Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: On the wild Card Line. Michael in Bellingham, Washington has
Speaker 2: been very patient. Michael, Welcome to coast. Good morning, Richard.
Speaker 3: I'm honored, good morning. Thank you so much for taking
Speaker 3: my call. I've been a very very long time listener,
Speaker 3: and today's the first time I've ever called because of
Speaker 3: the topic that you mentioned.
Speaker 2: Ah, a stranger that affected your life.
Speaker 3: Actually, I affected a stranger's life in a very weird way.
Speaker 3: I found out my brother had moved to Philadelphia. I
Speaker 3: live in Seattle, and we'd lost touch. We didn't talk
Speaker 3: very often, and several years went by, and then suddenly
Speaker 3: somebody called me and said, well, your brother's in the hospital.
Speaker 3: He had done They found him standing on the side
Speaker 3: of the bridge. He was thinking about jumping and committing suicide.
Speaker 3: Oh dear, I said, well, gush, that's horrible, and I
Speaker 3: felt guilty. I had spoken to him in a couple
Speaker 3: of years, and so I picked up the phone and
Speaker 3: I called the old phone number that I had lied
Speaker 3: my contacts for him, and person answers the phone and
Speaker 3: I said, Kevin, just listen to me, don't say anything,
Speaker 3: just listen to me for three minutes and then go
Speaker 3: ahead and speak. And I went into a three minute
Speaker 3: dialogue of you know, how important life was, how precious
Speaker 3: it is, and how much people really loved him, and
Speaker 3: you know, I'm sad to hear these depressed and everything,
Speaker 3: but really it's you know, not something worth doing this for,
Speaker 3: and so on and full for it. And then finally at
Speaker 3: the end of the end of my dialogue, is really
Speaker 3: quiet and didn't say anything, and all goes, you know, uh,
Speaker 3: who do you call it? While I was calling my
Speaker 3: brother Kevin, he goes, well, myning is not Kevin. My
Speaker 3: name is John. And he goes, I'm just sitting here.
Speaker 3: The last couple I was thinking about committing suicide because
Speaker 3: a lot of months ago from breast cancer, and I
Speaker 3: have a nine year old boy to sleep in the
Speaker 3: other room and sitting here depressed and thinking about taking
Speaker 3: my own life. He goes, do you believe in God?
Speaker 3: I said, I do.
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: I was praying really hard the last time that God
Speaker 3: would give me some kind of a fine that I
Speaker 3: shouldn't do this. And then you called, oh my, and
Speaker 3: he says, I'm I'm so thankfully you did. And you're
Speaker 3: not going to do that anymore. And that was it.
Speaker 2: That that is remarkable. And what about your brother? What
Speaker 2: about your brother in Philadelphia? Did you find him?
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was fine. I called, I got the right,
Speaker 3: correct number for him, and he was fine. He was
Speaker 3: depressed and stood out the side of the bridge and thought, well,
Speaker 3: I better not do this. And you know, by then
Speaker 3: it was the seed and the police gave and took
Speaker 3: him to the hospital. So, but everybody's okay. In the end,
Speaker 3: it was just a weird, weird thing. How you know.
Speaker 3: He just listened and said I needed someone to call me,
Speaker 3: and I got the wrong number, but I reached the
Speaker 3: right person.
Speaker 2: You did, indeed, you saved the life.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Great to show what everything you guys do. And
Speaker 3: thanks for letting me share my story with you. JD.
Speaker 2: Richard, God bless you. Ah Wow. Tom is in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Tom,
Speaker 2: Welcome to Coast.
Speaker 4: New York Rangers fan here, and looks like we were
Speaker 4: off to a good start. I found your topic very
Speaker 4: interesting tonight and coincidental because I just told a coworker
Speaker 4: just two days ago a story about an encounter with
Speaker 4: a stranger that had a profound attitude.
Speaker 3: Check on me.
Speaker 4: I have two stories, but I'm gonna I'm gonna choose
Speaker 4: this one to tell you. I was a teenager growing
Speaker 4: up in New York City, and I worked in a
Speaker 4: full service fast food restaurant all through high school. And
Speaker 4: I worked the Sunday morning shift, opened the open the place,
Speaker 4: and worked all the way through the afternoon, all through
Speaker 4: high school. And there was a group of older gentlemen
Speaker 4: who came in early Sunday morning. They had eggs, they
Speaker 4: drank their coffee, and he just sat there all day long,
Speaker 4: just talking. And as a young high school kid who
Speaker 4: just couldn't wait to get out and do things all
Speaker 4: the time, I was so irritated by it. These guys
Speaker 4: just wasting their lives away, you know, week after week, months, months,
Speaker 4: year after year. Until one day one of the gentlemen
Speaker 4: came over summertime, these short sleeves comes over places his order,
Speaker 4: and when he went to hand me the money to
Speaker 4: pay for his food, I noticed numbers tattooed on his forearm.
