Oscar Night Heroics and a Happy Ending

WOODLAND HILLS —  The final award for best dramatic performance went to the Oscar ceremony’s chief carpenter Wednesday for his heroic rescue of a Woodland Hills couple from their burning house as he returned home from the annual Hollywood function.

The couple, determined to find the mystery man who saved them, tracked down Jack Gies and said they will pay for a week in Hawaii for him, his wife and two daughters as a reward.

After the Academy Awards, Gies left the Shrine Auditorium, where he is chief carpenter, and on his way home to Woodland Hills spotted a burning garage and pounded on the door of the home until he awakened Robert Lillibridge, 72, and his wife, Lois, 68.

Then he fought the fire with a garden hose and finished with a Hollywood flourish: presenting the couple with a bouquet of orchids he had taken home from the awards ceremony to give his wife.

But the Lillibridges never got his full name, just that it was Jack and that his last name began with a G. And they could see he was wearing an Academy Awards crew shirt with security passes.

After news stories about the couple’s search, about a dozen friends of the 40-year-old Gies called the Lillibridges on Wednesday, saying they knew who the hero was.

“It was Jack,” said Patti Mathews, a friend of Gies’ for 25 years. Besides the other clues, Mathews said that when she read that the mystery man gave Lois Lillibridge flowers, she knew it just had to be Gies.

“He’s a wonderful guy, very family-oriented and a hard worker,” she said. “He’s just a great person.”

Gies said he was driving slowly in his neighborhood to avoid hitting the opossums that come out at night when he saw flames in the Lillibridges’ garage. He tried to dial 911 but his cell phone was broken.

“I grabbed the hose and tried to put the fire out,” he said, relating how he crouched below the smoke layer in the garage in a futile attempt to save their BMW. “It was an awesome fire.”

That’s when Lois Lillibridge came out and begged Gies to get out of the garage, afraid he would be hurt.

“Lady, this is not my day to die,” Gies recalled saying, his spirits still buoyed by the good job his crew did on the awards ceremony. “I thought I was going to put that fire out.”

On Wednesday, after learning his identity, the Lillibridges and their son, Joe Perez, a deputy public defender in Orange County, went to the Shrine Auditorium to surprise Gies with his Hawaii reward.

“Words and thanks are fine, but we wanted to do something more concrete to let him know how much we appreciate it that he went the extra mile and put his life in jeopardy,” Lois Lillibridge said.

“One individual who . . . did the right thing by trying to wake us up and get us out of harm’s way--just think of how lucky his wife is to be married to him,” she said.

As the Lillibridges thanked him, the other construction crew members took a break from tearing down the award ceremony set to give Gies a round of applause.

“If you look up hero in the dictionary, there’s his photograph,” said Perez. “I’m not kidding you; this guy is amazing.”

Gies shrugged off the hero label but did have a reaction to the knowledge he had saved the Lillibridges.

“It feels way cool,” he said.