When JoJo Kordik rides through town, adults stop and smile.

Children wave and cheer.

Even the cops are inclined to blare their sirens.

Kordik readily admits the reception has nothing to do with him. The 56-year-old Merrionette Park road maintenance worker says, "It's all about the dog."

Snowbaby, an 8-year-old Siberian Husky, loves to ride on the back of Kordik's 2005 Ultra Classic Harley-Davidson. Wearing "doggles," she sits in a custom-made basket that has a built-in harness.

Kordik had to weigh Snowbaby and take her measurements sitting down before he could order the all-leather, fur-lined seat from Beast Riders in Maryland.

"It's specifically made for my model, but it can be modified to fit any motorcycle," he said. Straps hold Snowbaby secure in three places.

Kordik's been riding Snowbaby around the Southland, and even as far north as the Wisconsin border, for the past five years.

"She's got 16,000 miles under her," he said, many of them logged in parades and Toys For Tots events. She rode in the Mokena Fourth of July parade and the Manteno Veteran's Run.

Kordik's a member of the Oak Lawn chapter of Illinois Harley Owners Group and Hogs for Hope, a nonprofit group of Harley-Davidson owners who help raise funds for Hope Children's Hospital in Oak Lawn.

"I always sell the most chances for Hope - 3,500 this year," he said. "But I cheat. I use the dog."

The impressive bike and the extensive tattoos belie a soft spot in Kordik's heart for sick children. Perhaps because he was one.

He endured several bouts of pneumonia as a child and at one point doctors told his mother he would likely die. At 16, he was diagnosed with scoliosis. When he was 23, he had surgery and today his spine is completely fused from the base of his neck to his tailbone.

"I live in pain, but I figure I can sit here and worry or get out and do something to help others," he said.

The kids are the ones who benefit from his outings with Snowbaby. And the kids are the ones who are his biggest fans when he passes them on the streets.

"They go nuts," he said.

Adults can be just as awe-struck, though. Once Kordik was stopped by two cops who said, "See you got your co-pilot with you."

To which Kordik replied, "Nope, she's my seeing-eye dog."

Snowbaby seems to enjoy the attention, although it took a good six months for her to get acclimated to the ride.

When she was first placed in the harness, she went wild. She didn't like being constrained, Kordik said.

"She'd shake the bike so bad, I'd have to stop," he said.

But now she loves it. She has her own vest and when she hears the sound of a motor revving, her ears perk up.

Despite her celebrity status in the community, Kordik said, Snowbaby is not a big fan of the dark glasses.

"She gets fed up with them sometimes," he said, "and flings them while we're riding."

CTA train operator offers pleasantries and smiles aboard the Red Line

By Christopher Borrelli

March 31, 2009

Tribune reporter/CTA Red Line rider Christopher Borrelli has dubbed Michael Powell (above) The Nicest Train Operator in Chicago (Tribune photo by E. Jason Wambsgans / March 30, 2009)

By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 1, 2009; A01

A bus filled with about 50 of President Obama's friends and in-laws arrived at the White House just after midnight, as Inauguration Day came to a close, for what they called a "housewarming party." The group had celebrated more than a dozen moves together over the years, usually with casual dinners in bungalows on the South Side of Chicago. This time, they wore rented tuxedos and gowns as a small army of presidential staffers ushered them past Secret Service agents and into the East Room.

Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama's mother and the family matriarch, came downstairs from her new bedroom, and the family reunited on an oak parquet floor underneath crystal chandeliers. Celebrities and political power brokers greeted them. Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis played trumpet while caterers handed out hors d'oeuvres and flutes of champagne.

About an hour into the reception, Obama returned from his whirlwind tour of 10 inaugural balls. His wife, Michelle, and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, went to bed, exhausted. But the new president called over a photographer and explained that he wanted one final memento from the historic day. He gathered his in-laws -- teachers, secretaries and retirees from a self-described middle-class black family in Chicago -- and posed with them beneath a 1797 portrait of George Washington in his velvet suit.

"I was just trying to soak it all in, and then this realization hit me," said Steve Shields, 57, Michelle Obama's uncle. "It was like, 'Okay. This is different. All of the sudden, we are the family that's, like, at the center of the universe.' "

To help him adjust to Washington, President Obama has lifted an entire network of unassuming friends and in-laws from the South Side into the capital's stratosphere. None of them has been more suddenly transported than Robinson, 71, who has moved from the walk-up home where she spent 40 years to the historic mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She has a room on the third floor, one level up from the Obamas, with a four-poster bed, a walk-in closet, a television set and a small sitting area for guests. She can walk down the hall to visit Malia and Sasha in their playroom, where the girls will spend as much time with their Nintendo Wii as Grandma allows. Or she can step over to the solarium to read on a plush couch or gaze out the bay windows, with their sweeping views of the Washington Monument and the city beyond.

