The Gold-and-Ivory Tablecloth

By Rev. Howard C. Schade

December 1954

At Christmas time men and women everywhere gather in their churches to wonder anew at the greatest miracle the world has ever known. But the story I like best to recall was not a miracle—not exactly.

It happened to a pastor who was very young. His church was very old. Once, long ago, it had flourished. Famous men had preached from its pulpit, prayed before its altar. Rich and poor alike had worshiped there and built it beautifully. Now the good days had passed from the section of town where it stood. But the pastor and his young wife believed in their run-down church. They felt that with paint, hammer and faith they could get it in shape. Together they went to work.

But late in December a severe storm whipped through the river valley, and the worst blow fell on the little church—a huge chunk of rain-soaked plaster fell out of the inside wall just behind the altar. Sorrowfully the pastor and his wife swept away the mess, but they couldn’t hide the ragged hole.

The pastor looked at it and had to remind himself quickly, “Thy will be done!” But his wife wept, “Christmas is only two days away!”

That afternoon the dispirited couple attended an auction held for the benefit of a youth group. The auctioneer opened a box and shook out of its folds a handsome gold-and-ivory lace tablecloth. It was a magnificent item, nearly 15 feet long. But it, too, dated from a long-vanished era. Who, today, had any use for such a thing? There were a few halfhearted bids. Then the pastor was seized with what he thought was a great idea. He bid it in for six dollars and fifty cents.

He carried the cloth back to the church and tacked it up on the wall behind the altar. It completely hid the hole! And the extraordinary beauty of its shimmering handwork cast a fine, holiday glow over the chancel. It was a great triumph. Happily he went back to pre­paring his Christmas sermon.

Just before noon on the day of Christmas Eve, as the pastor was opening the church, he noticed a woman standing in the cold at the bus stop.

“The bus won’t be here for 40 minutes!” he called, and he invited her into the church to get warm.

She told him that she had come from the city that morning to be interviewed for a job as governess to the children of one of the wealthy families in town but she had been turned down. A war refugee, her English was imperfect.

The woman sat down in a pew and chafed her hands and rested. After a while she dropped her head and prayed. She looked up as the pastor began to adjust the great gold-and-ivory lace cloth across the hole. She rose suddenly and walked up the steps of the chancel. She looked at the tablecloth. The pastor smiled and started to tell her about the storm damage, but she didn’t seem to listen. She took up a fold of the cloth and rubbed it between her fingers.

“It is mine!” she said. “It is my banquet cloth!” She lifted up a corner and showed the surprised pastor that there were initials monogrammed on it. “My husband had the cloth made especially for me in Brussels! There could not be another like it!”

For the next few minutes the woman and the pastor talked excitedly together. She explained that she was Viennese; that she and her husband had opposed the Nazis and decided to leave the country. They were advised to go separately. Her husband put her on a train for Switzerland. They planned that he would join her as soon as he could arrange to ship their household goods across the border.

She never saw him again. Later she heard that he had died in a concentration camp.

“I have always felt that it was my fault—to leave without him,” she said. “Perhaps these years of wandering have been my punishment!”

The pastor tried to comfort her, urged her to take the cloth with her. She refused. Then she went away.

As the church began to fill on Christmas Eve, it was clear that the cloth was going to be a great success. It had been skillfully designed to look its best by candlelight.

After the service, the pastor stood at the doorway; many people told him that the church looked beautiful. One gentle-faced, middle-aged man—he was the local clock-and-watch repairman—looked rather puzzled.

“It is strange,” he said in his soft accent. “Many years ago my wife—God rest her—and I owned such a cloth. In our home in Vienna, my wife put it on the table”—and here he smiled—“only when the bishop came to dinner!”

The pastor suddenly became very excited. He told the jeweler about the woman who had been in church earlier in the day.

The startled jeweler clutched the pastor’s arm. “Can it be? Does she live?”

Together the two got in touch with the family who had interviewed her. Then, in the pastor’s car they started for the city. And as Christmas Day was born this man and his wife—who had been separated through so many saddened Yuletides—were reunited.

To all who heard this story, the joyful purpose of the storm that had knocked a hole in the wall of the church was now quite clear. Of course people said it was a miracle, but I think you will agree it was the season for it!

 

Humor in the Face of Adversity

“Say something funny!” That’s what people say when they find out I’m a comedian. But how would they feel if I found out they were a plumber and said, “Fix my sink!”? So when someone asks me to say something funny, I reply, “You’re good-looking!” And they laugh. Usually.

