Word: rafts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...week's end, only one scrap of evidence had been picked up in the Baltic-an empty yellow life raft of the type issued to Navy patrol bombers. This week, the U.S. charged that the Russians shot down the plane over open waters and demanded indemnity for the dead American flyers. But it was a sign of U.S. awareness of the incidental perils of cold war, that there were no shouts for any hot fighting to begin...
...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...
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...
...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 2½ hours later spotted it again...
...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...