Robinson sometimes yearns for her anonymous life in Chicago, but she is committed to making the president and first lady feel at home. And she is hardly alone in that commitment. Kaye Wilson, godmother to both Obama daughters, will visit about once a month to cook family favorites and twist Malia's hair. More than a dozen other friends and relatives -- some of whom have never so much as visited Washington -- are scheduling spring sleepovers in the White House.

How well the group handles its rise to extended first family could foretell the president's happiness in his new job. Obama generally shied away from new friendships during his political ascendancy, preferring the company of the people who had babysat his daughters and thrown his birthday parties -- people who would retell familiar jokes. As the state senator became a U.S. senator and waged a successful campaign for the presidency, the extended network provided a cocoon of normalcy. Now, as extended first family, the friends and in-laws wonder: Can normalcy ever be re-created?

"The way [the Obamas] got this far was with support from all of these people in Chicago," said Wilson, the godmother, who works as an artist and consultant in Olympia Fields, Ill. "They always had people to depend on, friends who watched the girls and took care of things so some part of their life could stay the same. That group has to stick together. We have to find a way to make their lives comfortable in Washington."

Until last week, the family nexus had remained 700 miles to the west, at a two-story house on Euclid Street in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood. Robinson and her husband, Fraser, rented a small apartment on the house's second floor from an aunt, who lived downstairs. As toddlers, their children, Michelle and Craig, shared a large bedroom. It was a tidy home in a predominantly black, working-class neighborhood -- safe and affordable -- and Marian Robinson loved it. She sent Michelle and Craig to the elementary school down the block and took them to South Shore Methodist Church across the street.

In that house, she raised two future Ivy League students, cared for her dying aunt and sick husband, and lived alone as a widow for almost two decades. She parked on the street and shoveled snow off her sidewalk. In the winter, she played the piano or watched home improvement shows on an aging television surrounded by pictures of four generations of her family. On summer days, she read the entire newspaper and then worked crosswords and other puzzles on her brick sun porch.

It was home, and she never planned to leave.

Few in the Robinson family have ever left Chicago. Marian grew up the daughter of a painter and a stay-at-home mother in a small house with seven siblings on the South Side, and all five of her surviving brothers and sisters still live within 15 miles. They gather every few months for holidays and impromptu dinners. When Michelle married Barack Obama, who had no family nearby, the Robinsons adopted him as one of their own and threw his birthday parties.

Marian built a life entrenched in routine, and almost all of her activities revolved around family. Until she retired last year, she carpooled to her job as an assistant in the trust department of a downtown bank with her sister Grace Hale, who lives in a duplex around the corner. On Thursdays, Marian took a yoga class taught by her brother Steve Shields. She visited a downtown hair salon on Saturday mornings and then went to River Oaks Mall with Hale, who doesn't drive. Afterward, the two women treated themselves to lunch, usually at Red Lobster or Bennigan's, before stopping to do their weekly grocery shopping on the way home.

"We are longtime doers of everything," said Hale, 68, who works at a medical company. "We like things simple. We've never needed too much. All of us have our lives here, and we have them set the way we like."

After Obama announced plans to run for president in February 2007, the extended family worked to adapt. Marian, who had never before wanted to retire, quit her job so she could watch over Malia and Sasha and sometimes spent the night at their home in Hyde Park while the Obamas campaigned. She listened to the girls' morning piano practice and then ferried them to school, tennis, gymnastics, dance and drama -- a modern parenting schedule that sometimes made Marian yearn for actual retirement, she joked.

Still, she loved being around her grandchildren, and she insisted on watching them rather than hiring a babysitter. In the Robinson family, nobody relied too heavily on babysitters. With dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins nearby, Marian thought, why would you?

"I've heard Barack and Michelle say that their greatest comfort was having Marian watching the girls and a whole other rotation of us waiting and ready to back her up," said Wilson, the godmother. "Her being with those girls kept their lives normal."

Normal -- it was the goal they strived for, and a target that became increasingly elusive. Marian took a trip to a fundraiser at Oprah Winfrey's mansion and marveled at closets that looked bigger than her house. Hale accepted well wishes from strangers who rode with her on the No. 14 public bus that she takes each morning to work. At the Democratic National Convention, Wilson was crying alone in the Obama family box during Hillary Rodham Clinton's speech, grateful for anonymity, when she received a text message from her daughter: "Mom, they keep showing you on TV and you're wiping your nose with a paper bag. Get a tissue."

"It was like our private space was slowly disappearing," Wilson said.

The extended family continued to throw the usual parties -- a bash at Wilson's suburban home on Mother's Day, a get-together with about 60 people for Obama's birthday in August -- but now Secret Service agents secured the perimeter and gratefully accepted leftovers. The Obama daughters continued to visit the same friends for play dates, but now they rode in dark Chevy Suburbans driven by agents who had memorized the girls' favorite Jonas Brothers songs.

