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Old West Humor

by | Apr 25, 2026 | ,

Old West Humor

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.

Pole Ferry

by | Apr 24, 2026 | ,

Pole Ferry

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.

Little Dead School House

by | Apr 23, 2026 | ,

Little Dead School House

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.

Castle Tooth

by | Apr 22, 2026 | ,

Castle Tooth

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.

Kids Soap Opera

by | Apr 21, 2026 | ,

If you want to know what’s happening at Henderson school, you don’t join the Yearbook staff. You watch a Soap Opera at lunch time. Each Friday, the kids in the cafeteria share a second carton of milk with “The Growing Years.” A show they write and produce themselves about their own problems.

Marathon Mom

by | Apr 20, 2026 | ,

Marathon Mom

Vivian White is no taller than an August cornstalk, but — at age fifty-one — she was determined to run 6,500 miles. That was the distance from her home in Illinois to her son’s front-line Army post in Iraq.

“Every mile that I jog,” she said, “brings him that much closer to being home, at least in my mind.”

Vivian logged more than a thousand of those miles in the first 6 months after Brian went to war. She had 5,500 to go. Friends quickly realized that she would need help covering that distance.

Tea and Sugar Train

by | Apr 19, 2026 | ,

Today, we’ll do a bit of time traveling. All aboard the Tea and Sugar train! Want to see our first American Story in foreign country? It aired on Halloween. Let’s see how kids celebrate in Australia’s Outback.

Skunk Train 

by | Apr 18, 2026 | ,

Skunk Train

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.

Laughter Saves a City

by | Apr 16, 2026 | ,

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.”

Old West Humor

by | Apr 25, 2026 | ,

Old West Humor

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.

Pole Ferry

by | Apr 24, 2026 | ,

Pole Ferry

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.

Little Dead School House

by | Apr 23, 2026 | ,

Little Dead School House

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.

Castle Tooth

by | Apr 22, 2026 | ,

Castle Tooth

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.

Kids Soap Opera

by | Apr 21, 2026 | ,

If you want to know what’s happening at Henderson school, you don’t join the Yearbook staff. You watch a Soap Opera at lunch time. Each Friday, the kids in the cafeteria share a second carton of milk with “The Growing Years.” A show they write and produce themselves about their own problems.

Marathon Mom

by | Apr 20, 2026 | ,

Marathon Mom

Vivian White is no taller than an August cornstalk, but — at age fifty-one — she was determined to run 6,500 miles. That was the distance from her home in Illinois to her son’s front-line Army post in Iraq.

“Every mile that I jog,” she said, “brings him that much closer to being home, at least in my mind.”

Vivian logged more than a thousand of those miles in the first 6 months after Brian went to war. She had 5,500 to go. Friends quickly realized that she would need help covering that distance.

Tea and Sugar Train

by | Apr 19, 2026 | ,

Today, we’ll do a bit of time traveling. All aboard the Tea and Sugar train! Want to see our first American Story in foreign country? It aired on Halloween. Let’s see how kids celebrate in Australia’s Outback.

Skunk Train 

by | Apr 18, 2026 | ,

Skunk Train

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.

Laughter Saves a City

by | Apr 16, 2026 | ,

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.”

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    https://youtu.be/9Huz2pd-at4
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    https://youtu.be/w4gt4LHxKbg
  • Rescuing the Rescuers

    The wind can sound like Hell's idea of music in the north Atlantic.  Blizzards blow in biblical proportions; one of them taught Lanier Phillips a great lesson.  Caring can come from unexpected places.  

    https://youtu.be/y3fY2h2ByZk
  • Soul Circuit Rodeo

    June 19th. This was the date great, great, grand daddies used to mark the calendar of their lives. In  1865 folks gathered to hear a general who came to tell Texas what the rest of the world already knew.  Black Americans were now free.  They called it Juneteeth, the day that changed the world.  Black Texans had already turned their world upside down.

    https://youtu.be/4Y_VIbUYyx8
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    “All my competitors are dead.”  

    https://youtu.be/IYngYuPWKQw
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    https://youtu.be/Nq1W9Az2ses
  • Miracle Beneath the Sea Part # 4

    "Bless their hearts,” Caroline Surofchek said, squeezing my hand. We were sitting together at a memorial service a few years later for the families of the men who went down with the sub. At ninety-one she was the only wife still living. “Those Abele boys weren’t nothing but little kids when they lost their dad. Thanks to them I’ve outlived the mystery of what happened to my Steve.”

