In the Perrysville neighborhood of Ross, a utility pole on Perry Highway with a flashing "Slow School Zone'' sign had a danger it didn't advertise.

It's right outside George Lindner's daughter's house, which he was leaving one afternoon last month to get to his car. He didn't see that the pole's ground wire had worked its way out of the soil, and it tripped him.

Mr. Lindner fell flat on his face, smashed his nose, cut his face and right hand and scraped his knee. He'll tell you that matter of factly, in that way men who have seen far worse times will do. Mr. Lindner, 81, was a Marine wounded in the battle of Iwo Jima back when the digits in his age were flipped and he was but 18.

Still, he could have used a little help on Perry Highway. And it came.

Doree, Bridget and Kevin Simon, students of North Hills High, had seen him fall and stopped their car, then helped him to his feet.

"They rushed to my aid, handing me paper towels to wipe my bleeding face and hand and insisted on taking me to the Emergency Department at Passavant Hospital,'' he wrote in a short letter to me.

A neighbor, Brian Fisher, got in the car with the teenagers and got Mr. Lindner to the hospital in 10 minutes. Mr. Lindner's daughter, Janet, a pharmacist there, came straightaway. After hours of waiting, tests and treatment, taking stitches in his nose and hand, Mr. Lindner went home thankful he hadn't broken his hip.

When he got home, he found messages on his answering machine from the Simon teens, asking how he was doing.

"I will always be thankful for the kindness these students showed to me. We read about so many of the bad kids, but there are millions of good young people on our planet. I ask God to bless them all.''

So why share this tale? Because teens like these don't get in the paper much. Just as we cover the planes that crash rather than the ones that land, we're more likely to notice kids going wrong than the ones who do right. That is unless they run for a touchdown or sink a basket at the buzzer. Then we care.

So after I got Mr. Lindner's letter, I drove up to North Hills High and sat down in a conference room with the Simons: Doree, 18; Bridget, 16; and Kevin, 15. They told me how Bridget was driving to a doctor's appointment that got them out early from school. She saw Mr. Lindner fall, saw the blood pouring from his face, and pulled over.

She found napkins and water to daub his wounds, and then the siblings figured that taking Mr. Lindner to the hospital, and letting yet another stranger in the car to direct them there, was the only thing they could reasonably do.

Why?

"The Golden Rule,'' Bridget said.

Pretty simple.

The Simons said their mother worried about the liability if something had happened to Mr. Lindner along the way, and told them it would have been better to call 911 for an ambulance, but Bridget said, "I'd do it again.''

Mr. Lindner is doing OK, though his knee hurts enough that he needs a cane when he gets up from a chair. He does well enough once he gets walking.

He was the same age as Doree when shrapnel from a mortar shell slammed him on March 11, 1945, his 22nd day on Iwo Jima. He was wounded in the hand, leg and back, and he was flown to Guam and then to the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to recuperate. He turned 19 in that hospital, and after he was released he was sent to Japan to assist in its occupation after the war.

Funny thing about his war wounds, if there can be anything funny about shrapnel, is that his injuries came on his father's birthday. George Sr. later told him, "I was praying real hard for you to get off that island.''

Dad didn't specify how.

Call that a coincidence, and the fact that the Simons drove down Perry Highway when Mr. Lindner most needed them is likewise coincidental. But as I was driving from the North Hills, a guy came on the radio with what might have seemed a sanctimonious Memorial Day message in another context. I wasn't taking notes, but he said something about how all of us are called upon to do what we can when crises arise.

Not all the tasks are hazardous. Most are mundane. But those who recognize those moments when called upon will be people we remember.