The Red Rose Diner in Towanda, Pa., a town of 3,000 about 65 miles northwest of Wilkes-Barre, attracts all sorts of visitors. Retiree Joe Dupont stops in regularly. Sparky visited only once.
"I was going for my morning coffee and breakfast, and there he was nestled up against the step," Joe, 62, told me when I called him this week. "He was really pretty well mangled up."
Sparky was a pigeon that had apparently been attacked by a hawk.
"He looked up, and then he passed away," Joe said.
That was in October. Joe took the pigeon home and put him in the freezer. You wouldn't do that with most pigeons, but Sparky wasn't like most pigeons. The three bands on the bird's legs indicated that he was a racing pigeon.
As Sparky cooled, Joe went online and found that the pigeon was owned by a Binghamton, N.Y., man. Joe got in touch, offering to bury Sparky and recite the poem "High Flight" ("Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth . . ."). Then Joe learned that in Sparky's last race he was trying to get from Winchester, Va., to Endicott, N.Y. Endicott is about 30 miles from Towanda as the pigeon flies.
"What got me was he was so close," Joe said. "When I looked how far he had gotten - right on the money - I said, 'Poor guy, he was right on target.' "
And so on the day before Thanksgiving, Joe took Sparky from the freezer, put him in his Geo Metro and drove to New York, delivering the brave bird to the man who had scanned the skies in vain, Sparky's owner.
Joe was himself a pilot once.
"I think pilots are romantics or something," he said. "I think they tend to go above and beyond the call of duty for fellow pilots. I look at Sparky as just another aviator."
Source: Washington Post
