by bob.dotson | Jun 30, 2026 | Blog, Hiding in History's Shadow | 2 comments
Bungee jumping was just taking hold in America when this story was done in 1991. I call it Bernstein’s symphony of air. First. And last.
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Bungee jumping was just taking hold in America when this story was done in 1991. I call it Bernstein’s symphony of air. First. And last.
There’s an old grocery store in Detroit, Texas. Its shelves are stocked with music. Edith DeWitt’s dad opened the place in 1919. His daughter has nudged aside the can goods to nourish other needs. For 66 years she learned to play dozens of instruments so she could teach whatever her students wanted to master — piano, organ, drums, ballroom dancing, tap dancing, marimba, banjo. She also mastered ballet, acrobatic dancing, drama and voice. Her most important lesson?
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.)”
On an island off the coast of South Carolina sits an old school with a wooden floor, smoothed by a century of sliding feet. You’ll hear reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, but this story is about another “R.” Remembering Mrs. Ruby, Ruby Forsyth
Bill Eisenhuth watched his psychiatric patients come and go. He decided to follow them into the streets. His office became the steam vents and alleys where his patients lived.
To all of us who grew up watching pirate movies, this place is kind of special. Blackbeard had a home just off of Main Street. There were more parrots and eye patches on these wharves than on the movie backlot. In 1981 they came back. Russ Morphew ran the only school for pirates this side of Hollywood.
Jasmine Lawrence is living every kid’s dream. She gets to boss her mom. April Lawrence works for her 16 year old daughter. How’s that working out? It began with a bad hair day. The chemicals Jazzman used to relax her curls left her practically bald. She decided to create her own recipe — at age 11. Thirteen when she went off to summer camp to learn how to start a business. Eden Body Works was born with a $2-thousand dollar advance on her allowance.
At an age when most kids are lucky to get a summer job stacking shelves, Jazzman has 30 products in stores. She signed a distribution agreement with Walmart. Plans to take her brand world wide. Projected profits: one million dollars. Not bad for a kid in Williamstown, New Jersey.
For 93 years Beltran Paris has carried his home in his heart. He is the last of the old time mountain men who came from from France and Spain to take a job few people wanted. You can find him behind a moving white blanket of sheep. He still walks them 150 miles to winter pasture. In all those hours alone, Beltran Paris set a plan. He took his pay in sheep. One day, he hoped his children and his children’s children would own the valley where he walked. They do — Butte Valley, Nevada.
Detective Dick Dutrow has had to arrest children as young as 11. He worries less about catching them than keeping them out of prison. When all else fails, he will raise a troubled boy himself. He took in 35 foster children in the 15 years. Most went to college. Married and now have children of their own. None went to prison.
If you could take Alaska and lay it over the lower 48 states, one side would touch Florida, the other California. It's distances are so vast, travel budgets for high school sports teams can run 100-thousand dollars a year. Arch rivals often live a thousand miles away. Any high school kid who wants to perform or play music must first — learn how to pack.
Under a cotton puff sky, I met the kind of family America used to know. Wading through the wheat fields came Roger and David and their nephew Jay. Their dads work on the oil rigs. So do four older brothers — 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. They live in a home their parents bought two decades ago for $140., a home their parents rebuilt in the quiet of their evenings.
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.
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.
The Texas Spiny Lizard is the most elusive animal on earth. It can only be caught with a blow gun and pitted pimento olives.
In a beefcake world, LaGrand Nielsen was a patty melt, putting on the pounds. So, at 96, he started eating right. At 97, he entered the Panhellenic Games in Greece. Won races in China, South Africa, Finland, Australia and Rome. How’d he do it?
“All my competitors are dead.”
Eureka, Montana, is home to the world’s most exclusive golf club. A nine hole course was built with just one person in mind — a handicapped son.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s something rare. A Rock star whose music also makes kids giggle.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This train travels the longest stretch of railroad track on earth without a turn — 299 miles. There’s a bank car, theater car, grocery store car, a car filled with doctor’s offices, one that has a chapel. Sixty train cars. A mile long. Most do not have a passage way between them, so people who work in one seldom see those who work in another. The “Tea and Sugar” meanders more than a thousand miles across South Australia, stopping whenever someone waves it down. Its arrival in remote places is the social event of the week. All the families linger for hours buying impulsively, trying to extend the moment when there is laughter and community.
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.
A little band of inventors are refitting cars to run on left over grease from French fries. Next time you stop for fast food, you can fill up. Twice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Native American sculptor Michael Naranjo lost his sight during the Vietnam war. He created a 17 foot sculpture by touch.
Newspapers are the first draft of history, so it makes sense that a museum stepped up to save its small town newspaper and the story of their lives. The Silverton, Colorado, Standard & the Miner is now a National Historic site.
When the Renaissance Players perform in Miami, Jay Brown tunes up with a turkey baster, and in just a few minutes people hear him play Mozart on 47 brandy snifters filled with water. It’s no gimmick. Jay Brown’s instrument was once more popular than the piano.
Beverly Bickle moved to the suburbs so she could have more time with her family. Trouble is, more than half of us were already there. Suburban roads were so clogged before the pandemic, most of us spent 8 weeks a year, just to commute to work. 13 trips a day are about average for suburban living. Nothing is nearby. But a small group of suburban planners were trying to change all that.
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.
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.
Mary Smith McClain is torn between what she loves and what she feels is right. For most of her life she was known as Diamond Tooth Mary, a dazzling blues singer who performed on star studded bills with Duke Ellington and Nate King Cole. She turned her back on the blues and joined the Baptist church. Her pastor said the music was evil. And she believed him. When Mary turned 82, her husband died. Money got tight. Old blues singers don’t have pensions. She accepted an offer to sing in New York City for the first time in 42 years.
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.
Dr. Leila Denmark opened her practice in 1928. She was Atlanta’s first female pediatrician and was still doctoring babies at age 90. Dr. Denmark healed children until her retirement at 104. That retirement lasted a decade. She lived to be 114, the oldest doctor in the world.
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.
H. Lee Waters didn’t set out to preserve history. He was simply looking for a way to survive. People couldn’t afford his portraits during the Great Depression, so he picked up a film camera, taught himself to you use it and persuaded theater owners to show the films for free, as an added attraction at the movies. If more folks the usual showed up, he’d take a small percentage.
For six years, H. Lee never missed a show, until one night his wife called him and said she was going to the hospital and bring their first baby into the world. By the time he got there, that baby had already arrived. He decided to stay home instead of traveling. He returned to the portrait studio. At 87, he was still clicking away at life — and getting the best of it.
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.
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.
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.
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Thanks Brendon. I post a new story every day. Check back often.