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Whatever Happened To...? Catching Up With Canadian Icons

Roger Woodward - Falls Survivor

In the summer of 1960, Roger Woodward was at the centre of what the history books have recorded as the "Niagara Falls" miracle.
On the afternoon of July 9, the seven-year-old Niagara Falls, New York youngster and his seventeen-year-old sister Deanne, were enjoying their first-ever boat ride in an aluminum fishing boat piloted on the Niagara River by family friend Jim Honeycutt.

While cruising above Canada's Horseshoe Falls the 12-foot craft's 7.5-horsepower outboard motor hit a rock, sheared its cotter pin and lost power. As it was swept toward the falls, it capsized, tossing Honeycutt and the Woodward children into the frothing waters.
Roger was wearing nothing but a swimsuit and a lifejacket as he floated toward the brink of the falls, which drop 162 feet into a pile of rocks. His sister managed to slip into a life jacket before the boat flipped.

John Hayes and John Quattrochi, both tourists, pulled Deanne out of the water 20 feet from the top of the of Canadian falls but Roger was not so lucky. He went over the edge into an area strewn with boulders.
Miraculously, he escaped with nothing more than minor cuts and bruises, suffered when he landed at the bottom, and a concussion, which happened before he went over the brink.

To this day, Woodward, now in his early 50s, has vivid memories of his experience.
"One minute I was looking over the gorge, then I was floating in a cloud, I couldn't see anything. I could not discern up or down or where I was," he says. "What I remember next is a severe throbbing in my head, likely from the concussion, which happened in the rapids or when I fell out of the boat…I had surrendered to the fact that I was going to die, then through the mist I saw the Maid of the Mist."

Why did he not perish like others who have gone over the falls?
"There were not a whole lot of places to land but by the grace of God, I landed in a in a pool of water. Had I even grazed one rock on the way down it would have shattered every bone in my body."
The 55-pound boy was pulled from the river by the crew of a Maid of the Mist tour boat, which luckily was cruising nearby with a load of tourists who were snapping photographs of the falls. Roger immediately asked about the whereabouts of his sister, and then requested a glass of water.
"I had probably drank half the Niagara River, but I was pretty thirsty," he says.

Back on shore, he was taken to the Greater Niagara General Hospital in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where he remained for three days for treatment of his injuries.
Deanne, with only a cut hand, was treated at a hospital in Niagara Falls, New York where she learned of her brother's fate. The body of Honeycutt, who also went over the falls, was found in the river four days later. He was not wearing a life jacket.

When the world learned that Woodward had become the first person to go over the falls unprotected, the media descended on the boy and his family. Newspapers took his picture. Movie producers wanted his story.
"The story became famous," he recalls. "It was a time when the daredevil thing and going over the falls was pretty amazing and here you had two kids from a blue collar family who ended up in a horrific accident and a man was killed…the fact that we lived when many others had died going over the falls was quite amazing."

In 1962, the Woodward family moved to Florida, in part to escape the prying eyes of the media. The parents never talked about the incident with Roger and Deanne. In Florida, Roger met and married his high school sweetheart, Susan. After college he joined the Navy and later worked for a business and office products company in Atlanta for 13 years before a career change took the family to Michigan where he worked in the telecom industry for 17 years.

In 1996, the Woodwards and their three sons moved to Huntsville, Alabama, a city of 350,000 people 290 kilometres northwest of Atlanta where Roger was working in real estate. In 2006, Deanne was living in Lakeland, Florida.
Roger Woodward has returned to Niagara Falls, Ontario several times since the accident.
On the 25th anniversary in 1985 he and all of those involved in the mishap, including Deanne, were given a key to the city and a portrait of the falls.

Five years later, he spoke to the congregation at Glengate Alliance Church in Niagara Falls, Ontario. The audience was silent as Woodward, 37-years-old at the time, told how Honeycutt's boat was caught in the fast flowing current and dragged toward the edge of the falls.
In 1994 Woodward and Deanne returned to the city to retell their story on a half-hour Canadian television special. Joining Roger and his sister were the two men, in their eighties at the time, who rescued Deanne before she went over the falls.

Worth Noting …
The incident at the Horseshoe Falls was not Roger Woodward's only brush with death. In his junior year of high school in 1970, a tractor-trailer ran a red light and broadsided his motorcycle. He landed on a set of railroad tracks, escaping with only a broken finger on his left hand. In the fall of 1994, while on a nighttime boat trip across Lake Huron with his 9-year-old son, Jonathan, the pair became disoriented in a fog bank. Their boat was narrowly missed by a freighter.
The boating incident "was the single most frightening experience since Niagara Falls," says Woodward.