O.K. SANDY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 43, 22 April 1942, Page 5

O.K. SANDY

"CAN YOU HEAR ME, MUTHER?"

A SWIFTY AT SIX

It is not often the BEACON" lias to tell one on itself; but readers can be assured this journal take "take it" besides just handing it out.

A well known local Civil Servant when in Auckland last week had accidentally to; visit Chelsea across the Waitemata. You know, where the sugar commences to be Returning to Auckland by the evening boat, the Whakatane man noticed that the lengthening evening shadows combined with the deliberate unhaste of the ferry had excited the male passenger to even greater efforts in their customary long jump ashore so startling to •strangers. Foremost amongst the gazelles our local man observed a short stocky soldier who leapt far and longpecked vigorously with iron-shod regulation hoofs at the piling of the wharf —half-rolled in mid air—and disappeared kcrflomp into the' drink.

Aucklanders arc phlegmatic; they can watch a Springbok winger sprint fifty yards to score between the posts with hardly a murmur; so that the spectacle of soldiery struggling in the foam moved them not at all.

Our Civil Servant surged forth to aid the drowning, and observed the now hatless soldier with tight-shut eyes sturdily swim himself right out of the water on to his back and he was amazed to recognise—guess who? OUR SANDY!

We who knew him can still hear him saying "Well, if the air force, don't want me—l'll join the Navy and see the world"; and here he was, seeing more of the sea than some men who spend a lifetime on the billowy ocean.

The tightly" packed Auckland scrum swept the local lad up the gangway willy-nilly but he turned in time to see a soldier pal lower a rope to his spluttering mate with the cheery remark, "Its O.K. Sandy old pal, can you hear me Muthcr?"