Not all my stories were done in America. I found Doug Mealing in Australia. One side of his face grew faster than the other. He was born with Elephant Man’s Disease. Mealing worked far above the whispers and stares repairing the old Sydney Harbor bridge, but could not climb above his problems, until a woman’s love earned him a job on the number one soap opera in Australia.
I'd like you to meet Mario Capecchi. He's the son of a single mom, a poet, who thought she could defeat the Nazis with her pen. She didn’t, but he became one of the scientists who saved us.
After years of urban decline, the community of the South Bronx gets a boost from native Hedy Fox, who brings the skills she learned in college to the challenges of neighborhood crime.
Photographer Rex Ziak (pronounced Zeek) spent almost a decade trying to get a new National Park at the point where American explorers Lewis and Clark ended their westward journey. He tramped along the last bit of trail they blazed near his home in Southwestern Washington, studied their journals and discovered no one had accurately pinpointed that place on the Pacific coast. So Rex spent years searching their path until he found it. That work led directly to the creation of the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, but Rex didn't attend the opening ceremony. He planned it that way.
Every generation faces terrible challenges. Wars, depressions, holocausts. Polio, Aids, pandemics. We cannot predict what will come, but it is well to remember people who play a bad hand well, over and over again. They are why America not only survives, but thrives. Let me share with you one of my TODAY Show reports that was so much more than a weather story.
The Alonso’s lost their mother during the 9/11 attack in 2001. Janet went to work at the World Trade Center that morning and never returned. Robert was left to care for a 2-year-old daughter and a baby boy with Down syndrome.
“If I was to tell you I did this by myself, I’d be a liar; I’d be a flat-out liar,” Robert said. “I got my mom, my aunt, my pop to help.”
But he never returned to work at the pizza place he owned in Stony Point, New York. His family substituted for him. “I owe it to my children to be around,” Robert explained. “If I buried my grief in work, my kids would lose both their parents.”
How’d they turn out?
I remember when milk and doctors came to your house. Fred Richardson still does — in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago. He is a brave man with a big heart. Dr. Richardson returned to his old neighborhood to open a one-man practice. Scary? No. His neighbors keep him safe.
These guys were to hockey what the Harlem Globe Trotters are to basketball. Their goalie rode a horse named Penance. Their best player was a priest dressed as a nun, “Sister Mary Shooter.” She would distract the other team’s goalie by lassoing him with a twelve-foot rosary.
Not all my stories were done in America. I found Doug Mealing in Australia. One side of his face grew faster than the other. He was born with Elephant Man’s Disease. Mealing worked far above the whispers and stares repairing the old Sydney Harbor bridge, but could not climb above his problems, until a woman’s love earned him a job on the number one soap opera in Australia.
Most of us no longer recall or have ever heard what America did to retaliate for the destruction at Pearl Harbor that brought us into World War Two, but it changed our country as surely as 9/11. Eighty Americans volunteered to do the unthinkable. They bombed Japan, knowing they would have to ditch their planes behind enemy lines. After the war, Jake DeShazer astounded his former comrades by going back to Japan as a minister. He stayed thirty years. Started twenty-three churches, including one, in Nagoya, the city he bombed.
Long before Covid-19 made virtual classrooms a necessity, students in Australia’s vast Outback were learning via two-way radio. The Warwick family built an extraordinary life in that dessert on not much more than hope. Their ranch sits on some of the driest country on earth. In order to make a modest living they farmed one hundred and twenty five square miles. Their kids’ closest friends lived six hundred miles away. The children dressed up on Halloween and described their costumes to their teacher over a short-wave radio. They experienced the first chapter of modern communication.
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A 6-year-old girl became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. Ruby Bridges always said her mother was the hero of the moment. She put her family and her husband’s job in jeopardy to open schools for all.
Beloved teacher Ruby Forsyth had died. The classroom where she taught for half a century was now quiet. The school she started for Black children was about to close. Her former students share their memories of what she taught them.
Ruby Walker is an inexhaustible wisp of a woman who cleans 27 houses a week. Five houses a day. Two on Saturdays. That has been her routine for two decades, since her husband died. Most are big homes, as you might expect, but Ruby also works the other side of town — for free.
A special story of love and courage that reaches across color lines to touch the core of America. For 30 years, Barbara Knox beat the dawn to work. This was her last. She was worried. Her boss was retiring, closing the diner where Barbara had labored all of her adult life. The place was more than a paycheck for her.
