LOCAL HEROES
Now for some true stories that will restore your faith in humanity, brought to you by the kindness of strangers.
CLEAN-UP IN AISLE 7
Marianne LaPlante and her 94-year-old mother were shopping at a Howell, New Jersey, grocery store in 2018 when LaPlante suddenly felt ill. She tried to steady herself on her shopping cart, but lost consciousness and fell headfirst onto the floor. Blood pooled around her head, and she started having convulsions. No one knew what to do. Suddenly, a middle-aged woman rushed in and told another customer to keep pressure on the head wound while she checked LaPlante’s vital signs. Then LaPlante stopped breathing. The stranger administered CPR until paramedics arrived, while her daughter comforted LaPlante’s elderly mother. LaPlante survived. When she later came to at the hospital, no one there knew who the stranger was, so she posted this Facebook status:
“I would like to thank the woman who resuscitated me at Aldi’s yesterday afternoon. You may have well saved my life. Also, thank you to the woman who held my 94-year-old Mom and said prayers with her while waiting for the ambulance. You may never see this post or know my gratitude to the both of you, but I will forever think of the two women who jumped into my life and made it possible for me to see a new day. There is still great good in this world.”
The post went viral and a State of New Jersey Facebook page shared it, which is where Lisa Manoy saw it. The former nurse had been shopping with her daughter Lindsay that day when she stepped in and saved LaPlante’s life. (Manoy had actually tried to contact LaPlante at the hospital but couldn’t due to privacy laws.) At last report, the two women have become close friends. “We were meant to cross paths,” Manoy said.
BATTLE BUDDIES
Rabbi Michael Harari, a U.S. Army chaplain serving on a base near Tacoma, Washington, was driving to the airport in August 2018 when he saw a man standing on a highway overpass. Fearing that something was wrong, Harari turned off at the next exit and drove back to the man, who was still there, on the other side of the guard rail. The loud traffic made it hard to hear, so Harari asked the man to come a bit closer so they could talk. “He wasn’t so coherent,” Harari later told reporters, but he’d managed to get him far enough away from the edge, so that “physically I would be able to restrain him if I needed to.” He didn’t need to. Upon learning that the man was a veteran, Harari told him he was an army chaplain, and that it’s his job to talk to struggling soldiers just like him. That did the trick, and Harari was able to talk the man down and get him help. “We all have to look out for each other, not only here on-post but also off-post,” Harari said after receiving an Army Commendation Medal for his heroics, adding, “We have to be everyone’s battle buddy.”
The McRib sandwich consists primarily of pork tripe, heart, and stomach.
“It wasn’t the first time I have done that, it’s something like the fourth time,” soccer player Francis Kone said somewhat nonchalantly, adding, “twice in Africa, once in Thailand.” Kone wasn’t talking about scoring a winning goal—he was talking about saving other players’ lives. In his most recent save in February 2017, the Ivory Coast–born striker was playing in a Czech First League game when his teammate, running in front of him, collided with the opposing goalkeeper, Martin Bekovec. The next thing Kone knew, Berkovic was flat on his back, unconscious, and choking on his tongue. Without hesitation, Kone lunged to the ground and reached into Bekovic’s mouth. He kept the man’s airway open until the medics arrived to take Bekovic to the hospital, where he made a full recovery. Without Kone’s quick thinking, Bekovec could have choked to death right there on the field. “I’m always checking the players,” said Kone, “to make sure they have not swallowed their tongue.”