Once at JFK airport, the customs guy looked at my paperwork and saw that I was a comedian. “Say something funny,” he commanded.

“You’re good-looking,” I shot back.

There was a pause, followed by a smile. Then he pulled me aside and went through all my luggage. Eddie Brill, for Reader’s Digest

A Dog Like No Other

By Peter Muilenburg

June 1998

Awaning moon had turned the muddy ­waters of Oyster Creek to quicksilver. Not so much as a zephyr stirred the inlet where our 42-foot ketch Breath lay in the delta of western Africa’s mighty Gambia River near Banjul, the capital of Gambia. Days before, we’d sailed in off a thousand miles of ocean. Snug in this anchorage, we could still hear surf thundering just beyond the low span of the Denton Bridge.

The chance to see Africa had brought our family back together for a couple of months. Our older son, Rafael, 20, had taken leave from college to join the rest of us: Diego, 13, my wife, Dorothy, and our little black dog, Santos.

Breath had been our only home since I had built the vessel on St. John in the Virgin Islands in the early 1980s. Life afloat had knit close bonds. Everyone had responsibilities—the boys were standing watch when they were six. And for the past eight years, Santos, our loving, feisty, 11-pound schipperke, was at our side.

When we went to bed that night, Santos lay on the cabin top, which he vacated only in the worst weather. He touched his nose to Dorothy’s face as she bent low to nuzzle him good night. His ardent eyes flared briefly—he worshiped her—then he returned to his duty.

We slept easier with him aboard. It was his self-appointed mission to ensure that no one, friend or foe, approached within 100 yards of Breath without a warning. He’d sailed with us through the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, keeping sharp watch and good company, and bringing us luck. In eight years we’d never suffered a mishap. But during the night of January 2, 1991, that would change.

We were asleep when, just past midnight, our dock lines began to creak. At first I thought a passing boat might have sent a wake, but Santos would have barked. The creaking grew louder. By the time I climbed on deck, the ropes groaned against the cleats that tethered our boat to another vessel.

On such a calm night there could be only one cause—current. My boat was tied stern to stream, and a glance over the side at water speeding past the hull alarmed me. The ebb had tripled its usual spring-tide rate. The cleats on the other boat looked ready to snap. If anything gave, both vessels could spin off bound together, helpless to avoid destruction. I had to cast off.

We were in a difficult spot. Just a few boat-lengths downstream, two high-tension power lines hung across the creek. About 100 feet behind them loomed Denton Bridge. If we couldn’t turn in time, our metal mainmast might hit the wires. If the boat hit the bridge, both masts would be pinned by the roadway while the hull was sucked under.

I called everyone up on deck. Sensing something was wrong, Santos stood by, poised to react.

We cast off the lines and hung briefly to a stern anchor, but we had to let go as Breath was swung violently back and forth by the current’s force. I gunned the engine and had almost turned the boat around when I realized that, dragged toward the bridge by the current, we were going to hit the power line. Dorothy clutched a quivering Santos, and we all held our breath.

We just tipped the wire. There was a meteor shower of sparks and we were through, but the second wire was coming up fast. I flung the wheel over hard, but we struck the wire anyway—a long, scraping skid, the top six inches of our mast pinned against the power line.

Electricity exploded down the rigging, and a hideous incandescence lit the sky. Flames leapt up inside the cabin; fuses shot from their sockets; smoke billowed out the hatches.

Then the fireworks stopped. The cable had rolled over the mast, but we were trapped between the second wire and the bridge. There was nowhere to go but back out—through the wire. Santos wriggled out of Dorothy’s arms and dashed up to the foredeck to be in on the action.

The wheel hard over, we braced for impact. The mast top hit the cable, sending down a torrent of red sparks. Santos, eyes fixed ahead, stood his ground to defend the foredeck. He was growling for all he was worth when sparks landed in his fur. Uttering a high-pitched scream, he sprinted down the side deck, cinders glowing in his coat, and plunged into the water. When he surfaced, Santos was swimming for the boat, his eyes fastened on Dorothy. But the current swept him into the shadows under Denton Bridge and out of sight.

An instant later a blast like a small thunderbolt hit the mainstay. My son Raffy was flipped backward off the foredeck and into the water.

Then we were through. Diego seized a fire extinguisher and attacked the flames as I steered toward a trawler tied to a concrete slab on the muddy bank. Raffy, a college swimmer, managed to get to the bank.

Against all odds we were safe—except for Santos. Raffy called along both shores, but there was no sign of him. We spent the rest of the night tied to the trawler. As I tried to sleep, I kept thinking of Santos. I felt a helpless sorrow over his fate.

