Eddie Rickenbacker became a race car driver, a decorated aviation ace, and an airline executive. He was influential in the General Motors acquisition of Eastern Air Transport, which was later renamed Eastern Air Lines. In January 1934, he became general manager for Eastern Air Lines and later served as president. He died in1973.
This amazing true story of his enduring commitment to gratitude is a rewritten excerpt from a book titled, In the Eye of the Storm, authored by Max Lucado, a popular minister and inspirational author. Since its initial publication in 1991, over the ensuing years, versions of this story have appeared in books, magazines and on the internet. Whether the story is familiar or new to you, its message is worthy of hearing and emulating time and time again…
It happened every Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun resembles a giant orange and is starting to dip into the blue ocean. Old Ed would come strolling along the beach to his favorite pier. Always clutching in his bony hand an overfull bucket of shrimp.
Ed would walk out to the end of the pier, where it seemed he almost had the world to himself. The sun would be a golden bronze at that time. Everybody gone, except for a few joggers on the beach. Standing out on the end of the pier, Ed would stand, alone with his thoughts…and his bucket of shrimp.
Before long, however, he would no longer be alone. Up in the sky a thousand white dots would come screeching and squawking, winging their way toward that lanky frame standing there on the end of the pier. Before long, dozens of seagulls would envelop him, their wings fluttering and flapping wildly.
Then Ed would slowly begin tossing shrimp to the hungry birds. As he did, if you listened closely, you could hear him say repeatedly with a smile, “Thank you. Thank you.”
In a few short minutes, the bucket would be empty. But Ed wouldn’t leave. He would stand there lost in thought, as though transported to another time and place. Invariably, one of the gulls would land on his sea-bleached, weather-beaten hat – an old military hat he’d been wearing for years.
When he finally would turn around and begin to walk back toward the beach, a few of the birds would hop along the pier with him until he reached the stairs, and then they, too, would fly away. And old Ed would quietly shuffle his way down to the end of the beach and slowly make his way 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 was 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 the young or unfamiliar. Most of them would probably write Old Ed off, down there in Florida.
That’s too bad. They’d have done well to know him better. His full name was Eddie Rickenbacker. He was an American fighter ace in World War I and a Medal of Honor recipient. With 26 aerial victories, he was America’s most successful fighter ace in that war. During his prolific life, he also excelled as a race car driver and automotive designer, a government consultant in military matters and as a pioneer in air transportation, particularly as the longtime head of Eastern Air Lines.
During World War II, Rickenbacker was sent on a tour of the Pacific Theater Operations to review both living conditions and military operations, and to personally deliver a secret message to General Douglas MacArthur from the President. After visiting several air and sea bases in Hawaii, Rickenbacker was a passenger in a B-17D Flying Fortress which strayed hundreds of miles off course while on its way to a refueling stop on Canton Island in the Central Pacific Ocean. The plane was forced to ditch in a remote and little-traveled part of the Central Pacific. Miraculously, all the men survived the crash, crawled out of the sinking plane, and climbed into a life raft.
Rickenbacker and the 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 all 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.
Each day, they had a simple devotional service and prayed for that miracle. Then they would try to nap. One particularly scorching afternoon Eddie, as was his routine, had leaned his head back and pulled his military cap over his eyes and nose trying to ignore the heat. As he struggled unsuccessfully to slumber. As he listened to the monotonous slap of the waves against side of 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 this simple survival technique, they were able to endure the rigors of 24 days at sea until they were finally discovered and rescued.
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.”
So often in our daily lives we fail to realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others. That’s why every Friday night without fail, a stooped old man named Eddie would amble to the end of the pier with a bucket overflowing with shrimp and a heart chock-full of gratitude.
If from this day forward the only prayer you say will be thank you, that will surely be enough. ― Meister Eckhart
Have an AWE-full Weekend!
William “Bill” Bacque