Marian adapted to one change at a time, steadfastly refusing to look ahead. While other family members predicted an Obama victory, Marian remained skeptical until election night. She hesitated to move into the White House -- it would be like living in a museum, she once said -- until she visited in November and saw her room. Even when she finally decided to leave Chicago, Marian told friends the move might only be temporary. She would stay in Washington as long as the family needed her, she said, and probably no longer.

"She's 71 years old, you know, and I wouldn't say she's set in her ways, but she certainly was comfortable in them," said Craig Robinson, Marian's son. "Moving, even if she had to move just downtown from where we lived in Chicago, it would have been a little bit of a daunting task to get her arms around. I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school when I say that she had to think hard about going to the White House. She knew it was going to be a serious change."

The White House isn't a bad place to stay, Marian has told friends, but it still lacks the comforts of home. She went for a walk downtown every day while staying at Blair House, but leaving the White House grounds requires security coordination and planning. Staff members have offered to help her find a yoga class, but she joked that she would rather take her brother's class in Chicago via webcam. Every Saturday, Marian calls her sister Grace Hale to make sure she found her own way to the grocery store.

Marian confessed to friends in Chicago that she is worried about boredom, and they suggested she volunteer for a few hours each day for a government agency, possibly doing accounting. Marian agreed to look into it; she has always been good with numbers.

Her primary daily task is to shepherd her grandchildren to and from school, and even that has stretched her comfort zone. For years, Marian drove 40 minutes to work near the Chicago Loop through hellacious weather and traffic, chauffeuring Hale to her job en route. Now, Marian sits in the back with the Obama daughters, who have been required to ride with the Secret Service since August, friends said.

"I think the hardest thing in her situation is that making new friends is almost impossible," said Wilson, the godmother. "I don't know how anybody makes friends from inside the White House. And when you get to our age, making friends anywhere is hard."

So the only option -- for Marian, for the Obamas -- is to bring their old friends to Washington. As Michelle said goodbye to the Chicago entourage at the end of the inauguration weekend, she encouraged a handful of friends and in-laws to immediately buy plane tickets for return trips to Washington. Wilson is back in town this weekend. Michelle's brother, Craig, a college basketball coach at Oregon State, will travel across the country with his family of four as much as possible. Friend Yvonne Davila will visit from Chicago with her two young daughters. A revolving door of aunts, uncles and cousins will provide a constant rotation of familiar faces.

"They've made it abundantly clear that we're welcome," said Yvonne Shields, a former in-law and one of Marian's closest friends.

The Robinsons used to vacation in White Cloud, Mich., where they shared rustic cabins in the woods, so transitioning to sleepovers at the White House has required some fine-tuning. A few hours after Obama took the oath of office, he asked Wilson if she and her husband were going to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.

"Oh, no, I can't do that," Wilson said. "I'd be the one who broke the glass and spilled my coffee on the Gettysburg Address."

Wilson stayed in Room 303 instead -- a suite with its own bathroom -- and Craig Robinson and his wife slept in the Lincoln Bedroom. Craig, who had never even toured the White House before, retired to a rosewood bed from the 1860s. He woke up and walked on the Truman Balcony, where 11 presidents have entertained the world elite.

"We're a pretty down-to-earth family from the South Side of Chicago, so nobody can get their arms around this whole thing," Craig said. "When all of our family was in there, it almost felt like: 'Wait. Are we at somebody's kitchen table? Because this can't actually be the White House.' The kids were off playing, and some of us adults sat back and just said: 'Can you believe this? Are you kidding?' "

Father, son rescued after more than 12 hours in Atlantic

Story Highlights
• Son swept out to sea by currents, father jumped in after him
  
• At some point, father and son were separated by three miles
  
• Father: "We were floating and just waiting for help to come"
  
• Boater finds father, Coast Guard rescues autistic son two hours later
  

A father and son who tread water for more than 12 hours in the Atlantic Ocean before being rescued spent much of the time in the dark seas not knowing if the other was alive, authorities said Monday.

Walter Marino, 46, and his son Chris Marino, who has autism, were swimming in the Ponce Inlet, south of Daytona Beach, Florida, on Saturday when currents pulled the 12-year-old boy out to sea.

His father jumped in to try to save Chris but was also pulled out to sea.

Family members called 911, but by the time rescue units arrived, the father and son could no longer be seen, officials said.

The U.S. Coast Guard, the Volusia County Beach Patrol and the sheriff's office immediately launched a search-and-rescue mission using helicopters, boats and personal watercraft to try to find the Winter Park father and son.

"[We were] floating," Walter Marino told CNN affiliate WKMG-TV after the rescue. "We were floating and just waiting for help to come." Watch the father thank rescuers »

Hoping to find the pair alive, the Coast Guard searched from Saturday night until early Sunday morning before suspending the search because of darkness, Coast Guard officials told CNN.

Coast Guard officials told Lt. j.g. David Birky that he would be part of a backup crew to relieve the team from the night before. Birky told CNN the crew was set to do a search when the sun came up, but received a call while they were en route that a good Samaritan boat found Walter Marino about 7:30 a.m.