PAY THE PIPELINE
In December 2015, professional surfer Evan Geiselman, 22, was surfing the famed Pipeline in Oahu, Hawaii, when a massive wave crashed down on top of him like a ton of bricks. His lungs filled up with seawater and his head slammed into a reef, knocking him out in the heavy surf. Andre Botha, a world champion bodyboarder, was watching closely when Geiselman went under. “A bit of time passed and I was still expecting him to come up,” Botha told FreeSurf magazine. “At one point it clicked that he wasn’t going to.” So Botha, 34, swam over to the “impact zone” and, after getting slammed by a huge wave, was able to find Geiselman. He was “just limp, dark purple, and foamy at the mouth,” said Botha. “Eyes were rolled back, and honestly I thought he was dead at that point.” Botha blew a big breath straight into Geiselman’s mouth, and a whoosh of water spouted out…but Geiselman was still unconscious. Another huge wave crashed down, and then another. Botha was able to keep them both alive until other surfers and lifeguards could get them to the beach. Back on shore, medics gave the injured surfer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while his fellow surfers yelled, “Come on, Evan! You got this, Evan, you got this!” A moment later, Geiselman started coughing. He was rushed to the hospital, where he made a full recovery (although it took a while). “People are calling me the hero,” said Botha, “but I think Evan is just as much a hero. He’s such a warrior to survive something like that.”
Elvis never performed a single encore. (Instead an announcer said, “Elvis has left the building.”) It was the King’s way of leaving his audiences hungry for more.
It looked like there would be no escape from Paradise as a wildfire roared through the northern California mountain town in November 2018. It wasn’t just one fire, “it was coming down in 1,000 places,” Kevin McKay told CNN. The Camp Fire wiped most of Paradise off the map, including McKay’s house. Thankfully his family was able to evacuate on one of the few roads out of town. But McKay, a 41-year-old bus driver with only a few months’ experience, chose to stay behind after receiving an emergency call that there were people stranded at Ponderosa Elementary School. He rushed over there and loaded 22 students and two teachers onto his bus. By the time they got to their only escape route, traffic was barely moving and the fires had blacked out the sun. It got even more terrifying when smoke started filling up the bus. The two teachers on board—Abbie Davis, 29, and Mary Ludwig, 50—kept the kids calm while also “trying to keep each other from crying,” Ludwig later told CBS News. The smoke was getting thicker, and there was only one gallon of water on the bus. Then McKay had an idea. He took off his shirt, and the teachers tore it into smaller pieces, which the kids dipped in the water to use as moist rags. It actually helped keep smoke out of their lungs…but they still had a long way to go. At one point, they contemplated getting out and making a run for it, but conditions were even worse outside the bus, so they all rode it out together. Five hours and 30 miles later, the “bus driver from heaven” (as headlines read) had finally gotten everyone to safety. The Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in the history of California, taking 76 lives that day, but if not for the level-headed thinking of a bus driver and two teachers, it probably would have been even worse. When a reporter referred to McKay as a hero, he pointed out who the real heroes were: “Our firemen were going the opposite direction we were. And that’s pretty awesome.”
PAY IT BACKWARD
“This random act of kindness was directed at me on this day for a purpose,” read an anonymous letter sent to the Durham Region in Ontario in November 2017. The writer said that, a few months earlier, on a really bad morning, he or she had come to the decision that they would commit suicide that night. While tying up loose ends, they stopped at a Tim Hortons drive-through for a coffee and a muffin. At the pay window, the cashier said the previous driver had already paid for their breakfast. Not only that, but he’d instructed the cashier to tell the breakfast beneficiary to “have a great day in case you’re not already having one.”
The letter writer was floored: “I wondered why someone would buy coffee for a stranger for no reason. Why me? Why today?” Believing it was a sign, “I decided at that moment to change my plans for the day and do something nice for someone. I ended up helping a neighbor take groceries out of her car and into the house.” After that, the person started doing good deeds for strangers every day. The letter concluded: “To the nice man in the SUV, thank you from the bottom of my heart, and know your kind gesture has truly saved a life.”
Dough! The smell of doughnuts can lead to male arousal.
Update: The breakfast benefactor’s identity was later revealed as a local man named Glen Oliver. Every time he goes to Tim Hortons for a “medium dark roast with a little bit of milk,” he also pays the tab for whoever is in line behind him…along with wishing them a nice day. “It’s the least I can do for people, you know?” Oliver told Global News. “It’s like holding the door.”
LADY IN THE WATER
“I dread to think what would have happened had I not driven past her that afternoon,” wrote Jo Stewart-Smith in the Guardian in 2017. The documentary filmmaker was recounting a harrowing incident that happened to her four years earlier. She was driving through the English countryside when she saw a woman slumped over in her car on the shoulder, not far from Stewart-Smith’s sprawling farm. She pulled over and slowly walked back to the car. The woman was sitting up, but she was acting oddly, at one point saying, “I’ve stopped listening to music in peace.”
