Amidst arctic temperatures descending on the Midwest lately, a retired Iowa woman lost her footing while fetching her mail. She fell on the sidewalk and was unable to get up.
It could have ended much worse for 73-year-old Linda Houlton had it not been for a local mailman who stopped and helped her.
On that cold January day with minus-5-degree-Fahrenheit windchills, the former medical insurance clerk treaded carefully down her icy-laden drive before slipping in front of her house in Des Moines.
“I got the mail, but when I came back, I hit ice and fell face-first on the sidewalk, and from that point I couldn’t get back up,” she told The Epoch Times. “My boots wouldn’t let my legs underneath me.”
She laid there on the freezing concrete for 19 minutes, she said, adding that it saddened her that no motorists even stopped to ask if she was okay.
“Until the postal service—Chris Meyer is his name—stopped and picked me up and took me back to the garage and then went back and got my mail and brought it back to me,” she said.
Linda’s son-in-law, journeyman ironworker Wen Boatwright, 47, was downstairs when Linda fell, but his home security camera recorded the moment when Chris stopped his postal truck and rescued her.
After Linda got back inside, Wen placed an electric blanket over her and, aside from having sore knees, Linda recovered from her cold hands and feet without requiring medical attention.
She has since learned that mailman Meyers had been substituting for their regular neighborhood postie.
“If it wasn’t for Chris, I probably would’ve been out there for quite some time,” she told the newspaper, calling him her “good Samaritan.”
This isn’t the first time a postal worker came to Linda’s rescue; their usual mail carrier, Zack, had helped her get back to her garage a month earlier, though she'd managed to stay on her feet.
Meyer deserves recognition for what he did, said Wen, who hopes to thank him in person, shake his hand, and repay the deed with a few gift cards in the near future.
“I’m trying to get him nationally recognized,” Wen added. “They got the postal of the year award, I’d like to see him go up for that.
“He saved her life.”