Birky, the co-pilot of the crew, told CNN that after the father was found, they began searching that area for his son. Chris Marino was found two hours later, three miles from where his father was rescued.

The Coast Guard lifted the boy into a helicopter, and both father and son were taken to Halifax Medical Center in Daytona Beach, where they were in good condition. Both were treated for dehydration, according to WKMG-TV.

"The Coast Guard rocks," Walter Marino said as he was being transported to the hospital, according to WKMG-TV. "God bless the Coast Guard."

While Walter Marino praised the Coast Guard for its rescue efforts, Birky said the true praise goes to the father and his young son.

"That kid is an amazing kid," Birky said. "To tread water for almost 14 hours, I don't know about you, but I don't think I could do that. They have amazing willpower to be able to do it."

Local Boy Uses Birthday To Help Children In Africa

New Lenox 10-Year-Old Raising Money To Buy Malaria Bed Nets For Kids

Reporting

Mai Martinez

(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

POMONA, California (AP) -- A thrift store worker in Southern California says she didn't think twice about returning $30,000 she found in donated clothing.

Barbarita Nunez was sorting clothes on Tuesday at the Veterans Thrift Store when she found a small box. Inside was an envelope of cash. Nunez said at first she thought the money was fake. But just in case, she gave it to her supervisor.

The money turned out to belong to a woman who had recently died. It was returned to her family, who gave Nunez a cash reward.

Nunez said she will send some of the reward to Mexico so her mother can have an eye operation and will use the rest to buy a digital camera.

Associated Press article:

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent 47 minutes ago

The Japanese fighter caught the American pilot from behind, riddling his plane with machine-gun rounds. The left engine burst into flames. It was time to bail out.

He yanked on the release lever but the cockpit canopy only half-opened. He unbuckled his seat belt, rose to shake the canopy loose and was instantly sucked out.

Swinging beneath his opened parachute, he plunged toward a Pacific island jungle of thick, towering eucalyptus trees, of crocodile rivers and headhunters, into enemy territory, and into an unimagined future as a hero, "Suara Auru," Chief Warrior, to generations of islanders yet unborn.

___

Fred Hargesheimer was shot down in the southwest Pacific on June 5, 1943. A lifetime later, he sits in his quiet California ranch house amid the snow and soaring sugar pines of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The light blue eyes, at age 91, can't see as well as they once did. But when he looks back over 65 years, the smiling Minnesotan sees it all clearly — the struggle to survive, the native rescuers, the Japanese patrols and narrow escapes, the mother's milk that saved him. He remembers well his return to New Britain, the people's embrace, the fundraising and building, the children taught, the adults cured, the happy years beside the Bismarck Sea with Dorothy, his wife.

"I'm so grateful for getting shot out of the sky," he says.

Garua Peni is grateful, too, as a member of those once-future generations here on New Britain.

"I thank God from the depths of my heart for blessing me in such an abundant way when He brought Suara Auru Fred Hargesheimer," she says.

The improbable story of "Mastah Preddi," a story of uncommon gratitude and the heart's uncanny ways, begins when the 27-year-old Army lieutenant crashes to the tangled underbrush of the jungle floor.

___

Picking himself up, "Hargy" Hargesheimer found no broken bones, but felt a bloody gash on his head, the graze of a bullet or shrapnel. He cut off bits of nylon parachute for a bandage. Then he looked around.

He had been on a photo-reconnaissance mission from his base on the main island of New Guinea, tracking ship movements around Japanese-occupied New Britain, a primitive, 370-mile-long crescent of hot, dark, mist-shrouded forests fringed by smoldering volcanos, 700 miles from northeastern Australia.

He came down halfway up the slopes of the 4,000-foot-high Nakanai mountains, in a wilderness of torrential rains, giant ferns, venomous insects and vicious wild pigs whose tusks could kill a man. Hargesheimer checked his survival kit, finding compass, machete, extra ammunition for his pistol, and two bars of concentrated chocolate, his only food.

First he set out southward, hoping to cross the mountains and reach New Britain's south coast, and somehow from there the island of New Guinea, 300 miles across the Solomon Sea. Steep and muddy slopes defeated him, however, and he turned north instead, toward the Bismarck Sea. Remembering the small inflatable raft in his kit, he tried floating down a stream, but a huge crocodile reared up and sent him scrambling back ashore.

Day by day, he pushed agonizingly through the choking jungle, hoping for a trail or clearing. At night, he recalled, he'd lie beneath a parachute shelter, dreaming he was home in bed in Rochester, Minn.

After 10 days, as his chocolate dwindled, he came upon a riverside clearing and an empty native lean-to, and decided to settle in, start a fire with his emergency matches, and hunt for food. Snails he found in the riverbed became his staple for weeks to come, roasted by the dozen.

His daily existence in the jungle was miserable. Leeches clung to his skin. Flying insects sought out his eyes and nose. Losing weight and strength, out of matches and desperately keeping his fire going, he suffered through nightmares of dying alone in the jungle. From his youthful days as an Episcopalian lay reader, the lost pilot summoned words of hope.

