Later Years
Etheridge served as the keeper at Pea Island for twenty years. In January 1900, as Orville and Wilbur Wright were planning their voyage to Kitty Hawk to experiment with human flight, Etheridge, at the age of 58, fell ill and died at the station. Pea Island continued to be manned by an all-black crew through the Second World War. The station was decommissioned in 1947. One of the last surviving surfmen to serve at the station, William Charles Bowser, died at age 91 on June 28, 2006. Herbert Collins, who served in the 1940s and put the locks on the station when it was closed, died Sunday, March 14, 2010. In 1996, the Coast Guard awarded the Gold Life-Saving Medal posthumously to the keeper and crew of the Pea Island station for the rescue of the people of the E.S. Newman. Etheridge and his family are buried at the Pea Island Life Saving Station memorial on the grounds of the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island.
Read more about this topic: Pea Island Life-Saving Station
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have.... Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)