People who defied the odds will inspire you Eric Manning, 91, with his wife Veronica (Ronnie). He five when he and his younger brother were orphaned. Picture: Tony Gough ERIC Manning is a cheerful little man with blue eyes bright as a bird's and hair as thick and wavy as when he went to war soon after he met his "Ronnie" in 1943. The Imperial Japanese Army interrupted the courtship and he had to send an engagement ring in the mail. Luckily, it fitted. After Private Manning returned from "the islands" in late 1945, he and Veronica Anderson married as soon as possible. Eric was driving a milk cart in Bendigo when the first baby came. He took Ronnie to the hospital on the cart after midnight, urging the old horse into a trot to get there in time for the arrival of baby Ruth. Judith, now a grandmother, arrived two years and 10 months later. And then they lived happily ever after, for the past 34 years in their neat weatherboard and cladding house in Spotswood, a punt kick from the Westgate Bridge. For 27 years before that, they lived around the corner in Melbourne Rd. Eric worked on the railways for 30 years and Ronnie in local fruit shops nearly as long. He played cricket longer than was strictly necessary, she says, before taking up bowls at Spotswood RSL in 1982. Now, he restricts his sporting activities to bending the elbow at the Williamstown Bowls Club bar twice a week. "They call me 'Potholes' down at the club," he says delightedly, bowling up a joke that's older than decimal currency. To be avoided at all costs. He is 91 now and looks much younger - almost as if he's never had a care in the world apart from the Bulldogs losing ("I'm thinking of changing clubs") and "crook knees" and other infirmities that come with age. A stranger would never guess he grew up in the shadow of a terrible crime. IT happened 85 years ago this week, on July 19, 1928. The Argus newspaper started it this way: "Early this morning a gruesome tragedy took place at Junorton near Bendigo, four persons being shot and two of them afterwards burned when the home in which they were living was destroyed by fire." The victims were William Edward Manning, his wife Ida Millicent Manning, and Hannah Walker. The fourth person, Hannah's husband Thomas Walker, had shot the other three before setting light to the house, then tried to shoot himself before jumping into a full water tank and drowning. Eric Manning (left) and his brother Jack with their parents who were shot and burnt. Early in those few murderous minutes, two little boys jerked awake by the gunshots walked down the hallway in their pyjamas. They looked into their mother's bedroom and saw her body. When they went outside, "Mr Walker" told them to go to the neighbours' to "fetch some blacklead." They walked barefoot across cold, wet paddocks "nearly a mile" to the neighbours. "They are shooting mummy and daddy and burning the house," was how The Argus reported what little Eric blurted. By then, the house was burned down and the boys' parents were burned beyond recognition. Mrs Walker had staggered outside after tackling her deranged husband with a bread knife, but died of terrible gunshot wounds a few hours later. No one knows why Thomas snapped that morning. He was being treated, as they used to say then, for "nervous trouble," and had complained of headaches. The Walkers were staying with the Mannings, who had moved to the farm only six weeks earlier from Kennington in Bendigo. Mrs Manning had offered to look after Mrs Walker, who was recovering from an operation. The two couples had also been involved in a joint farming venture but there was no evidence of a dispute. David Schwarz with wife Karen, son Cooper and daughter Indiana. Picture: Voss Photography When the police came, Eric and his little brother John, 4, were still in pyjamas, playing with a cat. It was the first stage of blocking out a tragedy beyond their comprehension. The orphaned boys grew up with a succession of relatives. John would go on to father four children and run his own service station in Golden Square. Eric left Bendigo and a pastrycook apprenticeship to join the army as soon as he turned 18, but returned with his bride in 1946 for a few years before moving to the railways and Spotswood in 1952. The pair were "as close as brothers can get" Eric recalls, linked by shared loss and haunted by those far-off gunshots. Each was the other's closest living relative. But after John died in his 70s, Eric has faced his memories alone, behind the chirpy face he turned to the world. His girls didn't know much about it as they grew up, only that their Manning grandparents had died tragically. They didn't piece it together until they were adults. When Eric was in his 70s, his daughters took him into the city to search old newspaper files. They found the original Argus story, complete with a photograph of the lost boys in their pyjamas. "He could only read half of it because he became so emotional," Judith recalls. That was when they realised what their father had lived with. He had always been "sentimental" about his daughters and their children and, now, his great-grandson, and this was why. He treasures his family. The trip to the library with his daughters let him talk about the unspeakable thing he buried for half a century. Lately, he is ready to fish out a faded photocopy of the newspaper and a copy of the only family portrait of his parents, his brother and himself. The same picture was reproduced in the newspapers of