"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want," he told himself, over and over. From memory each day, he'd recite that 23rd Psalm to its comforting final verse, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life..."

And on the 31st day, he heard voices on the river. When they came to him, he cried.

___

Villagers here on the north coast had seen the distant plane go down. Now, in an outrigger canoe on an upriver hunting trip, they had their eyes out for a pilot.

Finding Hargesheimer by the riverside, Lauo, their "luluai," or chief, showed the bearded, haggard white man a note written by an Australian officer saying these villagers had saved other pilots and could be trusted.

That night by the river, Lauo's party exploded with wild singing and feasting, unnerving the young American, who had been warned by intelligence officers of headhunters in these highlands. Then, as they sang in an island tongue, he picked out the melody: "Onward, Christian Soldiers." He felt reassured.

They took him downriver to their seaside village, Ea Ea, a place of grass-roofed lean-tos. They gave him a hut and fed him boiled pig, shellfish and taro, their starchy tuber mainstay. He went fishing with them in their canoes under cover of darkness, and began to learn Pidgin, the islanders' simple, English-based common language.

In his tattered aviator's uniform, he joined in services each Sunday led by three Christian missionaries, natives who had fled New Britain's main town, Rabaul, when the Japanese landed 17 months earlier.

Because enemy troops patrolled the beaches, Hargesheimer spent many days in a hut hidden in a nearby swamp. But one day he was caught away from his hideout when an alarm went up that Japanese were approaching. Village friend Joseph Gabu led the American into the rain forest, sending him up a eucalyptus tree to hide.

Through the night, he was tormented by swarms of mosquitoes, until finally the next day Gabu came for him. All was clear, but within weeks Hargesheimer was stricken with the severe chills and fever of mosquito-borne malaria.

It left him prostrate, weakening, not eating for days. He asked for milk, but there was none. Then the missionary Apelis asked whether he would drink "susu." He brought his wife, Ida, to the hut, carrying their month-old baby.

She slipped behind the grass wall and returned with a cup of milk. For 10 or more days following, she supplied Hargesheimer with her "susu," mother's milk that helped restore his health.

Villagers protected "Mastah Preddi" — Master Freddie — apparently because they hated the Japanese for their cruel treatment of natives. Time and again, the low echo of a conch shell blown by a villager would warn of Japanese. If Mastah Preddi wore his boots as he rushed to hide, children would follow with makeshift brooms, sweeping away his prints from the sand.

The village took a great risk by protecting him from the Japanese, he says.

"If they'd seen my boot prints, I think they would have tortured everyone in the village until they produced me."

When he finally left, "some of them wanted me to take their children back to the States with me," he recalls, sitting so many years later in the afternoon light at his dining table, sharing indelible memories of human kindness.

Fred Hargesheimer walked repeatedly through the 23rd Psalm's "valley of the shadow of death," always emerging safely with the help of the people of Ea Ea.

___

In February 1944, eight months after he was shot down, Hargesheimer was picked up from a New Britain beach by a U.S. submarine, in a rendezvous arranged by Australian "coastwatcher" commandos operating behind Japanese lines.

He returned to civilian life after the war ended in 1945. By then he had married Dorothy Sheldon of Ashtabula, Ohio, and by 1949 they had three children — Richard, Eric and Carol. In 1951, he took a sales job with a Minnesota forerunner of computer maker Sperry Rand, his employer ever after.

But the people of Ea Ea never left his mind. He corresponded with a missionary to learn how they had fared. He studied and restudied international air schedules.

"The more I thought about my experience with the people in New Guinea, the more I realized what a debt I had to try to repay," he says.

In 1960, with the family vacation money and the family's blessing, Hargesheimer made a solitary, 11,000-mile journey back to New Britain, biggest outer island of Papua New Guinea, then Australian-run, now independent.

The villagers, hearing Mastah Preddi was coming, lined the beach and sang "God Save the Queen" as he stepped from a boat in the moonlight.

"It was wonderful, overwhelming," he says. He was met by Luluai Lauo, Joseph Gabu and others, and later found Ida and her 16-year-old son, to thank her, too.

But "a simple thank you didn't seem enough," he recalls. Back home, he consulted with a missionary, who told him what the people needed: a school.

The Minnesota salesman went to work, canvassing relatives, meeting with church groups, speaking to service organizations. He raised $15,000 over three years, "most of it $5 and $10 gifts."

With the money and 17-year-old son Dick in tow, he returned to New Britain in 1963. He was given church land in Ewasse, a central settlement near Ea Ea, now renamed Nantabu. There a contractor raised the area's first permanent elementary school — cement floor, metal roof, sturdy walls.

He brought in New Guinean teachers, American volunteers and an Australian headmaster, and the Airmen's Memorial School opened in 1964 with 40 pupils and four classrooms. But Fred Hargesheimer wasn't finished.

