By Brenda Erdahl
Every community has a hometown hero. Sometimes it’s a high school football star who makes it to the NFL, or a local actor who goes on to make it big in Hollywood.
In Maple Lake, Dr. James Jude holds that honor.
For those who don’t know, Dr. Jude was a co-developer of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, more commonly known as CPR. He was a cardiac and thoracic surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore when chance brought him in contact with Dr. William Kouwenhoven and Dr. Guy Knickerbocker who combined their research to discover the lifesaving technique.
But before all of that, Dr. Jude was your average small-town boy who went to school (Maple Lake Class of 1946), likely played sports, and probably dreamed of making his mark on the world. Recently, a relative of Dr. Jude delivered an interesting package to the Maple Lake Library. It contained one of Dr. Jude’s senior class projects with dozens of pictures of Maple Lake from 1946. Town Historian Sue Sylvester said it’s the most extensive collection of a dated period she’s ever seen for this community. Inspired, Sylvester has since turned that collection into an archival display at the Maple Lake Library that everyone is invited to come in and see.
Jude’s school project, which is protected in a glass case at the library, is a handcrafted, wooden photo album containing numerous black and white photographs taken, seemingly, from every angle of the town – there are even a couple that Sylvester suspects were taken from on top of St. Timothy Church. A brief description inside the cover suggests Jude was looking to document the village by photographing “views of the town,” “places of interest,” and “some homes.” The date is recorded as April 1946. Dr. Jude was a senior and the project was for English XII, taught by Miss Hamm.
Dr. Jude has since passed away, but in a Maple Lake Messenger article written by Theresa Andrus in 2011, he explains how Miss Hamm was the one who made him realize medicine was his calling.
Pictured, from left, are the creators of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), Dr. James Jude of Maple Lake, Dr. William Kouwenhoven and Dr. Guy Knickerbocker.