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Olian watched the chopper get closer. “I knew instinctively that this was a Vietnam pilot,” he says, smiling. “Because those guys, they were great. They would do anything.” The windshield was iced over and the helicopter’s downdraft was blowing debris dangerously close to the rotor system. But Usher, indeed a Vietnam veteran, delicately lowered the chopper toward the water.

First, the helicopter headed toward Olian, mistaking him for a passenger. He waved it off, and the bystanders began to reel him in toward the shore. He had done all he could do. “A helicopter was real help. I was an illusion,” he says. When he got to the shore, he couldn’t walk. When the body gets extremely cold, muscle rigidity sets in. Someone dragged him up the bank and into a heated truck. He started shaking violently, the body’s way of generating heat through muscle friction.

The helicopter eventually plucked five of the survivors from the river, dragging them one by one over to the bank with a lifeline. After Priscilla Tirado, the woman who had lost her baby, repeatedly lost her grip on the line and dropped back into the water not far from shore, two other men—a firefighter and a government clerk—jumped into the water to drag her out and finish the job. The final crash survivor, the man whose legs had been trapped by the wreckage, died, just as he had predicted. He sunk into the water before the helicopter could reach him. Of the seventy-nine people on Flight 90, seventy-four died.

Olian rode in an ambulance with Stiley and other survivors to a nearby hospital. He was placed in a warm shower until his body temperature went up to ninety-four degrees. Then he went home to his wife.

The next day, the government was closed due to the blizzard. So Olian had the day off. He went to an impound lot to pick up his truck, which had been towed from the riverside. Sure enough, the battery was dead. Luckily he and his wife had brought jumper cables. When Olian went to pay the fine, he was a few dollars short. The money he took out of his wallet was still wet. He muttered an explanation to the cashier (“There was this plane crash, and I jumped in, and everything is still wet, see…”). The cashier let him take the truck.

One of the other men who had jumped in at the end of the ordeal, Lenny Skutnik, became an instant celebrity. His feat had been captured by the news cameras. Skutnik appeared at the State of the Union address at the invitation of President Ronald Reagan, the start of a new tradition at the speech. But no one knew about Olian until Stiley and the helicopter pilots told reporters they had to find him. “I was fascinated by this man. He just kept coming,” Stiley would later tell Life. “It was he who saved my life.”

A Hero Database

Olian and Skutnik, along with the helicopter crew, received something called the Carnegie Hero Medals. Over the past century, the little-known Carnegie Hero Fund Commission has doled out over nine thousand medals and cash assistance to people who voluntarily risk their lives to an extraordinary degree to try to save others.

Andrew Carnegie, even more than most people, was enchanted by the hero. In the winter of 1904, from his sixty-four-room mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he heard about a horrible coal mine disaster outside of Pittsburgh. A massive explosion had killed 181 people. Within hours, a respected engineer who had designed the mine had arrived at the site and descended into the main shaft to help rescue survivors. Deep underground, he encountered toxic gas, a by-product of the explosion. He died soon afterward, leaving a widow and a stepson. Another volunteer, this one a coal miner, went searching for survivors the next day. He, too, died from the asphyxiating gases, leaving a widow and five children. Carnegie, not an easy man to impress, was moved to match the $40,000 in public donations for the victims’ families. “I can’t get the women and children of the disaster out of my mind,” he wrote. He also arranged for two