You remember Sitting Bull who helped defeat General Custer at the Little Big Horn? He was a Great War Chief of the Lakota Sioux Indian tribe. He was also a man who cared deeply about children.
On his trip to New York City with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Sitting Bull was moved by the orphans he saw on the streets. He spent his pay buying them food which he handed out in a back alley. Ron His Horse is Thunder told me that story. He is Sitting Bull’s Great-Great-Great grandson. Ron let me ponder what he had said. Finally, he looked up and asked, "Who's the savage?”
One mother told me her Home Schooling curriculum includes Honors laundry and AP vacuuming. And then — there’s the Harding family who sent 6 kids kids to college by age 12. That’s right. 12. The Harding’s offer tired parents some tips.
Everything immortal must first pass away. For nearly 60 years, Route 66 was THE way west — America’s Main Street — before highways looped outside little towns and fenced folks off from homemade America. Route 66 was for most a Yellow brick road, a journey important for what we would find.
Jack McConnell stopped to pick up a man who was walking down a dirt road without an umbrella on a drizzly day.
“Where you headed?” McConnell called out the window.
“To look for a job,” the man answered. “Any one I can get.”
“What’s your name?”
“James.”
“You married?”
“Yes. I’ve got two kids and my wife is pregnant with our third.”
“What do you do for medical care?” McConnell wondered. He was a retired doctor.
“We have to take care of ourselves,” James said. “No one else is going to help us.”
His answer would change thousands of lives across the country.
Lewis Whirlwind Horse was the last living member of a traveling troupe of cowboys and Indians who invented the way we imagine the Old West must have been. “We were playing at the old Madison Square Garden in New York City, which is neither square nor a garden,” Whirlwind Horse said. “Buffalo Bill directed us to ride our horses around a circled ‘wagon train’ so we could show off our riding skills. My role in the act was to grab a pioneer woman and take her into a tepee set up at the other end of the arena. She was supposed to scream until Buffalo Bill came and rescued her, but we Indians were doing the screeching. You see, we played gin rummy while we were waiting for Bill to come shoot us, and she sat in on the game. She was the best card player in the show. Beat us every time. We were supposed to be killing her, but her card playing was killing us!”
Three little boys live in a magical place riddled with secret tunnels: a 35,000-square-foot building their parents are restoring, mostly by themselves.
That's right: a home one-third the size of Downton Abbey — without the downstairs help.
TV would have us believe that "high-tech" catches criminals, but only about a third of the cases get solved with DNA evidence. The rest rely on people whose minds never retire.
BILL PETERS SOLVED THE MYSTERY TO A LIFE LONG ROMANCE.
The west of legend has so captured our imagination that the real west is often overlooked. For nearly 30 years cowboy cartoonist Ace Reid gave voice to people we thought we know, but never asked. His cartoon series “Cowpokes” was read in Gobblers Knob, Utah and Fishtail, Montana, hundreds of small towns where cowboys still challenge a hardscrabble land.
Growing up, I spent my summers in farm country — Kansas — with a grandfather who loved to tell stories. Perhaps that’s why I got into the storytelling business.
My grandfather told me that when he was 18, he was what used to be called “all hat and no cattle,” a kid with little money and no property.
“One of my biggest thrills,” he said, “was loading my buggy and best girl on a river ferry. That was like a ride at Disneyland. The ferryman would push us across with a pole and an encyclopedic knowledge of the currents. Quite an adventure in 1903!”
Grandpa would have loved Ashley Pillar, one of the last of those old-time river ferrymen.
The road out of town is the only way the road seems to go. So few families remained in McLeod, North Dakota, Jan Herbranson ran out of kids at the old one-room school. Normally, that would spell the end of a place like McLeod. The school closed in 1986. But in this village of 50, four babies born. When they grew up, children returned to her little dead school house and so did Jan Herbranson.
Each evening Dr. Mort Copenhaven drove 900 feet up the side of Camelback Mountain to his own castle. It took him 13 years to chisel his home out of a cliff. He did all the work. Mort had no formal training, but he was a dentist. Figured that building a castle on the side of a mountain wouldn’t be much different than planting a false tooth.
Sometime the best college lessons are learned outside the classroom. A young man with Down Syndrome taught a fraternity what no professor ever could. Todd Martz respected everybody the same. Black. White. Red. Yellow. Short. Fat. Ugly. Beautiful. The fraternity brothers were so taken with Todd’s approach to life, they did something extraordinary.
