A Part Of My Life Lost For 36 Years Recovered By Incredible Good Luck!

      Today I have another interesting Jack story for all of you. If you walked into our living room, you would look at the large television screen. If your gaze goes down a bit, you will notice a large leather-bound book. Careful observation would show that it was Charles Darwin's "The Voyage Of The HMS Beagle." If you opened the book, you would see a reproduction of Darwin's original handwritten journal that he kept as he sailed around the world studying natural life in the 1800s. It is an elegant book.

       This book was lovingly published in Australia in 1978. In December of 1981, my first wife Maria and I were in Sydney living in the suburb of Turra Murra. I was looking for a special gift for her. American Express had sent us a catalog of elegant Christmas gifts. I spied the book and fell in love with it. I ordered it. When it was delivered, I gave it to Maria as her Christmas gift. When we moved to Perth, West Australia, it was packed away and went with us all the way across Australia. When we bought a house in the Perth suburb of Attadale, the book was unpacked. Our marriage then failed. The house was sold. I gave all of the furniture and personal property in the house to my then-business partner Shirley Ann Bickel. I never saw it again.

     The book was always a wonderful memory for me. I doubted that I would ever see it again. In 2018, I decided to take a wild chance to see if could recover it. I contacted my rare bookseller in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. I asked him to see if he could find the book. He contacted a colleague who is a rare book dealer in London. This man contacted a rare book dealer in Perth, West Australia. At the point, "I won the lottery." He had the book that I was looking for. A woman named Shirley Ann Bickel had come into his shop and sold the book to him. We agreed on a purchase price. A couple of weeks later, a Federal Express box came from Perth, West Australia. The treasured book was there. I had recovered a part of my life that I thought was lost for good