Cindy Lange-Kubick: Woman meets stranger who saved her life

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She took one big breath.

Then the first-grader raised her arm, the way she did in school if she knew the answer to a teacher’s question.

She went down in the murky lake water, one hand waving.

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Nikki McFarland-Walton was rescued from drowning 32 years ago by Dick Becker. They were recently reunited on "Good Morning America." (William Lauer)

Nikki McFarland-Walton was rescued from drowning 32 years ago by Dick Becker. They were recently reunited on "Good Morning America." (William Lauer)

And the next thing the little blonde girl saw was the man who pulled her up — sputtering, coughing, holding on like she’d never let go.

The man she’d seen just before she went under the last time, her blue eyes locked on his blue eyes.

Then she was back on the shore and in her parents’ arms and, before she knew it, 32 years disappeared.

Nikki McFarland added Walton to her name. She moved from Lincoln to Waverly with her husband and six cats. She would have liked to have added a couple of kids. That didn’t happen, but it didn’t mean she didn’t have a terrific life. Great parents, two older sisters, wonderful nieces and nephews, a good job at an eye doctor’s office.

“I’ve had a Beaver Cleaver life,” the 38-year-old says.

She lived all her growing-up years in the same brick ranch on the same quiet north Lincoln street, rode bikes to her dad’s fire station on Touzalin, the kind of kid who jumped back into the water and never looked back.

And never saw the man from that lake near Fremont again.

Until last week, when a limo picked her up from her parents’ house on Greenwood Street to take her and her father to the airport and to New York City and to the set of “Good Morning America.”

That same day, a little more than a mile away, another limo stopped in front of another brick ranch on a quiet north Lincoln street and picked up a 72-year-old man and his wife to take them to the airport and to New York City and to the set of “Good Morning America.”

Everyone but the man knew what would happen next.

Which was this: He would show up on the set of the morning show, thinking his wife, Jo Becker, was being honored for the charity work she does with her sorority.

But instead Diane Sawyer would ask him — Dick Becker, retired salesman, father, grandfather, gravelly voiced, good-time guy who spent every weekend for 13 years camping and boating with his family and friends — to the set.

And she would start to tell the story of a lake and a girl and a man.

A “Good Morning America” junkie, Nikki had written the show’s producers in January after she heard they were looking for stories — offering to help viewers find someone from their past they wanted to thank.

She told them the way the day had gone by in a blur. How in all the commotion they’d lost the name of the man who drove his boat toward the sound of screams and jumped in the muddy water with his clothes and shoes on.

On the “Good Morning America” set last Thursday, Sawyer narrated the story.

There is footage from the lake. Dick and Jo’s son on camera telling what he remembered from that day. Nikki’s older sister explaining how the girls chased a ball into the water, and suddenly it was over her sister’s head and she was screaming for help.

And then Nikki hugging Dick with tears in her eyes.

“I always wanted to find him and thank him for his bravery,” Nikki says the next Monday, home from four days in New York.

“Another five or 10 seconds and I wouldn’t be alive.”

She didn’t think that much of it when she was a girl.

“But you get older and you realize how important things are. I just started thinking of him.”

Now she knows how close he’s always been. And that his wife is a patient at Dr. Mausolf’s office, where she is a certified medical assistant. And that her dad goes by the Becker house on Urbana Lane when he rides his bike.

And that along with his son, Dick Becker has two daughters.

And that one of them had cancer and that the treatment damaged her kidneys.

And that after the “Good Morning America” show, the Beckers flew home to be with her.

Because 11 days earlier she had a kidney transplant.

A second chance at life.

Given by a stranger.

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.