SMALL BOY DOWN A WELL: MANORVILLE SAVES BENNY

OUTSIDE the trim, grey ranch house in sleepy Manorville, N.Y., seven-year-old Benny Hooper and a playmate whooped and darted through the yard in the supercharged hour before bedtime. Turning his back on the children, Benjamin Kent Hooper, 32, was on his way to the house to get a pipe for the irrigation well he had been hand-digging for the vegetable patch. He heard a scurry, then a shriek: "Benny fell in the hole!"

Kent Hooper grabbed a flashlight and raced to the wellshaft. At the bottom, 21 feet down, his son was wedged feet first in a clammy cavity less than ten inches wide. Benny's red wool jacket had been jerked over his head by the fall; one hand was stretched pitifully upward. "Daddy," he whimpered.

Truck Driver Hooper lowered a rope, but Benny was not strong enough to hold on with one hand. Hooper hurried indoors to call police and the Manorville Fire Department. At the nearby Riverhead telephone exchange, the switchboard buzzed with a sudden burst of emergency calls. For 20 minutes Operator Borghild ("Betty") Hooper was kept busy handling them before it dawned on her that rescue workers were being directed to her home.

Benny's mother arrived home to find a town-strong task force deployed across her lawn. Firemen had lowered a hose to Benny and were pumping oxygen into the airless hole. In the eerie shadows cast by searchlights, trucks disgorged tools, timber, volunteers. Rescue workers were feverishly digging a pit ten feet from Benny's shaft and parallel to it. A power shovel clanked in to speed the digging, but had to give up only four feet down when the pit caved in. A dozen men stepped back into the hole with hand shovels, shoring up the crumbling walls every foot of the way. At 11 p.m., Benny's hand quivered in the light of a flashlamp trained down the well. It was his last movement. Dried out by the hissing oxygen, fine salt sand drifted softly over the child's head.

Through the long, cold night, more than 150 dogged men battled cave-ins and exhaustion. Time after time earth slides blocked their passage. By early afternoon Deputy Sheriff Philip Coros sighed: "This is a lost cause."

As the agonizing hours wore on, the groggy, red-eyed diggers received atomic-age assistance. From the AEC's nearby Brookhaven Laboratories came a set of tempered-steel tubes (used as gamma-ray shields) that telescoped one inside the other like a nest of cups; they were trip-hammered into the loft. wall that separated Benny from his rescuers. At 7:32 p.m., 23 hours and 48 minutes after Benny had plunged down the well, a wiry Negro construction worker named Sam Woodson wormed through the narrow pipe and touched Benny's hand. It was cold as death. Then, as Woodson scrabbled at the imprisoning sand, the boy groaned. Woodson pillowed Benny on his chest and was dragged back out of the pipe by his ankles. The incredulous cry, "He's alive!", swept through the crowd. Benny, who was found later to have contracted mild pneumonia in the 55DEG cold, owed his life to his jacket, which created an air pocket over his head, and to the skill and dedication of a community that was determined he should not die.

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