I can sympathize with the man whose car plunged into the murky waters of the Inner Harbor this morning near the ESPN Zone. He got out by climbing through the window and standing on the roof of his SUV as it sank.

Back in the early 1990s, when I was a cub reporter working out of the Anne Arundel County bureau and pulling the night weekend cop shift downtown, I was sent to a fire in Fells Point. I don't even remember the exact date or year anymore -- I tried but couldn't find the old clip -- but it was a vacant building that is now on the site of some planned upscale development.

It was nothing of a fire, worth just a few paragraphs at best, but I decided to get as close as I could. I followed some firefighters out onto a pier. They had flashlights. I didn't. At the end of the pier, they turned right. I didn't.

I walked straight off the pier and fell about 18 feet into the water. I didn't know what hit me until I was under, and remember not knowing which way was up. I shed my coat and swam, luckily in the right direction, and surfaced a long way from the pier. By that time, fighters had a spotlight on me and I swam over to a life preserver they threw. They hauled me up; I declined medical attention (I went to the hospital later, after my stomach couldn't handle whatever was in that water) and filed a short story on the fire.

I was lucky that the television cameras were on the other side of the pier and didn't catch my tumble. But that didn't save me from years of ribbing from my colleagues, who told and retold the story to new generations of reporters. The story made American Jouralism Review and instead of a card when I left the Arundel bureau, the reporters gave me an orange life preserver with their signatures on it.

I became the only reporter at the Sun, perhaps ever, to win the Employee of the Month award for peforming an act of stupidy. I got a coffee mug and a gift certificate.

But I wasn't the first to fall in the water. Mary Helen "Bebe' Cadwalader beat me to it back in the 1930s. According to her obituary by Frederick N. Rasmussen, she fell off a pier while covering a story in Curtis Bay. She was unfortunate to have a photographer with her, and a picture of her bobbing in the water hung in the city room, complete with this caption: "Bebe covers the waterfront, and the water covers Bebe."

Shortly after I fell in, I got promoted from Arundel to the cop beat in Baltimore. One of my colleagues wrote me a note: "Bebe Cadwalader fell into the harbor and went on to Life Magazine. You fell into the harbor and went to Metro."

Now, years later, I own a house on the other side of the pond, just above Key Highway, and I can see the spot I went in from my rooftop deck.

Ah, the memories.