The next day Dorothy walked for miles down the beach, making inquiries at every hotel, talking to beach attendants, tourists, vendors. Nobody had seen our little black dog.

She offered a reward over the ship’s radio, notified the police and nailed up signs. It was touching, but it seemed futile to me. Just beyond the bridge were broad flats of sand pounded that night by row after row of massive breakers. The thought of Santos funneled helplessly into the surf made me wince.

Days later we’d repaired Breath, but Santos still hadn’t turned up. “Honey,” I told Dorothy, “we’ve got to get on with our life—do the river, cross the Atlantic, get back to work.”

“But what if he survived?” she asked. “What if he finds his way back, and we’re gone?”

“It’s hard to believe he survived that surf,” I said flatly, “and then swam till dawn.”

She searched my face, looking for a reprieve from reality. Then her eyes flooded and her voice broke. “I just didn’t want to abandon him.”

With heavy hearts the next morning, we hauled the anchor for our trip upriver.

Our loss really hit home 50 miles upstream where we anchored. Suddenly a strange face peered in the porthole and inquired if we wanted to buy a fish. The fisherman had paddled up silently alongside. When Santos was alive, that could never have happened. Now we sorely missed the zealous barking we’d so often tried to hush.

Not a day went by without someone bringing up another Santos story. He might have been small, but he was absolutely fearless. Santos had a classic Napoleon complex. He had to have respect, and he got it by making bigger animals run from him. He was all bluff. But with a histrionically vicious growl and a headlong charge, he had put to flight Rottweilers, herds of goats, troops of wild donkeys, even a meter reader.

Once, on the island of St. Lucia, an elephant brought over by a rich estate owner emerged from the woods into a clearing where Santos was merrily scattering a flock of chickens. Our dog reacted in character: he charged. The elephant panicked, flaring its ears, splitting the air with its trumpet call and smacking the ground with its trunk as Santos dodged and darted underfoot. We had to catch Santos and drag him away.

We’d never see another like him, I thought as I steered upriver.

Soon after, I woke one night to an empty bed. I found Dorothy sitting in the moonlight. From the way her eyes glistened, I could tell she’d been thinking of Santos. I sat down and put an arm around her. After a while she spoke. “You know what I miss most? His shaggy mane filling the porthole. He liked to watch me cook. Now every time a shadow falls over that port, it reminds me of the love in those bright black eyes.”

We watched the moon slip below the treetops; then, our hearts filled with grief, we went back to bed.

Two weeks passed as we made our way 150 miles up the Gambia River. One afternoon Dorothy and I were reinforcing the deck awning when I saw a catamaran with a man on board inspecting us with binoculars.

“Are you the Americans who lost the dog?” he called.

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“I don’t know if it is yours, but the police at Denton Bridge have a small black dog found on the beach.”

Everyone tumbled up on deck shouting, “Oh, my God! Yes! Yes!” But I cautioned, “Someone might have found a stray mutt and brought it in, hoping for the reward. Don’t get your hopes too high.”

Dorothy and I took a series of bush taxis and old buses back to Banjul the next morning. With hope and trepidation we caught a taxi to Denton Bridge to see if Santos had truly survived.

“You’ve come for your dog!” the police officer on duty greeted us. He turned and called to a boy, “Go bring the dog.” Dorothy and I waited on tenterhooks.

Then, led on a ratty piece of string down the path, there was Santos. He walked with a limp, head down. But when Dorothy called “Santos,” his head shot up, his ears snapped forward, his whole body trembled as that beloved voice registered. He leapt into her arms and covered her face with licks. Dorothy hugged him, her eyes filled with tears.

The police officer told us that the morning after we’d hit the power lines, a Swedish tourist was walking the beach and found Santos—six miles from Oyster Creek. The Swede smuggled the wet, hungry animal into his hotel room and fed him. When the Swede had to fly home, he gave Santos to the police.

We noticed Santos’s muzzle seemed whiter, and when we patted him on his right flank, he sometimes yelped in pain. We wondered what he’d experienced as he was swept into the surf and carried along the coast. We marveled at his fortitude and his luck. But most of all we were grateful to have him back.

Next morning we made our way back upriver. We arrived just after sundown and shouted for the boys.

“Do you have him?” they called. Dorothy urged the dog to bark. His unmistakable voice rang across the river, to be answered by a cheer of wild exuberance.

Later that night we toasted Santos with lemonade. No need for champagne when euphoria spiced the air we breathed. Santos was back. Our family was intact.

