The engine was dead. This was a concern, because Randy Carver
wasn't driving his car; he was flying an airplane. A rental.
Some 6,000 feet over a mountainous region in Pennsylvania. Mindy,
his wife and childhood sweetheart, was sitting beside him. Their
15-month-old daughter, Cidney, was in the back.
Randy attempted to re-start the engine, and it worked. It hummed
along just fine--for a moment. And then it stalled again. The plane
was going down.
Maybe Randy, who was then just shy of 25 years old, managed to
remain calm because he'd survived a turbulent childhood.
Perhaps it was thanks to his sky-diving experiences or his job
training--working as a financial planner takes a cool head.
Whatever kept his nerve box nailed shut, the engine's last gasp
didn't ruffle him at first. Randy says now, a little more than
10 years later, "Truthfully, I thought we'd land
it."
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They didn't.
"When the air-traffic controller said, `You're on your
own,' I figured we were in trouble," says Randy. "But
it wasn't until we started hitting trees that I really realized
we were going to crash."
The airplane hit the ground. For Randy, everything went black,
but Mindy was alert, despite a broken collarbone. Leaving her
unconscious husband for the time being, she removed her daughter
from the wreckage--Cidney, strapped in a car seat, was
unscathed--and set out on a strained hike across a field to an
empty farm house. She called 911, and when an ambulance arrived on
the scene, Randy was whisked to a nearby hospital. His right leg
was shattered, as was his career, it seemed. Not even the best of
fortune-tellers could have predicted that less than two years
later, Randy would open Carver Financial, his own Mentor, Ohio,
financial services firm, which today has 2,000 clients, manages a
fortune of $400 million and brings in annual revenues of as much as
$30 million.
Some fortune-tellers might have even hedged their bets. Some
might have predicted the New York City native wouldn't live to
see the next day.
The unconscious Randy lay in his hospital bed. "His nose
was smashed. His leg was smashed. There were chest tubes and blood
everywhere," shudders Mindy, who recalls that her husband had,
at the time of their descent, been wearing a green T-shirt with a
skiing-related slogan on it that went something like, "It
screamed like an eagle...that fell like a rock."
Except that after they fall, rocks don't have cuts and
bruises everywhere, and crimson-colored eyes.
"He looked awful," says Mindy. Worse still, when Randy
came to, he couldn't speak. His throat had been crushed.
Geoff Williams is a features reporter at The Cincinnati
Post. He frequently contributes to Entrepreneur and has
written articles for many other publications, including LIFE
and Entertainment Weekly.
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