TAYLORSVILLE, Ky. — When a Taylorsville grandfather had a heart attack that first responder refer to as a "Widowmaker", it was a southeast Bullitt County firefighter that saved his life.
Although Tatum Scharrer wasn't working at the time, he said he's always on the clock.
"A lot of the times we do that and on the fire side of things, we don't see them after that," Scharrer added. "This time I actually got to meet the family, and that was really cool."
Scharrer started his life-saving career as a junior firefighter in Taylorsville. It's a small town where he said everybody is family, now he can officially add two more to the list.
"I guess you could say we have another member of the family, 'cause we're never gonna forget what he's done and we're never gonna let him forget it either," Wanda Vaught said.
Her husband, Clifton Vaught, doesn't remember his rescue, but Wanda does.
"From what I saw," she recalled. "He was gasping for air and I was just telling him, 'breathe, just breathe Clifton.'"
After a 12-hour shift on June 12, Clifton hauled a four-wheeler to the Shelby County Fair so his grandson could drag race.
Midway through the races, the grandfather dropped, and Scharrer bolted across the drag strip. He saved Clifton's life with CPR, then checked on him later in the hospital.
"I said, 'you scared me a little bit too, 'cause in the middle of it you just woke up and look straight at me,'" Scharrer recounted.
But the young rescuer opened Clifton's eyes another way—to life's finer details.
"I notice it now. The little stuff that we all take for granted every day," he said.
Now as he notices more, he looks forward to teaching his other grandchildren about drag racing. It's more time together that he now owes to Scharrer, though Scharrer humbly owes his heroics to the mentors who trained him.
"I just got lucky enough to have some light shed on mine. Everybody in the fire service has that moment," he explained.
Though in this case, it was a moment with a less than 1% chance of survival.
"His doctor told him, it was a miracle," Wanda said.
A miracle giving Clifton more time for what he loves.
"I actually was talking to his son," Scharrer said. "He said they're getting ready to come back out, and I said 'I'll see you out there.'"
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