Back in the U.S., a brief spurt of publicity drew more contributions, he got more ideas, and this story of a debt repaid grew, decade by decade. But it was a story little known or celebrated beyond New Britain's welcoming villages.

In 1969, his fund built a library at the school and a clinic for Ewasse. By then, too, the school's successful plot of oil palm helped pave the way for a large plantation of the lucrative crop, with scores of jobs, easing the deep poverty here in Bialla district. Rows of the stout palms today blanket the hills, property of Belgian-owned Hargy Oil Palm Ltd., west of a large lake named Hargy.

Once his own children were grown, Hargesheimer saw an opportunity to "say thank you in a meaningful way." In 1970, he and Dorothy packed up and moved to New Britain, to teach the children themselves and to build a second school — this time closer to Nantabu, next door in the village of Noau, at the foot of the smoking Mount Ulawan volcano.

Garua Peni, then 10, was one of their first students.

"I thought, 'Wow! They left their place to come here for us, just to share themselves with us,'" she recalls.

Dorothy said their four years here were the best of their lives, despite New Britain's difficulties — of supplies, transportation, the surprises of local culture.

"Dorothy sometimes had a problem registering children, because they would change their names often, just on a whim," Hargesheimer recalls with a laugh.

But the couple, leaving New Britain in 1974, had less than a dozen more years left together. In 1985, at age 63, Dorothy Hargesheimer died of a heart attack.

The old pilot flew on alone, visiting New Britain every two or three years, funneling fresh funds into his causes, finding ever-warm embraces. On a visit in 2000, they proclaimed him, in a great tribute, "Suara Auru," "Chief Warrior" in the local Nakanai language.

Then, in 2006, Fred Hargesheimer, at 90, returned for what he said would be his last visit.

Life had changed here since he first walked in the shadow of Mount Ulawan. Grass huts have given way to concrete-block houses, conch shells to cell phones. The men favor slacks over sarongs and all the women wear tops. Blue-eyed cockatoos may still squawk in the forest, but their eucalyptus trees are falling to loggers by the millions.

As he was carried past them in a ceremonial canoe and Nakanai headdress, thousands cheered. "The people were very happy. They'll always remember what Mr. Fred Hargesheimer has done for our people," says Ismael Saua, 69, a former teacher at the Airmen's school.

Mastah Preddi had come back for a special reason: His old P-38 fighter had been found deep in the jungle. He was flown by helicopter up the winding Pandi River, the river he once descended by canoe, and then carried in a chair by Nakanai men to the site, to view what's left of the plane he bailed out of so long ago.

As usual, he also had business to attend to, dedicating a new library at the Noau school.

The schools had an enrollment of some 500, and a list of well-educated alumni numbering many hundreds more, including Garua Peni. She had gone on to an advanced degree in linguistics in Australia and now was taking over Hargesheimer's New Guinea foundation as chairperson.

He may have taken a step back, but his heart was still in New Britain. And the love they returned at times seemed almost mystical. At one point, in the 1960s, he was told villagers planned to send the late Luluai Lauo's bones to him in Minnesota, a trust he solemnly declined.

___

As he looks back from his Grass Valley, Calif., retirement home, Hargesheimer says he often mused over the word "if." Why, for example, didn't the Japanese pilot finish him off as he floated helplessly down beneath his parachute?

In 1999 he got an answer. With the help of World War II history buffs, he located Mitsugu Hyakutomi of Yamaguchi, Japan, the pilot who records show downed his P-38. He was suffering from Alzheimer's disease but his wife recounted by mail that her husband had said he could never shoot such defenseless enemy flyers.

"The Japanese pilot gave me the opportunity to get involved in something worthwhile, and for that I'm ever grateful," he says.

This modest man says he has many people to thank as he draws nearer the end of a long, perilous, challenging road from 1943. "These people were responsible for saving my life. How could I ever repay it?"

It came down to that, and perhaps to the psalmist's words of gratitude, "My cup runneth over."

"I wasn't a millionaire," says Mastah Preddi. "But I was very rich."

___

On the Net:

Fred Hargesheimer's foundation: http://www.hargycaldera.name

New Britain expedition slideshow with Hargesheimer material:

http://www2.chicoer.com/olextras/slideshows/20080127PapuaNewGuinea/soundslider.swf

At dusk on New Year's Eve, Erika Gunderson got into a taxi in New York City and entered a digital-age mystery. Sitting on the back seat was a nice Canon digital camera. Gunderson asked the driver which previous passenger might have left it, but the cabbie didn't seem to care. So Gunderson brought it home and showed it to her fiance, Brian Ascher. They decided that the only right thing to do was to find the owner.

But how? The only clues were the pictures on the camera: typical tourist snapshots, complete with a visit to the Statue of Liberty. How could they find a stranger among the huddled masses?

Gunderson is busy in finance for Bear Stearns Cos., so the detective quest fell to Ascher, a 26-year-old law student at New York University. He was on winter break and eager to put off writing a paper about climate change treaties.