 

Life in These United States

My wife and I were looking at paintings in a gallery. One was of a beautiful nude woman with only a little foliage covering her private areas.

“Bad taste,” muttered my wife, and moved on. Not me. I lingered, completely transfixed, until I heard her shout, “What are you waiting for—autumn?” Dennis Dook

• • •

Robbie, my nine-year-old grandson, recently asked his mother about puberty. She explained that it occurs when children’s bodies begin to change. “Boys,” she said, “grow taller and develop muscles. Their voices deepen, and they start to grow hair, like facial hair.” She paused. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I just hope it happens on a Saturday, when I’m not in school.” Michael Stephenson

“A Man Don’t Know What He Can Do”

by Elise Miller Davis

October 1952

Just before midnight Roy Gaby, driving for a Houston, Texas, trucking company, ran out of gasoline while returning from Waco in a heavy 14-wheel truck-trailer. From a house nearby he telephoned his wife, “SOS, honey, I’m out of gas.” Mrs. Gaby sighed, bundled up the baby and set out to the rescue in the family car. It was February 18, 1952.

On the way home Mrs. Gaby drove ahead of Roy. About ten miles from Houston a speeding car, with an apparently drunken driver who never stopped, darted out of a side road, forcing Mrs. Gaby’s car off the highway on the right. In the rearview mirror she caught a glimpse of Roy’s truck swerving to avoid a collision. Then she heard a crash.

The engine had smashed into a mammoth oak tree, the trailer had piled up on the cab and Roy was trapped in the twisted debris.

A passing motorist rushed into the village of Fairbanks and notified Deputy Sheriff Don Henry.

Henry decided to try “untelescoping” the wreck. “We attached a wrecker to the front of the mashed-in engine, hoping to pull it straight enough to get Gaby out. But the idea didn’t work. We added the power of a truck at the front of the wrecker. Finally two more trucks were attached to the rear, and they pulled in the opposite direction. But still, no soap.”

Small flames appeared beneath the truck, and there was no extinguisher at hand. Halting passing drivers, Henry set helpers to working frantically at the crumpled doors with hammers and crowbars. The twisted doors refused to budge. Henry crawled onto the hood of the cab and turned his flashlight on the victim. The steering wheel was crushed against ­Gaby’s waist and his feet were pinned between twisted brake and clutch pedals. Tiny flames were licking at his feet.

“I’m an accident investigator,” Henry told me later, “and I’ve seen a lot of terrible sights. But I’ve never seen one more terrible and I’ve never felt more helpless. I looked at Mrs. Gaby and the baby, then back at the poor guy in the burning cab, and I felt like praying for a miracle.”

At that moment, a husky black man appeared out of the darkness.

“Can I help?” he asked quietly. Henry shook his head. Nobody could help if three trucks and a wrecker couldn’t budge that cab, and by the time cutting torchers and fire apparatus arrived it was going to be just too bad. The stranger calmly walked over to the cab, put his hands on the door and wrenched it off!

Speechless, the crowd watched him reach in the cab and tear out the burning floor mat. Then he put out the flames around Gaby’s legs—with his bare hands.

“It was just about then that I caught a glimpse of the big fellow’s face,” said one of the witnesses. “At first I thought he was in a trance. Then I saw that set expression for what it was—cold, calculated fury. I’d seen it before—at Pearl Harbor, on Okinawa. I remember thinking: Why, that guy’s not calm, he’s enraged. It was just as if he despised fire.”

Swiftly, almost as if rehearsed, the black man worked on, poking large arms into the truck cab. “He straightened that steering wheel like it was tin,” the driver of the wrecker said. “With his left hand on the brake pedal and his right on the clutch, he all but uprooted the whole works to free Gaby’s feet.”

But the crucial job wasn’t done. The victim still lay encased in what witnesses called “a squashed sardine can over a bonfire.”

Patiently, then stubbornly, the big man struggled to squeeze in beside Gaby. The space was too tiny. Stepping back from the cab, he hesitated fleetingly. The flames were growing. He glared at them, slumped to a squatting position and began pushing into the cab, fighting crazily. At long last he was in far enough to rest his feet firmly on the floorboard. He started rising slowly. His muscles bulged in the half-light and the sleeves of his shirt tore.

“My God, he’s trying to push up the top!” a woman’s voice called.

Neck and shoulders against the caved-in cab roof, he pushed. Hard.

“We actually heard the metal give,” reported a farmer who had come to the scene. Discussing the rescue afterward, Deputy Henry shook his head, still baffled. “And he held that top up until we could pull Gaby out.”

