Hollywood (Jan - Oct 1934)

— Elmer Fryer "I was as truly dead as though I never had been awakened," says Edward G. Robinson in telling of the awful experience of his youth when he was drowned Edward G. Robinson tells of the horrifying time he actually met death! by J. EUGENE CHRISMAN Artificial means brought him back to life, emptying his lungs of their burden of water, setting his stilled heart again in motion, restoring consciousness to his brain. He remembers clearly and distinctly, every thought and every reaction during those minutes when he felt himself drifting into Eternity. • "I was attending school at the Townsend Harris Hall, a preparatory school for City College in New York," said Robinson, "and the boys of the preparatory school were allowed the use of the gym at certain hours of the day. I wanted to learn to swim so badly that I had overstayed my time. The physical instructor, seeing me in the pool, decided to impress upon me the fact that I was over my time and give me what he thought was an innocent ducking. I had just expelled my breath and was preparing to fill my lungs with oxygen when suddenly I felt my feet grasped and I was pulled under the surface!" In one gulp Eddie filled his straining lungs with water. There was a horrible moment of suffocation as he struggled frantically for breath without being able to reach the surface. "By this time, I knew that I was actually drowning," continued Eddie, "but the instructor, not realizing what he had done, had swum to the side of the tank, waiting for me to come up. But I didn't come up. It was only when I ceased to struggle and sank limp to the bottom of the pool that they realized I was drowning." How Does It Feel to die? What does a man think of, what are his sensations, his last reactions as the final veil is drawn across the window of his consciousness and he feels himself sinking slowly but surely into the Great Unknown? Few of us will ever have the chance to know and then to return to life to record our experiences but Edward G. Robinson did. He has actually been dead, as dead as it is possible for a man to be and yet he was brought back to life to give us, at first hand, the reactions of a man who has felt his immortal soul slipping from his body. This is no fantastic tale of fiction. Eddie Robinson was dead. He died of drowning. His heart no longer beat. He was actually in the Valley of the Shadow. Not one spark of life remained in his body and he had been pronounced dead by a competent physician. He was dead and that was £.11 there was to it. • When he was taken from the pool, it seemed that it was too late. There was not a sign of pulse or respiration and his heart had stopped beating. A physician, hastily summoned, pronounced him dead but in the faint hope of reviving him, ordered artificial respiration. For nearly an hour they worked over him and then, at last, they were rewarded by a faint flutter of his pulse. In a moment he was drawing the blessed air into his lungs. He who had been dead was alive! "I was as truly dead as though I never had been awakened," he says. "I had been dead so far as my mental processes were concerned. I had felt death creeping upon me and my mind told me that the end had come. My conscious self had been completely obliterated." Science, or at least one branch of it, says that a man's mind becomes so numbed in the presence of death that he Please turn to page sixty-flve and Lived to Tell the Story I 28 HOLLYWOOD