He checked whether anyone had reported a matching missing camera to the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission. No dice. He placed ads in lost-and-found sections of Craigslist but got just one response — from a couple in Brazil who had lost a camera in a cab on Oct. 12, not Dec. 31.

"I guess they thought their camera had been riding around in a taxi for two months," Ascher recalls now, chuckling at the notion that such a thing would be possible in New York.

The 350 pictures and two videos on the camera showed several adults, an older woman and three children. Half put them at New York sites like the Empire State Building. The other half had the group enjoying warm weather and frolicking at kid-friendly theme parks.

Ascher easily pinpointed Florida. The group had stood in front of a sign indicating Clearwater, Fla., and posed at Bob Heilman's Beachcomber Restaurant there.

They also took a pirate-themed boat ride where the kids got mustaches painted on their faces. Ascher zoomed in on the group to see name tags on their shirts. He spotted an Alan, an Eileen, a male Noel and a female Noelle, plus a Ciarnan. Under their names was written "IRE."

When Ascher checked the videos, he saw nothing telling, just the children dancing and swimming. But in the background, he heard Irish accents.

OK, Ascher figured, the camera's owner is from Ireland.

Ascher called Canon's Ireland division to see if anyone had registered the $500 camera's serial number. No such luck. He posted ads on Irish Web sites. Nothing.

He checked the date stamp on the photos from Bob Heilman's and called to inquire whether anyone remembered serving a big Irish group that day. Without the diners' last names, there was no way to check. It's a nice thing you're trying, the manager told Ascher, but you probably just found yourself a new camera.

Enter some fresh eyes. Ascher's mother, Nancy, and sister, Emily Rann, scoured the pictures for clues he might have missed. Nancy was particularly confident, having reunited people with their lost belongings before. She once found a California woman's wallet in a cab in Florence, Italy, and spent all day on her trail before making a handover at an American Express office.

"I thought, with all this data in the camera, there's no way we're not going to get it back to them," Nancy Ascher says now. "I was hoping it wasn't going to take a trip to Ireland, flashing their pictures everywhere."

Ascher's mother and his sister noticed that one of the pictures showed a doorman helping someone into a New York taxi. Zooming tight on the doorman's uniform, they made out the logo of the Radisson Hotel.

After several phone calls and a visit to the hotel to show the pictures around, Nancy Ascher persuaded an employee to search the Radisson's guest records by first name and country of residence. Indeed, a Noel from Ireland had stayed there on the date stamped on the photo. Nancy Ascher charmed the hotel employee into sharing the guest's e-mail address.

Wonderful.

Except that when Noel responded to Brian Ascher, he said he hadn't lost a camera.

By now, school was resuming, and Ascher was prepared to give the camera to his mom so she could take over. She had figured out the name of the Florida pirate-boat cruise and was trying to reach its operator.

But first Ascher took a final look at the photographs.

He pored over some from Dec. 30 that didn't include the children. The photos showed signs for bars in Manhattan's East Village: The Thirsty Scholar, Telephone Bar, Burp Castle. There also were multiple interior shots of a tavern, but they didn't seem to fit with what Ascher knew of those other three bars.

Then he stopped on another picture, showing two people outside an apartment building. Seemingly accidentally included in the picture was something Ascher had missed the first time: an awning in the background that read "Standings." Aha! Standings is a bar next to Burp Castle. Ascher checked its Web site, and the interior matched the pictures on the camera.

Ascher found Standings' owner, who reached the bartender who had worked Dec. 30. Yes, he recalled an Irish group. Especially because one of the women was a big tipper and said she worked at another New York City bar, Playwrights. The Standings bartender called Playwrights to ask which employees had been in his bar.

Ascher soon got an e-mail from a woman named Sarah Casey, whose sister Jeanette works at Playwrights. Suddenly everything Ascher had seen on the camera came to life.

The Caseys recently had hosted relatives and friends from Ireland. The group included their friend Alan Murphy, who had journeyed to Florida with family before heading to New York, where the clan stayed at the Radisson. (Their Noel was not the Noel whom Ascher e-mailed.) Murphy ended the trip kicking himself for leaving his camera in a cab in the twilight on New Year's Eve.

Sarah Casey agreed to send it to him. It didn't go to Ireland but to Sydney, Australia, where Murphy lives now.

Murphy, an insurance underwriter, had been devastated to lose the pictures from a trip he had planned for years. It was Jan. 10 — his 34th birthday — when he heard he would be getting the photos back. "I was over the moon," he says now. "Best present ever."

"I owe you one," he wrote to Ascher. "It's good to know there are some honest people left in the world."

By Vanessa Bauza

Tribune staff reporter

December 16, 2007

Snowplow driver Demetrius Duplessis was determined to pull Khushboo Jani from her burning car -- even if she didn't quite realize she needed rescuing.

