How two NC boys survived 13 days in a train boxcar on nothing but stale Schlitz
The whole mess started when a pair of Fayetteville boys, bored on Friday afternoon, ran away from home carrying $40 and a sleeping bag, tearing off on bicycles in search of Huck Finn adventure.
On their first stop, they pedaled up to a Schlitz beer plant, where they discovered a worker loading empty bottles onto a boxcar. Flush with boyish mischief, they hid their bikes in the woods.
Details here get murky, but according to newspaper accounts at the time, the pair either ducked into the boxcar with plans to build a fort or deliberately hid behind the bottles, overhearing word that the train was bound for a mysterious new land called Milwaukee.
Either way, somebody slammed the boxcar door shut and left the boys locked in the dark. Nobody would see their sorry faces for 13 days.
The adventures of Billy Waddell and David Harvey Jr. took place 60 years old last week — an event recalled in a variety of Internet posts that dredged up grainy black-and-white pictures.
‘Scared in the dark’
Both of them were Army kids at Fort Bragg, and both of them sixth-graders at Belvedere Elementary, and for nearly two weeks, the police, their parents and anybody who knew them dashed around North Carolina in a frantic search.
But the whole time, Billy Waddell, just 13, and his pal David Harvey, still 12, sat in the darkness of a moving train, keeping themselves alive by sipping the dregs of stale beer from the bottom of mostly empty Schlitz bottles.
“We told stories and jokes to keep from getting scared in the dark,” David later explained.
For a long time, the boys sat still on the tracks, banging on the door with an iron bar, calling to whomever would listen.
But then later — two days maybe? — the train started moving, chugging across the Blue Ridge mountains, into Kentucky and skirting Lake Michigan while they sipped warm Schlitz in the dark.
Mixing up bottles
While I was reading the accounts splashed across the state’s newspapers, it occurred to me that my mother-in-law, Debbie Nimocks, likely knew this pair of knuckleheads.
A Fayetteville native and proud Army daughter, she worked for years as a Realtor and crossed paths with anybody who ever drank a Schlitz in her hometown, so she needed no prodding to recall the ordeal of the missing kids:
“Yes,” she said, “Billy Waddell was one of them. I can’t remember the other’s name, but I can almost see his face. We were in the same grade and elementary school. Billy told me they were locked in the rail car. The only thing they had to consume was the dregs from nearly empty beer bottles shipped back to the breweries. He said they tried to keep the ones they (peed) in away from all the others. They got mixed up several times.”
‘Thank God, mister’
After nearly two weeks, the boys glimpsed daylight again, blinking into the brightness of a Milwaukee rail yard.
“Thank God, mister,” they said to their rescuer. “Thank God you opened the door.”
Newspapers across Wisconsin soon printed pictures of the pair, hungry but alive, recovering in their hospital beds.
Back home in Fayetteville, Billy’s mother took the call she had prayed for and collapsed into tears.
David called his parents, told his Mom he loved her and then asked, nearly blubbering into the phone, if he could go back to the woods to fetch his bike.
“The first two days they were gone, I was ready to tar and feather them,” Billy’s father, a chief warrant officer, told the Associated Press. “After that I decided I’d hug them to death if I ever found them again.”
The two flew home to find a crowd of 150 waiting, and chocolate pie with chocolate milk for a treat. Billy, finished with adventure, gave his dog Misty a sip.
A reporter asked David, “How’d you like the plane trip?”
“Fine,” he said.
“Did you like the beer?” the reporter fired back.
“Not anymore.”
This story was originally published May 4, 2026 at 5:30 AM with the headline "How two NC boys survived 13 days in a train boxcar on nothing but stale Schlitz."