Mary Cowboy believes wealth should be like manure.
“The idea is to take the manure and spread it out,” she says with a grin. “It’s not good to keep all the manure in your pocket.”
But no one would lend her money to start a high tech farm in time for spring planting. Until an unlikely super hero rolled to her rescue.
The Federal government gave some starving folks 40 acres and a mule during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. It saved them. I found them 50 years later.
A redwood forest 140 miles North of San Francisco is a place so bountiful and full of peace, "Nothing around here is ever killed. It always dies of old age and cholesterol," Juanita Dahl grins. She lives miles from the nearest highway, but not alone. Each morning, a one car train rattles up from Fort Bragg on the California coast to snatch the mail and take Jaunita to the grocery store.
Fred Benson was the most successful person I ever met. He lived on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island. Fred was police chief, fire chief and the state Driver’s license examiner. He was also head of the rescue squad, baseball coach, teacher, builder and President of the Chamber of Commerce. Five times. Then — he won the Rhode Island state lottery. Five hundred thousand dollars. He threw the biggest birthday party anyone could remember. Invited all the children on the island and announced he’d pay the college tuition of any child who wanted to go. Fred always thought of his community first. In the Seventies there was a housing shortage on Block Island. So, at 54, Fred went to college and got a degree. He taught high school shop. The island’s four builders got their start with Fred. He never married. Never had children. But, for 82 years, he dedicated himself to the people of Block island. Fred Benson had found a safe harbor and then showed others the way.
Juan Delgadillo looked like a Shriner who had lost his parade. He cruised by my car window on a hot, dusty day west of the Grand Canyon driving an ancient convertible painted the colors of a dripping ice cream cone. It was a griddle hot morning in July, but a decorated Christmas tree stood tall in his back seat. At the top a sign read: “Follow me to Dead Chicken sandwiches.”
Paid your taxes? Dreaming of a better way to fund government? Maybe more lotteries? Back in 1986, governments were beginning to experiment with gambling to raise money. The mayor of McClusky, North Dakota mayor bet on his town's future. He left it to chance. Friday nights down at Elms cafe, you could find him dealing blackjack. The money he won went to charity. All of it. In four years, this village of 650 people had raised $57-thousand dollars. Gambling. Players figure they couldn’t lose. If they did, their money helped paint the town's pool or buy a new ambulance. It had been a blessing for some, a curse for others.
Florence Thompson’s picture haunted the nation. Her grandson saw the photograph hanging inside a G.I.’s tent in Vietnam. The face had been printed black and the Black soldier who owned it swore she was Black. Florence and her story had not yet been found. But that frozen moment of her life, that picture, writes its own story in each of us.
Aren’t we all dreaming of breaking out? Seeing something besides the place where we live? Sometimes in life you have to get lost -- to find yourself. Roy and Anna Williams set out from their home in Florence, Kentucky, to circle the west in a car that ran on dreams.
Some of us are lucky enough to have had a great teacher. A cheerleader who changed our lives. Frank Cooper told his students something that stuck — Keep Your Promise. He said that dressed as Elvis.
When Joe Clark left home, he carried with him pictures of friends and neighbors who would set a course for his life. Joe went to work for the great news magazines, Time and Life and Newsweek, capturing the faces of common people. Seasons, like sign posts, mark the time. In the fall of his 76th year, Joe Clark decided to come back to Cumberland Gap for a harvest of memory.
27 years after my first story, artist Michael Naranjo, who lost his sight in the Vietnam War, has become a world renowned sculptor, despite his total blindness. The Native American sees more clearly than most.
No one had time for the old man squatting over a box of vegetable peelers on a New York City street corner. The crowds swirled around him on their way to work, but he didn’t seem to notice. The solitary street vendor flicked a slice of potato off his thousand-dollar suit, smiled to himself, and asked, “Why would you buy four peelers, if they last a lifetime? Because you have four friends,” Joe explained. “Never underestimate a small amount of money, gathered by hand.” For 60 years he loved the glorious uncertainty of starting every day—with nothing.
Jennifer Annable was five months pregnant when she moved to Seattle with fifty-bucks in her pocket. She worked long hours, struggling to become a teacher. Eventually, she ran a school for children with special needs. Melvin Jones was one of them. He was 16, drifting on the streets of Seattle. She made up a room for him. She had already opened her home to five kids. Why would a divorced, single mom take on such a challenge?
