On Aug. 1, 1956, Dr. K. Alvin Merendino at the University of Washington in Seattle performed the first successful open-heart bypass surgery in the western U.S. The patient was thirteen-year-old Tommy Fangboner from Ellensburg, WA.

Merendino and his team gathered in the operating suites on the 7th floor of UW’s de facto teaching hospital, the old King County Hospital, now known as Harborview Medical Center. A young resident named George Thomas, ’58, recalls that it was an uneventful surgery—the team had rehearsed this moment a hundred times, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was going to work. “We were ready for this,” recalls Thomas. “We walked in and Merendino said ‘Are you ready boys?’ and we were.”

An Aug. 12, 1956, newspaper article recounted the groundbreaking surgery. ”An incision reaching from armpit to armpit was made and the heart was exposed. Two tube-like catheters were placed into the main veins leading into the heart, shutting off the blood flow. Pumps immediately began drawing out the blue blood and circulated it through the artificial lung, which added the correct amount of oxygen, at the same time removing waste carbon dioxide.

“The normal circulation back into the heart was blocked by the lower left valve. As steel and plastic quivered in emulating the duties of the body’s most delicate organs, Tommy’s blood coursed normally through his body. The heart was as still as death …”

For nearly half an hour, the mechanical heart-lung machine kept the young boy alive. Tommy Fangboner’s heart did not beat. In that half an hour, a three-inch incision was made into the right ventricle of Tommy’s heart and the extraneous muscle was cut away before the incision was closed. Doctors disconnected Tommy from the bypass machine, and his heart began to beat again.

The following morning, as he gazed out over Elliott Bay from his hospital room at Harborview, Tommy asked his nurses for a milkshake. He was looking forward to returning to his life in Ellensburg, his world of rodeos and baseball—never mind that he had made cardiac history; he was just a boy whose heart needed to be fixed.

Merendino later became chair of the surgery department. He last spoke to Tommy Fangboner about 15 years ago and says his first bypass surgery patient was still healthy and living a full life in eastern Washington. Fangboner died in 1991.