This is one of those wonderful stories that Paul Harvey tells on "The Rest of the Story".
Good read.
Old EddieIt happens every Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun resembles a giant orange and is starting to dip into the blue ocean.
Old Ed comes strolling along the beach to his favorite pier. Clutched in his bony hand is a bucket of shrimp. Ed walks out to the end of the pier, where it seems he almost has the world to himself. The glow of the sun is a golden bronze now.
Everybody's gone, except for a few joggers on the beach. Standing out on the end of the pier, Ed is alone with his thoughts....and his bucket of shrimp.
Before long, however, he is no longer alone. Up in the sky a thousand white dots come screeching and squawking, winging their way toward that lanky frame standing there on the end of the pier. Before long, dozens of seagulls have enveloped him, their wings fluttering and flapping wildly. Ed stands there tossing shrimp to the hungry birds. As he does, if you listen closely, you can hear him say with a smile, "Thank you. Thank you."
In a few short minutes the bucket is empty. But Ed doesn't leave. He stands there lost in thought, as though transported to another time and place. Invariably, one of the gulls lands on his sea-bleached, weather-beaten hat - an old military hat he's been wearing for years.
When he finally turns around and begins to walk back toward the beach, a few of the birds hop along the pier with him until he gets to the stairs, and then they, too, fly away. And old Ed quietly makes his way down to the end of the beach and on home.
If you were sitting there on the pier with your fishing line in the water, Ed might seem like "a funny old duck," as my dad used to
say. Or, "a guy that's a sandwich shy of a picnic," as my kids might say. To onlookers, he's just another old codger, lost in his own weird world, feeding the seagulls with a bucket full of shrimp.
To the onlooker, rituals can look either very strange or very empty. They can seem altogether unimportant ....maybe even a lot of nonsense. Old folks often do strange things, at least in the eyes of Boomers and Busters. Most of them would probably write Old Ed off, down there in Florida .
That's too bad.
They'd do well to know him better.
His full name: Eddie Rickenbacker.
He was a famous hero back in World War I.
And a civilian consultant during WWII. On one of his flying missions across the Pacific, he and his seven-member crew went down. Miraculously, all of the men survived the crash, crawled out of their plane, and climbed into a life raft.
Captain Rickenbacker and his crew floated for days on the rough waters of the Pacific. They fought the sun. They fought sharks. Most of all, they fought hunger. By the eighth day their rations ran out. No food. No water. They were hundreds of miles from land and no one knew where they were.
They needed a miracle.
That afternoon they had a simple devotional service and prayed for a miracle. They tried to nap. Eddie leaned back and pulled his military cap over his nose. Time dragged. All he could hear was the slap of the waves against the raft.
Suddenly, Eddie felt something land on the top of his cap.
It was a seagull!
Old Ed would later describe how he sat perfectly still, planning his next move. With a flash of his hand and a squawk from the gull, he managed to grab it and wring its neck. He tore the feathers off, and he and his starving crew made a meal - a very slight meal for eight men - of it. Then they used the intestines for bait. With it, they caught fish, which gave them food and more bait.....and the cycle continued. With that simple survival technique, they were able to endure the rigors of the sea until they were found and rescued, while losing only one man who succumbed to his injuries.
(after 24 days at sea...)
Eddie Rickenbacker lived many years beyond that ordeal, but he never forgot the sacrifice of that first lifesaving seagull. And he never stopped saying, "Thank you." That's why almost every Friday night he would walk to the end of the pier with a bucket full of shrimp and a heart full of gratitude.
And now you know the rest of the story.
PS: Eddie was also an Ace in WW I and started Eastern Airlines back in the 30's.
Adrift at sea
One of Rickenbacker's most famous near-death experiences occurred in October 1942. He was sent on a tour of the Pacific theater to review conditions and operations, and to personally deliver a secret message to General Douglas MacArthur. After visiting bases in Hawaii, the B-17D, 40-3089, in which he was flying went hundreds of miles off course from its first scheduled stop at Canton Island. The navigation failure was due to an out-of-true octant which introduced bias in the navigation calculations. The octant had suffered a severe shock in a pre-takeoff incident. This accident spurred the development of improved navigation tools and survival gear for aircraft. The pilots ditched the plane in the Pacific Ocean, dangerously close to Japanese-held enemy territory.
For 24 days, Rickenbacker, his friend and business partner, and the crew drifted at sea. Rickenbacker was still suffering from his prior airplane crash, his friend Hans Adamson sustained serious injuries in the water landing, and others in the crew were hurt to varying degrees. The crew's food supply ran out after three days. On the eighth day, a seagull landed on Rickenbacker's head. He painstakingly captured it, and the survivors meticulously divided it equally and used some for fishing bait. They lived on sporadic rain water and similar food "miracles". Rickenbacker assumed leadership, encouraging and browbeating the others to survive. He encouraged them to turn to Christianity for solace using Psalm 46. The U.S. Army Air Forces intended to abandon the search for the lost crew after more than two weeks, but Rickenbacker's wife convinced them to extend the search another week. Once again, the press reported that Rickenbacker had died.
Navy pilots rescued the surviving members of the crew on November 13, 1942, off the coast of Nukufetau near Samoa. The survivors were suffering from exposure, dehydration, and starvation. One serviceman had died and was buried at sea. Rickenbacker completed his assignment and delivered MacArthur's secret message, which has never been made public.
Rickenbacker initially thought that he had been lost for 21 days, and wrote a book about the experience titled Seven Came Through, published by Doubleday, Doran. It was not until later that he recalculated and corrected himself in his 1967 autobiography.
Rickenbacker's ordeal was used as an example for Alcoholics Anonymous when the first of their Twelve Traditions was formulated: Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity."[12]http://www.answers.com/topic/eddie-rickenbacker
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