Chuck Taylor waved at a hawk strafing the wheat field in front of him. “There is beauty everywhere. I just want to express what I am feeling.”
He pushed up his feed company cap and began to sing louder than his farm tractor engine. Chuck’s voice boomed over that Colorado field, keeping time to the rhythm of his motor. The tractor turned into the setting sun, revealing a big man, close to three hundred pounds, haloed in the cab. Chuck Taylor was wondering why that sun wasn’t a spotlight.
TURNS OUT, IT WAS.
Bussey, Iowa may make you homesick for a place you’ve probably never been. Just 422 people lived there the day I dropped by. But this small town has made a big difference in Todd Spaur’s life. He was in a terrible accident two decades ago when his car flipped off a bridge and lay hidden in heavy underbrush for 16 hours. He could not call for help or call out because he’d broken his back, neck and most of the bones in his face. Doctors said he would never walk.
“I could wiggle one toe,” Todd says.
The town offered to look after Todd while he proved the doctors wrong. He decided to take art classes with some of the money townspeople donated to help him design a new life. The man who struggled to stand for 18 years, now dangles from a cherry picker two stories tall. He’s painting a picture of all those people who pitched in when he needed them most.
Life has taken Todd Spaur to such a dark place, perhaps it is easier for him to see beauty. The fellow with 9 steel plates in his body and a fractured hip vertebrae, has been painting this gift on the side of downtown wall for 10 painful months. In Todd’s mural you see America that was and in this place still is.
Its not just a painting. Its everybody’s story.
Deborah Huddleston fell in love with Glenn Gammage. They were married out on the prairie, dreaming dreams, as if they were new. He speaks 5 languages and has circled the world with the U.S. Navy. She has seldom left Texas. They fell in love and decided to marry, never having met.
No matter how far we go into the wilderness, we can seldom escape the sounds we make. There are few places where planes do not fly or foghorns cannot pierce. Just as city lights keep us from seeing dimmer stars, these noises of every day life drown out the more delicate voices of nature. Gordon Hempton searches for spots to record the earth's chorus -- without us.
New York spends more money on the arts than other city in the country, but a lot of those dollars come from outsiders. If you subtract all that out of town money, the place that spends the most per person for culture is Bassett, Nebraska.
“Huh?” Yep.
I found myself in a forest filled with forgotten lives. Their final resting places were marked, not with names, but numbered stakes, unnoticed, until Bud Merritt stumbled upon them. He found the first of six lost graveyards at what was once the largest mental hospital in America: Milledgeville, Georgia.
John Coffer turned his back on modern times to wander America in a wagon pulled by oxen, stopping only to take portraits with his antique camera. Coffer traveled at two and a half miles an hour for five years. 25 states. 10-thousand miles. He crisscrossed America so slowly, everywhere he went, folks joked he was a temporary resident. Coffer captured old fashioned images of modern America.
A surveyor from Valentine, Nebraska, was charting the land of the Rio Grande. He stopped for lunch and took a nap. When he awoke, poor people had gathered to eat his scraps. That bothered Frank Ferree. It bothered him so much he sold all his land to buy food and medicine for the poor. He kept nothing for himself. For 40 years Frank Ferree fed thousands on both sides of the Rio Grande. Five Presidents of Mexico have given him gold medals. He melted them down and bought beans.
There’s a mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the locals call “Misery Heights.” The last cowboys left there in the 1930s. It was too remote to raise horses, too cold to grow crops. Just right to teach something about life. Jack Snoble teaches a course in homesteading. Class size, one student.
There are a lot of little towns in farm country fighting for their lives. In Havana, North Dakota, the sun hasn't set. When the town's cafe went under, all 158 people in town volunteered to cook. It became something of a competition. They made $51,000, enough to open a new grocery store, build sidewalks and put an archery range. Now they dream of a jacuzzi.
Some folks do not see limits, only opportunities. Ed Lucas decided he wanted to broadcast baseball games, after watching the first nationally televised playoff. He ran outside to celebrate his decision. The twelve year old fired a fastball to a boyfriend with a bat.
“The ball came back and boom, hit me right between the eyes.” Destroyed his retinas. Left him totally blind.
