 The DuPont Company, maker of better things for better living through chemistry, presents Dane Clark on the Cavalcade of America. Lifeline, a story of adventure on the bottom of the ocean. And here is Dane Clark as Bob Forrest. I mustered out of the Coast Guard in late 45. And like lots of others, the change over to civilian life wasn't easy. I was restless. I picked up some deep-sea diving experience in the Coast Guard, so I signed with a salvage crew that was working in the Philippines, China, and places west. I guess I spent a year or more walking halfway around the world, underwater. I came home to see my wife and baby in 46, October 46, and Lula had a little speech all prepared. You've got to make up your mind, Bob. It's got to be one way or the other. Oh, wait a minute, honey. Please, let me finish. I've spent the last eight months rehearsing this speech, and I want to finish it. All right, all right. Lula, how do you think it is with you going for months on end? China, the Philippines, Alaska, Timbuktu. Or when someone asks the baby where his daddy is, he says in the mailbox. Okay, Lula. Okay. Suppose I give it up. Suppose I settle down nice and fast here in Port Angeles. Well, what do I do? What kind of a job do I get? You'll find a job? Where and doing what? You'll find a job. You're too good a man not to find a job and a good one. Not deep-sea diving either. Now, wait a minute, Lupin. Bob, how do you think I see her? Knowing that every day, any day may be the end. Underwater with all the things that can happen to you. And when I read somewhere that some divers had an accident, I... I cave in inside. Honey, the way you say that someone listening might get the idea that you're in love with me is something. I am in love with you, Bob, and you know it. Completely and for always. But so far, the only one who's gotten anything out of our marriage is the kid next door who collects stamps. It's a smart thing not to argue with a woman, especially when she's right. But agreeing with Lula still solved practically nothing because our town, Port Angeles, Washington, is up there in the hip pocket of the country on the shore of Puget Sound. It's timber country mostly with big paper mills that work over the hemlocks hauled from miles around. But I was a diver, not a lumberjack. So getting something for myself was going to be a question. Next day, I wandered down to the docks. It was a wet, sloppy day with the wind blowing in from the sound. The first thing I see is a cloud around a barge tied to the pier. How long has it been in there? It looked like something was happening, so I ran out and asked what was up. A fellow let me know quick enough. There's a fellow down there under the water, 40 or 50 feet down. A diver. Something wrong? Yeah, plenty. They can't haul him up. The line seems to be snagged or something. Want to get by with you? Okay. Hello? Hello on the barge, who's down there? Guy Kiddler. Is he getting there? Yeah, but we can't get him up, or the phone is out. Oh, wait a minute, will you? I'm coming aboard. Got a suit? Yeah, there's a spare in the cabin. Well, give someone else a pump. Come on, help me get into it. You a diver? Yeah, I'm a diver. Then come on. Johnny, keep the pup going. And stop yanking on that line. He'll only follow up words. This way. Come on, let's go. I was in that diving suit within three minutes and over the side in four. I went below down maybe 20, 30 feet. And then what I saw was enough to make any diver's hair turn platinum. It was weird. Like nothing I'd ever seen before. It was a jungle. A crazy, sunken jungle with huge logs piled up like jack straws. Not just a few, but thousands. Some flat, some upended, some swaying in the current. You see him? Yeah. Give me some slack. Is he OK? I don't know yet. Give me a chance. I saw Si before he spotted me. He was jammed up against a hemlock that must have measured four feet across the rump. His airline was snagged, caught fast. Si was an old hand. He knew what I had to do and he was ready. I put the blade of a saw right across his airline, then waited as Si slipped the lead weights off his shoes and from around his belt. He waved his hand. I cut the airline. He flexed his knees and shot upward. He was free. OK. He's up. We got a line out to him. Well, get me up, will you? There's plenty of trees down here, but it ain't no picnic park. Come on, haul away. They're in the cabin of the barge, Si said to me. Thanks, Bob. I'll do the same for you sometime. Oh, not familiar. Won't you never catch me going down that lopset trap? Say, Si, where could the devil has all that timber come from? They floated down from the lumber camps in great big rafts. Some of the stuff, the hemlocks especially, are heavier than water, so they sink. But there must be hundreds of thousands of feet of timber down there. There must be. Been dropping down there for many years. Well, come on. We going somewhere? Home, my place. Yeah, but I've got a date. Bet your life you have with me and the wife. Lula's going to find out that I've been diving again, and if something tells me, I'd better bring along my alibi. I couldn't get those underwater logs out of my mind. All that timber just lying there, doing nothing, waiting. Then the idea came to me. Not sudden, but over a day or two of thinking. I walked into the office of Don Frodel of the Crown Zellaback Lumber Company, operators of the biggest paper mill in Port Angeles. He asked me to sit down. He offered me a cigarette. Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Forrest? How many feet of logs do your raft booms drop to the bottom of the sound every month, Mr. Frodel? Thousands of feet. It's a chronic problem. Why? And for every log you lose, you've got to cut another tree, don't you? Yeah. Well, turning that around now, for every sunken log that could be saved, that would save a tree. That's right. And your company likes to save trees. Naturally. We're always interested in conservation. Good. Good. I'm in the conservation business. Or I will be if I can sell you this idea. You see, I want to haul the logs out of the sound. You interested? Interested. Well, how far will that interest go financially? We'll pay you 60% of the original value of the logs. You'll give me a contract saying that? I'll give you a contract saying that. And agreeing to take all you hand over to us. With one proviso. Yes. The logs must be sound. Well, naturally, that's exactly where I'm going to get it, in the sound. On the basis of my contract with Crown Zellaback and maybe even a little bit on my own gall, the banks gave me the financing I needed. I was in business. I latched onto some top diving gear from the War Assets Administration. I picked up a diesel-powered crane barge and three sea mules. Then with an old pal of mine, Dewey Landrieu, his topside man, I went into business as an underwater lumberjack. Hey, I'm Mr. Frodle. First load now scheduled. Got over 100 logs. Should be come to 3,000 at least, huh? Oh, fine. Splendid. Let's have a look, huh? Okay, okay. I picked out the biggest I could find. Grandpas, all of them. Look at them, will you? Mm-hmm. Nice, huh? Hmm. Uh, something wrong? Pterados. Come again? Pterados. I'm just looking at these logs for Pterados. Underwater wood borers. Now, this one is chewed hollow. No good? I'm afraid not. Not for pulp. I couldn't use it. Well, what about this one? Same thing. You see these little white marks on the bark? Well, that's the sure sign. Skeletons of the Pterado slugs. This one is bad. Well, what about this one here? Let's see. Well, that one may be all right. But the one under it is bad. That one? That one? Most of them, huh? Looks that way. But unload them all from the scow. I'll have one of my inspectors go over the lot. And when we have it, we'll send you the report. I found out something else then. To get a business started, you need more than the idea. Even more than the push to see it through. You need that little thing called know-how. And that's what I was learning. The hard way. What I learned, I got so that I could spot a Pterado at 20 feet and 15 fathoms of water. In the meantime, my wife Lula, who was also my financial secretary, kept tabs on our earnings. The second month, her report was pretty good. All bills of the Port Angeles Marine Ways and Supplies Company paid. Profit, $501.73. A dollar and 73 cents is your bonus, honey. Go and blow it on a fur coat or something. Come on, live a little. Gee, thanks. Oh, I'll get it. Hello? Yes, Dewey. He's here. Hold on. It's Dewey. He sounds worked up. Oh, Dewey? No, I haven't had the radio on. When did it come in? Sure, sure thing. I'll be right down. Bye. Trouble, Bob? Storm coming up fast. The barge is anchored in open water. It's got to be moved. Broadside, don't try it, Bob. You can't get aboard that barge. Not the way it's working in this way. Come on, get me closer, will you? Closer. I'll get aboard next time. It dips this way. But he's the launch. Closer, will you? Closer. Now. Are you okay? Okay. Can you get the line? Yeah. Here it comes. Yeah. I got it. We'll make it fast, the hurry. Get off that barge now. Get off. All right, here it comes. And hitch it on the stern. Okay. It's fast. Now get going. If we can just get it around the plow. Bob. Where's the plow? It's peeling over. It's going over. I got it with it. The axe, give me that axe, will you? It's under your seat. All right, got it. I got it. Cut the line, Bob. Cut the line. Right here. Everything we had. The whole work's sunk with it. Our business is back where it started. On the bottom of the sound. There's an equipment sunk below the water. There's a Puget sound. Bob Forrest planned to salvage sunken logs. It stopped