    MYSTERY SOLVED.  TIME FOR THE FAMILIES TO SAY GOODBYE IN PART FOUR OF THE ABELE BROTHER’S SEARCH FOR THEIR MISSING FATHER’S SUBMARINE.  

    https://youtu.be/-27TIE4xMcE
  • Miracle Beneath the Sea Part # 3

    While the Abele brothers searched for their father’s submarine, the crewmen’s relatives looked for one another. The boys’ mom, Kay Abele, had kept them together for years, writing notes to the other sixty-nine families, week after week, until she died. Then they drifted apart, losing track of one another. The last relative was located the morning the Grunion was found.

    TWO MYSTERIES.  SOLVED.  THIS IS THE THIRD OF FOUR STORIES IN THE ABELE BROTHER’S SAGA. 

    https://youtu.be/g8dmRNgsMck
  • Miracle Beneath the Sea Part # 2

    The sea holds many mysteries, but few detectives were as dogged as the Abele brothers who search a lifetime for their father’s submarine which went missing during World War Two. In 2006 they began crisscrossing the Bering Sea, probing its depths with sonar. The brothers caught a break when a Japanese historian found a lost account of the Grunion ’s last battle, which mentioned a confrontation between a cargo ship and the sub. The freighter’s crew spotted two torpedoes bubbling toward them, the first of which missed; but the second exploded and stopped the engine. Terrified, the Japanese seamen turned a deck gun on the sub, firing eighty-four times as it began to surface. 

    "There was a dull ‘thud’ noise and a little spout. Presumably oil, we don’t know,” John said. Their dad’s sub slid into history’s shadows, and seventy men were never heard from again. Until now.

    https://youtu.be/9inK0jO8QZo
  • Miracle Beneath the sea Part # 1

    We all make deals with our hearts from time to time, redoubling our efforts when others drop away. Sensible voices tell us to stop, but we don’t. The Abele brothers, John, Bruce, and Brad, spent a lifetime searching for their father’s submarine, long after the U.S. Navy gave up and historians closed the book on one of World War II’s biggest mysteries. 

    https://youtu.be/VRae5RfZVk8?t=7
  • Town Follows People

    Valmy mayor Gene DeGrazia owns a gas station in the middle of a dessert.  To entice motorists to stop, he built a motel, dug a pond and put up signs to his secret fishing hole.  Over the years, that gas station spawned a tiny town.  The new interstate highway bypassed it, so DeGrazia, who had become mayor of Valmy, Nevada, made an executive decision.  If people no longer came to town, the town would follow them.

    https://youtu.be/w6tMLYksf5w
  • Ritchie Boys

     Ever heard of the Ritchie Boys?  They were a group of German born Jewish immigrants who were trained and sent back to defeat the Nazis that killed their families.  Their story has been hiding in history’s shadow.

    https://youtu.be/KW28vh3CdaM
  • Flying Fathers

    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. 

    https://youtu.be/VG-iQo17gaQ?t=3
  • How to Make Life Beautiful

    Pat Knisley, a swimming coach from New Bern, NC, cares more about kids than a winning team. Her enthusiasm and love have inspired thousands of young students. Despite a 20-year battle with multiple sclerosis and the loss of her husband, Knisley continues to teaches us a lesson in life.

    https://youtu.be/ODydY7x63p0
  • Go Cooker

    There was a time when rush hour in Odessa, Texas, became a kind of moving McDonalds.  There was more that sizzled than hot pavement.  Hooked to the back bumper of several small cars were little ovens that fried eggs on the way to work and steaks on the way home.  The oven’s heat came from the car’s exhaust pipe, which was shielded to keep out fumes.  Bill Worrell was responsible for this culinary revolution.  No matter how fast he went, there was still one problem.

    https://youtu.be/NwasMcuSZc0
  • Long Lost Man Who Saved a Life

    Let us remember a time when Americans lived up to their ideals and those ideals helped save the world. On June 6, 1944 we set out to free Europe. The invasion began just 3 miles from the little port where the Pilgrims left for the new world. The allies too, carried a gift of freedom.

