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.
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.
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.
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.
Doris Travis’s talent brought her to Broadway twice. The first time she was 14. Doris did something no other 14-year-old had ever done. She danced her way into one of the most popular shows in New York City. It took her more than twenty seven million minutes to get back. She was 93.
Chicago Bulls Hall of Famer Bob Love ended up bussing tables in a Seattle restaurant because he suffered from a life time of stuttering.
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.
The new methodist minister in Sparta, Georgia, was a guy with a red nose. No, not from drinking or sunburn. Folks thought they were hiring the Reverend Bill Matthews. What they got was Bags the clown.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
The Sound of Music movie was re-released with a twist. The audience showed up in costumes and was encouraged to sing along. I did. Want to see?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A PBS interview with the team that won a National EMMY for what was — at the time — an untold story: African American history in the old west. Their 1973 documentary, "Through the Looking Glass Darkly,” had higher ratings than any of the network shows the nights it aired. A high definition restoration of the original program was paired with this interview on the 30th anniversary. Bob Dotson, produced, wrote and narrated. Photojournalist Oliver Murray was also an associate producer, as was George Wesley.
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?
Listen to Logan Jackson's story: "Dan Porter was an old Civil War veteran. I was a little boy. At the time we met, they were enforcing the Jim Crow law, which said black men could not vote. ‘Man told Dan Porter, says, ‘Don’t you go in there and try to vote.’ Says, ‘You can’t read.’ “Porter says, ‘That don’t make no difference. I’m one of the men who made General Lee surrender!’” Logan stared into the faces around him, ‘You don’t know who General Lee was, do you? He was a general in the Civil War. Yeah, an old soldier.’ Well, Dan, he voted.”
How a diverse group of Americans succeeded in living together is a fascinating tale that has made an extraordinary difference for the millions who came after them. Of course they had racial problems, and still do, but the way they worked them out holds lessons for our own time.
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.
One of the most diverse places in America is not where you might expect. Oklahoma once had 28 towns settled by former slaves, scattered throughout 37 Indian Nations. For nearly a century it was primarily a land of the Red and the Black, a checkerboard of Indians and ex-slaves who very nearly got their own state until thousands of immigrants from around the world joined them seeking free land -- land they got in a single day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Picture this the next time you’re waiting until your knees turn numb in a doctor’s office. Patients in an Idaho wilderness have one who will fly to them. Rich Paris is the only doctor for the remote areas of Custer County, Idaho, a neighborhood about the size of Connecticut. Doc makes his rounds alone. Hailey to Challis. Two hundred sixty miles in one day. Two decades ago, he made a deal with his heart. Not his head. He decided that patients should pay nothing extra for this fly-in service, since he loves the commute so much.
Forest Cochran was just two. Much had happened in his little life. His parents separated. His mother Karen lost their home. There was no shelter for the homeless in Loganville, Georgia. But Joy Davis and her husband Wayne took them in. They have helped dozens of people get back on their feet. Once they started their single bathroom with ten strangers. Why?
The keys to history’s treasures are often discovered in unexpected places. One of them turned up in a tiny Kansas town, unlocking a story half a world away. This week let’s celebrate the 100th anniversary of a woman who saved 2,500 children. In 1940 the Nazis walled off a neighborhood near Irena Sendler’s home in Warsaw, Poland. Pressed almost half a million people into an area the size of New York City’s Central Park – with not enough food to keep them alive. Five thousand were dying each month. Sendler, a public health service nurse, devised a daring plan to save the children.
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?”
Gordon Wright was the conductor of the Arctic Chamber orchestra, a group he formed to take classical music to the remote villages of Alaska. His musicians have performed in places so cold, the violinists play wearing gloves.
A secret room. A walled up tomb. A priceless jewel. No, not on the set of the next Indiana Jones movie. They lay hidden in America’s busiest railroad station. Train travel still thrives in New York City. Grand Central Terminal sees as many trains today as it did in the golden age of steam and steel. Picture the population of Atlanta and Buffalo pouring out of trains and subways. Seven hundred thousand travelers every day. Ten thousand pause to grab a meal, a thousand stop to ask directions. Some lose more than their way. In one month, train crews sent Grand Central's Lost and Found three hundred cell phones, one hundred and fifty eyeglasses and an engagement ring.
John Suta bought tarnished french horn for $75 bucks. His retirement pay left little for lessons, so he found another way to learn how to play it. He showed up at Roosevelt Middle School in Eugene, Oregon, and asked to join the beginning band.
Okay, the kids thought it was funny, then they heard the seventy-four year old’s first sweet note.
