As the years go by

Set your Wayback Machine to April 2005, and imagine  Mary Majcunich-Beasley, an air traffic controller at the Savannah, Georgia, airport. It's 10:20 PM on April 15 as Mary finishes her shift and gets into the elevator on the 12th floor, pressing the button for the first floor.

Mary had just worked her eight-hour shift and was seven months pregnant at the time and more than ready to go home and unwind, but the elevator had other plans, grinding to a halt on the way down.

“I didn’t want anything bad to happen,” Majcunich-Beasley told The Washington Post, “because emotions, especially when you’re pregnant, can get the best of you.”

It took an hour, which must have seemed like a dozen hours, for the airport fire department crew to pry open the doors so Majcunich-Beasley could crawl out. After the paramedics checked her out, she was on her way home.

Majcunich-Beasley's daughter Malia Beasley came along that June, and Mary came to believe that the girl's life was saved by the rescue.

So here we are, 18 years later, and Malia is being graduated from high school. And as Ms Majcunich-Beasley was planning the grad party, she took the notion to invite the brave firefighter she credits with getting her off that lift in 2005. At the time of the rescue, he was Sergeant Raymond Sikes, and is now Deputy Chief Raymond Sikes, and he remembered rescuing Majcunich-Beasley from the broken elevator.

Mom, 53 now,  and daughter recently went to the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport to meet up with DC Sikes and thank him again.

“It’s always been on the back of my mind; I wanted to get my daughter and him together,” says Majcunich-Beasley.  “We get so busy in life that we don’t go back and acknowledge that person.”

“We’re there in some of the worst times in people’s lives during emergencies, and I don’t think everybody wants to remember some of those events,” Sikes recalled. “That’s one of the first times that anybody’s ever reached out from an event like that and invited me to something. To me, it was a big deal.”

So they threw a party to celebrate Malia's graduation and the reunion with Sikes, and amid the pasta, peanut butter cookies, and cake, she told the chief she is heading to Montreat College in North Carolina this fall to study criminal justice.

“I guess I’ll see you at college graduation next,” Sikes told mom and daughter.

“Expect that invite!" Majcunich-Beasley responded.