    American soldier Sam Fuller returned on the 40th anniversary to find the Frenchman who saved his life during the D-Day landings. 

    https://youtu.be/RiyNeDP_unQ
  • Surprise! I’m Alive.

    Patrolman Bill Sample was stationed at the Philadelphia Children’s hospital.  His beat took him among children who are very sick.  He smiled and they talked, telling him of dreams they would not live.  Bill Sample decided to provide some of those dreams. He paved the way for Make a Wish and all the other big time charities that followed.  The little girl featured in the first story did not die. 

    https://youtu.be/xmsiGKTZqv4
  • Sunshine Child

    Patrolman Bill Sample was stationed at the Philadelphia Children’s hospital.  His beat took him among children who were very sick.  He smiled and they talked, telling him of dreams they would not live.  Bill Sample decided to provide some of those dreams. He paved the way for Make a Wish and all the other big time charities that followed.

    https://youtu.be/nk_lbOQhW3A
  • That Last Howard Johnson’s

    his a month of memories.  I remember a time when summer was served in 28 flavors.  Howard Johnson’s ice cream was every where.  When I was a kid, the brand was as well known as Coca Cola.  I had my last taste in the state where it began.  The last Howard Johnson restaurant was closing in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

    https://youtu.be/lDO368xnI7M

  • Simpler Sign Language

    A 21 year old graduating senior at the University of Virginia has developed a simpler sign language for autistic children and stroke victims, helping some to communicate for the very first time. Micki Cassagne brings life to children crouching in the darkness of their minds.

    https://youtu.be/UVwjuaWvqq0
  • Places No One Else Has Photographed

    David Tatnall worked as a janitor until he saved enough to go looking for places no one else has photographed.  His was not the dry Australia of foreign imagination.  Tatnall hiked the high mountain forest east of Melbourne where the rain melts the landscape into a vivid softness.  

    https://youtu.be/De4niM7MRcs
  • Surviving the Great Depression

    It is an accident of history that old stories are recalled in black and white.  Familiar, faded images.  Always the same.  They never tell it all.  During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, farmers from half a continent funneled into California looking for work. Leo Hart helped their children find a way out of poverty.  He taught arithmetic in an air plane.  Children with the highest marks got to taxi it around.  Those kids ended up owning mining companies and supermarkets.  They became college professors, engineers and judges.  Their teacher emphasized what they could become, not what they were. 

    https://youtu.be/ONMTYLwHiBs
  • Saying NO to Money

    West Texas has one of the most sparsely populated counties in the country, 647 square miles of nothing but sagebrush, rattlesnakes and sand.  It has one town.  Only 110 people live there.  So few, the mayor bought something unusual to let them sleep late. 

    https://youtu.be/8cBqresVrrw
  • A Lobbyist for Wildflower

    Carroll Abbott was the only registered lobbyist in Texas — for wild flowers.  I loved his motto:  “A weed is just a flower in a place you don’t want it.”

    https://youtu.be/_35r6SsaSi8
  • Riches to Rags

    David Rosenblum was a professional race car driver who didn’t win many races, but crashed a lot of cars.  He was a drug addict, driving 130 miles an hour.  Rosenblum went from riches to rags, until he met some real heroes, kids who declined a drug deal every day.  Chris Serano and his friends passed up what David could not.  So, he tapped their strength to control his own addiction.  In return, he offered them a ticket out of North Philadelphia.  He picked his pit crews from  the Edison High shop class.  Good kids with average grades who are often overlooked.  

    https://youtu.be/WePOnBVr_pw
  • People’s Bridge

    San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge was so loved when it opened in 1937 that a lot of people scribbled their names and addresses on its towers. A friend bet 14-year old Bill Hughes a quarter that Bill couldn’t write a letter to a name and address chosen at random and get a reply. The friend closed his eyes and put his finger on a name: Patricia Lucas. Bill wrote the letter.

