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Joe Teresi and Patrick Feehan don’t meet very often, but when they do it tends to be a matter of life and death.
And each encounter leaves both men profoundly moved.
The first time they ran across each other, Teresi was unconscious, starved of oxygen and stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool. It was a June day in 1972 and, 14-year-old “Joey” Teresi came out to take a dip at the Chuck Thompson Swimming School, which was then located at 3005 Middlefield Road in Palo Alto. At some point, in a possible pique of hijinks, someone removed the grate from the bottom of the pool. As Teresi swam in the deep end, he suddenly found himself trapped under water.
“The suction pipe was exposed. It sucked my arm in the suction pipe, and I got stuck under six feet of water,” Teresi recalled in interview. “I was down there and instead of trying to conserve my oxygen, I started to scream and there was no air.”
Feehan, 23, didn’t immediately know that there was a kid trapped at the bottom of the pool. An athletic San Jose State University student who was in his fourth year of judo training, Feehan was working as the manager in the Palo Alto branch of the Chuck Thompson Swim School. He was not poolside when Teresi submerged, but the lifeguard who was overseeing the swimmers ran in to tell him that a child was stuck at the bottom of the pool.
Feehan sprinted to the pool and dove in. He saw a kid floating about a foot-and-a-half above the bottom of his pool, his arm stuck inside the drain.
I was down there and instead of trying to conserve my oxygen, I started to scream and there was no air.
joe teresi
“I straddled his arm and pulled with every fiber of my being,” Feehan said. “There was an adrenaline thing, where if I don’t get this done, this guy’s going to die. But I was feeling that as much as I was wiggling it, all I was doing was getting it in farther and farther because the suction was so strong.”
Feehan said the kid was completely unconscious by the time he got to the pool. He didn’t know how long the boy had been trapped. What he does know is that luck was on his side that day. The Chuck Thompson school, as well as three others, were overseen by Fred Dunnett, a roving general manager who tended to spend about a quarter of his time at each school.
He happened to be in Palo Alto that day and, seeing the commotion, he hit the switch that turned off the pump, freeing Teresi’s arm. At the time, Feehan didn’t know the switch existed.
“If Fred was not there that day, Joe would have died and my first phone call would have been to Fred, ‘We’ve got a dead kid at bottom of the pool, his arm stuck in the pool.’ And he would say, ‘Did you hit the switch?’” Feehan said.
Freed from the vacuum, Feehan and Teresi ascended to the surface.
“I started giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation because he didn’t breathe for who knows how long,” Feehan recalled. “People helped pull us out and as I continued, I could feel a little spasm in his chest. I moved my head back and he vomited God knows how much pool water, which is exactly what I wanted to see.
“Then he opened his eyes and said, ‘Thank you.'”
AN UNLIKELY REUNION
Civil engineers rarely find themselves under the spotlight but in his quiet and understated way, Teresi became a well-known figure in Palo Alto. He grew up in the Midtown neighborhood of Palo Alto and later spent more than 30 years working for the city’s Department of Public Works. After joining the city as an assistant engineer in 1984, he worked on projects such as the new Friendship Bridge over the San Francisquito Creek, the expansion of Greer Park and the seismic retrofit of a dam at Foothills Park. He represented the city on the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority, an agency dedicated to improving flood control near the eponymous creek, and entertained children in a “Flo-the-Racoon” mascot costume, according to a resolution that the City Council passed in his honor when he retired in 2016. He also worked with citizens of a 2005 measure to find the storm drain program.
In other words, he never stopped messing with pipes. So, when his boss, George Bagdon, asked Teresi in May 1996 to take a field trip to inspect a drainage that the city had just purchased, Teresi agreed to come along.
There was an adrenaline thing, where if I don’t get this done, this guy’s going to die.
patrick feehan
He realized something was amiss when he arrived at the former Chuck Thompson school site to see his mom and dad, his wife, some co-workers and a Weekly photographer. He was handed a hard hat and a sledgehammer and invited to take some swings at the pool and the pipe that had almost killed him 24 years prior. His co-workers read the brief story that the Palo Alto Times devoted to his accident in 1972 (headlined, “Boy, trapped under water, saved”). They felt that smashing the pool, which was about to be demolished to make way for tennis courts, would be “good therapy,” in the words of then-Public Works Director Glenn Roberts, this newspaper previously reported. Teresi “swung away with cathartic vigor,” according to this newspaper’s coverage at that time.
