Alabama man recalls harrowing childhood plunge over Niagara Falls

7/10/15

Even now, retelling his unique, miraculous story, “I literally smell the water when we talk about it.”

He remembers it “like it happened yesterday.”

Instead, it was 55 years ago, on July 9, 1960, when a leisurely ride in a 12-foot aluminum fishing boat went horribly awry and Roger Woodward, now a Huntsville resident, found his place in history still being told at Niagara Falls.

Watch the IMAX movie at Niagara Falls. Or cruise along on the “Maid of the Mist” boat, where the story is shared in three different languages, and hear how a seven-year-old boy wearing just a swim suit and a life jacket somehow survived the tumultuous trip over the 162-foot falls and was rescued by the boat’s crew members. He was the first person to go over the falls unprotected and to survive.

“My sister and I didn’t do anything wrong. We weren’t trying to become part of the history of Niagara. But I’m somewhat surprised that after all these years the story of Roger and Deanne Woodward has remained alive, 55 years later.”

Niagara Falls Survivor
Madison resident John Peck shot this video on recent Niagara Falls trip.
While Roger Woodward was carried over the falls, his sister Deanne was being pulled from the Niagara River by an off-duty New Jersey trooper named John Hayes.

“My sister was rescued 20 feet from the brink of the falls and by the grace of God, we both were rescued,” Woodward says.

Indeed, after two decades of inner turmoil, he was rescued in a spiritual sense and has frequently spoken to church groups and shared his faith.

“I felt guilty when given the opportunity to acknowledge God. I didn’t (in his younger days),” he says. “But since then I’ve tried at every opportunity to make sure I give Him praise for it.”

Woodward turns back the clock – as he is so often called upon to do, especially this time of the year – from his office in McLean, Va. He is chief strategy officer for iCore Networks and makes a weekly commute from Washington, D.C. to Huntsville. His wife, Susan, lives here; they have three grown sons, Christopher, Jonathan and Daniel, all of whom are graduates of Huntsville High.

Deanne, the mother of two, lives in Jacksonville, Fla., and turned 72 on July 5.

It was, in fact, a birthday treat for Deanne when family friend Jim Honeycutt offered to take the kids out for a ride on the Upper Niagara River. Roger and Deanne were kids raised in a relatively poor household. Their father was a construction worker who frequently moved his family to where there were available jobs. (He’d also move them from the Niagara area two years after the incident merely to avoid the limelight.)

The 7 ½-horsepower Evinrude motor on Honeycutt’s boat putt-putted them along downstream, inexplicably venturing under a bridge a mile from the falls that served as an unofficial warning to small boaters. The kids weren’t aware of the falls’ proximity.

“My sister and I didn’t do anything wrong. We weren’t trying to become part of the history of Niagara.”
Honeycutt, who wouldn’t survive the ordeal, caught the boat on a shoals and it capsized. Roger, a poor swimmer, was already wearing his life jacket. Deanne had begun shrugging into hers as the boat shimmied on the rocks. They were all three thrown into the water.

The currents carried Deanne closer to Goat Island, which divides the river. That’s where Hayes was able to latch onto her, getting some assistance from another tourist named John Quattrochi.

They could see Roger floating toward the edge of Horseshoe Falls and Hayes simply told Deanne, “Pray for your brother.”

Woodward recalls the sensation as “floating on a cloud of mist,” that there was no real sense of falling. The distance isn’t the peril of Niagara Falls. It’s “the rocks that are as big as houses at the base of the falls,” Woodward says. “If I’d have touched one, it would have shattered every bone in my body.”

Instead, he landed safely “in a cushion of water” at the base and was somehow spit clean of the millions of gallons of water tumbling from above. He was spied by the “Maid of the Mist” crew, who tossed a life preserver to him.

Safely pulled aboard, Roger had one request: “I’m thirsty.”

Laughing now, “I wanted water after drinking half the Niagara.”