The headlines of today are sufficiently dreary that I thought I’d buck the trend and draw some attention to what little good news I could find.
Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully glided his plane into the Hudson River after a flock of geese had killed power in both engines, will return to work after completing his mandatory re-training course:
The US Airways pilot who glided his jet safely into New York’s Hudson River will return to the cockpit soon, the airline said Monday.
Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger will pilot regular flights as well as join the airline’s flight operations safety management team. The airline said it was working out the details of his return to flight duties.
Sullenberger, 58, has finished the training required to return to the cockpit and is eligible to fly, said US Airways Group Inc. spokesman Jonathan Freed. On Jan. 15, Sullenberger ditched the Airbus A320 in the Hudson after a collision with a flock of geese killed power in both engines minutes after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport. All 155 people on the plane survived
The only filling station that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright will be restored:
The prairie-style homes, churches, hotels and public buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright are well-known.
But the famed architect also designed a service station in this town about 20 miles west of Duluth.
And now the family that owns it is restoring and preserving it after about 30 years of neglect.
It’s the only service station ever designed by Wright, the renowned early-20th century architect and longtime Oak Park resident.
The station was built in 1958 but had fallen into disrepair. Since last year, the owners have spent nearly $250,000 to restore some of Wright’s original design touches, including copper trim around the roof and ’50s-style garbage cans.
An elderly woman has sold the pair of pistols gathering dust on her shelf for $130,000:
It sat on a shelf in the closet for years, a rosewood case containing two Civil War-era revolvers with ivory handles. The guns had been a gift from a friend to Sharlene Perez’s late husband, but they held no sentimental value for her. So in June, she decided it was time to sell them.
She slipped the case into a sturdy Lord & Taylor shopping bag and took a taxi six blocks to meet appraiser Greg Martin in midtown Manhattan, N.Y. She knew that there were engravings on the barrels, that the grips were monogrammed and that an inscription on the lid of the case indicated that townspeople in Watertown, N.Y., had given the guns to William C. Browne, a local man heading off to serve as a colonel in the Civil War.
In her most optimistic moments, Perez hoped the guns might net $20,000.
Instead, she “about keeled over,” Martin said, when he told her the guns were Colt 1851 Navy revolvers and might be worth 10 times as much. He told her there would be an auction in Anaheim in September. He told her he would set the appraisal value at $125,000 to $250,000.
On Sunday afternoon at the Doubletree Hotel Anaheim in Orange, Perez, 74, sat with ice-cold hands and a stepped-up heartbeat as auctioneer Scott Bradley said, “Let’s start the bidding at $50,000.”
Martin, who has an auction business with offices in San Francisco and Irvine, clearly was enjoying the buildup to the auction and Perez’s near-certain windfall. “I’m excited because of the unlikelihood of finding something like this,” he said a few days before the auction. “These could have been a nice couple of unengraved guns and gone for $10,000 to $12,000.”
But the combination of a matched set engraved by Gustave Young — a master of that time period — the ivory grips and the personalized nature of the Civil War connection raised their potential value, Martin said.
I may make this a regular feature.
If you’ve got any good news to contribute, please leave the links in the comments.
