OT, but seasonally appropriate

[torquer]

Came across this story in the obituary section of today's NYTimes:
Fred Hargesheimer, Repaid His Rescuers, Dies at 94
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Fred Hargesheimer, a World War II Army pilot whose rescue by Pacific islanders led to a life of giving back as a builder of schools and a teacher, died here Thursday. He was 94.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/world/24harg.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries
As my wife said, he "got it."
Not all of us are aided in as dramatic a fashion, nor can we all contribute our time and fortune with as much impact, but this man's life story was a reminder to me, at least, that we should be thinking about giving at least as much as about getting during this time of year.
Merry HanaKwanaChristmas, everyone!

[Pete Serotta]

Yep, very well put and I could not agree more.


LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Fred Hargesheimer, a World War II Army pilot whose rescue by Pacific islanders led to a life of giving back as a builder of schools and a teacher, died here Thursday. He was 94.
Enlarge This Image

Geoffrey Heard, via Associated Press
In 2004, Fred Hargesheimer visited students at a school he helped build in Papua New Guinea.
His death was confirmed by his son Richard.

On June 5, 1943, Mr. Hargesheimer, a P-38 pilot with the Eighth Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron, was shot down by a Japanese fighter while on a mission over the Japanese-held island of New Britain in the southwest Pacific. He parachuted into the jungle, where he barely survived for 31 days until local hunters found him.

They took him to their coastal village, and for seven months hid him from Japanese patrols, fed him and nursed him back to health. In February 1944, with the help of Australian commandos working behind Japanese lines, he was picked up by an American submarine off a New Britain beach.

After returning to the United States following the war, Mr. Hargesheimer married and began a sales career with a Minnesota forerunner of the computer maker Sperry Rand, his lifelong employer. But he said he could not forget the Nakanai people, whom he considered his saviors.

The more he thought about it, he later said, “the more I realized what a debt I had to try to repay.”

After revisiting the village of Ea Ea in 1960, he came home, raised $15,000 over three years — “most of it $5 and $10 gifts,” he said — and returned in 1963 with his son Richard, then 17, to contract for the building of the villagers’ first school.

In the decades to come, Mr. Hargesheimer’s fund-raising and determination built a clinic, another school and libraries in Ea Ea, renamed Nantabu, and surrounding villages.

In 1970, with their three children grown, Mr. Hargesheimer and his wife, Dorothy, moved to New Britain, today an out-island of the nation of Papua New Guinea, and taught the village children themselves for four years. The Nantabu school’s experimental plot of oil palm even helped create a local economy, a large plantation with jobs for impoverished villagers.

On his last visit, in 2006, Mr. Hargesheimer was flown by helicopter into the jungle and carried in a chair by Nakanai men to view the newly found wreckage of his World War II plane. “These people were responsible for saving my life,” Mr. Hargesheimer told The Associated Press in a 2008 interview. “How could I ever repay it?”


Thanks for sharing. PETE