Marty Revellette lived his life with a single mindedness that blocked out everything but challenge. He was a man with no arms, but he pulled a women from her burning car. She survived. This story tells not only “how,” but “why.” The country owes its success to those who are willing to try regardless of disability, people who risk their lives for country, family, even strangers.
During this dark time, it is well to remember the families in this country who help others end nightmares and find dreams. It is the very core of our American story because most of us also have ancestors who risked everything for a better life. The communities they built prospered because people took care of one another. Some still do.
Dan and Susie Kellogg sold their home in Colorado. Bought an RV. And set out traveling into the unknown. They decided to live full time in a mobile home with enough kids to field a football team. 12.
Laughter echoes down Pillar Mountain. Two duffers in Kodiak, Alaska, are ice picking their way up the snow-covered cliffs. Carrying golf clubs. The course is practically straight up, fourteen hundred feet, from the valley floor to the green. Pebble Beach, it ain’t. But it is a golf tournament. One hole, par 70. That’s right. One hole, par 70.
There once lived a Prince, who became a pauper and then lived happily ever after. This year, he turned 94 and is painting his life on little bits of plastic, a life that would have been filled with pomp—if the circumstances had been different.
Andrew Romanoff was born into Russian royalty, a prince raised in a castle. That’s usually a recipe for a grand life, but he lost his kingdom in the Russian Revolution, only to find a fairy tale ending in northern California.
Lonnie Bedwell never let a handicap, handicap him. The man is lights out blind. Lives far from fast water, but Bedwell was the first blind person to kayak the Grand Canyon. He navigated the rapids listening closely, as friends called out the way.
WHAT INSPIRED HIS QUEST? THE FRIEND WHO SHOT HIM.
Will Steiger searches for land that hasn’t felt footsteps, the coldest parts of our earth, where the north wind bullies and temperatures cower—to seventy below. In this vast wilderness near the North and South Poles he seems oddly out of place—plodding carefully through the massive ice, alone. Will Steger explored the unknown—one step at a time—for more than forty years. Some ice fields are now so thin, his sled dogs fall through. But science alone won’t fix this. Will thinks people coming together and working for the common good might. We may get blisters on our hands, and calluses on our dreams, but the ally he seeks is the part in all of us that knows what is right. Many preach about saving the planet. Will just puts his boots on and goes.
Five little boys rattled across America in the fall of 1922. They were part of a remarkable odyssey. One hundred thousand such children were plucked from the streets of New York City and sent west, to a new life. Most were the sons and daughters of immigrants, found starving and alone. The Children’s Aid Society swept them up and shipped them to villages all across the country. At each stop their arrival was advertised. Kids trouped off the train, lined up, and couples simply picked the one they wanted. The brothers had very different experiences, but survived — with the help of each other.
Many people in Goose Creek, South Carolina, were speechless when Braeden Kershner turned his back on celebrity. It seemed somehow un-American. Don’t we all want to be somebody special? Don’t we try to become our dreams? It’s not that Braeden didn’t try. For months they watched him conducting music in front of a mirror with his eyes shut tightly, so he could see his dream. Conducting the Boston Pops. He did, after learning every instrument in the orchestra.
That night could have made Braeden Kershner a star. Few step out of the spotlight after they’ve had a flash of fame. Instead, he joined the Marines, just before 9/11.
Braeden Kirchner likes to conduct music with his eyes closed, so he can see his dream. The boy from Goose Creek, South Carolina, wanted to conduct the Boston Pops. Never mind that Braeden was just 18. To prepare for a career in conducting, he learned to play every instrument in the orchestra. He finally got his chance.
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.
The only journalism course Norris Alfred ever took, he failed. In 1980, he was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. This is what he wrote:
“The concept of progress has a firm hold. We are on the march from Worse to Better. From Cruelty to Compassion. With our bought vote, we cast a hope that the next leader will take us where we should go, confidently heading the parade of progress in an armored limousine.”
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
Working folks have always been the great voyagers of America. There were always new businesses, new jobs, new frontiers just over the next hill. But something fundamentally is changing in the American economy. Old skills don’t always fit new jobs. The American instinct to move on when times get tough can no longer solve the problem.
We caught up with Jim and Deborah Carey and their daughter Chastity once again. The bankrupt farmers still had not harvested a dream. Jim had won and lost six jobs in a year. Six jobs. In three different states. And he had a new baby. All was not bleak. Two things were about to happen that would change their lives for the better.
Bob McClain doesn’t have the kind of face that would launch a Soap Opera, but he’s a handyman with a difference. He listens. His smile crumples up the silence in people’s lives. Not everyone knows how to fix things. McClain is ready to help.
