Muscular Mother

In a crisis, the human body is capable of superhuman feats. Last week, by way of demonstration, a slender, ailing woman lifted the rear of a 3,300-lb. car.

Maxwell and Florence Rogers were sitting in their kitchen in Tampa. Fla. when a youngster rushed in yelling that the car had fallen on Charles (Mrs. Rogers' son by a former marriage). Husband and wife dashed out to the yard where Charles Trotter, 16, had blocked the front wheels and jacked up the rear of their 1954 Ford Ranch Wagon to work on the universal joints. The bumper jack had slipped, and Charles's right leg was pinned between the car body and the driveshaft.

Manlike, Maxwell Rogers knew that nobody could raise the car by hand, so he started to fiddle with the jack. Womanlike, Florence Rogers, 39, a 5-ft. 7-in. woman of 123 lbs., went right ahead. She grabbed the rear bumper in the middle. She kept her legs straight and simply heaved with her arm and trunk muscles. The car rose enough for Charles to scramble out, with only minor bruises.

But as it rose, Mrs. Rogers felt something snap in her back. X rays disclosed a compression fracture, with one vertebra crushed. But despite the injury to her spinal column, she suffered no paralysis. This week, fitted with a special brace, she is at St. Joseph's Hospital. What amazes Mrs. Rogers' physician, Dr. William A. Moore III, is the fact that she could have exerted herself at all. She had been ill at home for two weeks, recovering from a rheumatic disorder of the left knee and an attack of thrombophlebitis in her right leg. How far she might have lifted the car if she had been in good physical shape, no one would guess.

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