The following is  from Readers Digest 1945

  "On a May afternoon in 1909, a boy on the bank of the Roanoke River watched helplessly while two men struggled in the water trying to reach their overturned canoe.

  Bystanders shouted hoarse advice and tossed branches into the stream. The men kept crying for help -- then suddenly, they were gone.

  Memory of the scene haunted the boy for years. It was a needless tragedy  -- there should be a means of quick rescue for accident victims.

  Just 19 years later, in May 1928, Julian S. Wise, the boy grown man, organized with nine other volunteers, the Roanoke Lifesaving and First Aid Crew, the first of its kind in America.

  As its fame spread, other communities have founded lifesaving crews on the Roanoke, Va., model...

  And what do the members receive for their labor and the risking of their lives?

  'It's hard to explain,' Wise said, 'but once you feel a human life come back under your own hands, that's all the reward you could ask."