Former Montana teen reunites with man who rescued him from drowning 50 years ago
Loren Oelkers never got to thank the two men who saved his life that day.
In the summer of 1973, he was a 17-year-old kid who’d come within seconds of drowning in the murky waters of Montana's Canyon Ferry Lake, the reservoir on the Missouri River. The men who saved him were complete strangers, two unfamiliar guys who just happened to be there that 4th of July morning. Two men whom he’d never met before and didn’t see again.
Loren learned their names only through the newspaper report that appeared in the Helena Independent Record later that week, but neither Rick Goff nor Jim Funk lived in his hometown. Nor had they reached out to contact him in the days that followed. As life moved on decades later, the knowledge of the debt he owed these two strangers was never far from Loren’s thoughts, but the responsibilities of a career and raising a growing family were his first priorities.
This past Friday, for the first time in half a century, Loren Oelkers got the chance to shake the hand of one of the men who plucked him from those deep waters and to thank him for saving his life.
“This is just such a beautiful story,” said Christine Maillet, rescuer Rick Goff’s daughter and one of the people who played a pivotal role in reuniting the two men. “I call it a miracle come full circle 50 years later.”
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A ‘Perfect Day’ gone wrong
It was morning on the 4th of July 1973, and Loren and his best friend Steve Miller were camping with Loren’s parents at the National Guard Chalet Campground on Canyon Ferry Lake east of Helena. It was a place both young men knew well.
“We used to camp out there a lot,” Loren said of the camping area just south of the dam and across from the Yacht Basin boat launch. “As high school students we’d go out there during the week and swim across the bay. It’s a little cove probably 50-yards across if that. I’d probably swam across it 40 or 50 times before.”
By 10:30 a.m. the sun was already warm. Just a slight breeze rippled across the small cove separating them from the boat launch. Loren and Steve had finished their breakfasts and decided it was a good time to take a swim.
“It was a perfect day,” he remembered. “We were just going to swim across the cove and go over to the docks to see if there any high school kids that we knew over there. Probably looking for girls more than anything else.”
His friend Steve jumped in first, paddling toward a rocky outcropping that young people commonly use as a diving platform into the water. It was a swim that both Loren and Steve had made dozens of times, but on this morning, something went terribly wrong.
“On this particular day on the Fourth of July I just didn’t make it,” Loren said with honest simplicity. “I got very close to shore but I just couldn’t continue. I don’t know if I cramped up or got exhausted or what it was. I just panicked”
Loren’s friend Steve had already climbed out onto a rock ledge just a few yards ahead of Loren, then turned to see his friend struggling to keep his head above water.
“He was on the shore and jumped in to help me,” Loren recalled. “I grabbed ahold of him, and we both went down. Then we came up and I pushed Steve away and said, ‘Get help.’ Steve started screaming and that’s the last thing that I remember.”
Loren’s head disappeared beneath the water.
Bad day for fishing on the Missouri
On July 4, 1973, Rick Goff and his family were camping at the National Guard Chalet Campground for a holiday getaway. Rick and his teenage son Mike had risen early to try their luck fishing on the downstream side of Canyon Ferry Dam.
“We got out of camp early, and the family was still asleep,” Rick remembers clearly of that day. “We didn’t want to fish the lake, we wanted to go down to fast water to fish lures below the dam. Both of us are good fishermen, but we couldn’t buy a fish that day.”
Discouraged, Rick and his son returned early to their camp to eat breakfast. They’d barely finished eating when Rick heard screaming and yelling from women and children at the water’s edge. He ran down to the shoreline to see what was going on.
“I saw his friend maybe 20-feet offshore, floundering and yelling,” Rick said. “I thought he was the one who was drowning, and I was about ready to throw him an empty cooler so he could use it as a flotation device, but he shouted ‘No, no, no – it’s not me. Down there, it’s my buddy.”
The waters of Canyon Ferry Lake are deep and murky. The only thing Rick could make out was Loren’s panicked friend screaming for help. Rick was fully clothed and wearing heavy boots. He’d just eaten breakfast. For a few moments, he hesitated.
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“Thoughts raced through my mind,” he recalled. “I’m hesitating about whether I’ve got to dive in there or not. What if I drown trying to save the victim, who will care for my family? Here I am this old guy at 43. Where are the other men?
In that moment of indecision, the second hero of this story arrived. Jim Funk was a 25-year-old enlisted man at home on leave for the 4th of July holiday. Dressed only in a bathing suit, Funk raced down the hill, yelling toward Rick as he neared the shore.
