My Dear Family and Friends, Anne and I have just returned from London, where I thought I would be killed in the street alongside the Tower of London. We had stupidly climbed the tower stairs until I was totally exhausted and my left leg was buckling, and then we missed our tour bus and were running to catch it when we saw a green pedestrian light. Anne went through it, but I was in the middle of the street when it turned red. Motorcycles and cars went around me; I spun in the middle and almost went down on the bad leg but managed to get to the curb. There was a taxi there; I tried to climb in but my left leg collapsed, and I fell back on the pavement and hit my head hard against the curb. I probably received a 2-inch hematoma on my scalp and a 6-inch bruise on the sacrum. Fortunately, bystanders helped me climb into the taxi on my hands and knees, after which we returned to the hotel, where I couldn't walk due to the twisted left knee. This incident made me think about near-death experiences in the past. And they all have one quality: stupidity. To wit: Driving as a 13-year-old without a license. I stayed in the middle of the road and forced another car to run into a ditch, where he turned over. As a high school student, riding with a driver who decided to race and beat a train. As we crossed in front of the charging locomotive, there was a “ting” on the back of the car, where the bumper contacted the train. Flying at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio in 1949 at 5000 feet in an AT6, doing spins with an instructor. I was terrified and vomited all over the instruments and the instructor. Fortunately, the instructor took us out of the spin before we crashed; we landed, and the instructor looked at me and said, “The rule here is you mess it up, you clean it up.” That was the kindest thing he could have said. Flying in Korea over the Chinese-Communist line in an AT6 with the boom'boom ack-ack coming up and the napalm going down. I was trying to make an 8-mm Kodachrome film of the action when the colonel I was flying with said, “Let's get the hell out of here,” which we did. If I had been caught, I would have been tortured and held as a doctor dropping germ warfare. Taking off in an AT6 loaded with rockets and bombs when the engine caught on fire. Needless to say, we stopped, got out, and ran like hell. The plane burned. Flying out of Nagoya, Japan, at night in a C-47 that was loaded with steel runway planks and was 5000 pounds over the limit. We barely got off the ground, barely stayed afloat before going across the city, and barely missed the buildings. When we got across Korea, the plane was so heavy we blew the tires upon landing. Nearly falling into a 6-foot hole of boiling oil while backing up to take photos of the whaling station in Paita, Peru, in 1958. The oil was where they rendered the whale fat. Dropping into that would have been instant death. More recently, driving from Rockport to Austin at night in the old 1974 Mercedes, going to sleep, and waking up with headlights in my eyeballs. I barely turned right to miss a head on collision. Facing a scary case of mistaken identity. In 1967 after tiger hunting in Central India, I wanted to leave early. It was a 7-hour train ride to New Delhi, and the authorities sent an armed policeman to guard me so I would not be kidnapped. Unnecessary, I thought. But on arriving in Hong Kong with reservations in the Peninsula Hotel, I hailed a taxi that was not in the queue. I got in, two burly chaps got in each side door, and we sped away in the dark. I said I wanted to go to the Peninsula Hotel, but the driver headed for the docks. One Chinese man asked if I was a Saigon colonel. I said no, I was a doctor in America. Meanwhile, he fingered my camera bag label showing Dr. George J. Race, Dallas, Texas. They had a conversation in Chinese, and then the taxi did a U-turn and took me to the Peninsula Hotel. I was scared to death and asked, “How much?” They said nothing and sped away. Later, at 2:30 in the morning, I received a phone call from the hotel lobby and someone said, “Where is it?” I asked what. He said, “You know better than to foul up.” I called the desk and the attendant said a Chinese man came in and asked for my room number by name. I propped a chair by the door, had three drinks, called Pan Am for a 6:00 AM flight, and got out of there. Were they trying to kidnap US officers from Vietnam? Run dope to Hong Kong? I don't know. Landing the Cessna 182 that I bought from a crook in Abilene. The airplane had no brakes, and I almost ran it into the ravine at the airport at Red Bird. Falling asleep at the wheel after Joshua's Stanford, California, graduation, returning by way of Death Valley and the Grand Canyon. Suddenly the guardrail bumps on the left rubbed the vehicle and woke me. We had crossed the center lane into the oncoming lane. Fortunately, no one was coming towards us. The Mitsubishi we were driving has a front-end engine and a front-end drive. I did a sharp right turn, which produced an instant 360° spin. When the spin was completed, we ended up going the right way in the right lane. Trembling, I backed up and looked at all the skid marks to see what we had done. I could probably recite a few other incidents, such as the time I flew out of Rockport with Anne and Caroline in the middle of an ice storm and discovered the plane was covered with ice. Fortunately, in this case, I was smart enough to make a 180° turn to fly south until the ice melted, whereupon I landed at Cameron, near Temple, and left the plane. The moral of this story is that every one of these near-miss, potentially fatal accidents occurred because of stupidity, usually salvaged by luck and followed by terrified afterthought.