in its tracks. With what little money we had saved up, I hired a salvage outfit to try to get our barge off the bottom. Day after day, I'd go out and watch them work. One day, Si Kindler came aboard. He lit his pipe, squatted down next to me on a coil of cable, and he said, I'm pushing out next week, Bob. Where to? Madagascar. What's doing there? British transport sunk there during the war. Carried the payroll for the whole expeditionary force. Nice job. Good figure? Uh-huh. $35 a day. Plus keep. Plus a buck extra for every foot down below 16. Sounds good. Yeah, sweet. Wish you luck. Thanks. They need another diver. Had it been to Madagascar? No. Not a bad port. Sorry, Si. I'm not interested. I just thought I'd tell you. Okay, you told me. That doesn't figure Bob. You're too good a diver to be wasting your time. I'm not wasting my time. $35 a day. No maybes, no worries. And no future. Nothing you can sink your fist into and hold onto. Oh, look, Si, it's not the money. It's being on my own. My own boss taking my risks, taking my profits. And your loss? Yeah, that's right. And my loss. That's part of the deal. But it's worth a gamble. When you got a business, your own business, you can grow. You're not stuck on the water. You can get up. You can get up on dry land. I'm sticking with this, Si. I'm sticking as long as I'm able to. I'm seeing it through. Two months after the hurricane, my loan was due, and I... I was at rock bottom. I went to the bank. The bank had listened to my troubles, scratched his nose a bit, and said, How much of an extension will you need, Mr. Forrest? One month. I'll be time enough to get you rolling again? I want a month. If I'm not rolling by then, I'll be ready to call it quits. One month? Let me see. That'll be until April 30th. That's right. Okay. The bank will go along with you. And good luck. I went up to see Mr. Frodel at Crown Zellaback. He had some bad news for me. Something I hadn't figured out, and he told it to me straight. There's another outfit moving in, Bob. They've approached us for a contract. I guess I can't stop that. I had no pattern on the idea. It's a good idea, and it stands to reason that someone else will take a crack at it. Did they get the contract? I haven't got it yet. Why not? Well, I'm kind of rooting for your side. I appreciate that, Mr. Frodel. But just remember, I'm not the man who makes all the decisions around here. I can hold out, but not indefinitely. How long more? Maybe a month. Until April 30th. Just about that long, but no longer. April 30th. April 30th. We'll make our first delivery on it before that date, or... Or what? Or expect to get a postcard for me from Madagascar. Tuesday, the 18th was the day set by the salvage company for raising of the barge. Lula came along with me, and Dewey was there, too. And the three of us stood along in the railing of the salvage tug, looking down at the water. Waiting. Stop them bubbles! The tanks are servicing. Get back from the rail, Lula. Back! Back! There she comes! Yeah, it's up. But look, what a mess. Bob, Bob, it's all right, isn't it? It doesn't matter about the mud. The barge is all right. I don't know, honey. We'll have to go aboard and find out. But it looks like it'll take a month just to scrape the scum off our deck. And all we've got is 12 days, it's like I said. I just don't know. The next day we went aboard, all of us. We stood knee deep in the muck and tried to tell ourselves that it wasn't so bad. The equipment seemed okay, at least as much as we could see of it, on the three inches of slime. But we went to work, all of us. Lula along with a rest, elbow deep in mud and winning. We started the stern, we worked forward, first with shovels and power hoses and rags, brooms, scrapers. We didn't work any special hours, we worked them all night and day. The 30th was a Friday. Thursday night we swapped down the deck. And about one in the morning I called a halt. We had coffee and then Lula and I sat down on the bulkhead up for it. And she said, Tired? Ah, little, what about you? Fresh as an eight-year-old kid with freckles. Oh, honey, tomorrow's a day. You're sure the equipment is okay, Bob? Don't take any chances. Oh, it's okay. Do we give it a final check? Bob? Hmm? Are there any mermaids down there? If there were, do you think I'd tell my wife? Why not? Do you think I'd be jealous of an old mermaid? Wouldn't you? Uh-huh. I would. Ah, honey, as soon as we get set again, we're going to take off on a vacation with little Steve. Your Seminy, maybe. We'll take the coast route down, see the big trees. Frisco, too. Maybe we'll even be able to catch the big rodeo at Salinas. Wouldn't that be something, Lula? Lula? Sweet dreams, baby. Sleep tight. All right, Dewey, this'll tell the story. Clamp on the head. Let's get going. Let me do a test on your phone. One, two, three, four, five, six. I