Once a Boy Scout . . .

Emerging from Newark's Barringer High School one afternoon last week, lanky, six-foot Freshman George Allen, 15, saw that he might miss his bus. Sprinting across the icy sidewalk, he fell sprawling on his face, picked himself up, hopped aboard just in time. Then he realized that a metal pencil he had carried in his shirt pocket had stabbed him in the chest, straight toward the heart.

George paled. But an ex-Boy Scout is good in emergencies. "Don't anybody touch this," he calmly warned the alarmed driver and passengers, "until you get a doctor." When a City Hospital ambulance arrived, the doctor found George with his hands cupped protectively over the protruding pencil haft. "Mighty smart boy," said the doctor.

Hospital surgeons cut through George's fourth and fifth ribs and gingerly pulled out the pencil. It had been driven in four inches, penetrating the pericardium (outer sac of the heart). George's coolness, they allowed, had certainly saved his life. What George wanted to know was: Could he pitch for the baseball team, come spring? Doctors thought he probably could.

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