“I got to go down to the bottom of the pool and take the first blow to the awful pool that almost took my life,” Teresi said.
The following morning, Feehan was reading the paper when he saw the story about an engineer taking revenge against a swimming pool. He and Teresi hadn’t been in contact for more than two decades, but the face looked familiar.
“I see it in the paper and I say, ‘That’s my guy!’” Feehan said.
He called Teresi and they agreed to meet for lunch. Both said they found the encounter pleasant and profound.
“He called me and said, ‘I always wondered what happened to you,’” Teresi said.
Naturally, the discussion turned to the pool incident 24 years ago. That’s when Teresi learned how close he came to not making it out of the pool.
“He told me, ‘The only reason you’re still here is that just at the right moment, the roving manager came to the site and was able to turn off the pipe,’” Teresi recalled. “He said, ‘If the manager didn’t come back, either you would’ve died or I would’ve ripped your arm off.’”
Feehan also met Teresi’s parents, whom he described as a “wonderful Italian couple.” They said they were sorry that they didn’t call him earlier to thank him for saving his son’s life, he said. At one point, Teresi had someone take a photo of the two of them together with a Polaroid camera. For him, the photo became a valued object.
“I kept it in my briefcase, wherever I went,” Teresi said.
THE ANNIVERSARY
Both men have stayed busy since their last reunion. Teresi moved to Millbrae, which in 2013 named him its “Citizen of the Year” for, among other things, working on the city’s emergency response team and raising money for the American Cancer Society through Relay for Life. He also currently serves on the board of the Millbrae Community Foundation, which distributes grants to local nonprofits. For a man in retirement, he attends many meetings.
Feehan chose a different path. Since seventh grade, when a choir teacher taught him about chord progressions, Feehan has been devoted to playing and making music. He has spent decades as a composer, working for corporate clients such as HP and IBM to create music that accompanies their presentations. Over the years, he has composed tunes in all sorts of genres: New Age, country, Baroque. He recalled one client requesting that he compose in a Brazilian style; another requested Malaysian music.
Composing has remained his passion and chief hobby long after he left the corporate world. Feehan was serving as music director at St. Raymond Catholic Church in 2009 when he took a three-month sabbatical to record an album, which he called “Learning What I already Know.”
Today, he spends many free evenings composing in a studio at his home. He also has an unusual passion: playing at funerals.
“I enjoy playing funerals because my job helps people deal with their emotions, to bring them up. It seems like significant work,” Feehan said.
In fact, he is also the designated “No. 2 call” at Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church on Cowper Street, in south Palo Alto. When the church’s music director is not around, Feehan steps in.
That’s what happened on May 7, when he was called in to perform at a funeral for a long-time Palo Alto resident who died peacefully at her home at the age of 90. That Wednesday also happened to be Feehan’s wedding anniversary. His wife, Marion McCarthy, had also worked at the Chuck Thompson Swimming School during the time of the 1972 incident, as a swimming instructor. Nine years later, they started dating.
Teresi, meanwhile, experienced a loss on April 30, when his mother, Mabel Teresi, died. He was preparing for a May 6 funeral service but then shifted it to May 7. With the change, the musician who was scheduled to perform at the service could no longer make it. The church recommended another musician, to whom Teresi reached out.
Later, he received a call from an unknown number.
“The guy said, ‘I’m going to play at your mom’s service, but I think I might know you. Did you work in the city of Palo Alto?’ I thought it may have been a co-worker whom I forgot,” Teresi said.
He quickly learned that the musician who is booked to play at his mother’s funeral is the man who had saved his life more than 50 years ago.
Feehan said Mabel Teresi’s ceremony was beautiful and meaningful. There was testimony from people who knew her and numerous songs, ending with a performance of “Amazing Grace.”
“This whole thing has had such a deep effect on me. It’s indescribable, this thing of weaving in and out of each other’s lives,” Feehan said. “It hit me really hard, it opened something in me and it has remained open.”
At one point, Feehan said, it felt to him like there were larger forces at work. The two men took another photo together at the service, a formal sequel to the Polaroid from 1996.
“I’m not ‘woo-woo’ but it sure felt like that,” he said. “They were the only encounters I’ve had with Joe, but it was unbelievably meaningful for me.”