In the excitement of attending Gaby, no one thought to thank the stranger or even ask his name. Later, at the hospital with Gaby, Deputy Henry told newsmen: “The mysterious Samson disappeared as quietly as he’d come. If I hadn’t witnessed it I’d never believe a lone man could do a job we couldn’t do with three trucks and a wrecker.”

“I wish I knew his name,” put in Mrs. Gaby. “He was a giant.”

No giant, 33-year-old Charles Dennis Jones was in fact six-feet-two inches tall and weighed 220 pounds. He’d been out to nearby Hempstead to change tires on a disabled truck when he came upon the accident. By morning the whole city of Houston was wondering about his identity. Newspapers throughout the country carried the story. But Jones didn’t tell even his wife about his experience. His boss, C. C. Myers, became suspicious, however, when he noticed the big fellow walk away from a group of employees who were discussing the amazing rescue. Remembering the mission he’d sent Jones on the night before, Myers grabbed a photograph from company files and headed for the sheriff’s office. “Yes, that’s him,” agreed Deputy Henry.

And Myers knew immediately how Charlie Jones found the strength to lick that fire.

One December night 14 months before, Jones had come home to the three-room house where he lived with his wife, Mildred, and their five small children. Under one arm he carried a tiny pine tree and a single string of Christmas lights.

They’d had a lot of bad luck that year. Only two months before both his mother and Mildred’s had died within a week, leaving grief, doctor bills, funeral ­expenses. But Evelyn Carol, his eight-year-old first-born, wanted some real Christmas-tree lights and he had them. He’d manage. He was healthy and husky and could stand a 16-hour day. Double work meant double pay. And they had a roof over their heads. Paid for.

Mildred left for church, where she was singing that evening. Jones tucked in the children. As he undressed, he wondered if he should risk leaving the tree lights on. He decided he would. Evelyn Carol wanted to surprise her mother and he’d promised. He fell asleep.

Mildred’s pillow was still untouched when Jones awoke, sure he was having a nightmare. There was a burning in his nostrils, a crackling sound in his ears. He heard a child’s cry: “Daddy!” Instantly he was on his feet, awake in a world on fire, pushing through choking waves of smoke, grabbing small bodies until he counted five, finding his way to the open window, pitching the children out.

People gathered. And Mildred came running through the darkness, crying his name. Then Jones heard a man’s voice, maybe his own: “No, no—Evelyn Carol, come back, come back!” A child’s answer: “But I must get my Christmas lights!” And like a fleeting spirit Evelyn Carol in a little white nightgown ran back toward the flames.

Later a neighbor told how the men couldn’t hold Jones. How he’d raced after his child but hadn’t reached her because just as he neared the dwelling its last remains exploded. How the blast had thrown Jones to the ground unconscious, and he’d been dragged out of danger.

The next morning, for the first time in ten years, Charles Dennis Jones failed to report to work at Robertson Transport. Everybody there had heard. When a man loses a child and his home, has four children to support and another one on the way, what can other men do?

Before nine o’clock a paper was circulating—from workshops to offices to yards. By noon it bore the names of 84 Robertson employees, and was sealed in an envelope and delivered to Charlie Jones. In the envelope Jones found $765.50.

The following day friends at Hughes Tool Company, where Mildred had formerly worked, sent in $80. By mail, from strangers, came $16. There were countless offers: Can you use a refrigerator? An army cot? A boy’s coat, size six? It seemed everyone had united to help the Jones family. And before long Charlie began to work on a new home. He figured that before the new baby came he’d have his family back under their own roof.

You could understand why he always would hate fire.

Reading a newspaper account of Jones’s heroic ­rescue, R. A. Childers, a Houston businessman, wrote the papers, saying he would give $400 to start a fund providing an annual college scholarship for a black high school graduate. The rescue had taken place during Brotherhood Week. “Could anything be more characteristic of brotherhood than the fact that Jones walked away without waiting for thanks?” Childers asked.

And so it came about in the new house Charlie and Mildred and their children had built with their own hands that they received a group of citizens who informed them of the proposed Charles D. Jones Endowment Fund. Jones heard the committee’s proposal in his faded blue overalls, eyes glazed by unshed tears. His wife stood beside him, his children huddled near. He didn’t say a word.

Finally, Childers broke the silence. Somehow Charlie must give a statement to the press. There was the mystery he might yet clear up. How in the name of heaven had he managed to wrench off a steel door, beat out flames with his hands, raise with his own back the crushed-in top of a driver’s cab?