“I heard a voice from behind that just called out, ‘Where is he?” Rick said. “I turned around and there was Jim – of course I didn’t know him from Adam. I pointed to the area in front of the ledge we were standing on. He was on the run and never even stopped to say hello or goodbye, he dove right in off the rock, never hesitated for a bit.”
Rick quickly lost sight of Jim in the murky water.
“I couldn’t see either of them, they’d both disappeared,” he said of the two young men. “The next time I saw them they were coming up through that six- or eight-foot depth of water and Jim had Loren in his left arm and was paddling up through the water with the other. He couldn’t have been more than six or eight feet offshore. He had an advantage because it wasn’t a sand beach. It was about a three- or four-foot rock ledge that we were standing on and he didn't have to wade in to the shore.”
Newspaper reports published near the time of Loren Oelkers rescue say that Funk found Loren's seemingly lifeless body lying across a ledge 12- to 15-feet below the water’s surface. With limited visibility the thing that had caught Funk's attention was the sweep of Oelkers long red hair.
“Had I been over a couple more feet I would have gone down significantly deeper because the rocks end there,” Oelkers said.
As the exhausted Jim Funk paddled toward the shore with Loren slung under one arm, Rick yelled to the two women that were standing with him on the rock ledge to, “Get ready, he has him.”
Rick Goff earned his living as a full time pipe-fitter for the Great Falls Gas Company, and as a part-time Technical Sergeant for the Montana Air National Guard. At the time of Oelkers rescue Goff had recently completed a required multi-medic first aid course that included cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training. Goff said that at the time it was a skill he was certain he would never use.
With help from the two unidentified women on scene, Goff was able to drag the unconscious teenager onto the rock ledge the three of them were standing upon.
“Each woman had him by an arm, and I had him by the hair on his head and we just raked him across that rock ledge,” Rick said of the rescue. “I don’t even know if his feet got out of the water before I started.”
His first impression was that things looked grim for the Helena teenager.
“When I saw him come out of the water, he had the appearance of death,” Rick Goff said. “His face was pure white, the white of ashes. His lips and fingernails were absolutely purple. Not blue, purple. I said to myself, ‘We’re too late, he’s dead. I figured he was gone. I really did.’”
However, Rick’s first aid training kicked in, a skill that no one else on the scene had at the time. Goff began applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, followed by repeated rounds of chest compressions. Within a few minutes one of the women on scene screamed “we have a pulse.” Then, Loren Oelkers coughed out some of the water that had filled his lungs and then began gasping for air.
Throughout the whole ordeal, Loren’s parents had no idea what had happened to their son.
“My Mom said that somebody came up to their campsite and said, ‘There’s two boys in the water down there and I think they belong to you,” Loren recounted. “They came running down around the cove, and by the time they got there I had thrown up all the water and was already breathing. I heard somebody say an ambulance was on its way. I was in and out of consciousness. I’d spent everything I had to get out of the water.”
Oelkers spent three days in a Helena hospital with an oxygen tube attached to his nose. He didn’t suffer any permanent injury, but by the time he was released all who had been on that rocky shore at Canyon Ferry Lake had gone their separate ways. The missed opportunity to thank all those who had rescued him would haunt Loren Oelkers for the next 50 years.
Finding his rescuers
By his own admission, Loren Oelkers has led a blessed life. He's had a 33-year career in the Army National Guard in Helena, one that saw him rise to the rank of Colonel. He married Maureen, his high school sweetheart, and together the couple has seen their three children grow to adulthood and bring 10 grandchildren into the world as the highlight of their lives.
“None of this would have been possible if Jim hadn’t jumped into the water and pulled me out, and if Rick hadn’t been at the lake that day and knew how to do CPR,” Loren commented on Friday. “I’ve thought a lot about those guys. They added 50 years to my life that I shouldn’t have gotten. That’s a miracle.”
Still, there was a task left yet undone; to reach out personally and thank the men who had saved him. That task took on more urgency after 2020, when Loren suffered a stroke. As part of his rehabilitation, Loren was asked to write stories about his life to help with his cognitive rehabilitation, motor skills, and perhaps most importantly to share the recollections of his life’s experience with his family.
On Father’s Day this year, his daughter, Erin, bought Loren a subscription to Storyworth, a digital platform that encourages people to write down the stories of their own lives to eventually be printed as a hardcover book.
