A handful of years ago my wife's dad was doing very poorly health wise so I booked us a flight from TRI to PIA with a layover in ATL. A plane developed mechanical problems so they absconded our plane for that one and started cascading flights in the hopes of getting a plane back in service before they have to cancel flights. It is a domino effect that I've seen too many times. So at 11:00PM, they cancel our flight to PIA. People that fly regularly started booking the next available flight and by the time that we got to the DELTA desk, the only flight available was 2 days later. They ended up booking us into Bloomington/Normal Illinois and I had to get someone to drive 40 miles to get us to take us to the airport where our rental car was waiting. We still had one plane develop a failure on the taxiway and finally made it onto a 3rd or 4th plane.
The only good thing about DELTA screwing up our trip so badly is that they had to put us up in a hotel overnight. The next morning on the way to the airport to sit and wait all day, we met a gentleman on the shuttle bus. Harold Fritz was his name. We got talking with him as I'll strike up a conversation with anyone. We found that he was returning to Peoria from Washington D.C. where he'd attended a medal of honor award ceremony. He told us about the young man getting the award and what he had done to deserve the award. We explained how we have 2 guest rooms in our house, the military room in honor of one son and the magenta room in honor of the other son who was an architect. We went on to explain some of the memorabilia that we have such as my Uncle Clarence's USMC issue Kabar knife that he carried on the beaches of Iwo Jima, my Uncle Joe's Pearl Harbor survivor plaque and watch and many other curios and trinkets.
It ends up that Harold Fritz was the president of the Medal of Honor society and that was why he was in D.C. He gave us a postcard that he carried and when I saw it, I realized that he himself was a medal of honor recipient. We were stunned. Literally floored and honored to meet him. I told him how privileged that we were to get the card from him and that if it was okay with him, we'd frame it to go on the wall with the other pictures and items from our family's military members. He said, "wait a moment", dug in his briefcase and handed us a coin to go with the postcard. I didn't realize the significance of it until later in the airport where I called my son and told him the story.
He said, "He gave you a challenge coin?"
"I guess."
"Do you know how much of an honor it is to get one of those?"
I did not know at the time but I came to understand the significance.
This is Harold. It ends up that my mother in law knows him somewhat well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_A._Fritz
Not everything that is bad will end up bad. Sometimes the most special things occur after the bleakest.
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