Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, July 19, 1978, the back seat of a station wagon in the Arbon Valley area served as the delivery room for a newborn girl. The man who delivered her was Brad Flores, a trooper with the Idaho State Police. The Idaho State Journal told the story on its front page the next day, beside news of a threatened national mail strike and a tax bill in Congress.
As Flores told it, the mother and a relative had already set out for the hospital when it became clear to them that the baby was coming first. Their call went to Med-Alert, the ambulance service, which alerted the police in turn. The message found Flores in American Falls, the county seat, at the Power County Sheriff's Office. It was about 5:31 p.m. when he got there, and the healthy girl was born around 5:35. The Med-Alert ambulance reached the scene several minutes after Flores did, and mother and daughter ended up at Bannock Memorial Hospital in Pocatello. The paper said she learned at the hospital, and not before, that her daughter's delivery had been the work of a state trooper.
Before joining the state police, Flores had served on the Rexburg police force. Emergency childbirth was part of every trooper's training; until this July evening, Flores had never needed it. Speaking to the Journal the next morning, he said events moved too fast for nerves, which caught up with him only once it was over.
The paper paired this birth with another from the same day, a boy whose birth came in an ambulance at about 5:05 that morning, half a day ahead of the girl. The article does not say where that family came from, and nothing ties it to the valley. On Thursday the hospital said all four, two mothers and two newborns, were in good shape.
Distance to a doctor was an old fact of valley life. The valley lies about 30 miles southwest of Pocatello. In February 1915 a Pauline writer to the American Falls Press put it this way:
It is about twenty-seven miles from American Falls to Pauline and about the same distance to Pocatello.
The earliest doctor this site has found living in the valley is Dr. Leo Castle at Pauline in 1918, and how long he stayed is not known. Sixty years later the hospital was still a long drive away, and on this July evening the baby came first.
Much is unknown. The hospital would not release the parents' names, and the paper does not say where the family lived, which road the car was on, or exactly where it stopped. "The Arbon Valley area" is all it gives. The family probably lived in or near the valley, since the call for help came from there, but the article does not say so. No later report of the birth has been found in the papers searched for this site. If this is your family's story, or you know more, the site would be glad to hear from you.
On this site: the long road to the doctor in 1915, the influenza autumn of 1918, when no doctor was within forty miles, and the Arbon community.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, July 20, 1978, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
On Wednesday evening a baby girl was born in a station wagon in the Arbon Valley area, and the one who delivered her was Brad Flores of the Idaho State Police.
The paper put the time of birth at about 5:35 p.m. Word of the emergency reached Flores while he was in American Falls, at the Power County sheriff's office. He said the mother and a relative had left for the hospital by car, then saw they would not reach it in time. Their phone call went to Med-Alert, which relayed it to the police. Flores reached the station wagon at about 5:31 p.m., and the girl, healthy, arrived a few minutes after that.
Flores told the Journal on Thursday morning that the speed of it all left him no chance to be anxious; that came afterward. The baby was in fine shape, he said, and he had praise for the Med-Alert crew, whose ambulance pulled in several minutes behind him. Only after she reached Bannock Memorial Hospital in Pocatello did the mother find out, according to the paper, that a state trooper had been the one to deliver her daughter.
Every state trooper learns how to handle a birth in an emergency. Flores, who had been a police officer in Rexburg before joining the state police, used that lesson for the first time on Wednesday. He was paid nothing extra for it; in his words, "it comes with the job." What mattered to him, he said, was a girl safely in the world and well.
The girl was the second of two babies the paper counted that day who did not make it to a hospital before being born. The first, a boy, was born in an ambulance at about 5:05 a.m., some twelve hours earlier.
Both mothers and both babies were well on Thursday, according to a Bannock Memorial spokeswoman. She said the hospital would not make the parents' names public.