The Man Who Thanked the Sea Gulls-Truth!

The Man Who Thanked the Sea Gulls-Eddie Rickenbacker-Truth!

Summary of the eRumor:
The story of a man who would routinely take a bucket of shrimp to the end of a pier and fed them to sea gulls. He would say "thank you" to them as he did. It turned out to be World War I military hero Eddie Rickenbacker who regarded a sea gull as the beginning of a series of events that saved his life while drifting for 24 days in a raft after a plane crash into the Pacific.

The Truth:
The story is true and, as indicated in the eRumor, is an excerpt from a book by popular minister and inspirational author Max Lucado. The book is titled "In the Eye of the Storm."

Rickenbacker tells the story of the sea gulls in his autobiography. The crash at sea took place in 1942 when he was sent by the U.S. government on a tour of the Pacific theater. The four-engine B-17 bomber that he was piloting went off course and ran out of fuel at sea.

Rickenbacker was a pilot during WW I who became an ace and was presented with The Medal of Honor. He went on to be a race car driver, an aviation consultant, and airline executive. He brought together two existing airlines to become Eastern airlines that went on to become a major presence in commercial aviation.

Updated 2/27/08

A real example of the eRumor as it has appeared on the Internet:

Old Eddie

It happens every Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun
resembles a giant orange and is starting to dip into the blue ocean.
Old Ed comes strolling along the beach to his favorite pier. Clutched
in his bony hand is a bucket of shrimp.

Ed walks out to the end of the pier, where it seems he almost has the
world
to himself. The glow of the sun is a golden bronze now. Everybody's
gone,
except for a few joggers on the beach. Standing out on the end of the p
ier, Ed is alone with his thoughts....and his bucket of shrimp.

Before long, however, he is no longer alone. Up in the sky a thousand
white dots come screeching and squawking, winging their way toward that
lanky frame standing there on the end of the pier. Before long, dozens of
seagulls have enveloped him, their wings fluttering and flapping wildly.
Ed
stands there tossing shrimp to the hungry birds. As he does, if you
listen
closely, you can hear him say with a smile, 'Thank you. Thank you.'

In a few short minutes the bucket is empty. But Ed doesn't leave. He
stands there lost in thought, as though transported to another time and
place. Invariably, one of the gulls lands on his sea-bleached,
weather-beaten hat - an old military hat he's been wearing for years.
When he finally turns around and begins to walk back toward the beach, a
few
of the birds hop along the pier with him until he gets to the stairs, and
then they, too, fly away. And old Ed quietly makes his way down to the
end
of the beach and on home.

If you were sitting there on the pier with your fishing line in the water,
Ed might seem like 'a funny old duck,' as my dad used to say. Or, 'a guy
that's a sandwich shy of a picnic,' as my kids might say. To onlookers,
he's just another old codger, lost in his own weird world, feeding the
seagulls with a bucket full of shrimp.

To the onlooker, rituals can look either very strange or very empty. They
can seem altogether unimportant....maybe even a lot of nonsense. Old fo
lks
often do strange things, at least in the eyes of Boomers and Busters.
Most
of them would probably write Old Ed off, down there in Florida.

That's too bad. They'd do well to know him better. His full name: Eddie
Rickenbacker. He was a famous hero back in
World War II. On one of his flying missions across the Pacific, he and
his
seven-member crew went down. Miraculously, all of the men survived,
crawled
out of their plane, and climbed into a life raft. Captain Rickenbacker
and
his crew floated for days on the rough waters of the Pacific. They fought
the sun. They fought sharks. Most of all, they fought hunger. By the
eighth day their rations ran out. No food. No water. They were hundreds
of miles from land and no one knew where they were. They needed a
miracle.
< BRThat afternoon they had a simple devotional service and prayed for a
miracle. They tried to nap. Eddie leaned back and pulled his military
cap
over his nose. Time dragged. All he could hear was the slap of the waves
against the raft.

Suddenly, Eddie felt something land on the top of his cap. It was a
seagull! Old Ed would later describe how he sat perfectly still, planning
his next move. With a flash of his hand and a squawk from the gull, he
managed to grab it and wring its neck. He tore the feathers off, and he
and
his starving crew made a meal - a very slight meal for eight
men - of it. Then they used the intestines for bait. With it, they
caught
fish, which gave them food and more bait......and the cycle continued.
With
that simple survival technique, they were able to endure the rigors of the
sea until they were found and rescued. (after
24 days at sea...)

Eddie Rickenbacker lived many years beyond that ordeal, but he never
forgot
the sacrifice of that first lifesaving seagull. And he never stopped
saying, 'Thank you.' That's why almost every Friday night he would walk
to
the end of the pier with a bucket full of shrimp and a heart full of
gratitude.

(Max Lucado, In The Eye of the Storm, pp.221, 225-226)

PS: Eddie was also an Ace in WW I and started Eastern Airlines.