    https://youtu.be/3QYAi2uUFeo
  • Fighting Grossman’s

    I overheard this exchange in Walmart between two older men, one a customer and the other a greeter offering him assistance: “Can I help you?” “Sorry,” said the customer, pulling out a cart. “I don’t hear so well.” He pointed at his ear. “I flew combat during the war.” “I served, too,” said the greeter. Carl Grossman, an affable little guy, played his trump card in this game of “Me, too.” He leaned in, touching the customer’s arm. “Eight of us brothers were in uniform during World War II.”

    https://youtu.be/Nn1a-Qo0vyU?t=8
  • Section 60

    There is a section of Arlington National cemetery where mothers come to tend their son’s graves.  They watch over them, just as they did on playgrounds long ago. Let us pause a moment. And remember.

    https://youtu.be/DU58dgmbRgk
  • Winning the Game of Life

    For 35 years Tyrone Curry started work every morning at four.  Seldom quit before dinner, but the longtime janitor at Evergreen high school in Seattle, Washington, was happy.  He accepted that someone has to put out the folding chairs in life.  Someone has to do the jobs we all take for granted.  Besides, it left him muscled like a man who tilled poor soil and he liked that.  Still, everyone wondered why he didn't kiss his trash sack goodbye, after he won the Washington State Lottery.

    https://youtu.be/9rfvZbQ3YKo
  • Naval Academy Family

    This story took four years to complete.  We followed a family of students who were making Naval Academy history.  The mom was one of the first women to graduate and her oldest children — twins — graduated in the same place and at the exact same moment 30 years later.  There was still one more child in the Academy.  The dad went there too.  The Disher Family is the first in American history to send everyone to the Naval Academy.

    https://youtu.be/iWYKcxBMcx8
  • Light House Homes

    Pete Jerowitz likes to rest with his eyes open, so he can see his dream.  Can’t beat his view. He’s living in a lighthouse.

    https://youtu.be/WALAWg5ei1Q
  • Homeless Chef

    The winter of life brings choices.  Decisions.  Its time to travel back looking for lost dreams.  Rollie Richardson quietly gathered some of his homeless neighbors from winter’s worst.  And helped them try to find those dreams.  He drove them non-stop from Delaware to Disney World for nothing but a smile.  

    The homeless used to be people he stepped around on the way to the bank, where he was a vice president, until one day, he made the kind of choice the homeless make.  Friends offered him drugs and he took them. He was 51 years old.  Delores, his wife of 38 years, sent Rollie to rehab — 8 times.  He finally quit for good, after a friend said, “Folks used to look up to you.”  

    Rollie got a new job coaching kids and started cooking up an idea with the money he made.  Every Saturday, he would entice the homeless with a gourmet breakfast.  Then, offer to help them solve their problems.  They had heard that message many times, but in Rollie, they saw themselves — a mirror of hope in the vast uncertainty of life.  

    https://youtu.be/A8DI6a9s-9c
  • A REALLY Senior Prom

    Mount Clemens, Michigan is a suburb of Detroit, not Hollywood.  But for fantasy, nothing could top an evening like this.  The oldest citizens mingling with its youngest at a REAL senior prom.  This is not just one of those cute things kids sometimes do for older folks.  Rose Dysert earned her invitation.  She graduated from high school at 98.

    https://youtu.be/wSKGZyisMKU
  • Medical Careers for All

     Shanita Viera believed she could be a brain surgeon one day, but being a doctor was something few kids in her block ever considered, until the staff at New York Presbyterian hospital volunteered to teach them. Just the prescription to pull a dream within reach.  Don’t you wish people could see what we wish we could be.

    https://youtu.be/6sA0fAfb9J4?t=2
  • Mark Mothersbaugh- A Musician for All Ages

    Here’s something rare.  A Rock star whose music also makes kids giggle.

    https://youtu.be/buaABb5_vvM
  • Does Our Music Matter?