Milton Rogovin grew old watching his neighborhood grow up, sharing the yearbook of their lives. He was still photographing them at age 100, surrounded by friends who were now taking his picture -- the "forgotten ones," who did not forget him.
In 1915, Robert Frost brought his wife and four children to a small farm in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He was a terrible farmer. He used to milk the cows at midnight, so he could sleep late. Townsfolk figured he’d be on their welfare rolls by Christmas. Then, they read something he wrote. It inspired them to do something very special for poets.
Steven White tried for decades to save a small island for someone he’d never met. Waves were slowly whittling it away. He told me the tale as we chopped through the water in a tiny boat on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.
"Holland Island once held sixty houses,” Stephan pointed out as we approached what had once been a neighborhood that stretched two miles down the shore. “It was a bustling community that had sixty-eight kids in school until rising tides forced them to abandon the building. My home is all that remains above water.”
Working alone, he hauled hundred pound stones across Chesapeake Bay to shore up the place.
A caring heart is as good a measure as any, when you try to evaluate success. World-class Chef Scott Peacock once told me, "It's always the most important ingredient.”
He was lifting a cake out of the oven. Turned and dropped it on the kitchen table next to an elderly woman.
"Tell me if it's ready?"
Edna Lewis didn’t poke it or taste it. She cocked her head and lowered her ear to the dish.
“It’s fading away,” it’s fading away
There was a reason she was in the cookbook hall of fame. She cooked
by ear.
My grandfather’s basketball coach was James Naismith, the man who invented the sport. In those days the Founding Father had not yet punched a hole in the bottom of the peach basket that was used instead of a net. “Coach,” grandpa said, “this game would be a whole lot faster if we didn’t have to climb a ladder to pull out the ball!” Few people alive have ever heard Naismith’s voice. Here’s a rare recording: https://goo.gl/s8yVK1
Basketball has always been more than a game. It brings together groups that may have no other common ground.
My first job for NBC News was at the Munich Olympics in 1972. That’s where I met legendary basketball coach Abe Lemons. He was president of the College Coaches Association that year, but told me he couldn’t get tickets to any Olympic basketball games. Instead, he scored a seat to the finals of the hammer throw.
I asked Abe: How was it?
“Well, our seats were kinda high up,” he said with a slow grin.
“How high?”
“When one of those hammer guys wound up and tossed, the fellows around me all yelled down, ‘How’d he do?’ And the fans down below would turn, cup their ears, and say: ‘Huh?’”
Janelle Barencott has never heard the bounce of a ball, the swish of a net. But on this day, she got to play against the best of the best, players dreaming of jobs in the National Women's Basketball Association. Janelle’s dreams are silent.
March Madness gives us a chance to watch the superstars of tomorrow. Before Larry Bird became a basketball legend, he was a shy student. I covered one of his first games. Hop in my Way Back Machine for a bit of March Madness from 1979. You’ll be watching the only undefeated major college basketball team in the country back then — the Sycamores of Terra Haute, Indiana.
The black muscle car roared up. Growling, throbbing. A tiny silver skull wired to the brake lights blinked with red eyes, the same color as the cross - painted on the car's roof. Two words decorated its side: "Bone Mobile." Anyone looking for wonder among the world's ordinary stuff would, as they say in old movies, "follow that car.”
In January 1957, Henry Alexander offered an innocent black man, Willie Edwards, a terrible choice while he looked down the barrel of a gun. Either run or jump from a bridge north of Montgomery, Alabama. He leapt into the Alabama River 50 feet below. Some fishermen found his body three months later.
Edwards’ wife, Sarah, was left with two children. She was pregnant with another. They never knew what happened to their father.
Before Diane Alexander’s husband died, he gave her his guilt. Clippings from his Ku Klux Klan days. The pattern for his hood. His pistol. A whip. And a stunning confession.
“He said, ‘My problem is Willie Edwards. I caused (his death.)”
Michael Najarian found his name chiseled on a list of war dead. His was one of more than 58 thousand names on the Wall of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Najarian served in Vietnam, but was still very much alive.
"I just sort of sank on the ground," he said, shaking his head. "I couldn't believe it."
You may not either.
Folks in Polk, Nebraska prefer to get their news the old fashioned way — in a newspaper, the Polk Progress. Its editor Norris Alfred is the only Democrat in the county. Why do people buy his newspaper? “I play poker with a lot of them. And I lose.” Norris loves slow news days. Gives him time to put things into perspective, something he’s done so well for 70 years.