wish you'd get real original. Read me a poem or something. Bring up the big ones, Bob. The jumbos. That's for me, honey. Okay, Dewey. Right. There we are. Good luck, Bob. Good luck. The last thing I saw of Lula was she was standing at the rail and there was a mist in her eyes. Or maybe tears. Then I was below in my private little jungle below Puget Sound. Dewey and I had figured out that about 28 logs would make up our load. That meant 14 cables to attach, two logs to align. I passed up the first few. Two were rotten with tornadoes. Three more were puny, not my style. Then I hit a batch of beauties, all of them over three foot across and solid as a rock. This was my meat. How are you doing, Papi? Great. Well, how's Lula? She's got one finger bitten down to the palm. She's halfway through the next. I'll tell her I'm okay. I'm starting the last cable. We'll get going then. Time's a-wasting. In a little less than two hours, I had 13 cables attached. One more to go. And all the time I was whistling to myself, feeling that at last I was over the hump. Once when a five foot sand shark swam up to give me the one so I slapped him on the tail and told him to go find another playmate. I was busy. I headed for the last log. A whopper that must have measured close to four feet across. Then I saw it. It swam out out of a heap of logs that must have been its nest. It's eight arms playing away at the current. It's dagger like beak, white and ugly. Octopus! But I wanted that last log. An octopus or no octopus, that was for me. One eye on the devil fish, I stomped slowly to the log, bent down to twist the cable around its beam, and then it was on me. Octopus, come on up. No, not yet. One more log. I'm just hitching it on. Come on up, you crazy fool. No, wait. Wait. Okay. Okay, lines attached. Now hold me up and get set on deck. I'm bringing company. Look, it's back. I'm bringing them both in. It's choking him. Hey, act. Give me the ax, Lula. I got it. Get away. Sure, honey, sure, I'm fine. Oh, you swing a mean action, lady. I still don't feel so well. I shouldn't wonder. It was so ugly. Uh, forget it, honey. Forget it. It's all over with now. Do we get those logs, the boy? We just got time to meet our deadline. You're better. You okay now, honey? Sure, I'm okay. We're in business again. Uh-huh. The business is beginning to look swell. Dane working. Here's your timber. Right on time. You can say that again. Right smack on the nose. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dane Clark. You've just heard me in the role of Bob Forrest. Now, how would you like to hear the real Bob Forrest? All right, let's go to our cavalcade microphone in Hollywood where Bob Forrest is waiting for a cue. Come in, Bob Forrest in Hollywood. Hello, Dane. You did a swell job. I got quite a bang on listening to my story. I just don't know why the cavalcade people decided to pick my story when there must be thousands they could have chosen. I will say this, though. What happened in my case, my being able to build up a pretty fair business from nothing but an idea, shows that the little guy still has a chance in this country. And another thing is this. I couldn't have done it without the help of the bigger concerns that were in there pulling for me all the time. Crown Zellerback, for instance, the bank, they went out of their way to give me every break. Big business, helping little business, that's the way it was. One thing else. In the past couple of years, my outfit has been able to salvage upwards of 2 million feet of timber. That means that maybe a square mile of trees is still standing in the forest. And that's the best part of my story. If I'm proud of anything, that's it. Thanks again, cavalcade. It was a great show. Thank you, Bob Forrest. We understand that you've just opened a boat repair yard, too. Well, good luck to you, Bob, in your new venture. Next Tuesday, cavalcade will present Strike of Blow for Liberty, an exciting drama of revolutionary days, and starring in his very first radio appearance after his return from Europe, Tyrone Power. Tonight's cavalcade play was written by Margaret Lleworth and Irv Tunic, and was suggested by an American magazine article on interesting people, and based on the true life story of Robert Forrest. The program was directed by John Zoller. The music was composed by Arden Cornwell and conducted by Donald Voorhees. Be sure to listen next week when cavalcade will present Tyrone Power. In the weeks following, Kerry Grant, Ray Malan, and other great stars in stories of America and its people. This is Ted Pearson speaking. Cavalcade of America comes to you from the stage of the Balasco Theater in New York and is presented by the DuPont Company of Wilmington, Delaware. Makers of better things for better living through chemistry. To me and Jenny, following immediately on NBC.