The "Legends" Friday softball player has some one looking over the shoulder of his children. A few years ago his daughter was caught in an avalanche in Argentina. Miraculously she survived, despite some very serious injuries.

Now Dick's son Andy survived the tsunami in Southeast Asia. Moira Lee was on Larry King Live, on Monday 12/27. Dick Q. (& Beth) is being interviewed by ABC for broadcast at 4:30 and 6:00 pm on 12/31.

We are all thankful that with so many casualties Dick's son is safe.

Below is a story published in the Daily Herald. I wonder if Dick will start answering phones now................

5 feet, 20 seconds and lucky choices
By Dave Orrick Daily Herald Staff Writer
Posted Friday, December 31, 2004

She had just finished law school in Hong Kong, and he had some time off from his job in Washington, D.C.

Her mother told them the white sands and crystal blue waters were unmatched. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for a vacation in paradise, she said.

That's the simple story of how lifelong friends Moira Lee, who grew up in Barrington, and Andy Quathamer, a Glen Ellyn native, found themselves seated at Coffee Lovers beachfront cafe Sunday morning. The cafe sits along Patong Beach, the most popular stretch of Phuket, the most popular island along the slender finger of Thailand that stretches into the Andaman Sea, the most popular vacation spot in the Indian Ocean.

Here's the story of how they didn't get killed by the tsunami that killed thousands all around them:

Lee and Quathamer weren't supposed to be at the cafe. They were supposed to be on a boat bound for a popular snorkeling destination.

"We went snorkeling the day before," Lee, 28, recalled in a telephone interview from a hotel in Bangkok on Thursday. "They all said at the dive shop, 'You must go to Phi Phi island to dive in the coral.' But it was four hours away. We decided Saturday night to go to a different island on Monday."

They don't know for certain what happened to the boat carrying 30 to 40 divers that they had been scheduled to board. But they know what happened to most divers that day.

"There were a couple of hundred divers out that morning," Lee said. "They were all missing. Some began washing up on shore (days later)."

Not getting on that boat turned out to be one of many choices - purely lucky choices, they insist - that might have spared them.

"They just somehow kept making the right choices," Lee's mother, Catherine, said several days after getting the news that her daughter was safe.

Like their choice of where to sit outside Coffee Lovers cafe. Facing the gentle surf foaming in across the street, they were also in the best position to see any danger approaching from the ocean.

So when a waitress behind them started screaming, "High water! High water!" it took only a glance over the rims of their coffee cups to see.

"All of sudden, everything started to come onto the street," Lee said. "We might have been the first people to see it coming. Beach furniture, boats, everything was getting tossed around like toys. This huge yacht was probably 20 to 30 feet from us. It all came up onto the street.

"We just ran."

Soon, so was everyone else, as a rush of fleeing, screaming people funneled down an alley, taking with them a rush of other fleeing, screaming people.

Several times, as they ran through the patchwork of streets and alleys, Lee and Quathamer were nearly cornered, forced to traverse parallel to the beach to find a through-street.

Again, luck guided them.

"We were literally able to survive by meters, by feet," Quathamer said.

A wrong turn at the wrong time would have been deadly.

"It was terrifying, not knowing where to run or having any idea what was happening," said Quathamer, 29, who had hurt his knee days earlier while "playing soccer like I was 15.

"I couldn't really walk very well, but I guess I ran fine."

He never looked back, training his eyes ahead of him on Lee, with whom he had been friends since the two met at summer camp. She did look back.

"I only looked back once," Lee said. "The water was 5 feet behind him. I was too scared to look back again.

"It was a weird, weird feeling, getting chased by water. ... I had never seen that amount of water. I honestly didn't know what was going on. The fear overwhelmed me."

The roughly half-mile gauntlet probably would have been enough to get them out of the water's reach, but they couldn't be sure.

After about a mile, the streets climbed into a series of offshore hills. Joined by "masses and masses of people," they stayed there all day. Word from handheld radios gradually trickled around that there had been an earthquake and a resulting tsunami, but they had no idea of the destruction, not just throughout the beach, or the island, or the country, but the entire Indian Ocean. The death toll Thursday topped 117,000.

"I'm glad I didn't know," Lee said. "I'm not sure I could have handled it."

They also didn't know when another wave might come.

In the evening, people began to filter back into town. Lee went to an Internet cafe and typed her parents in Barrington a quick e-mail saying she was OK. Before she could send it, police and emergency workers shouted for everyone to flee. She and Quathamer squeezed into a pickup that carried several dozen back into the hills. They spent the entire night there.

Lee said local hospitality filled in where modern amenities could not.

"The Thai people are absolutely amazing, such a generous people," she said. "If they saw we weren't eating, they shared their food with us. We were cold, so they gave us blankets."

The next day, they returned to town and found the coffee shop destroyed and their hotel nearly unrecognizable. Cars were piled on top of cars. And people were missing.

"We started seeing people who had lost a family member," Lee said. They paid a driver to take them to the airport and were boarded into a cargo plane for Bangkok.

"Being on the plane and seeing how many people were injured and how many people were missing family members, it started to hit us," Quathamer said. "We weren't even hurt at all."

Moira Lee's e-mail from the cafe had never been sent. Catherine and Timothy Lee and their three other adult children had been waiting for 23 hours since the tsunami struck. In Bangkok, after waiting in line Moira got to a phone.

"My dad picked up the phone," she said. "I said 'Dad?' he said yes. But I don't think he believed it was really me. ... Then I heard screaming. At that moment I realized what they must have been going through that whole time."

As of Thursday morning, Andy Quathamer, who works for an architecture firm in Washington, D.C., was in a prolonged game of international phone tag with his father in Elgin and mother and siblings in Mexico. He said he was sure they knew he was all right. Physically, at least.

He and Lee said they feel what experts predict many survivors will feel: guilt.

"They're asking 'Why us?'æ" Catherine Lee said.

Both friends said their ordeal drew them closer together.

And as for those choices that may have saved their lives, both Quathamer and Lee have the same explanation: "We were incredibly, incredibly lucky."

They said they weren't sure where, or how, they would spend New Year's.

• Daily Herald news services contributed to this report.