Speaker 4: And this is the This was the mid seventies, and
Speaker 4: I was stunned and I looked at him and I said, sir,
Speaker 4: were you in a concentration camp? And he said yeah.
Speaker 4: And from that point on, I at that moment, all
Speaker 4: I could think was you snot And I thought, you
Speaker 4: know what, if these guys want to sit here, if
Speaker 4: that's what they want to do with their time, that's
Speaker 4: that's their right. And who am I to judge them
Speaker 4: for deciding to do that with their time. They could
Speaker 4: do whatever they want for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 4: That's what I was thinking.
Speaker 2: They were all Holocaust survivors.
Speaker 4: No, no, just this one job. I don't know if
Speaker 4: the others were. I don't know any but this one gentleman.
Speaker 4: And oh my gosh, who was I to be thinking
Speaker 4: of things that I was thinking? Can I tell you
Speaker 4: a second story?
Speaker 1: Sure, okay.
Speaker 4: I was a young officer in the Navy, and in
Speaker 4: the early eighties, I was a Naval Academy graduate. I
Speaker 4: was finally at fourteen, right after Top Gun. You know,
Speaker 4: I was just riding the top of the world and
Speaker 4: got back from a six months deployment. Two weeks after
Speaker 4: I returned for my six month deployment, I had to
Speaker 4: go for temporary duty down to Florida. Was based in
Speaker 4: Virginia Beach, and I was gone from my girlfriend for
Speaker 4: six months and two weeks after I'm back, I have
Speaker 4: to leave for two more weeks. Well, the weekend in
Speaker 4: between the two weeks, I was traveling back to Virginia
Speaker 4: Beach to go see my girlfriend. And I'm sitting in
Speaker 4: the Base Operations passenger terminal, waiting for my flight to
Speaker 4: go back to Virginia Beach, not feeling, you know, feeling
Speaker 4: pretty sorry for myself and young lieutenant and for all
Speaker 4: the time I'd spent away and missing my girlfriend. And
Speaker 4: this older black gentleman goes walking by and he looks
Speaker 4: at my name tag and it's it's ethnic, and it's
Speaker 4: it's obvious that I'm of Greek heritage with my last name.
Speaker 4: And he says to me, oh, he says my last name.
Speaker 4: He says, you're Greek, aren't you. And my first thought was, oh,
Speaker 4: my gosh, here's this old retired guy, and I'm gonna
Speaker 4: have to entertain him and listen to his stories about
Speaker 4: how he used to load bombs or whatever, and and
Speaker 4: I just wasn't in the mood for it. And but
Speaker 4: I was polite and I said, yes I am, and
Speaker 4: he said something to me in Greek, and I thought,
Speaker 4: and I said to him, Oh, how do you, how
Speaker 4: do you know the language? And he said, well, I
Speaker 4: learned it from the Greeks. And I said, how did
Speaker 4: you happen to learn from the Greeks And he said, well,
Speaker 4: back in World War Two, I got shot down in
Speaker 4: my P fifty one over the Mediterranean, and Greek fishermen
Speaker 4: picked me up and I was with them for about
Speaker 4: six weeks until they repatriated me. And as he's telling
Speaker 4: me this, this, this brief story, I realized, oh, my gosh,
Speaker 4: this is a Tuskegee airman, and you should be you
Speaker 4: should be licking his boots and not worrying about having
Speaker 4: to entertain him while he wants to perhaps tell me
Speaker 4: his stories. And I was so humbled by my you know,
Speaker 4: by my my stupid attitude and uh and the encounter.
Speaker 4: So those are my two stories of encounters with strangers
Speaker 4: that profoundly gave me an attitude check.
Speaker 2: Oh amaze, saying Tom, there you go. Great story, all right,
Speaker 2: two great stories. Humbling, right, humbling. That's but you know,
Speaker 2: don't beat yourself up so much because you were humbled
Speaker 2: by it. You recognized you learned the lesson. You learned
Speaker 2: the lesson which was to be humbled. Some people don't
Speaker 2: learn that lesson.
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