Duplessis was driving east on the Eisenhower Expressway at 8 a.m. Saturday when he spotted a black Honda on the left shoulder with flames and smoke billowing from the engine. He pulled over, used his snowplow to block swift-moving traffic and jumped out of his vehicle.

But as Duplessis approached the car, Jani, 22, who was talking to her father on her cell phone, tried to lock the doors.

"I was going to call 911. I saw him and got really scared," said Jani of Schaumburg. "He's like, 'Get out of the car.' I'm like, 'No.' I just thought the engine broke down."

Duplessis knew better.

"I grabbed the door and opened it real quick and snatched her out of the car," he said. "She still didn't realize the car was on fire."

A driver with the Illinois Department of Transportation's Emergency Traffic Patrol quickly doused the flames with a hand-held extinguisher. Jani's car was towed but she still needed to get to Roosevelt University to take a final exam in physics.

"Her biggest concern [was] getting there in time to take the test," Illinois State Police Trooper Greg Jones said. "One of the troopers took her to the college."

Duplessis, 44, of Montgomery has worked as an IDOT snowplow driver for five years. He does not consider himself a hero. However, he said he hopes if his own college-age daughter ever finds herself in a similar predicament that a good Samaritan will be there to help.

Jani, who made it to her exam, was relieved Duplessis came along when he did. "I'm really glad that he did what he did. I'm really grateful for that."

-----------

vbauza@tribune.com

Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has said sorry to his wife for flirting with other women after she demanded a public apology.

Mr Berlusconi issued a written statement, referring to the constant pressure he was under from work, trips, politics and problems.

Veronica Berlusconi, his second wife, said his flirting damaged her dignity.

She had demanded the apology in a front-page letter to the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica.

NYC subway savior showered with gifts

By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press WriterThu Jan 4, 7:28 PM ET

A man's daring rescue of a teen who fell on the subway tracks earned him the unique title "the hero of Harlem" on Thursday, plus $10,000 from Donald Trump and a trip to Disney World.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg bestowed the title upon Wesley Autrey as he presented him with the city's highest award for civic achievement, calling the 50-year-old construction worker "a great man — a man who makes us all proud to be New Yorkers."

Past recipients of the Bronze Medallion have included Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and Willie Mays. The last honoree was Housing Authority employee Felix Vasquez, who caught a baby thrown from a burning building in 2005.

On Tuesday, Autrey saw Cameron Hollopeter, a 19-year-old film student, suffering a seizure while waiting for a train. After stumbling down the platform, Hollopeter, of Littleton, Mass., fell onto the tracks with a train on its way into the station.

Autrey, traveling with his two young daughters, said something needed to be done and he thought: "I'm the only one to do it."

He jumped down to the tracks, a few feet below platform level, and rolled with the young man into a drainage trough between the rails as the southbound No. 1 train came into the 137th Street/City College station.

Some train cars passed over Autrey and Hollopeter with only a couple of inches to spare, but neither man suffered any harm from the incident. Hollopeter, hospitalized for his medical condition, was in stable condition Thursday.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority Executive Director Elliot Sander called Autrey's action "a death-defying act of bravery. We truly have not seen anything like this. ... He was at the right place at the right time and did the right thing."

After the City Hall ceremony, a limousine whisked Autrey — who also received a year's worth of free subway rides — to a meeting with Trump, who presented him with $10,000.

He also has received $2,500 from the New York Film Academy to start a scholarship fund for his children, and tickets and a backstage tour to the Broadway musical "The Lion King."

Autrey, who did the morning news show circuit on Thursday and taped a David Letterman appearance later in the day, will be flown to Los Angeles for an appearance next week on Ellen DeGeneres' show.

As for his new celebrity, he concluded, "good things happen when you do good."

MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15402822/

LOCKPORT, Ill. -- A group of Lockport teens sprung to the rescue of their pals in a submerged car Wednesday.

A car carrying Brent Walker, 15, Nick Lopezalles, 16, and his father, Frank Walker Lopezalles, lay upside down and steaming in the Illinois & Michigan Canal.

Their friends piled out of their car and came to their rescue.

Chris Murphy pulled off his shirt and shoes and waded into the canal near downtown Lockport, with Darius Allen in pursuit.

"I didn't stop to think at all," Murphy told the Chicago Tribune Wednesday, recounting the harrowing incident from the day before. "I just did it."

Chris and Darius, both 15, broke three car windows using fists and elbows, they said.

"Then we opened up all the doors," Chris said, adding that he quickly pulled the 16-year-old driver from the murky water.

"He was blue and purple," Chris told the Tribune of his best friend. "His tongue was hanging out of his mouth. We put him on the back of (our) car."

Murphy said he thought he was dead, but Jesus Alejandre, 16, who had waded into the water behind his friends, yelled for them to apply CPR, so they did. Brent was revived.

Authorities said the victims were very lucky to have survived.

After the accident, Brent's mother called her son's high school to thank them for teaching CPR in class.

Quote

Bride holds charity event after fiance cheats - MSNBC.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14749520