Thinking Inside the Box

the media finally caught up with Spiers                                            E.D. Lacey

Climate change, ISIS, pesticides, racism. Sometimes, it's good to focus on the lighter side of human accomplishments, like how a guy mailed himself halfway around the world in 1964. When Australian javelin thrower Reg Spiers's wallet was stolen in London, he couldn't buy his plane ticket home. Remember, this was in the '60s. So, what's a guy to do? What this guy did, with the help of a friend, was get in a crate addressed to a fictitious shoe company in Australia. "I worked in the export cargo section," he recalls, "so I knew about cash-on-delivery with freight. I'd seen animals come through all the time and I thought, 'If they can do it I can do it.'" Interestingly, his adventures didn't stop there and include a death sentence in Sri Lanka (which he successfully fought): http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31700049