Sally Mulliken didn’t think her husband looked right that day.
“He looked a little ashen,” she recalls. “I’m a nurse. I said ‘you don’t look good.’’”
But Jack Mulliken was determined to go play softball. He was well past 70, retired from a business career, but sometimes played softball seven days a week in the summer — for so many teams that he can’t remember the name of the team he was playing for that day in the Hanover County senior league. He played for so many teams around Richmond that he never bothered to get a uniform; he always just wore a black T-shirt. “The man in black,” he was called.
Jack made a quip about how the field had recently installed an AED, the acronym for an automated external defibrillator, a device used to shock a patient’s heart back into action, and headed off to the game.
That evening, Sally was at home taking a nap when the phone rang. It was someone from the league. “They’ve taken Jack to Regional and you should get there now.”
* * *
Jack was playing first base that July day in 2024. When his team came up to bat, he lay down in the dugout to rest. He didn’t get back up.
When his teammates realized he was having a heart attack, they started doing chest compressions.
They weren’t working, though. Someone rushed to get the AED that had been installed just three months earlier.
“They got it out, shocked Jack, got him breathing for maybe a minute or two, then his heart stopped again,” Sally says. “They shocked him again. They hit him three times before the ambulance got there. They got him in the ambulance and he coded again, so they shocked him again in the ambulance, that was the fourth time. He coded again in the ER [at Bon Secours Memorial Regional Medical Center], so that was five times someone had to use a defibrillator.”
Somehow, Jack pulled through. After five days, he came home with six stents in his heart. “That tells you how many vessels were blocked,” Sally says. After Jack got settled back at home, Sally says, “I went outside and sat on the porch and called Bill.”
That Bill was Bill Stanley, the Republican state senator from Franklin County.
* * *
Years before, Stanley had been at a meeting in Richmond when a woman came up to him outside and started giving him grief about his conservative position on whatever issue had been discussed.
That woman was Sally Mulliken.
“We totally disagree on everything,” Stanley says. “We are complete polar opposites but she’s charming and hilarious. It’s one of those friendships in politics you make. I respect her for her opinion and she respects me for mine.”
Mulliken had come up to Stanley that day because she had grown up in Franklin County. “My father sold Mason jars to moonshiners,” she says, by way of hometown credentials.
Now she lives in the Richmond suburbs but didn’t want to pass up a chance to tell the Franklin County senator where she stood. “I was impressed with his responsiveness, his ability to respectfully banter back with me,” she says.
Neither persuaded the other, but they stayed in touch over the years.
Then her husband nearly died on a softball field.
They were nearly three hours apart by distance and even further apart politically.
Still, it was only natural for her to call Stanley.
* * *
“She told me this story,” Stanley recalls. “It’s moving.”
It also led to a policy initiative: Jack was lucky that Pole Green Park had an AED, paid for by the East Hanover Volunteer Fire Department. What if that were the standard for sports facilities? What if that were the law?
The two kept talking off and on. “She was so persistent,” Stanley says.
On New Year’s Eve 2025, just before midnight, Sally got a text from Stanley. “Happy New Year, Sally. Your AED bill is in.”
She wasn’t sure if he was serious; Stanley has a well-deserved reputation as a jokester. He wasn’t joking about this, though.
* * *
Stanley’s SB 87 would require government-owned sports facilities to have AEDs.
Sally Mulliken has spent much of the past few months visiting, calling, emailing legislators and their aides to talk up the bill. “I’d tell them, ‘This is Bill Stanley’s bill, but it’s not really his bill, it’s my bill,’” she says. “I let everyone know it was personal to me.”
Sally hasn’t needed any talking points. As a nurse, she already knew them: “When you have a heart attack, you have about a 10-minute window when you’re losing oxygen to the brain or you’ll have brain damage.”
The National Institutes of Health has a webpage on AEDs that quotes a Johns Hopkins University doctor who says they are used to save about 1,700 lives each year. “Unfortunately, not enough Americans know to look for AEDs in public locations, nor are they trained on how to use them,” Myron Weisfeldt says in that statement. That number has to be balanced against the 350,000 or so people who die from heart attacks each year.
According to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, 22 states have laws that require AEDs somewhere, although those locations vary — typically, it’s health clubs and schools. According to the foundation, Virginia requires the former, not the latter.
Stanley’s bill would put them at any sports facility owned by a local government — so schools, parks, recreation centers. To give local governments time to plan for the cost, it wouldn’t take effect until July 1, 2028. The fiscal impact statement accompanying the bill says AEDs cost $1,400 to $2,500 apiece. Not every locality responded to an inquiry from the Commission on Local Government about the cost, but among those who did, the total cost in those localities ranged from $6,435 in Prince George County to $250,000 in Hanover County. (The only locality in the western part of the state that responded was Roanoke County, which put the cost at $215,000.)
Stanley’s bill — although Sally Mulliken calls it her bill — passed both houses unanimously and now goes to the governor.
“We’re two diametrically opposed people,” Stanley says, “but we came together and got something passed.”
Meanwhile, Jack Mulliken is back to playing softball, bowling and running 10 miles a day. He’s 75.
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