Later Years
In 1976, Whitcomb sought the Republican nomination to the United States Senate, but was defeated in the primary by Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar. He then returned to his private practice which he moved to Seymour. He served several years as the director of Mid American World Trade Association and took a job for a media company based in Indianapolis and spent traveling the United States setting up a network of FM radio stations.
Whitcomb retired from his law practice in 1985, at age 68. He and his wife divorced in 1986 after a thirty-six year marriage. Whitcomb took up sailing as a hobby and purchased a 30-foot (9.1 m) boat. He sailed solo around the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In 1995, while attempting to sail solo around the world, his ship hit a reef in the Gulf of Suez and sank. He was rescued and returned to the United States. Whitcomb's second book, On Celestial Wings, was published in 1995. In 2000 he purchased a secluded cabin near Rome, Indiana, on the Ohio River within the Hoosier National Forest. The home has no electricity, and he spends most of his time gardening, fishing, and chopping firewood. During his last public interview in 2004, he told a reporter that he never reads the newspaper and was totally uninvolved in anything, and that he was “living in heaven.”
Read more about this topic: Edgar Whitcomb
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“In time, after a dozen years of centering their lives around the games boys play with one another, the boys’ bodies change and that changes everything else. But the memories are not erased of that safest time in the lives of men, when their prime concern was playing games with guys who just wanted to be their friendly competitors. Life never again gets so simple.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)