RIDE OF A LIFETIME

Palm Coast Observer
Neighbors

PALM COAST — It was the kind of rain that would make any driver nervous, but it was particularly frightening for someone on a motorcycle: a wall of water, a Florida downpour limiting visibility to a couple of car lengths on Interstate 95. Ronald Melvin was a nervous wreck, surrounded by cars that could slam on their brakes or knock right into him as they changed lanes in the storm.

“It gets your heart pumping,” Melvin recalled about that rainy ride in 2011. The rain pounded his glasses until finally, he decided to find safety under a bridge. He stopped, watching the geysers spray out from the passing cars. He wiped his face as the rain formed a curtain on either side of the bridge.

Shortly afterward, Bruce Wynne rode up to him on his motorcycle. Melvin had been following Wynne, and Wynne was frantic. He thought something terrible might have happened when he had looked back and couldn’t see Melvin.

The two men were an unlikely riding partnership, Melvin recalled. Aside from both being in their 60s, they were opposites in almost every way, from their race to their tastes in food and music. In fact, they didn’t talk much — they just rode. But the friendship meant everything to Melvin. It helped pull him out of a dark phase of his life, when a heart condition had limited his physical mobility. He withdrew, felt helpless and suddenly confrtoned with his own mortality.

To make matters worse, a loss in federal funding resulted in him losing his job in Palm Coast.

Thanks to Wynne, though, he learned to rediscover a certain joy in life. They loved each other like brothers, and that look on Wynne’s face said it all — the worried look at the thought that Melvin might have crashed in the rain.

A month later, however, a tragedy did occur: Melvin was leading Wynne on a ride along International Speedway Boulevard, and when he arrived at the next stoplight, he realized Wynne wasn’t behind him anymore. He circled back in time to see the ambulance arrive, but nothing could be done.

Melvin’s best friend had died in a crash with another motorcycle.

The loss sent Melvin in another emotional downward spiral. He stopped riding. He withdrew again. The last time it happened because of his heart troubles, and Wynne had helped him out of it. Without Wynne, where could he turn?

Common ground

One way he discovered to cope was through Toastmasters, an organization that teaches public speaking skills. He wrote a speech about his friendship with Wynne, inspiring people to build on common ground.

“To love others, you have to love yourself," Melvin said. "That’s the gauge you’re working from, if you want to love others as yourself.”

And he discovered that he was good at delivering this speech, which included a magic trick to capture the attention of his audience. He entered in competitions and won. He ultimately won a national title and was qualified for the international competition in Florida against eight other toastmasters from around the world — out of an original pool of 30,000.

But there was one problem: The contestants had to write new speeches for the championship. Melvin had to let go of his familiar stories about Wynne and find another experience to tell.

The fear of dying

The new speech ended up being about a flight instructor who once gave Melvin a flying lesson. The instructor held up a pencil and told Melvin he wanted to show him that he could make it float. The idea was to take the two-seat plane straight up into the sky and then quickly dive back toward the ground, suspending the pencil in the air momentarily. Melvin was so nervous as he was ascending that he gripped the seat at his sides. Inadvertently, he unclipped the pilot’s seat belt.

Therefore, when the plane made its dramatic turn, not only the pencil floated but also the pilot, who smacked his head on the roof of the cockpit and was knocked out cold.

Melvin was there, feeling alone, sick to his stomach, high above the earth, slowly tilting downward.

“What did you do?” I asked Melvin, my eyes wide. I met him at the studios of WNZF after he appeared on “Free For All Friday,” with David Ayres.

Melvin, a short and stout, unassuming man, laughed. As it turned out, the moment of terror was just that — a moment. The pilot recovered consciousness and safely landed the plane. No miraculous landing required for Melvin.

When they got out of the plane, Melvin recalled, the two men started laughing. “We never laughed so hard at the fear of dying,” he said. “He taught me to laugh at problems, to find the side that is funny.”

Melvin dramatically told the story in the studio last week, but unfortunately, the day of the competition in August 2012, his heart wasn’t in it. He felt he didn’t perform like he should have, and he lost. This sent him into yet another downward spiral. The success of reaching the international championships in Orlando faded, and all he could think about was losing.

“I hadn't done a good enough job,” he recalled. “My friends from Toastmasters were cheering me on. It was in Florida! Home crowd. This year, it's in Dubai. And I blew it. I blew it.”

‘Get up and do something’

Afterward, people asked him to give his speech again about Wynne, and he couldn’t do it. In fact, he stopped going to Toastmasters altogether.

“I didn’t want to talk about Bruce,” he said. “I didn’t want to talk about whether I was competing again next year.”

He felt the loss of his friend weigh on him, and he realized he still hadn’t fully come to terms with Wynne’s death. The speech had been a crutch, and losing the competition was like having someone kick away that crutch.

As a former firefighter in Pennsylvania, Melvin was a member of a group called Knights of the Inferno Motorcycle Club. Here was a new set of friends who all knew what Wynne’s death meant to Melvin.

“They said, ‘Do you think Bruce would want you to feel this way?’” Melvin recalled. “I realized I had to take care of me.”

So he rode his motorcycle around the block near his Palm Coast home, trying to overcome the fear that someone was going to blindside him from a side street.

But soon, he began venturing out of his neighborhood again, and , in the past six months, Melvin has begun to reconstruct.

Now, at 67, he is ready to begin again. He is riding in the second-annual poker run to benefit the Frank Celico Foundation, which is planned for April 19.

He decided he wants to become an inspirational speaker. His message: developing inner strength to build personal power.

On a chance meeting, Ayres invited him to be a guest on “Free For All Friday.” He wasn’t sure what to expect, but he was determined to take advantage of any chance to get exposure for his new venture.

“People don't know what to do, so they sit there,” Melvin said. “But even if you do the wrong thing, you at least know you're doing something.”

He’s exploring social media, setting up webinars, attending a branding seminar, seeking partnerships with magicians, under the stage name “Mystic Mel.” He’s seeking opportunities to speak at clubs and groups to see where this will take him. “I just decided to get up and go,” he said, “and look at what happened. Look at me and you,” he said, pointing to me, as we wrapped up our interview at the studio. “Look what happened. Get up and do something.”

That’s what Bruce Wynne would tell him to do. And as he rides through town now, Melvin has a smile on his face. It’s like his friend is right behind him again.

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