An eccentric passtime offers hope

[buckthesystem]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4207357a4560.html

The sign at the front of his repair workshop was no-nonsense and gruff: "Ernie's charity recycling. If you want to talk money, piss off."

But the late Ernest Ridding, known as "Ernie the Fridge Man", would have warmly accepted a new plaque honouring his many years of community service, says long-time friend Joe Mannix.

"I think he would be grateful," Mr Mannix said before the NSW Governor, Professor Marie Bashir, unveiled the plaque at Australia's Glebe Community Garden yesterday.

Mr Ridding was a wonderful and friendly man, "open, honest, respectful", Mr Mannix said. "He helped a lot of people in many ways."

From his Housing Department home in Glebe, Mr Ridding repaired and donated an estimated 3000 used fridges to people in need, insisting on receiving nothing in return.

He is considered one of Sydney's great characters and in 1999 was featured in a State Library of NSW exhibition, Sydney Eccentrics: A Celebration of Individuals in Society.

Mr Ridding joined Henry Grace, who could imitate the sounds of more than 60 birds; William King, who practised "pedestrianism" and once walked from Sydney to Parramatta in seven hours with a goat on his shoulders; and Richard Lee, who rode around the city on a decorated bicycle with his dog, Edward Bear, perched in a box with its own temperature-controlled water bed.

"These characters, they're not harming anyone, they are just marching to the beat of their own drum," the show's curator, Jennifer O'Callaghan, told the Sydney Morning Herald at the time.

Mr Ridding, who died in 2001 at the age of 74, used the letters "GKN LLM" at the end of his name.

They were a reference to his time at the Kenmore Psychiatric Hospital in Goulburn and stood for "Graduate of Kenmore Nuthouse, Legally and Lawfully Mad".

"Every time we visited him or saw Ernie, I'd say, 'How are you?' He replied, 'I am as mad as ever'," Mr Mannix recalled. But his friend was quite sane, he added.

Professor Bashir said Mr Ridding was "yet another highly intelligent person" who had been sent to a psychiatric institution.

"He came back from that to look after people ? He gave hope to the hopeless," she said.

The new plaque, which sits beneath a eucalyptus tree in the community gardens, reads, "In giving, he inspires us to give."

[Afal]

If only there were more people in the world who were willing to give in exchange for nothing!!!