Norris Alfred. In search of great truths. Or a minor truth. Or two.
There was a time in America where neighbors were considered part of your wealth. In Four Corners, Louisiana, they still are. Hardly a family here makes $10,000 a year. But together, they had rebuilt eleven homes. They linked up with trade people who taught them how.
Rachel Johnson races the garbage men each morning. She makes a living on what they come to throw away.
America survives and thrives because of all those names we don’t know, seemingly ordinary people who do extraordinary things. They don’t run for president or go on talk shows, but without them, the best of America would not exist.
There is still a little frontier in all of us. Something that urges us out beyond the limits of our settled lives. Diana Moroney shrugs off the world she lives in to find her heart in another. She races a team of sled dogs 11-hundred miles from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, sliding through a snowy wilderness so big, it would cover everything from Maine to the tip of Florida.
In Radio City Music Hall, the years do not flow back into the past. They gather invisibly around you. Each Christmas the Rockettes dance into our memories. Doris Carie was a Rockette at 17, the youngest girl in the line. They lived in the theater from 8 in the morning until 11 at night. After a year, she was sore all over. She went home to Georgia, but she never forgot the lessons.
Television did not begin in New York or Los Angeles. It was the brainchild of a fourteen-year-old farm boy, the vision of a fellow with a funny name: Philo T. Farnsworth. Philo was plowing a field on the family farm near Rigby, Idaho, day dreaming about sending pictures through the sky, when he noticed the sun glinting off the parallel lines he had made in the dirt. In a single, blazing moment of inspiration, it occurred to him that a picture could be broken down into lines, too, beamed into space and then put back together on a television set.
There are places where the past is not past. It keeps circling back around. Many towns in America are like that. Petaluma, California, continually celebrates a magical time when kids showed up to shoot a low budget movie called "American Graffiti." It launched some big name careers and boosted an unknown director, George Lucas, into an orbit that would lead to his epic -- Star Wars. History in Petaluma is never far, far way. Sadly, this town -- so tied to movie history -- lost its last picture show. Kids could have just hopped into a car. Their moms would have driven them to the movies in another town.
"Oh, no!" Madison Webb looked stricken. "You're not supposed to go with your parents!”
So, the teens created a business plan that would reopen their theater.
Oscar night. Time for little known Hollywood history. Amateur archeologists have uncovered a lost Egyptian city. Not on the Nile. Beneath the sands of coastal California. It was buried by that Pharaoh of films, Hollywood Director Cecil B. DeMille.
Bob Stanfill spent his first night in jail at age 9. For two decades he was in and out so often, he expected to die beneath prison towers. Until one day, he married into a remarkable family. They helped Bob open his own barbershop. Surrounded him with customers. And kept him out of prison for 30 years. Now he’s back. By choice.
FAMILY UNLOCKED HIS LIFE. NOW HE HOLDS THE KEY FOR OTHERS.
On Betty Sullivan’s 75th birthday, her kids got together to sing for their mom in a place polished with dreams and hard work. Carnegie Hall. She was set to perform again at Carnegie Hall on her 90th birthday. Coronavirus canceled the celebration.
Jim and Betty Sullivan just wanted their eight kids to learn music. They began to teach them in an old home, now covered in weeds. Son Tim sang country songs. His sister, Heather, wrote themes for television shows. Her sister, Stacy, had a recording career, and big sister, K.T., was a world-class cabaret singer.
She sang them a song with her favorite line.
“You have never left my mind long enough to leave me …”
Come on. Take a walk with me. I want you to meet Jim and Marty Dwyer and their five boys. The Dwyers always wanted a baby girl but figured it wasn’t going to happen after those five boys. So they agreed to raise someone else’s. But she wasn’t a baby. And she brought her brother. And those two brought four more.
Used to be only Seminoles wrestled alligators. The tribe lived in the Florida swamps. Gators were their major source of food and profit. But today, the 26 hundred members make big money running gambling casinos, enough for kids to afford college and dreams beyond the swamp. None of them wants to learn this dangerous, ancient skill. Chief James Billy tried to keep the tradition alive. It cost him. Big time.
Dee Follett has not seen a flower for half a century. She does not hear the bees. For her, summer is just another season of imagination. Dee is both blind and deaf, but each year she tries something no one else would dream. We found her driving a car.