Charlie Jones looked at Childers and at the hushed group around him. He cleared his throat and said, simply:

“A man don’t know what he can do until another man is hurting.”

 

All Our Problems, Solved!

Scene: A preschool class on plants.

Teacher: This plant grows something red and round that we use to make spaghetti sauce. What is it?

Student: Meatballs. Donanne Seese

The Forked-Stick Phenomenon

by Emily and Per Ola d’Aulaire

May 1976

Condensed from Saturday Evening Post

Dowsing, as a way of locating underground water, lacks any scientific basis, according to most geologists. How then, to account for its many successes?

A well-dressed man strolls across a meadow on his 130-acre Connecticut farm, a forked twig gripped between his upturned hands. Onlookers giggle. He ignores them, concentrating on the stick. Near a corner of the field, the tip of the twig suddenly turns down, seemingly pulled by some other-worldly force. He carefully marks the spot, and then calls in a well driller, telling him there’s water—plenty of it—about 125 feet down. The driller shrugs. “It’s your money,” he says, and starts work.

Later comes the call: “We’ve hit an underground river! At 127 feet. Enough water for the whole town.”

That is what happened to Joseph Baum, a Hartford, Connecticut, advertising executive, ten years ago when he needed water for his farm. Baum had been skeptical about dowsing, but changed his mind back in 1950 after reluctantly joining a friend on a dowsing expedition. Soon, people were calling him a dowser, a diviner, a water witch. Since that time he has located some two dozen wells for other people, and even written a book on the subject (The Beginner’s Handbook of Dowsing,Crown).

This kind of innate ability to find water has fascinated mankind for centuries. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have tried dowsing, and been intrigued. Reputedly, Thomas Edison attributed successful dowsing to electricity—while Albert Einstein thought the explanation lay in electromagnetism. The American Society of Dowsers estimates that nearly a quarter-million water wells sunk on the Atlantic seaboard since Colonial times have been located by “witching.” Today, some 25,000 people like Baum practice the arcane art in the United States, while millions more may possess the skill.

One of those maddeningly slippery phenomena that slide back and forth between truth and fiction, dowsing has long been a subject of controversy. Skeptics scoff at it as illogical, ridiculous, scientifically impossible. (Dowsers, in turn, point out that aero­dynamically, bumblebees can’t fly.) Geologists claim that in many places water can be found no matter where one digs. Then why, counter the dowsers, can they often find water where trained geologists can’t?

Take the case of New Sharon, Maine, a small town which until last summer was so short of water that residents were restricted to one bath a week. In five years, the town had sunk $180,000 worth of federal loans into geological studies and deep wells that consistently turned up dry. As a last resort, community officials hired a professional dowser for $500. Armed with his divining rod, he shortly located a site. When drilled, the well provided all the water the town could use.

Or take the case of the Shoreline Clinic in Essex, Connecticut. This million-dollar regional health-care center was nearing completion in 1975. Though several thousand dollars had been spent, engineers found themselves unable to get sufficient water from four wells sunk at sites deemed hydrologically most promising. A local water witch volunteered his services. Following the pull of his V-shaped fiberglass divining rod, he headed toward the rear of the clinic property. There the stick suddenly bobbed earthward. A drill rig started work, and soon there was a new well, yielding 20 gallons a minute—plenty of water for the new clinic.

“Just because science can’t explain it doesn’t mean dowsing can’t work,” says Baum. “We are still surrounded by mysteries here on earth which at present cannot be explained.”

The practice of dowsing goes back for millennia. Archeologists found an 8,000-year-old cave painting in North Africa’s Atlas Mountains which shows a dowser, divining rod in hand, surrounded by a group of onlookers. The idea of the magic wand may well have begun with the divining rod. Some scholars trace the work of dowsers through Biblical times. When Moses smote the rock to bring forth water in the wilderness, was he in fact dowsing?

Although the forked stick has become the classic instrument for dowsing, a wide variety of tools have been used over the ages: whalebone, crowbars, pliers, blades of grass, even bare hands. Today, plastic, metal or fiberglass V-rods are favored by some dowsers, since they are smoother than a tree branch to hold. (The forked stick is reported to react so violently at times that the dowser’s hands are left red and raw, and the bark peels off the twig.) The ability, however, lies not in the tool but in the user. Whether the dowser is aware of it or not, it is he or she who moves the rod.

