Jardine: Son saves Dad, who fainted in icy swim

From the e-mails and voice mails:

HE'S A HERO - Jeff Dobbek Jr. acted much older than his 11 years last week, and it wasn't simply because he'll turn 12 next Tuesday.

The Gilroy seventh-grader and his dad, Jeff Dobbek Sr., hiked up beyond Yosemite's Vernal Falls on July 20.

While mom Ingrid and daughter Christina went for a bicycle ride on the valley floor, dad and son decided to swim across the darned-cold Emerald Pool.

Jeff Jr. beat pop to the other side through the 50-degree snowmelt.

"My dad made it to the very edge, but he couldn't get up on the slippery rock," Jeff Jr. said. "He just fainted."

Jeff Sr., 53, slipped beneath the surface, his eyes still open. His son jumped back in, grabbed his dad and kept their heads above the water.

"I started holding him up and yelling for help," Jeff Jr. said.

Pretty amazing, considering dad stands 6 foot 5 inches and weighs 200 pounds. Jeff Jr. is 5 foot 4 inches and weighs 112 pounds.

How'd he do it? He kicked and kicked to keep them both at the surface. Turns out two other swimmers, who happened to be certified lifeguards, and a third, who is a paramedic, responded to the son's pleas for help and pulled Jeff Sr. out of the water.

"They did CPR," Jeff Jr. said. "They pumped once and he woke up."

Fortunately, the area has some cell phone reception and someone called 911. When Jeff Sr. didn't recover quickly, park paramedics decided to send him to Memorial Medical Center in Modesto.

He's a proud papa, alive in no small part because of his son's quick response.

"I think he just used his head," dad said.

Likewise, mom Ingrid marveled at her son's actions.

"We were so proud he managed to keep such a cool head," she said. "When they were loading his dad into the helicopter, he was trying so hard to be brave and not to cry. He held up so well, but by the time it was over I think he was ready to collapse."

Turns out Jeff Jr. did more than save his dad from drowning. The episode uncovered a heart blockage.

Jeff Sr., an electrical engineer for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in San Jose, needed an angioplasty procedure and had a stent implanted.

The ice-cold water had constricted the blocked vein and caused him to pass out, he said.

"Unless you're right at that breaking point, you never know," Jeff Sr. said.

He was released Friday and returned home to Gilroy.

STARGAZING, DOWNWARD -- While visiting family graves at Lakewood Memorial Park in Hughson recently, Dean Heaton of Modesto came across the grave of one Ira Dean Jagger and asked this question:

"I was wondering how the Academy Award winner came to be buried in our local cemetery?" he wrote in an e-mail.

Jagger won a best supporting actor Oscar in 1949 for "Twelve O'Clock High" and earned a pair of Emmys for his work as the principal in the 1960s show "Mr. Novak." He also played the retired Army general alongside Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney in Irving Berlin's classic "White Christmas."

Jagger's star is on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He died in Santa Monica at 87 in 1991. So why is he buried in Hughson?

His third wife, Etta Mae Norton Jagger, was a longtime dancer and dance instructor in Modesto before marrying Jagger and moving to Santa Monica. She returned to Modesto a few months before her own death in 1992. They are buried together at Lakewood.

THE SLUDGE REPORT -- The debate rages in Oakdale, where ConAgra needs to clean out the muck from the bottom of its waste-water runoff ponds and is seeking a permit to spread the sludge on farmland and in orchards around Oakdale.

Spreading food byproduct sludge is nothing new. It's been going on for years. In this case, though, the tomato waste would be spread on land that borders long-existing neighborhoods, and the neighbors fear that the sludge would stink for several weeks. Company officials say any odor would be minimal and that the sludge would be plowed into the soil within 72 hours.

No one at last week's meeting in Oakdale knew when the ponds had last been dredged.

But reader Rick Dillwood of Oakdale does.

Dillwood said he and business partner Don Holman helped Don Fagundes clean out the ponds in 1988. They used a crane and a one-cubic-yard bucket to scoop the goop, drop it into a truck and haul away what he called "the most vile-smelling, sticky, mucky sludge."

"I threw away all the clothes I was wearing, including my boots," Dillwood said. "The smell would not go away. We steam-cleaned our equipment, but months later if you got the equipment wet, or when the crane was nice and warm, you could still smell the slime. If you've smelled the ponds as you drove down Greger (Road), you've enjoyed a much-diluted sample."

ConAgra bought the plant in 1991, three years after that project.

Jeff Jardine's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in Local News. He can be reached at 578-2383 or jjardine@modbee.com