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