Dowsing is used for more than discovering water wells. Plumbers have long used “pipe locaters”—twin L-shaped dowsing rods made of bent wire that seem to swing apart or together when over buried water lines. Some utility companies employ dowsers to zero in on telephone cables, water mains, and electrical power lines prior to digging. In Vietnam, engineer units of the 1st and 3rd Marine divisions successfully used bent coat hangers to locate enemy tunnels, booby traps and mines.

Soviet scientists are actively using dowsing, which they call the Biophysical Method (BPM), to detect ore bodies, subterranean streams and oil. At a 1973 conference in Prague, Soviet professor Aleksandr Bakirov reported that BPM has proved of definite value in geological mapping—in establishing fissured zones and geological contact zones, in tracing mineralized zones. “It makes prospecting more effective and also lowers the cost of drilling,” he says.

Is there a physiological basis for the skill? In the United States, physicist Zaboj V. Harvalik has found that many dowsers are unconsciously sensitive to small disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field. In tests, he has had subjects walk across a low-intensity electromagnetic beam that can be switched on and off. Sensitive dowsers seem to pick up “dowsing signals” from it. Yet they fail to do so when certain parts of their bodies—the kidney area, or the head—are shielded with heavy aluminum or copper foil. This suggests the existence of magnetic sensors in those parts of the body, as well as a “signal processor” in the brain which transmits the command for subliminal arm-muscle contractions that move the rod. Says Harvalik: “The rod turns not because it is pulled by some unknown force, but because certain individuals sense a change deep in the earth.”

Some further explanation is needed, however, to account for “long-distance” or “map” dowsing. In one of the most famous cases on record, documented by American historical novelist Kenneth Roberts in 1950, dowser Henry Gross spread out a map of Bermuda in Roberts’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Then, passing his divining rod over it, he marked three places in Bermuda where fresh water was to be found—despite geologists’ conviction that no fresh water existed on the island. The Bermuda government was persuaded to provide drilling equipment, and by April 1950 all three wells had come in. One of them alone was providing a total of 63,360 gallons daily.

“Dowsing is a parapsychological phenomenon—ESP,” says Karlis Osis, of the American Society for Psychical Research. It works, he says, because humans unconsciously know a broad spectrum of things that lie beyond the range of normal awareness—perhaps through the 75 percent of brainpower seemingly unused in everyday life. Some of this information, hidden deep in the mind, may indirectly filter into consciousness through slight physiological changes demonstrated by muscular movements and an indicator such as a divining rod.

The American Society of Dowsers, which is composed of 1,400 true believers from all walks of life—teachers, farmers, doctors, housewives—convenes each September at its headquarters in Danville, Vermont. There last fall, as a test, we asked Maine dowser Bob Ater if he could locate the well on our property in Connecticut, over 300 miles away. He told us to draw a rough map of the property, including any buildings. Shown our finished sketch, he asked, “What about the old foundation over there?” For a moment, we thought he had to be mistaken—but then we remembered an overgrown concrete slab, where a garage had stood 30 years ago. We traced it in.

Ater picked up a pencil, which he explained acted as a dowsing rod for him. He poised it over the map. Then his hand descended, and he marked a neat little circle—just about where our well is.

As an afterthought, he said, “There seems to be something coming out of the house over here.” He drew a snakelike line from the end of our house, along the driveway, to the terrace. We stared in disbelief. It was where we had left the garden hose—and exactly where we found it when we returned home two days later.

Letter in the Wallet

By Arnold Fine

September 1985

from The Jewish Press

It was a freezing day, a few years ago, when I stumbled on a wallet in the street. There was no identification inside. Just three dollars and a crumpled letter that looked as if it had been carried around for years.

The only thing legible on the torn envelope was the return address. I opened the letter and saw that it had been written in 1924—almost 60 years ago. I read it carefully, hoping to find some clue to the identity of the wallet’s owner.

It was a “Dear John” letter. The writer, in a delicate script, told the recipient, whose name was ­Michael, that her mother forbade her to see him again. Nevertheless, she would always love him. It was signed, Hannah.

It was a beautiful letter. But there was no way, beyond the name Michael, to identify the owner. So I called information to see if the operator could help.

“Operator, this is an unusual request. I’m trying to find the owner of a wallet I found. Is there any way you could tell me the phone number for an address that was on a letter in the wallet?”

The operator gave me her supervisor, who said there was a phone listed at the address but that she could not give me that number. However, she would call and explain the situation. Then, if the party wanted to talk, she would connect me. I waited a minute, and she came back on the line. “I have a woman who will speak with you.”

I asked the woman if she knew a Hannah.

“Oh, of course! We bought this house from ­Hannah’s family.”

“Would you know where they could be located now?” I asked.

