Jessica McClure Morales — once known to the world as Baby Jessica, the toddler who famously tumbled down a well and remained wedged there for close to 60 hours in 1987 — was clueless about a similar though far more prolonged drama unfolding in a cave in Thailand.
“I didn’t know about it at all,” McClure Morales, now 32, told the New York Times.
“We live in the country and we’re pretty unplugged,” she added.
Since her rescue about 31 years ago, Morales has largely stayed out of the spotlight — she’s now a mom of two and lives less than two miles from the site of the well she fell into in rural Midland, Texas.
“Our internet’s very spotty, and we’re not willing to pay for cable because it’s too expensive,” Morales said.
Still, she was glad to hear the 12 young boys and their coach had been rescued, after being trapped in a partly flooded, underground network of caves for close to two weeks.
“It’s a miracle,” she said.
Baby Jessica’s own story kept Americans glued to their TV screens for two and a half days — even prompting President Ronald Reagan to say, “Everybody in America became godfathers and godmothers of Baby Jessica while this was going on.”
A study by the Pew Research Center found that 69 percent of Americans very closely followed her story.
But Morales, who was 18 months old, doesn’t remember her ordeal in the well, or being freed from it, and is now so unplugged, her friends joke about sending her their children to keep them off their devices.
“It didn’t affect me the way it affected other people,” she said. “I lived it, but I didn’t watch it.”
Even her husband, Danny Morales, remembers his mother watching Baby Jessica’s rescue on television and urging her friends to hold their children closer at the time.
Morales found a lesson in that.
“I hope that’s how the people feel when they listen to and read about the Thailand boys,” she said. “I hope they hold their kids a little tighter and I hope they hold them a little longer. Things can change and happen on a dime.”