The Adventurers

It was the kind of phantomlike day in a Midwest spring to inspire adventurers. A warm south wind blew across Lake Erie. On the narrow beach at the end of East 185th Street in Euclid, Ohio, a group of small sea-rovers collected excitedly around a yellow rubber raft. A few hundred feet out in the lake, drifting away in the offshore wind, was a derelict canoe--the legitimate prize of anyone who could salvage her. The rubber raft (Navy surplus), which Dickie Bauer, 14, had bought with money he had earned caddying, was bravely launched from the beach.

Four of the adventurers climbed in--Dickie, Willie Von Hof, David Hahn and Roland Riemer, members of Boy Scout Troop 193. Three pals left behind were a little dubious about the plan and warned the four not to try it. But Dickie and his crew, in cowboy jeans and cowboy shirts, paddled off, leaving their pals to watch the shoes, socks and fur-lined jackets which they had left on shore. They had one good oar, a broken oar and a piece of a board. In almost no time at all, carried by the brisk wind, they were out of shouting distance of the beach.

Toward sundown, Clarence Hahn, a General Electric engineer, came out to the cliff above the beach to call his son. He saw the yellow raft almost a mile out. Hahn phoned the Coast Guard Lifeboat Station and the Cleveland Airport. Parents and neighbors came down to the shore; by then the raft had vanished in the lowering darkness.

Night and cold closed down over Euclid. Hour after hour Coast Guard boats methodically zigzagged over the area, sweeping the water with searchlights. A cold front came out of the west bringing a sharp, high wind with it. At daybreak a B-17 bomber, Air National Guard planes, two Navy PBYs and private planes joined the hunt for the adventurers. At 7 a.m., the B-17 spotted Dickie Bauer's raft 25 miles from Euclid, near Fairport Harbor. The bomber lost it in the morning haze and tumbling waves, but 2 1/2 hours later spotted it again.

A Coast Guard lifeboat, directed to the spot, wallowed alongside in seven-foot waves, finally grappled Dickie's half-filled raft. All four adventurers were aboard. Two of them lay with their arms around each other. One of them sprawled over the raft's end, the other lay on the bottom in the sloshing, near-freezing water. All were dead of exposure. Two days later a Coast Guard patrol picked up the derelict canoe, floating emptily, still anyone's prize.

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