It was more than half a century ago, the last week of November, 1945, and the East Coast of the United States was besieged by a violent storm, of rain and snow and exceptionally high tides, all whipped into a frenzy by near hurricane force winds.

In Lakewood, New Jersey, a chambermaid was crushed to death when a hotel chimney crashed through the room where she was sleeping. In Jersey City, a railroad worker was killed when he was blown out of an open freight car.

In New York, all planes were grounded at LaGuardia field, many of them sitting like giant ducks in water that had washed in from Flushing Bay and made half the field a lake. In Boston, 7,000 soldiers returning from overseas duty in World War II cursed their fate because the four troopships that held them were rocking in the outer harbor, unable to dock because of the fierce winds.

And near Fairfield, Connecticut, on a bleak and wind-tortured reef in Long Island Sound, something wonderful happened.

Two men stranded on an oil barge and in peril of being washed overboard were lifted to safety by a hoist on a Sikorsky helicopter. On that day, Thursday, November 29, 1945, the helicopter entered a new and promising age.

Helicopters had been used for military, and even civilian, lifesaving missions during the latter part of World War II. On January 3, 1944, a Sikorsky helicopter based in Brooklyn was used by the Coast Guard to fly plasma to injured crewmen of the USS Turner after the destroyer exploded off Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

Later in the year, a helicopter landed on a sandbar in Jamaica Bay, New York, to rescue a teenager who had become marooned there, and, on the other side of the world, a helicopter was used in a combat rescue mission for the first time. An Army lieutenant rescued the pilot and three passengers of a light plane that had been forced down behind enemy lines in Burma.

But in those cases the helicopter had landed to perform the missions. At Fairfield it did not land because it could not land. Waves were washing over the barge, making a landing impossible. And no boats could reach the reef because they would be hurled onto the rocks by the waves. An attempt by men on a small surf boat to get a breeches buoy to the men on the barge had also failed.

The use of a hoist to lift the two men to safety was the concluding act of a high drama, played out before a somber group of people, including Sikorsky employees standing on a beach watching and hoping, and perhaps silently praying. They knew how high the stakes of failure might be.

What could have been one more tragedy of the sea started the day before. In mid afternoon, Texaco barge 397, with two men aboard, broke adrift from an oil tanker off Bridgeport Harbor and four hours later, in the dark, smashed onto Penfield Reef off the neighboring town of Fairfield.

In good weather and at low tide the reef, which lies a mile offshore, is a pleasant vista of huge rocks known locally as 'the cows" because they look like the backs of a herd of grazing cows. At high tide, the cows disappear. And in bad weather, in any tide, the reef is a perilous place.

During the night, the two men on the barge - Capt. Joseph Pawlik and crewman Steven Penninger - huddled in the cabin and wondered whether anyone had seen the flares they had set off. As dawn broke, the barge and the two men seemed doomed. Methodically, giant waves were stripping away the barge's deck and superstructure.

On Fairfield Beach, a group of townspeople who had seen the flares joined some policemen, peering at the macabre scene, as helpless to do anything as the men on the barge. Then someone had the thought: Sikorsky Aircraft was nearby, in Bridgeport. Maybe ...

"The police called us and said the barge was in a hell of a shape and asked if we could do anything,' says Jimmy Viner today at age 87. "I said, 'sure could."

His real first name is Dmitry but he never liked that and quickly adopted the name Jimmy. Viner even in 1945 was a legend at Sikorsky Aircraft. He was the salty little guy who at age 15 had followed his uncle, Igor I. Sikorsky, to America, went to work as one of the first employees of Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation on Long Island, and eventually became the company's chief test pilot.

A test pilot in the infancy of aviation was a job that did not promise much longevity but Jimmy Viner did not look on it that way. He trusted himself. He trusted his uncle. "I never thought of crashing. If you thought it would go well, it did. You developed faith in the machine. If you don't have that attitude, you should get out of the business.' He also had faith in something else. "God was good to me."