A Woman Who Knows Her Man

Here is a story about "a graying duo" that subdued two unruly passangers on a recent flight from Minneapolis-to-Boston. A retired police captain volunteered to help flight attendants, if they needed the men to be subdued. They developed a plan whereby the flight attendants would hold up plastic handcuffs if they needed him to subdue the unruly passengers. He looked around at the other men on the plane, but all of them averted their eyes. All, that is except the retired Captain U.S. Marine Corps.

But wait, this gets better. The retired police captain was accompanied on the trip by his wife.

When the captain announced preparations for landing, the man jumped up shouting, the flight attendant held up the handcuffs, and Hayden and the Marine came bounding down the aisle. Hayden said he and the retired Marine, whose name he never got, received an ovation from fellow passengers, and "some free air miles."

Hayden's wife of 42 years, Katie, who was also on the flight, was less impressed. Even as her husband struggled with the agitated passenger, she barely looked up from "The Richest Man in Babylon," the book she was reading.

"The woman sitting in front of us was very upset and asked me how I could just sit there reading," Katie Hayden said. "Bob's been shot at. He's been stabbed. He's taken knives away. He knows how to handle those situations. I figured he would go up there and step on somebody's neck, and that would be the end of it. I knew how that situation would end. I didn't know how the book would end."

How did I find out about this story? I learned about it from reading a wonderful blog called Redneck Peril.