day earlier this month, Tra received a text at school from his dad — a picture of the page detailing his work to save his dad’s life and limb.
“It was awesome,” he said with a laugh, then saying he, too, has always wondered about the young men who are featured in that monthly column of the magazine, and what it would be like to be one of them. “I don’t know anybody who has done that personally, but all those guys who are in there, a bunch of people talk about them,” he said.
“I hate that I got hurt and he had to see that (injury) in the process, but it’s an awesome opportunity to meet someone who has been awarded one of those,” Trae’s dad said, beaming with obvious pride.
Even though it’s been less than a month since publication of the piece, Trae said others have already noticed. He was recently at a camping event with Scouts from other areas, when his newfound fame became evident.
“One of the guys in my group, he asked me where I got that medal,” he said of the award he was wearing on his uniform. “I said I got it from helping my dad out when he got hurt cutting wood. ‘Oh, so you’re that guy in Boy’s Life magazine,’ Trae said the Scout replied.
Trae, now 15, may be in for more such recognition. Over the summer, he’ll be on the fulltime staff at Raven Knob Scout Camp, whee he’ll be working with thousands of Scouts coming in from different parts of the state, and region, to camp over the summer.
Afterward, he has plans to finish work on earning his Eagle rank by diving into his community service project required for the award, starting around mid-August, a service project that will be used to help others in the community.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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