Some races in life begin far from the starting line. That's why Rachael Scdoris and her dad drove 25-hundred miles, to the top of the globe, in the dead of winter, to help her chase a dream she cannot see.
Paul Rokich grew up in the old American Smelter camp in Tooerle, Utah. Copper lay under the Oquirrh Mountains. To get it, workers nearly killed the soil. The Oquirrh's were so polluted, experts told Rokich they could not be saved. One moonlit night, he flipped over the copper company's fence, alone in the darkened desert with a knapsack and two trees. Let’s let Paul tell the tale.
150th celebration Yellowstone National Park. It does not give up winter easily. The geysers cough and crackle and keep their warmth inside. Old Faithful is the first to break its glass jail. Splashing in the sun like a ghost train in the Rockies. Warm rivers are the only winter fire. Snow the only blanket. Animals who survive are as stubborn as the land itself. Bison have passed through the ice and the pain, standing dark and still, trembling in the wind. Trumpeter swans preen and float. The plain begin to look beautiful. Swirling through snow on currents of ice, they spin free. The Aspens are crystal. The pines are glass. An iridescent bone yard, waiting for the world to thaw.
The more of America I see, the more I find people who are ruled by courage, love, endurance and are driven to work hard no matter what may befall them. They are often overlooked and under reported. Nick Ackerman was the first disabled athlete picked as NCAA outstanding college player in the country, even though he was competing with no legs. He beat all the able bodied wrestlers. “I always thought I was the normal one," Nick grinned. "I used to break the legs off my G.I. Joe Action figures, to make 'em cool like me.”
I was sitting in a small cafe. At the other end of the counter was a man who looked like Lincoln. He was big and rawboned and about 80. His voice pierced and rattled like an old bugle. I couldn't help overhearing. He was holding forth about a fellow named Paul Sykes, who arrived in Oklahoma with 600 former slaves from Alabama the year before one of those big land runs that offered up free homesteads out west.
Pete Weststein used to live in a place of blue distances, tending his dairy herd. It is now a valley of prisons. Four of them, nudging aside the cows and the quiet. His wife Frieda is raising her family next to those prisons. She wondered, what became of the babies that were born inside.
Chicago Bulls Hall of Famer Bob Love ended up bussing tables in a Seattle restaurant because he suffered from a life time of stuttering.
Silverton, Washington has a hang up about being in touch. Out here, rivers sparkle like winter stars. And the air smells like it was just made. Denny Boyd grew up in asphalt meadows dreaming of such a place. So 15 years ago, he left city life to open a store in the mountains of western Washington. He neglected to notice the small print in his dream. Silverton, Washington was one of the last towns in America where you cannot make a phone call.
Seth Chwast cannot hold a conversation or a complex thought. At two he was diagnosed with Autism. His mother was determined to give him a normal life.
A counselor suggested that Seth consider mopping floors for a career. Instead, his mom enrolled him in one last therapy class at the Cleveland, Ohio, Museum of Art.
THE BOY WHO COULD BARELY SPEAK BECAME A WORLD CLASS ARTIST.
His eyes were turned to beauty only he could see, a gallery of gods. Native American spirits, watching over Christ.
“Some of my Zuni people won’t go along with this,” Alex Seowtewa told me, but he painted his vision on the walls of a church for more than half a century. This old mission in the heart of the pueblo was not in the heart of most Zuni’s. It reminded them of a time when Coronado came calling, looking for gold. And paid with death. The priests who ordered the Zuni’s to build the mission were found dead, buried beneath its floor.
“I was told not to look at the color of skin by my grandfather,” Seowtewa said. He dipped his brush into his own soul and painted what seemed best. For Alex, religion is a search, not certainty. He spent his life capturing clouds and sunsets to hang on a church wall.
He reached into the world and found its vagrant beauty.
When George Washington took the oath of office, the presidency was a uniquely American institution. Back then, kings ruled most of the world. They believed they were divinely chosen. Of course, the first presidential inauguration changed all that. But what if the popular general had decided to become king? Who would be our king today?
Jeff Hall’s buddy asked him, “Are you going?’ 290 guys, most of them from the Philadelphia area, were driving 19 hours non-stop to tryout for their beloved Phillies in Florida. Hall had pitched for dozens of minor league teams for 8 years, until a sore arm sidelined him. “Now, I’m in the real world.” Driving a forklift. The longest job he’d ever held. 17 months. Hall didn’t have the money for the trips to Clearwater, so his neighbors donated a thousand dollars to give him one last shot before his 30th birthday.
