Lula Mae McDaniel’s eyes fill as she thinks of how her life was saved 42 years ago. Visible burn scars on McDaniel’s left arm that continue down the left side of her body and back remind her every day of how lucky she is to be alive. (The Vicksburg Post/MELANIE DUNCAN)

[04/16/01] The Tuesday after Easter in 1959 was a life-changing day for 7-year-old Lula Mae McDaniel. That’s the day she could have burned to death in an accident at her home.

It also was the day her neighbor George Kennedy became what she calls today her guardian angel.

Lo these many years, McDaniel has wanted to thank Kennedy for tearing the flaming clothes from her tiny body, saving her from further pain and injury, but he has always put her off, saying he needed no thanks. In December, a chance meeting allowed her to thank him personally, and now she wants to do it publicly.

In April 1959, McDaniel, her mother and her siblings were living in a small apartment on Magnolia Street, now Bowman Street, having moved to “the big city” from Union Church in Jefferson County.

She and her sister had just gotten home from school when their mother crossed the street to her uncle’s home, leaving the 7-year-old in charge and telling both children to stay away from the stove.

Children being children and McDaniel being the big sister, she dragged over a chair to reach something above the stove. The hanging belt on her school dress, which she vividly recalls as blue-and-white-checked, hit the flames.

“The material was real thin and started blazing up,” she said last week.

The panicked child ran outside.

“I got about halfway down the alley, and there was Mr. Kennedy,” she said.

He and several other people, including Jack “Junior” Brown, helped the injured child. Kennedy ripped the burning clothes from McDaniel, and Brown wrapped her in a sheet. Lee Woods took her to Kuhn Memorial State Hospital for what would become a long stay.

“When I went in, I was 7, and when I came out, I was 8,” she said.

Out of Kuhn, she began a series of other hospital stays and surgeries that lasted until she was 17.

When she was 9, McDaniel said, her mother contacted the Shriners, who sent her to the University of Mississippi Medical Center, to St. Dominic Hospital and Mississippi Baptist Medical Center.

During those painful surgeries and hospital stays, doctors had to work to release her left arm, which had grown to her chest, and then cover the scars of the third-degree burns across her left side and back. McDaniel said the doctors told her she’d probably never have much use of the arm.

Last week, she waved her arm up and down, showing off its strength and flexibility.

“I can do anything I want to with it,” she said.

At the same time, she showed the terrible scars that cover that arm.

But it’s not the scars or the surgeries or the nights in the hospitals that left the biggest impression on McDaniel. It was George Kennedy.

“When you are a little child and on fire, and you run outside and see someone so big” it really makes an impression, she said.

For years, McDaniel wanted to thank Kennedy and even went to the A&P on Clay Street, where he worked. But he always put her off.

“He would not let me,” she said.

Throughout, thanking the man she calls her guardian angel remained on her mind.

“I must have written a letter a thousand times,” she said, but it never seemed just right.

Then in December, McDaniel was at a funeral for a former teacher at Bowman School when she saw Kennedy among the mourners.

When McDaniel got to her car, she found George Kennedy getting in his, parked nose-to-nose to hers.

Still, it did not seem enough to finally tell Kennedy thank you. She had to let others know how she felt and how much the big, kind man means to her.

Last week he said it didn’t require much thought to know the right thing to do. “She was whooping and crying, and I knew something had to be done,” he said.

McDaniel sees it differently. Forty-two years, a son, 10 grandchildren and a job as a slot supervisor at the Isle of Capri later, George Kennedy is still her guardian angel.