the day. On one copy he has written in shaky writing: Mum, Dad, Eric, John. If he ever had memories of what happened that winter morning 85 years ago they have faded, except for one: seeing the gunshot wound in his mother's head. David Schwarz marks for Melbourne in a match against St Kilda. He talks about it almost as if it happened to someone he knew a long time ago. His face clouds over as he goes through the story but in a few minutes that heartbroken little boy is back to his 91-year-old self, cracking jokes as if his life depends on it. As perhaps it always has. "You wouldn't be dead for quids," he says. Ronnie rolls her eyes. She's been hearing that for 70 years. BACK when Melbourne used to win a few AFL games, David Schwarz was a gun forward. On the football ground, the man they called the Ox was big, strong and skilled; off it, he was fun-loving to a fault. When his football career ended in a string of injuries, bad habits became vices he could no longer hide. He became a gambling addict and it took him to dark places with dodgy people. After facing financial ruin and family trauma, he kicked "the punt" and became the face of campaigns against problem gambling. But Schwarz nursed a blacker story than his addiction: when he was eight years old, his father had been shot dead in front of him. Those close to him knew about the shooting but it wasn't widely known until he revealed it in his life story, All Bets Are Off, in 2010. "I didn't hear the shot," he begins the book. But I woke up to a truly horrific scene. There was blood everywhere . . . all over the walls. All over the carpet. All over the double bed where my dad lay motionless . . . Blood was gushing out of his head. The pillow was like a red sponge. Daddy, Daddy! I yelled. There was no reply. A man dressed in black was wrestling with his father's girlfriend for control of a rifle. She yelled at the boy to get out. He dived head first through the hatch used to deliver breakfasts in the motel room where they were staying at Mt Beauty. He landed on the concrete outside and ran for help. By the time a doctor got there, his father was dead. It was just after dawn on January 28, 1981. He would spend the next 25 years running away from what happened the morning. Gregory Armstrong as a young boy. His mother Suzanne was stabbed to death in Collingwood in 1977. For a while, he cried himself to sleep and sometimes he yelled "I want my dad back." But one night he told himself: "That's it, I'm not crying any more." And he didn't. Right up until he was sitting in a counsellor's rooms, facing the demons that had left his life in ruins. At first he shrugged off questions about his father's death in the offhand way he had developed as a defence. But when the counsellor asked him to imagine his own small son seeing him killed, he cried. With the tears came the start of a new and better life. At 33, the Ox turned back into a boy still grieving for his larrikin dad. Now he can look back on it with something like wisdom. Surviving tragedy can give you self-belief and the hunger to succeed, he says. It makes you realise 'I ain't got it too bad'. He will never be sure his father's death propelled him towards the self-destructive spiral of gambling and drinking, although he suspects so. What he is sure of is that weathering the tragedy gave him "enormous resilience." No matter how bad things seemed, he knew they could be a lot worse and that made him mentally tougher than some of his mates. "It showed me life isn't fair and that nothing gets handed to you on a platter," he says. In junior football, he'd always been "a natural" who was bigger and stronger than his peers, and he wasn't sure he could handle the big league until he got there. He realised how scrappy his skills were when he started with Melbourne in 1991 as a hulking 19-year-old. He credits his past with giving him the grit to train harder and longer to turn himself into one of strongest marks and most accurate goal kickers in the side. It taught me to work hard for things and to make money - but then I flushed most of it down the drain. The night he tearfully announced his football retirement in 2002, he went on a three-day bender at Crown Casino. He still thinks about his father, Heinz Schwarz, as the "best mate" who took him fishing and camping. But having two children of his own with his partner Karen means he can see his father more clearly. He still misses him but he now understands how Heinz's faults wounded his family. He suspects but can't be sure that Heinz's murder - by a jealous husband who later suicided - pushed him over the edge into self-destructive behaviour. He thinks he "tried to numb a lot of feelings" by going on gambling and drinking binges. He lost $4 million before he realised he'd hit rock bottom and had to "pull up." He met Karen in 2003 and they married in 2008. Without her, he has said, he'd be "dead or in jail." In the years after he left football, he says, "I was a prick." Now he co-hosts a drive time radio shift on SEN radio, preaches the evils of problem gambling and looks after his own family. It took a while but the lost boy eventually found his way home. IF Ilona Stevens and Janet Powell hadn't been dog lovers, Gregory Armstrong might have perished in his cot in the room next to where his mother and her housemate were murdered. Stevens and Powlett lived at 149 Easey St, Collingwood. Their terrace house shared a wall with 147, where Suzanne Armstrong and Sue Bartlett lived. On