    Jimmy Driftwood is an Ozark farmer who also taught history.  Each evening as the sun slipped over the ridge, he set his lessons to song.  One of them lifted him out of a tiny school in Snowball, Arkansas, and made him famous.

    https://youtu.be/ueQHKk5E6Zw

  • Dragon Slayers

    Aniak, Alaska has the only Emergency Medical team serving three thousand people in an area the size of Delaware.  Every EMT is a teenager.  Teacher, Dave LeMaster, wasn’t too happy about letting his students cut class for all those emergency calls, until one day the rescue pager sounded and someone screamed, “Oh, my God, the principal just fell!”  LeMaster shook his head in disbelief, “By the time the ambulance got here, they already had him stabilized.”  And now?  “It’s like Ghostbusters,” LeMaster grinned.  “Who you gonna call?” 

    https://youtu.be/eheoWXS6sO4
  •  Restoring the South Bronx 

    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. 

    https://youtu.be/rju_8MisuSI
  • The Man Who Made a National Park

    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.

    https://youtu.be/QI0oqwBZsYI?t=4
  • Finding Hope

    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.  

    https://youtu.be/iCBs-lXVBYM
  • Doctor Will Come to You

    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.  

    https://youtu.be/JENgGJNrOrM
  • 40 Acres and a Mule

    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. 

    https://youtu.be/UOPugUifQWM
  • Mother’s Day Dad

    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? 

    https://youtu.be/Fm679Gt0d-g
  • Above the Whispers and Stares

    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. 

    https://youtu.be/9Rac-A1jwW8
  • Immigrant Surgeon

    One of the finest brain surgeons in the world began his journey  very differently from most doctors.  The hands that pluck out brain tumors once picked vegetables for $22 a day.  Alfredo Quinones was a migrant worker living in an old camper top in the middle of California field. 

    HOW DID A GUY LIKE THAT BECOME A DOCTOR?  

    https://youtu.be/eOVhMkRoQXA
  • School of the Air

    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.

    https://youtu.be/mb3s12KSbgM

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  • Piano Boxer

    A second grade girl gave me a lesson in equal rights long before the women’s movement — equal rights, equal lefts — punched my lights out.  Imagine if she’d had some training.  Doyle Weaver, a piano teacher, teaches arpeggios by day, punches by night.  Weaver is the founder and coach of the oldest girl’s boxing team in America. 

    https://youtu.be/uMipkuwmi1Q
  • Helping Artists Survive

    The beauty of this rare land masks how difficult life can be out here.  The Painted Dessert is chiseled by wind.  The sun leaves creek beds peeling.  In this barren place, Loren Phillips seems compelled to enhance life to add a beauty of his own. 

    https://youtu.be/CjYEpYXVGpY
  • Bus Boy Referee

    What's my all-time favorite story?  The next one.  A storyteller never stops searching.  At the core of this lifelong quest lies a simple truth - the shortest distance between two people - no matter how different - is a good story.  Once you know a person's story, you begin to see how much we are alike and that helps you appreciate what each of us brings to the mix of America.  That's not always obvious at first.  I was shooting a story in Las Vegas, Nevada, when I stumbled across a better one.  That city’s only commerce is hope.  Instant winners.  Methodical losers.  It is also home to the anonymous thousands who feed those dreams.  And, have dreams of their own.  Back home in the Philippines, Carlos Padilla is something of a legend. He has refereed 23 World Championship fights, but in between, he takes orders, as a bus boy.  

    https://youtu.be/Cy9iTD_oyb4
  • Old Man on the Mountain

    Niels Nielsen volunteered to sling from a slender thread of steel half a mile high to repair a Great Stone Face in New Hampshire.  His father once worked on the Statue of Liberty.  Niel liked to think he carried a torch, too.   Folks gathered below to watch and wonder:  Is that the face of an old man on the mountain?  It is seen from only one direction.  Without people, it is merely a pile of rocks.  Perhaps that is why the Old Man is so special.  Real men struggled to keep him from disappearing.  They failed.  The Face collapsed on May 3, 2003.  You can still see it here.

    https://youtu.be/8spdNdm8Xuo
  • Who’s the Savage?

    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?”

    https://youtu.be/HUyzuBsjoLk
  • College by 12

    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.

    https://youtu.be/cXb58-KCUjw
  • Vietnam Wall Washers

    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. 

    https://youtu.be/eLoSCbw06KQ
  • Best Lessons Learned Outside the Classroom

    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.

    https://youtu.be/F6MTWJj-ygs

  • Who Invented the Wild West?

    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!”  

    https://youtu.be/51c1ze8jotg
  • America’s Largest Do It Yourself

    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.

    https://youtu.be/raOSYDwrcFk
  • Cold Case

    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.

    https://youtu.be/gbXS1kYIfsI

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