It’s never too late to set the record straight.

That’s the message Susan Erickson of Kalispell was hoping to hear when she called the Daily Inter Lake newsroom recently and wondered if a correction could be made to a column written exactly 52 years ago today by then-publisher Joe Caraher.

Erickson simply wanted to note that it was her — not Susan Bishop as the article stated — who at age 4 saved her 3-year-old brother, John Erickson, from drowning in Spring Creek.

Caraher’s column, published Dec. 18, 1961, focused first on 10-year-old Pamela Erickson, Susan’s older sister, who had “bravely pulled little Ross Bishop (age 5) ... from the icy waters of Spring Creek.”

The Ericksons and Bishops were among a close-knit group of neighbors who lived on Edgewood Drive in Evergreen. Spring Creek was a big source of entertainment for the dozens of children who grew up there in the 1950s and ’60s.

Caraher’s column then detailed Susan’s heroic act two years earlier when she “managed to hold John’s head out of the water while young Ross (Bishop) went running to get his mother.

“Susan stayed with her task until Mrs. Bishop arrived on the scene and it is believed that had it not been for little Susie’s cool and collected approach to John’s problem, he may have drowned,” Caraher stated in the Inter Lake.

It was the Bishops’ English setter that brushed John into the water, Susan recalled.

Susan went on to have many more opportunities to save lives. After passing the senior lifeguarding course taught at the home swimming pool of her friends, Cindy and Sandy Bitney, Susan worked as a lifeguard at the Woodland Park pool for three summers and later got a job at the Montana State University pool through the work-study program.

John Erickson, who now lives in Springfield, Ore., was a skilled fisherman at an early age. In 1964 the Inter Lake wrote about how John, then 8, hauled in a 14.5-inch grayling out of Spring Creek. The Inter Lake  photographed him four years later displaying a 22-inch rainbow trout he caught in Spring Creek.

Those lunkers are long gone from Spring Creek, but fishing is still a favorite pastime for both John and Susan, who are less than a year apart in age.

A longtime local massage therapist, Susan, 58, said Spring Creek was the lifeblood of their idyllic childhood.

Doug Bishop used a backhoe to create a pond deep enough to dive into and there was a makeshift bridge across the creek. Bishop loved to take home movies and there’s plenty of film footage of the Edgewood neighbors diving into the creek.

The pond has since been overgrown with willows and foliage and now is more swamp than pond.

“We all took care of each other,” Susan said. “There were 97 kids on Edgewood. It was THE place to live. It was suburbia back then.”

Growing up along the creek and playing in and around water were a way of life.

Memories of life on Edgewood Drive have been circulating on Facebook, Susan said, as the baby boomers of that era reminisce about their childhood in Evergreen. Some have suggested a book should be written about life along Spring Creek.

When someone recently referred to the Inter Lake article and asked “Who’s Susan Bishop?” Susan knew she had to set the record straight — that she’s an Erickson, not a Bishop.

Caraher appropriately summed up the Erickson children’s two life-saving adventures, saying “It isn’t unusual to have a good many things in common with the people next door. But it is a rare instance indeed where youngsters have saved each other’s lives as they have in the cases of Master Ross Bishop and Master John Erickson.

“It’s a wonderful, reciprocal ‘good neighbor’ arrangement that carries out the intent of the Golden Rule to the very fullest,” Caraher added.    

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.