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.
There’s an old warehouse near San Francisco Bay filled with bronze sculptures, a salute to Americans who did not dream in black and white. They envisioned a country where everyone was equal. A long line of people have tried to make that so. Mario Kyoto thinks they ought to have their own Mount Rushmore. His work is so stunning, the Oakland City council has given his giant figures a home.
Roby Albouy spent most of his adult life in the Colorado mountains. But he carries faces from France framed in his mind, the fellows he passed on to freedom during World War Two. They were the downed crew of an America bomber. He was a fighter with the French Resistance. They never knew each other's names. After we did a story on Albouy, the crew and their French saviors found each other again. They had all lived long enough to joke about things that once were breaking their hearts. Without each other, they may not have grown old at all.
Every veteran carries faces framed in their minds, comrades who did not return from war. Roby Albouy and I were walking through the Aspen meadows out in Colorado one summer when he pulled a yellowing snapshot from his pocket and showed me the ones he can’t forget.
Childhood should be a season of dreams, but some children awoke each morning from an American nightmare: They are born addicted to drugs. Clara Hale saved hundreds of them. One morning she found a baby by her door. Mrs. Hale took him in. Word got around. Soon her tiny apartment was jammed with cribs.
Behind America's success story are untold tales of endurance. The people who succeed in this country come from sturdy stock, the ones who have always carried on when the going got tough. Their ancestors thought America’s streets would be paved with gold. What they found, instead, was opportunity to build, discover, create, achieve, survive, and grow.
For many that chance started in wilderness. They carved out lives, planted dreams and worked hard. In wilderness, time does not drift back into the past. It renews itself. People, too, or so I had heard. That’s why I went searching for a place few ever find. A moose munched his lunch by the side of a bubbling stream as my four-wheel drive waddled across the creek and continued up a mountain a few hundred miles southeast of Anchorage. At the top was a remote Alaskan village where the rhythm of life still resembled that in 1650.
Motts Tonelli enlisted in the New Mexico National Guard to play with an Army basketball team. The day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, he traded his ball for a gun. Tonelli was captured in the Philippines in the opening days of World War Two. Forced to walk 70 miles to a prisoner of war camp. Along the way, a Japanese soldier gave Motts an extraordinary gift.
My grandfather Paul Bailey was a rock ribbed, small town Republican. Former President Harry Truman, a Democrat, was his friend. Grandpa Bailey once argued a case before Mr. Truman, when Truman was a Jackson County, Missouri, Commissioner.
“You must have won,” I grinned, “if you became friends?”
“No,” he said, “I lost. But I learned something about Mr. Truman that made me admire the man. He opened a hat shop in Kansas City after he came home from the front lines of World War One. The business failed. His partner declared bankruptcy. Truman did not. He moved in with his mother-in-law, so he could pay back every penny.”
The only asset Mr. Truman had when he died was that house. His wife had inherited the home from her mother and father and other than their years in the White House, they lived their entire lives there.
As president he called home collect. Never billed the taxpayer.
“Mrs. Truman wanted Harry to buy a car,” Grandpa recalled. “He said, ‘We can’t afford one, but when we get out of this Great White Jail (the White House,) we’ll get one.”
After president Eisenhower was inaugurated, Harry and Bess bought one. There was no Secret Service following them.
President Truman retired from office in 1952. His income was a U.S. Army pension. $112.56 a month. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an 'allowance' and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year.
When offered corporate positions at large salaries, Mr. Truman declined, stating, "You don't want me. You want the office of the President, and that doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it's not for sale.”
One day on the way to Grandpa's house, he stopped to show me the retired president mowing his mother-in-law’s lawn.
“Hi, Harry,” he waved.
Mr. Truman shaded his eyes and smiled when he recognized his friend. "Hi, Paul.”
Grandpa grinned and then said, “Okay, Bobby. Let’s get out of here before this Democrat stuff sticks to the tires…”
The Knight family, Laura and John and six kids, manage to survive, no thrive, on $4-thousand dollars a year. That’s something to sing about. On their farm, music is all around them.
Ready for a happy puppy story? Sure you are. George Mahle takes pups on a 4,200-mile odyssey to loving arms.
https://www.today.com/news/puppy-rescuer-takes-dogs-4-200-mile-odyssey-loving-arms-2D79517768
Stacey Hansen, a fire fighter in San Jose, California, found an old dog tag while vacationing in Vietnam. It belonged to Marine Corporal Steven Zucroff who died during the War - the day after Mother's day -- his 21st year. She brought Steven's dog tag home. His brother Brad lived just an hour away, They met in a park overlooking the Pacific near Stacey's fire station. Brad carried an old box with his brother's things.
