“I’m no hero,” said Bill Mentzer.
“I just felt so sorry, and my heart went out to those people.”
Mentzer, now 90, was referring to the historic “Black Friday” Flood of July 1951, when much of Iola was submerged under water, and Neosho Falls was all but destroyed.
Yet despite his humbleness, Mentzer didn’t just watch as events unfolded. Rather, the then 20-year-old jumped in his boat and set about rescuing folks in the Neosho Falls area near his family’s farm.
“It wasn’t anything exciting. It was just something that had to be done,” he said. “That’s all there was to it.”
At the time of the flood, according to Mentzer, “I was just helping dad, starting junior college. We were milking a lot of cows by hand.”
The Mentzer farm is located in northwest Allen County, fairly close to the Neosho River, though perched at a safe elevation.
“That’s up on a high bluff there,” he said. “So we were on the edge of the water.”
“The flood was going on, and dad and I were looking at it,” Mentzer continued. “It just kept coming up and up.”
“We could see that our neighbors were going under water, so we went back and loaded up my old boat,” he said.
“It wasn’t much of a boat. It was a homemade boat. … though I’d bought a 5-horse motor for it.”
IT WASN’T long after taking to the water that Mentzer and his father, Leslie, started finding folks in need of help.
The Smading family were first in line.
“We stopped at their back porch,” Mentzer said, “and when we were going in, we had to maneuver through the farm implements.”
In order to slow the boat, Leslie reached out and grabbed hold of a tree, but the fierce current jerked his feet out from under him such that he’d be forced to wait there until his son’s return.
