Extraordinary events in an extraordinary life
Introduction
Stories Of A Lifetime contains extraordinary and true stories from my own extraordinary life. Every story is extraordinary. Every story is absolutely 100% true. You will be amazed. I know I was, when these things happened - to me!
I hope you will enjoy Stories Of A Lifetime. It took me a lifetime to write it.
Some Day ...
Some day you'll be old, really old, and sitting in a rocking chair. Some day you'll be old, really old, and sitting in a rocking chair and looking back over your entire life. You’ll look back and remember. You'll look back and remember your hopes and dreams. You'll remember the good times and the bad times. The struggles. The love. The pain. The successes and the failures. The fun. The tragedies. The things you did do ... and the things you didn't do. When you are old, and looking back at your life, what will count? What will be important and meaningful? What will have real value?
The memories.
When you are old, really old, you will want to look back at your life and be able to relive lots of wonderful memories.
Make memories. Make them now. Make them glorious!
Birth of a baby
Once upon a time, in the month of May, in the year 1946, I was born in upstate New York.
My very first recollection was of leaving the hospital. I was five days old.
Surrounded by my family I was swaddled in a soft blue baby blanket and was being carried by my mother’s mother. Down the corridor the small group walked. Toward the hospital’s front door exit. As we neared the exit I was dazzled by the beautiful warm sunny daylight streaming in through the doors from outside. The group came up to the doors and, for the very first time, I saw the sky. The deep majestic blue of an enormous sky that stretched forever. My senses were overwhelmed by the beauty and the color and the light.
The doors opened and, in awe and wonder, I went out into the world.
A Real Case of ESP
It was a very hot summer the year I turned 17. Broiling hot. Roasting hot. There were no beaches within hundreds of miles of my hometown. However, Blib’s mother’s sister lived in Asbury Park, NJ. Right near the beach. She invited Blib to visit her for a few days. Blib invited me. I had never been to Asbury Park, NJ before. The three of us went; Blib, me, and the Greyhound bus.
We were welcomed at the aunt’s house; we had a place to stay and the Atlantic Ocean nearby. It was cooler already. To get to the beach and back we could simply catch a shuttle bus that regularly made the thirty-forty minute trip. The next morning Blib and I packed up our suntan lotion and caught the shuttle to the beach. In the late afternoon we returned to the aunt’s house for dinner. The third day, we met a beautiful blonde on the shuttle bus and talked to her all the way out to the beach. The next morning she was once again on the same bus that we rode. She was exceptionally pretty, very nice and about the same age as Blib and I. She told us her first and last name, a little about herself and the name (but not the number) of the street she lived on. It was a main street which ran for maybe ten miles through Asbury Park.
Later that evening, after dinner, Blib and I took a walk. We found ourselves on the same street where our new blonde friend lived. We laughed. Blib said we should go and visit her, except we didn’t have the address only the street and the street was ten miles long. And there wasn’t any phonebooks anywhere around to look up her address, assuming she was even listed.
We kept walking. Block after block. Houses and apartment buildings lined both sides of the wide and long avenue. After about twenty minutes we came abreast of a nondescript medium sized apartment building. Suddenly, I stopped. I pointed my finger at the building and said, “She lives there.”
Blib laughed. “Yeah, right” he said.
“No,” I said emphatically, “she really does live right there.”
Blib looked at the building. Then he looked me. Then he looked back at the building. “There’s thousands of buildings on this street and she could be living in any one of them and you’re telling me she lives in this building right here?”
“She lives here,” I restated.
“Yeah, right. Let’s just see”, he said and walked up to the entrance of the building. I followed as he opened the door, stepped inside and went over to the tenant directory on the wall. He looked for her last name on the roster…and found it!
He turned to me with a strange look in his eye. “This is her last name alright,” he said. “But it’s a common last name and the first name is different anyhow and maybe it ain’t her.”
“She lives here,” I said.
Blib picked up the house phone, buzzed the apartment and, when someone answered, asked for the girl by name.
The girl came to the phone.
It turned out that she lived with her mother. Right there in that building on that wide, long street in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
She was totally amazed that we found her.
So was I.
Man Kills Building
In L.A. I was working in a large three story cement building which housed approximately one hundred people. The company trained people how to trade commodities. I was one of the supervisors for the staff of telemarketers. Some of our telemarketers were rather difficult and rough characters. Including Nick. Nick H. was the current Ultimate Fighting Champion of the World. In case you do not know what that is, it’s organized two-man no-holds-barred brawling involving boxing, kickboxing and other martial arts. The two combatants keep fighting until one of them gives up. Or dies. As a person, Nick was a terrific guy…who happened to have a very short fuse ... attached to an explosive and lethal arsenal of fighting skills. Besides being a great guy Nick was dangerous. Deadly. Scary.
