On October 16, 1987, the world was captivated by the contents of a well casing in Midland, Texas.
Jessica McClure, an 18-month-old, was pinned inside the narrow well after falling in. Local emergency workers and oil drillers worked together to rescue Baby Jessica while the world watched.
After more than 58 hours underground, McClure was finally brought to the surface. And for most people, the story stopped there. Lance Lunsford, however, kept following what happened.
Lunsford watched the rescue as a fourth grader in Midland, and the scene stuck with him. His new book, “Inside the Well: The Midland, Texas Rescue of Baby Jessica,” looks at the aftermath for the people involved in the rescue, as well as for American media. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What impact did Baby Jessica’s rescue have on Midland, do you think?
Lance Lunsford: I think you really have to understand – and that’s why we spend a little bit of time going into the economic situation in Midland – just how bad it was.
I mean, the unemployment level being 7 or 8%, maybe more. Everybody knew someone that was unemployed. Everybody knew someone whose house was about to get taken from them. And so you have this really dark cloud just over the city for so long, and then this thing happens that just seems so daunting.
I think that we take now that 58 hours and look back on it as we were so assured that this girl was going to come out alive. And at every single turn, there was something else getting in the way – to one problem in the rescue after another.
And so I think, for Midland, to be able to look at this thing that we can fight through, we can persevere. And that’s already the spirit of Texas and especially West Texas, where you’re not supposed to be living anyway. They are somewhat inhospitable, but if you can live out there and you can punch holes in the ground and live and survive and build, you can get through anything. And that’s kind of the spirit of that West Texas community.
If I’m not mistaken, there were attempts to dig a parallel well and rescue Jessica that way. That ran into a lot of problems because of how rocky the soil was. They ended up having to use some new water-cutting technology.
This is, as you said, a story that we look back on and we think “58 hours, that’s crazy.” But she was always going to come out. What are some some misconceptions about the story or the rescue that you have run into over the years?
I think that the biggest misconception is that, you know, it was just going to be easy from the start. And I mean, those moments – the incipient stages of that rescue – they thought that it was just going to take them a few minutes to get her out.
And so they started with a backhoe that just happened to be in operation nearby, get going on that, realize “oh, wait a second, this is a real bad idea.” Something could make that oil well unstable or Jessica could fall deeper and so pulled that real fast and quickly realized that that rathole rig to drill a parallel shaft was going to be the way to go and they could basically have guys rappel up and down it.
I think the other thing, the misconception was that the media was there from the get-go, and it does take a solid day for this to go from being a regional event where the Dallas reporters are kind of like “well, should I go?” to all of a sudden you have reporters from Hawaii – you have reporters from all over the world kind of descending into the community.
I thought it was important to take a real close look at the the media response to this. It’s all driven by consumers, one way or another. Whether it’s clicks or eyeballs, it’s consumer engagement. And there is absolutely nothing that is different now to then in terms of that consumer behavior, that consumer demand for media – that kind of thirst for real-world, real-life things, real news – has always been there. It’s just became so clear in that moment.
And so telling the story in the eyes of the the media demand to service that consumer side, I thought was really important.
Can you say more about some of the the lasting impacts that this event had on the American mainstream media?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, and this is a little bit of a misconception, too. Everybody thinks that CNN and its disruption was go into 24-hour live news.
And we delve into this a little bit, but that real business disruption – that business innovation – was really their finance model through cable and not having to rely on underwriters through advertising inventory. To be able to basically say “we have this subscription model to finance our station.” And so when they were ready to go over to live and stick with the story the way network affiliates couldn’t….
Because they had to go to commercial.
Because they had to go to commercial and fulfill that demand because their advertisers needed it. The disruption was knowing that there was this latent consumer demand for live, real drama always happening – real-world news. But also at the same time, Ted Turner and CNN built the capability for that by using cable to do it.
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Do you suppose that that live drama element of it – I mean, the fact that how this is going to end up was really in doubt – is that what contributed to the the gaze that was placed upon this event?
I think so. You have the real, life and death situation in front of you.
I think the real thing that catapulted this out for people is that, at the very beginning, you have a TV crew that showed up and there’s only one local affiliate there. They’re standing right by the well, and the first responders are there, and they’re trying to listen, they’re trying to get some sort of sign that the baby is alive. And so they drop a microphone down the well, connected to the wire, and then they throw the cameraman’s headphones on, and they can hear that voice.
Now, that voice is very real. There’s there’s a baby whimpering 20 ft away, and you’ve got dads and moms standing there. And I think that, as I became a dad, it was so much more real to me, and so I can kind of understand that when you can hear that baby’s voice and it sounds like that’s the same kind of whimper, then she’s singing “Winnie the Pooh,” and they have that audio and that really stuck out to people.
You also look a lot at the folks who were involved in the rescue and what happened to them. You were a reporter for the local paper, the Midland Reporter-Telegram, and while there, you spent some time retracing the lives of a few of the folks who were involved in the rescue. Could you tell us about a few that have stuck with you through the years?
Yeah. I mean, I think the main one, as is kind of who we start with, is Robert O’Donnell. He was the firefighter that was really responsible for the aspects of the rescue where they actually plucked her out.
But Robert O’Donnell was the one who ultimately kind of went down this path and couldn’t let go of kind of his role as hero. And at times he realized like that “I’m just trying to fulfill whatever is asked of me. I’ve got reporters calling and they want that story. I want to tell it just being a nice guy.”
But, eventually, you look at the way his behavior at work and he was kind of setting himself out, he was trying to do more than just the community service aspect of who he had become as a firefighter/paramedic. And so he was concentrating in on this definition that was much bigger than, in his own mind, than as a hero. And so when it was centralized, focused on that, started to lose access to that in real life, it put his job in jeopardy and he kind of continued a downfall.
When people find out that you are someone who’s very interested in this story, how do people tend to react when the light bulb goes off and you say, “oh, baby, Jessica, I remember that story.” I’m interested in how you find people regard it.
It takes about two seconds for them to recall exactly where they were the moment of the rescue.
But I think they kind of conflate the whole event in their mind to be that moment where she came out of the well live on TV. They’ve asked you about your project, they’ve asked you about your book and the research that you did, but you can see them almost go distant in their eyes where they’re thinking back to that moment and like they’re either a little kid or they’re an adult with young kids. That’s the one that I see the most.
My dad, you know, he had an about 18-month-old daughter and looked similar. And I can see him kind of like start to go back and think about the trauma he was feeling at the time, wondering “what if that was my daughter?” And so those people really go real quick to that memory.
When people read the book, once they’re done, what do you hope they take away?
I hope they take away that, number one, modern media or contemporary media is not to blame for our ills. I certainly went into journalism because I wanted to have some sort of corrective finger on the scales for what I saw as a certain kind of bias in media.
But people need to understand that the media environment serves as the balance to our society when we abide by the traditional rules of journalism. And we’ve seen just how far we’ve allowed traditional rules of journalism to go astray through the 24-hour news networks as they are now. Those aren’t news. We know they’re not news.
But if we had a commitment to the First Amendment, understanding that high quality journalism can help play a corrective role in our governing, in our communication with each other, I think we’d be in a lot better position. And I think that this is a path towards starting to kind of consider and understand that we’re the consumers, we’re the drivers of demand. There is no reporter there to do anything if we’re not there to consume it. And we should demand from them high quality, accurate, attributed, data-backed information.
