Medal recipient gets memorial at Pittsburgh grave

July 19, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

PITTSBURGH

More than a century after a western Pennsylvania teenager became the first recipient of a Carnegie Medal for diving into a pond to save a drowning friend, members of his family gathered at his grave to dedicate a memorial to his heroism.

The memorial, a bronze replica of the medal, is set in a granite square just below the headstone of Louis Baumann Jr. in Homewood Cemetery.

Baumann and three friends decided to go swimming at the pond on what an investigator later called an “ideal summer day” on July 17, 1904. One of them, Charles Stevick, leaped off the springboard but shouted for help after he surfaced and then sank. Baumann went in, and on his third attempt managed to pull him to the edge where others lifted them out.

Charles Stevick, who was unconscious, was revived in 10 minutes, and a 1930 newspaper account says Louis revived him, although the medal investigator’s report does not provide that detail. Louis was the 201st person nominated and the first awarded the Carnegie Medal, nominated by his father in a handwritten letter that listed witnesses to the event.

Three of Baumann’s four nephews, his closest survivors, attended Saturday’s ceremony along with representatives of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission and Wilkinsburg Historical Society. Nephew Ronald Hitchon, of Lewisville, Texas, who had been in New Jersey on business, said he came because “not too many families have heroes in them.”

Louis Baumann went on to found a taxi company and operated a car dealership with his brothers before he died in 1925 at age 36. Family members say they believe the strain of the rescue aggravated a pre-existing heart condition and contributed to his early death.

Pittsburgh steel baron Andrew Carnegie established the medal in spring 1904 after a mine disaster in Springdale killed 181 people, including two men who entered the mine on rescue attempts after the blast.