Tuesday, January 11, 1977, they recognised Suzanne Armstrong's part-labrador pup in the street. They knocked next door without response, then put the dog in their own backyard. They left a note on the neighbours' door to say where the dog was. The note was still on the door next day. They didn't investigate then but when they heard 16-month-old Gregory whimpering the next morning, they decided to check. Ilona went in the open back gate and the unlocked back door and found something she can't forget. "In the passage, near the front door, I saw Susan's body," she would say. She was lying on her stomach, face down. There were smears of blood on her legs and the passage walls. There was more blood in the front bedroom, where Suzanne Armstrong's body was splayed where the killer had left her after stabbing and raping her. She snatched Gregory from his cot in the next room. The little boy was distressed, dirty and dehydrated, but unhurt. He was the only person who might have seen the killer but was too young to know. Greg Armstrong was the forgotten victim of the Easey St murders. He grew up not remembering his mother and not knowing his natural father, a Greek fisherman Suzanne had met overseas. Greg grew up partly with Suzanne's sister, his aunt Gayle Armstrong, and her estranged husband, a farm manager near Euroa, where the Armstrongs came from. Gayle's son Travis is only a week older than Greg and they grew up like twins. His grandmother Eileen was a big influence on his life, a stable figure in a family shattered by the murders. Because he was illegitimate, Greg was not eligible for crimes compensation until a barrister friend of his mother's ran a campaign to have the law changed. The barrister also set up a trust fund that paid for his education. He learned Greek so he could talk with his father and other relatives when he finally travelled to Greece to meet them when he was 20. He joined the army reserve, taught in the army and later mastered computer websites. Now 38, he can afford to travel a lot and divides his time between business interests in Melbourne and Asia. "He's always been smart and he's a good-looking guy," says his aunt Gayle. He's been a fairly happy vegemite. Not being able to recall the crime is probably a good thing for Greg, but there is another side to it. He once told a friend he wished he could meet his mother just once because he couldn't remember her. IT'S different for a young man called Ben, now 20. He can remember when his mother Vicki Jacobs was shot dead as she slept beside him in their unit at Long Gully, near Bendigo. He was six. It was a cold-blooded execution by strangers done for the most calculating of reasons: Vicki had been brave enough to give evidence against her former husband Gerald Preston, Ben's father, in a South Australian murder trial. Police believe what others have told them - that Hells Angels hit men executed the 37-year-old mother not just as punishment but as a warning to others not to give evidence against bikies or their associates. Ben woke on June 12, 1999, with his mother's body cold beside him. She had been shot several times with a silenced weapon. Shocking as it was, the murder was not altogether a surprise: Ms Jacobs had prepared for it by making a will and asking friends to raise Ben if, or when, anything happened to her. She knew she could be the target of a "payback" killing organised by Hells Angel Terrence Tognolini, an extortionist and arsonist later expelled from the gang for sex offences against young girls -- and since then jailed for other violent crimes. She was right. The day his mother died, Ben went from the police station to the home of Colleen and James Hunter, as arranged in advance. The Hunters would spend the next 12 years raising him the way they promised. On the eve of the inquest into his mother's death in 2004, the then 11-year-old Ben said he prayed for her killers and no longer wanted revenge. By the time he hit his teens, he was a promising baseball player, and dreamed of pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays. After graduating from high school in Bendigo, he started an apprenticeship in Melbourne but missed his friends and moved back. Since then he has lived briefly in Brisbane but has returned again and lives and works locally. He has given up his boyhood dreams of being an elite baseballer but still plays regular sport. Like a lot of 20-year-olds, says a close family friend, he enjoys partying and "has his ups and downs." For several years his father wrote from prison in South Australia demanding information and trying to interfere. "From the beginning, Ben was aware if he wanted to see his father he could - but he never wanted to," says his former guardian James Hunter. But the man police believe connived to kill his son's mother launched legal action to gain "custody." Preston wanted Ben to live with a woman who visited him in jail. The Hunters kept their word to their dead friend and hired a QC to block Preston's twisted bid. It cost them $20,000 but it was worth it. Bern turns 21 in November. He still doesn't know what to do with his life but he's "a good steady worker," says James Hunter, and time is on his side. So is the homicide squad. Some detectives who worked on the case have befriended Ben and stay in touch. Some day, he might return to a dream he had at primary school - to become a policeman and try to find his mother's killer. It doesn't look as if the million-dollar reward is going to do it.