Macon county, Tennessee, is so lovely folks like to say, “If you stay long enough to wear out a pair of shoes, you’ll never leave.” Not everyone was given that chance. Black people used to be run out of the county. Some were hung from a tree on the courthouse square. Fred Thomas’ friends thought he was crazy when he opened a medical clinic in Macon county. “If I had listened to what people said,” Dr. Thomas pointed out, “I would have been a plumber.” Fred Thomas ignored the county’s racial history. He began to forge his own.
John McSherry ran a school like no others. He taught how to be UN-loved. His students were would-be big league umpires. McSherry, a National League umpire, worked his class like a drill sergeant. Get by John McSherry, the rest of the world seems like a smile.
Now you can enjoy heating your home. An inventor in Woodsdale, Ohio, gets all the warmth he needs from empty beer cans. Add a garbage pail and a copper coil buried in compost. You get heat. Wisdom doesn't always wear a suit.
One afternoon in St. Petersburg, Florida, I stopped to watch Fred Broadwell waiting for a pitch, crouching over the strike zone, leaning into the wind, seemingly suspended. The ball floated toward the plate. He chopped it toward the shortstop and shuffled off toward first base on stiff legs. It was a big day for Fred. A couple of years ago he was sidelined with pneumonia. Now he was back at 95.
DID HE SCORE?
Only shadows play in the Tabor Opera house. But for Evelyn Furman, it is an attic filled with memories. They survive because of her single minded devotion to the old theater in Leadville, Colorado. She saved it from the wrecking ball until younger generations fell in love with it too. Evelyn didn’t just preserve the brick and the mortar, she saved its stories.
150 years ago, the plains Indians of Oklahoma were refugees of war. The tattered remains of once proud tribes who had become foreigners in their own land. Practically overnight, they were faced with a new language, new religion and a new way of life. In the struggle to survive some of the old ways were forgotten. But Katie Osage remembers. "I was born in a tent and raised in a tent. Yeah, I still live in a tent." For nearly a century, she has lived in two worlds. And she has survived.
People buy more than 1-BILLION Valentines each year. Ever wonder who writes all those cards? What kind of mind comes up with "Be My Tootsie Wootsie or I'll Break Your Armsy Warmsy?" Well, I did. Went to the center of all this creativity, to the cupids of Kansas City.
Mardi Gras comes with fancy masked balls and big parades. Thousands spent on costumes and parties. But for a Cajun in Mamou, the celebration costs only $7.50. For that, you get a beer, hard boiled eggs, sausage and the answer to the age old question, “Why did the chicken cross the road?
A third of all the paperback books sold in America are romance novels. One company has published a billion books in ten years. Enough to give a copy to every man, woman and child in China. The author of those books, Laura London, was voted “the most sensuous writer.” She is a man. His real name is Tom Curtis, a cross country trucker.
Now here’s something that Valentine cards just can’t convey — the depth of your love. In this age of social media, where anyone can be a star, here’s a consolation prize, Romance novels that let you and the one you love — or would like to love — be the main characters.
We tend to think of classical music as big city music. Oh, there may be a snatch or two out in the country, but most often classical music is something big city folks bus to the boondocks on warm summer nights. That's the image. In Brattleboro, Vermont, it is wrong. Some of the finest classical singers in America live in this village.
A friend of mine played football for a school so small, the players changed uniforms at half time and came back as the band. There were so few girls, they borrowed cheerleaders from another town. It made for some close relationships. My pal married a cheerleader. She also played flute in the band. She also moved the yard markers. That’s the way it is with small town football — a family affair.
Have we ever said “Happy New” with such a sense of relief? Been a tough year. We all know what is, what ought to be. Few remain who remember what was. I recall a 1988 New Year celebration. It was a couple of beers before closing and the boys down at Brandy's bar were lost on Memory Lane. John Sanderson was a bit fuzzy. He forgot the title of his favorite song. No problem today. Just ask Siri. Back then, Siri hadn’t been born yet. He had to rely on a human jukebox to help him find it.
There’s a group of kids from a tough neighborhood who stand out from the rest. They wear ties and are clean shaven — all because of an unassuming teacher named Bob Salisbury. Each day, he teaches six special education classes. After school he coaches basketball. Works hardest with those who will never be stars.