“I’m calling help,” Stewart-Smith told her, but the woman insisted she was feeling better. So, reluctantly, Stewart-Smith went home. Unable to “shake the feeling that something was wrong,” she drove back later that day; the car was still there, with the engine running, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. So she called the police, and a search party was formed. “We wanted to help,” she wrote, “but were told we could contaminate the search.” By midnight, Stewart-Smith and her husband were getting frustrated by the lack of progress. They told an officer—yet again—that because it was their land that the woman was lost on, they knew where all the obstacles and cattle were (there were fears of a stampede). Finally, two officers agreed to go out with the spouses. “About ten minutes after we set off,” Stewart-Smith wrote, “I saw what looked like a lumpen pile of fat, white sausages in our pond. I knew immediately it was the woman. I plunged in. She was lying on her back, her hair flowing in the reeds, like Ophelia.” She was alive…barely. At the hospital, doctors treated her for a brain bleed—that was the cause of her strange behavior. The doctors told Stewart-Smith that without her intervention, the woman would have only lasted another 30 minutes.
WHAT A CATCH!
Byron Campbell of Dallas, Texas, was driving home on the day before Thanksgiving in 2018 when he saw smoke billowing out of an apartment building. He pulled over, jumped out, ran into the building, and started knocking on doors as he yelled, “Fire! Fire! Get out!” Before long, the smoke and flames forced him back outside. But there were still people trapped on the third floor, including Shuntara Thomas and her one-year-old daughter, and firefighters hadn’t arrived yet. “Drop your baby!” Campbell yelled up to her, “Just trust me—I got her, I got her.” With the flames blocking her exit, Thomas had no choice: She dropped her crying baby daughter from her third-story window, and Campbell made a perfect catch. Then he handed the baby to a woman and helped save more people. Thanks to Campbell’s and others’ quick thinking, no one was injured in the fire, and six people made it down safely from third-floor windows, including one very fortunate little girl. When Thomas told her story to KDFW News, she could still barely believe what happened: “Throwing my baby out to a complete stranger that I didn’t know…and without him my child’s life would not have been saved.”
How many balloons did it take to make Carl’s house fly away in Up? 20,622.
The Maple Heights (Ohio) Police Department posted a special Christmas message in 2018, praising two young men named Rayfield Hallman and Steven W. Wood. On the cold night of December 23, they were out driving when they noticed a small child all alone on a sidewalk. They almost kept going but decided to stop. Good thing, too. The kid’s mother was slumped over on the walk in front of her house, which was locked. The men called 911 and put the little girl and her pet poodle in the car to warm up, while they waited with the woman until help arrived. She was treated for a seizure at the hospital. The cops wrote: “Rayfield and Steven’s decision to show concern… probably saved not only the woman’s life, but possibly saved the life of her 3-year-old daughter, who was outside in the night cold (36 degrees). I’m sure that other people drove past and decided not to do anything.” The two heroes were given a “heart-felt thank you” from the police department, as well as two Mr. Chicken gift cards.
NEARLY CROAKED
One of the more interesting days on the job for Australian reptile wrangler Jamie Chapel took place in June 2018 when “I was called to relocate a common tree snake from an elderly lady’s pot plants.” When Chapel got to the snake, it had a “lump” inside it…which it then regurgitated. Out popped a mucus-covered frog that Chapel described as “limp, lifeless, and looking dead.” He went to set it aside so he could concentrate on the snake, but then the frog had a “very tiny movement of its leg.” All of a sudden the snake became secondary. “I decided to clean it up [the frog] and start CPR to see if I could revive it.” Chapel kept up the tiny chest compressions until the frog finally regained consciousness. He took the frog home, dressed its bite wounds, and nursed it back to health. A week later, he told Australia’s ABC network, “He’s really done well. He’s putting on a little bit of weight now.” Chapel named the frog Lucky.
Fun fight fact: According to Welsh folklore, fairies rode corgi dogs into battle.