"I would like now to read to those of you assembled here from one of Heinlein's stories, about a tramp, a train, and an unparalleled act of heroism. The story goes like this:
"Many of you may remember the flight of Air Florida 90 that crashed into the 14th Street Bridge in Washington, D.C., and how only six of the 79 people on the plane survived. The sixth passenger, who was later identified as Arland D. Williams, Jr., passed the rescue lines to others whom he felt needed rescue more urgently than he did, and chose to save five others.I said that ‘Patriotism' is a way of saying ‘Women and children first.' And that no one can force a man to feel this way. Instead he must embrace it freely. I want to tell about one such man. He wore no uniform and no one knows his name, or where he came from; all we know is what he did.
In my home town sixty years ago when I was a small child, a thing happened which made a permanent impression on me. My family lived in Kansas City then, and my mother and father used to take me and my brothers and sisters on the street car line to Swope Park almost every Sunday afternoon in good weather. It was a wonderful place for kids, with picnic grounds and lakes and a zoo. But through the park runs--or did run, then--a railroad track, the Katy line. There were a half a dozen places where one could cross the track on foot.
One Sunday afternoon a young married couple were walking in Swope Park and started across those tracks. She apparently did not watch her step, for she managed to catch her foot in the frog of a switch to a siding and could not pull it free. Her husband stopped to help her.
Nothing to panic about, there were no trains in sight and that line carried only a couple of trains a day.
But she found that she could not pull it out even with her husband's help--and there was no one else around. They both worked away at it for several minutes when a stranger came along, a man, and now all three of them strained and pulled. But try as they might they could not get her foot loose.
No luck--and now they heard a train coming. Out of sight around the curve a train whistled. Too late to flag it down--too late to do anything--save continue trying to get her foot out of there. Of course both the husband--and the stranger who had happened along--could have saved themselves easily. But they didn't. Neither gave up, both men kept trying and were still trying as the train hit them.
The wife and the stranger were killed at once; the husband lasted just long enough to tell what happened and died before he could be moved.
The woman had no choice. The husband had a choice but acted as a husband should. But what of the stranger?
No one would have blamed him if he had jumped clear at the last moment at which he could have saved himself. After all, in sober fact, the woman could not be saved--it was too late. She was not his wife, not his responsibility--she was a total stranger; we don't know that he ever learned her name.
But he didn't jump back. He was leaning over, pulling at this stranger's leg with all his strength when the locomotive hit him. He used the last golden moments of his life, the last efforts his muscles would ever make, still trying to save her.
I don't know anything about him. I didn't see it happen and when the crowd gathered--amazing how fast a crowd can gather even in a lonely spot once an accident happens. My parents got me quickly away from there to keep me from seeing the mangled bodies. So all I really know about it is what I can recall from hearing my father read aloud the account in the Kansas City Star.
I don't even know the stranger's name. The newspaper described him as about twenty-eight, I think it was, and a "laborer." Probably means "hobo" as he was walking along the tracks. It is possible that this married couple who died with him would never, under other circumstances, have met him formally, might not have been willing to sit down and eat with him.
I don't know. I'll never know anything about him--except how he chose to spend the last five minutes of his short life . . . and how he elected to die.
But that is really quite a lot and I've thought about it many times since. Why did he do what he did? What did he think about in those last few rushing minutes when the train bore down on them? Or did he think about anything save the great effort he was making? Was he afraid? If he was, what inner resources did he draw on to offset that fear with ultimate courage?
We can't know. All we know is that, with no flags flying, no bands playing, no time to prepare his soul for the ordeal--he did it.
The wife was killed, the husband was mortally injured and died later, the tramp was killed -- and testimony showed that neither man made the slightest effort to save himself.
The husband's behavior was heroic. . .but what we expect of a husband toward his wife: his right, and his proud privilege, to die for his woman. But what of this nameless stranger? Up to the very last second he could have jumped clear. He did not. He was still trying to save this woman he had never seen before in his life, right up to the very instant the train killed him. And that's all we'll ever know about him.
"I quote again from Robert Heinlein to refer to an unknown tramp from decades ago, to Arland D. Williams, who chose to make the effort to save the lives of other people, and who all paid the ultimate price in doing so.
He looked up at the audience, and finished his speech. "This is how a man dies. This is how a man... lives!'"