Just Call Him Lucky, but Don’t Risk Trading Places

Young Bill Goss plunged his head into a sink full of water, hoping to get the wet-head look of Elvis Presley. His head wedged between two faucets as the water poured in. Bill, just 9 years old then, thought for sure he was going to drown.

“My screams dissipated into gurgling noises, since my face was immersed in the water,” he recalls. “My head was too big and the basin too small. There was simply no way I could get my hands around my face to unplug the lifesaving stopper and drain the water. Neither could I move my face down far enough to pull it out with my teeth. That’s when I knew I was going to die.”

Goss survived by ripping out two hunks of scalp, denting the faucet handles. It was the first of 30 near-death experiences that he says he survived over the next three decades. From mine collapses to plane wrecks, his dances with the grim reaper are recounted in his book, “The Luckiest Unlucky Man Alive,” published by Bookworld Press Inc.

The most threatening of the retired Navy pilot’s experiences began five years ago with a small cyst behind his ear. Navy doctors told him to get his life in order because the cyst was malignant melanoma, a quick killer. In a desperate attempt to survive, Goss found a doctor who removed his left ear and 200 lymph nodes.

The stitches along the side of his head and down his neck made the dashing naval officer look like he had been put together with spare parts. Reconstructive surgery helped him look normal again, but for a while he had to glue on his silicon ear with rubber cement.

Greg O’Neil, a Cincinnati businessman and lifelong friend of Goss who was with him on several misadventures, thought the cancer would kill Goss.

“I was devastated. I thought this was it,” said O’Neil, who grew up with Goss in the Millburn, N.J., area.

Goss, 44, has been cancer-free for five years. “I lucked out,” he said. “I learned from those dark days that behind every challenge are great opportunities.”

O’Neil doesn’t see Goss as being unlucky.

“He was always able to pull something better and positive out of bad circumstances,” O’Neil said. “He’s like ‘Forrest Gump’ meets ‘Terminator II.’ ”

Few people, however, would wish to be quite as “lucky” as Goss.

While attending the University of Arizona in 1974, he worked weekends at a nearby copper mine. He was rigging blasting caps 5,000 feet underground to clear a chute along a 40-foot-hole when he heard the sound of splitting granite. Tons of sliding boulders and rubble knocked Goss off his perch. When the dust cleared, he was dangling over the chasm by his safety belt.

In 1985, Goss was in Spain as a Navy pilot of a P-3 Orion, a lumbering aircraft used for tracking submarines and drug runners. He was doing test landings when a crew member inadvertently shut down one of the plane’s four engines.

“Suddenly the aircraft snapped to the left more violently than before,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It departed the left side of the runway, twisting off the landing gear and causing the No. 3 propeller to touch the ground. That instantly tore the entire 4600-shaft horsepower engine propeller assembly off the aircraft. I remember seeing it out of the corner of my eye as it flew by over the right wing.”

Damage amounted to $3.5 million. No one was injured.

In 1991, Goss stopped his car on Interstate 295 in Jacksonville to remove a box of garbage from the roadway. As he stood in the median, he was struck by a car going about 50 mph. He said he flew 45 feet through the air and had an out-of-body experience, but he escaped without serious injury.

“It felt great to be dead, still able to think but no longer constrained to my physical being,” Goss wrote. “I felt my mind and spirit advance out beyond our stars. In the big picture; I mean the really big picture, time, space, distance, structure, weight, dimension--these things have no meaning--only spirit does.”

His cancer forced Goss to retire from the Navy. Now he spends much of his time writing and giving inspirational talks, billing himself as a “totally unique speaker” on his Web site. (www.luckiestman.com)

He lives on Fleming Island southwest of Jacksonville with his wife, Peggy, and their 11-year-old twins, Brian and Christie. He said the kids were his inspiration for writing the autobiography.

“I wanted to leave something behind--something for my children to read to know who their father was,” he said.

Goss’ wife has grown accustomed to his near-death experiences.

“The guy I married has nine lives,” she said. “My problem was, I didn’t know what number he was on.”