The Columbia Township retiree had returned from cardiac rehabilitative therapy — “the gym,” he calls it — only to discover he had lost his pack somewhere that day, July 31, during the workout or before, while running errands in Cincinnati.

        It had been gone at least a couple of hours, he figured.

        Mr. Smith was planning a 50th wedding anniversary getaway to Honolulu for this month.

        He feared he would have to cancel it while he took care of restoring his documents and closing his credit-card accounts.

        “My heart was in my mouth,” he said. “It was going to be a real mess.”

        A few minutes later the phone rang.

        A stranger, Marcus Brewer, asked if he had lost his fanny pack in the post office parking lot in Silverton. Mr. Brewer had found it, gotten his number from directory assistance and tracked him down.

A stranger's help

        Mr. Brewer gave Mr. Smith an Over-the-Rhine address to come pick it up. He said his home was off a tiny street, near Liberty and Sycamore streets, and said he'd have to get out of the car and yell for him.

        Mr. Smith knows little about Over-the-Rhine, mostly the bad stuff. That's near where Timothy Thomas was shot by police, he thought, near where rioting occurred. A group of youths had recently beaten a man to steal his hammer.

        This is a high-crime neighborhood, he thought; it could be a trap.

        He overcame his trepidation and drove there with his wife. It was a poor street, more like an alley. Around it were weeds, trash, some homes in disrepair.

        He stepped out of his car, yelled for Mr. Brewer, then got back into the car.

        “A fellow came out with a knit hat, a braided beard and all kinds of braids or dreads in his hair,” Mr. Smith recalled. He handed the fanny pack to Mr. Smith through a partially opened car window and told the older man to check that everything was still there.

Everything was.

        Mr. Smith tried to force some cash into Mr. Brewer's hands, to thank him, but he refused it. Some stranger in his past, Mr. Brewer said, had helped him in a pinch; he was merely returning the favor.

        “When you go to church on Sunday, just put it in the collection,” he told Mr. Smith.

        Mr. Smith told his friends in the suburbs about it.

        “Everyone I've mentioned this story to is quite surprised by it.”

        They shouldn't be, said Mr. Brewer.

A healthy balance

        Over-the-Rhine, like any other neighborhood, has its good Samaritans and others who aren't, he said.

        Mr. Brewer, a vegetarian personal chef, said doing what's right is part of healthy living.

        Like his 3-mile-a-day jogs and his herbology studies, it's all about keeping himself healthy and balanced.

        Mr. Brewer recalled the stranger who helped him more than 15 years ago.

        A biochemist in Tennessee noticed the Hamilton County, Ohio, license plates on the truck Mr. Brewer was driving to make some food deliveries there.

        The man told Mr. Brewer and his co-worker that he used to live in Cincinnati and still has family here.

        He gave them his business card.

        Later that evening, a snowstorm blocked the roads.

        The biochemist put both men up for the night in his home.

        “A lot of people watch what you do more than what you say,” Mr. Brewer said.

        “You have to be an example.”

        E-mail damos@enquirer.com or call 768-8395.

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