Luckily, he liked me.
One day I was taking a break in the parking lot next to our building when suddenly the door burst open (actually the door burst right off its hinges) and Nick came storming out. He was very upset. One of the other supervisors followed him out through the doorless doorway. The young supervisor and Nick apparently had had a verbal confrontation that now threatened to possibly erupt into murder. Nick being the potential murderer. With tremendous restraint Nick walked away from the kid and ranted and raved around the parking lot, getting more and more angry by the second.
By now, there were a half-dozen people who had come out to see what was going on. Adrenaline pumping, I decided to cautiously approach him to find out what was wrong.
Before I could get any nearer Nick walked up close to the building.
And started to punch the cement building with all his considerable might and skill.
He was trying to kill the building!
He hit the building so hard I saw it actually shudder! It moved!
He kept on hitting the building. Harder and harder. He hit it so hard that one of the women from administration came out onto the third floor outer stairs; she said she had been inside, felt the building shudder, and thought it was an earthquake!
I stood there absolutely amazed. I had never seen anything like it. Neither had anyone else. I gently walked up to Nick and started gently talking to him. He told me he was upset because the 23-year-old supervisor was telling him how to telemarket, something Nick had been doing successfully for many years. It’s what Nick did, between fights.
Nick is telling me all this while he is still ranting and raving and still punching the building. I noticed his knuckles were all bloody (he didn’t notice) and told him maybe he should leave the building alone, it was probably dead by now and he didn’t need to break his hands as that would maybe hamper his fighting career.
Luckily, he liked me.
He stopped killing the building. I walked him around the parking lot to cool down and then took him back inside to wash the cuts on his hands. We both noticed the door, torn off its hinges, now propped up against the wall. “Did I do that?” Nick asked. I just looked at him.
Workmen arrived shortly and installed a new door.
Nick, legitimately the toughest man in the world, shortly calmed down and went back to work.
I, either the bravest or the stupidest supervisor in the world, shortly resumed breathing and went back to work.
The near-mortally injured building also recovered ... and is still standing today.
The Night We Saw a UFO
When I was about 18 years old I saw a UFO.
I wasn’t the only one who saw it.
It was a typical, incredibly clear summer night in Binghamton, NY. There were a billion shining and twinkling stars overhead. Six or seven of us were over at my girlfriend’s house, at the top of one of the big hills/little mountains that ringed the town. We were outside. Just fooling around. I don’t know who first noticed something up in the sky but quickly we were all looking up to see. At first glance all there was to see was an airplane, not unusual due to the proximity of Broome County Airport. It had blinking lights like an airplane, flew like an airplane and was just an airplane. Flying southeast at maybe five thousand to ten thousand feet maximum. But then something weird happened. In a moment, as we continued to watch the airplane, something else started flying around it; circling it, darting back and forth.
Something very weird. A smaller object than the airliner. This smaller flying object didn’t have normal airplane lights, it’s lights didn’t blink and it looked like the whole thing was lit from the inside. Like a bright little shooting star. But it wasn’t a shooting star. And it wasn’t making any of the normal aeronautical movements airplanes make. This thing darted, in a strange jerky motion. This flying object was awesome! It accelerated faster than anything I have ever seen on land, sea or sky. It turned at impossible angles, without banking! It stopped dead in the sky! It darted around the airplane. From one side to the other. From front to back. Like it was taking a really close-up look. We all watched, dumbfounded, our mouths gaping. “What the hell is that???” we astonishingly asked. It sure ain’t no airplane, someone stated. Maybe it’s one of those weather balloons?, another ventured. No way a balloon could fly like that, someone answered. A comet? A shooting star? Some kind of top secret new Air Force plane?
We continued to watch the object buzz the commercial airliner. After about three or four minutes of darting around the airplane the object just stopped, and hung there in the sky for a moment. Like it was gathering strength. Then, faster than any comet or shooting star, it lept from one end of the vast sky to the other ... as fast as the eye could follow ... and disappeared.
Hundreds of people who had witnessed the event called the airport and the police for an explanation. It was reported on the local news and in the local newspaper.
No satisfactory explanation was ever given.
Like these stories? They are extraordinary. And 100% true. Want to read more stories like these? "Stories Of A Lifetime" will inspire you to make your own glorious memories! Get the book here.