“Hannah had to place her mother in a nursing home years ago. Maybe the home could help you track down the daughter.”

The woman gave me the name of the nursing home. I called and found out that Hannah’s mother had died. The woman I spoke with gave me an ­
address where she thought Hannah could be reached.

I phoned. The woman who answered explained that Hannah herself was now living in a nursing home. She gave me the number. I called and was told, “Yes, Hannah is with us.”

I asked if I could stop by to see her. It was almost 10:00 p.m. The director said that Hannah might be asleep. “But if you want to take a chance, maybe she’s in the dayroom watching television.”

The director and a guard greeted me at the door of the nursing home. We went up to the third floor and saw the nurse, who told us that Hannah was indeed watching TV.

We entered the dayroom. Hannah was a sweet, silver-­haired old-timer with a warm smile and friendly eyes. I told her about the wallet and showed her the letter. The second she saw it, she took a deep breath. “Young man,” she said, “this letter was the last contact I had with Michael.” She looked away, then said pensively, “I loved him very much. But I was only 16, and my mother felt I was too young. He was so handsome. You know, like Sean Connery, the actor.”

We both laughed. The director then left us alone. “Yes, Michael Goldstein was his name. If you find him, tell him I still think of him often. I never did marry,” she said, smiling through tears that welled up in her eyes. “I guess no one ever matched up to Michael. . . .”

I thanked Hannah, said good-bye, and took the elevator to the first floor. As I stood at the door, the guard asked, “Was she able to help you?”

I told him she had given me a lead. “At least I have a last name. But I probably won’t pursue it further for a while.” I explained that I had spent almost the whole day trying to find the wallet’s owner.

While we talked, I pulled out the brown-leather case with its red-lanyard lacing and showed it to the guard. He looked at it and said, “Hey, I’d know that anywhere. That’s Mr. Goldstein’s. He’s always
losing it. I found it in the hall at least three times.”

“Who’s Mr. Goldstein?” I asked.

“He’s one of the old-timers on the eighth floor. That’s Mike Goldstein’s wallet, for sure. He goes out for a walk quite often.”

I thanked the guard and ran back to the director’s office to tell him what the guard had said. He accompanied me to the eighth floor. I prayed that Mr. Goldstein would be up.

“I think he’s still in the dayroom,” the nurse said. “He likes to read at night. . . . A darling man.”

We went to the only room that had lights on, and there was a man reading a book. The director asked him if he had lost his wallet.

Michael Goldstein looked up, felt his back pocket, and then said, “Goodness, it is missing.”

“This kind gentleman found a wallet. Could it be yours?”

The second he saw it, he smiled with relief. “Yes,” he said, “that’s it. Must have dropped it this afternoon. I want to give you a reward.”

“Oh, no thank you,” I said. “But I have to tell you something. I read the letter in the hope of finding out who owned the wallet.”

The smile on his face disappeared. “You read that letter?”

“Not only did I read it, I think I know where ­Hannah is.”

He grew pale. “Hannah? You know where she is? How is she? Is she still as pretty as she was?”

I hesitated.

“Please tell me!” Michael urged.

“She’s fine, and just as pretty as when you knew her.”

“Could you tell me where she is? I want to call her tomorrow.” He grabbed my hand and said, “You know something? When that letter came, my life ended. I never married. I guess I’ve always loved her.”

“Michael,” I said. “Come with me.”

The three of us took the elevator to the third floor. We walked toward the dayroom where Hannah was sitting, still watching TV. The director went over to her.

“Hannah,” he said softly. “Do you know this man?” Michael and I stood waiting in the doorway.

She adjusted her glasses, looked for a moment, but didn’t say a word.

“Hannah, it’s Michael. Michael Goldstein. Do you remember?”

“Michael? Michael? It’s you!”

He walked slowly to her side. She stood, and they embraced. The two of them sat on a couch, held hands and started to talk. The director and I walked out, both of us crying.

“See how the good Lord works,” I said philosophically. “If it’s meant to be, it will be.”

Three weeks later, I got a call from the director, who asked, “Can you break away on Sunday to attend a wedding?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. “Yup, Michael and Hannah are going to tie the knot!”

It was a lovely wedding, with all the people at the nursing home joining in the celebration. ­Hannah wore a beige dress and looked beautiful. Michael wore a dark-blue suit and stood tall. The home gave them their own room, and if you ever wanted to see a 76-year-old bride and a 78-year-old groom acting like two teenagers, you had to see this couple.

A perfect ending for a love affair that had lasted nearly 60 years.