“Each week you get a question and you’ve got to write a story based on the question that you’ve been given,” Loren explained. “One of the questions was, ‘Have you ever been rescued figuratively or literally? So of course, I wrote the story of when I drowned in 1973.”
“When my daughter read the story she said, 'this is incredible', Loren recalled. “I know,’ I said, ‘but the story isn’t finished. I need to find these people. Hopefully they’re both still alive. I want to meet them and thank them.”
Storyworth's question could not have come at a more significant time. It had been almost exactly 50 years since Loren’s near-death experience. He felt compelled to reach out to those who had saved him.
“Once he wrote that story, I think it kind of put something in motion,” Loren’s wife Maureen said. “He’s thought about it for years, but just sitting down and taking the time to write about it and giving our kids that information … I think it promoted him to think 'I need to do this.'”
Finding either of the men did not seem like an easy task. With Rick Goff, he had a small advantage in that he’d saved the story published in the Helena newspaper a few days after his rescue.
“I had a picture of Mr. Goff with the Air National Guard, and I knew he had lived in Great Falls,” Loren explained. “So, I went to the Montana cadastral and that’s how I found his address.”
“I wasn’t confident at all,” Loren said of the chances of connecting with Rick Goff 50 years later. “I was thinking, well Rick’s got to be in his late 80s or early 90s. I wasn’t totally confident that I would ever hear from him.”
Still, he wrote Rick a letter, telling him in part; “I am Loren Oelkers, the 17-year-old teenager you revived at Canyon Ferry on July 4th, 1973. Let me start by saying thank you so much for saving my life. It has been 50 years, but I have thought about you thousands of times over the years. I was truly one of the luckiest persons in the entire world that day and I thank God that he placed you and your family at the lake on that day. Sir, you may not think of yourself as a hero, but I certainly do, and I cannot thank you enough.”
By that time Rick had moved out of his home of 67 years in Great Falls to take up residence at the Grandview Assisted Living center. However, his daughter, Christine, was still looking after the mail being sent to Rick's former home and passed the message on to her father. She called Loren a few days later.
“I had tears running down my cheeks when I was talking to her,” Loren said of learning that Rick was alive and well. “I told Chris that I didn’t have any outside interest other than I wanted to meet her Dad. I wanted to give him a handshake and a hug and just say thank you for saving my life.”
“I am not a hero,” Rick responded to Loren's first letter, as all true heroes often do. “Anyone with knowledge of CPR could have done the same thing. God was busy that day and he asked me to do Him a favor. So, I did. The miracle was in the timing of events. We were down to the last 60 seconds.”
“I cannot wait to meet you in person to share some stories with you,” Loren said in reply. “I could hardly sleep after hearing from (Chris) because I was excited like a child that I would have the opportunity to meet you.”
After more than 50 years, that long awaited opportunity arrived on Friday. A lot of tears followed.
“I don’t want this to be a one-and-done deal,” Oelkers said. “I want us to continue to correspond. I have some regrets that I didn’t try and contact with him a long time ago, but I’m so happy that I finally did and that we’ve been able to connect and share these stories. Hopefully I can talk to Jim Funk as well.”
What happened to Jim Funk?
The advantage that Loren Oelkers had in finding Rick Goff has not been the same for rescuer Jim Funk.
The newspaper stories of the time offer few clues helpful to identifying Jim Funk, other than he was referred to as a "resident of Helena." Loren believes that he was on active duty with the military at the time of the rescue, and likely returned to post assignment in the immediate days that followed.
“I’ve been searching for him, but there are a lot of James Funks in the United States,” Loren observed. “I narrowed down my search to a Helena High graduates and his name came up as graduating in 1968; now living in Greybull, Wyoming.”
Sifting through county property tax records, Loren thinks he’s found an address for Jim, and recently sent a letter off to the address in Big Horn County that Jim Funk is listed under. If alive today, Jim Funk would by 75-years-old. Loren Oelkers has yet to hear back.
It is hard to put a fine point on the significance of Loren’s search for those who saved his life so many decades ago. We live, we die, and somewhere in the moments in-between we hope that somehow, we made some small difference in the lives of the people who surround us.
If there is a lesson to be learned from Loren’s and Rick’s journey, perhaps it is this; that it is never truly over until it is. The gratitude and heart of our lives can always be expressed, even if it comes half a century later. You just need to take the time to express it.
This article originally appeared on Great Falls Tribune: How a Montana teenager, rescued in 1973, found the men who saved him