"You've seen his name," he said, as the two walked across the bluff and sat on a bench, "Now you should see the person.”
He lifted the lid and pulled out a picture. It was not the image of a weary warrior Stacey expected.
Wisdom is found in unexpected places. Tools for some of the first microsurgeries were invented in a garage. An out of work truck driver tinkered and perfected them until they changed our world.
Amish Country. Most of the kids on this tiny high school basketball team are shorter than their coach, but at the turn of the century, they won 49 or their first 53 games. A record unmatched in the entire county.
Peter Holworth is a foster parent to hundreds of sick little seals that wash up on his shore. Some are near death from starvation when he finds them. Peter nurses these babies back to health.
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.
It’s high time for something silly. “High” is the appropriate word. I don’t endorse or condone what George Contos has done. He simply had a personal plan to make good health fun. You see, George spent 50 years pouring drinks behind Benders Bar. He wanted to spend another 50 on the other side. So, each day he worked out at the YMCA. George was 90 years old at the time. He could do 1-thousand sit ups without stopping. Contos spent his mornings at the Y, so he could spend his afternoons at Benders, drinking Boiler Makers. His health plan worked for him. He was rarely ill. "I promised my wife, I would have just one drink. One at a time.”
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.
A lot of folks have asked how I got started searching for the stories of ordinary people. I remember the moment. It set me on a path that I have follow to this day. I had come to Miami, Oklahoma, to shoot a documentary. Artist Charles Banks Wilson’s most ambitious project. I had no idea back then how that work would change my life. Wilson convinced me that country would be better served if we listened more to people who don't have titles in front of their names.
One of Baltimore’s most dangerous neighborhoods has a special gift. It’s a blueprint for peace and its working. You could not find a more likely place for peace on earth to begin. But Rabbi Gela Ruskin is celebrating a Jewish sabbath in a Catholic high school. Baltimore’s Saint Frances Academy may be the first in the country with a full time rabbi on the faculty. Every junior in this Catholic school is required to take a full year of Jewish studies. Some think that is something a devout Christian did not need to do. But not school president Sister John Frances.
Remember the first time you sat on Santa’s lap? It was perhaps the most important speech of your life. Blow it here, you could end up with a sweater. We visited a unique toy workshop. For 35 years, volunteers have met once a week in an old sheep barn to make toys — year round — for children whose lives are as rough as theirs used to be.
This is for all those who are tired of credit card traditions at Christmas. People in Lake Palmer, Colorado, gather at the town hall for what looks and sounds like an Easter egg hunt. They set off every year to find a special log that will light the darkest days of the year. A yule log. Hidden in the hills above the town.
Kick back with a holiday treat, the American Story Hour Long Special. Filled with stories that will make you smile. Grab the egg nog and enjoy. Ho. Ho. Ho.
Folks in Boldon, Georgia proudly call their town, "the Briar Patch." Like Brer' Fox, they outwitted hard times, terror and indifference to bring us a Christmas Carol unique in all the world. It is called "the shout" an old West African word for "circle." The congregation of the Mount Calvary Baptist church is the last who can carol it. Early missionaries didn't want the slaves to sing the shout because it reminded slaves of home. Down through the years, this congregation has cradled the oldest Black spiritual in America. A Joyful noise, indeed.
The heart is the ultimate muscle. It can lift a heavy burden and make life easier. Those who meet Amy Wall notice her heart first. She was born deaf, the nerves in her ears, incurably damaged. “You can’t rebuild that inner ear,” her doctor, Matthew Bucko told me. “That is like trying to put a new brain into someone.” Amy’s brother and sister asked their mom, if they could pray for a miracle. She was skeptical.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
No child ever asks what Santa would like for Christmas.
I was pondering that point while shuffling in a long line waiting to see St. Nick. A little girl sprang onto his lap.
“I want a Barbie doll,” she announced.
“I want a Barbie!” her sister said.
“You want a Barbie, too,” the bearded man nodded.
“And some doll clothes,” the little girl poked his red coat.
“I want some doll clothes, too,” her sister said.
“Oh, boy,” sighed the Jolly Old Elf. “We definitely have an echo in here.”
This one, just needs a hug. He is more than a storefront Santa. The twinkle in his eye is love, not sales. His workshop is filled with the glitter of little kids’ dreams. But, he’s not making toys. Santa and his elves are making electric wheelchairs. The first, he built for a baby in Vietnam. She had lost both of her legs to a land mine. Santa wore a different uniform then. He was Marine major Ed Butcher. There have been 11-hundred wheelchairs since.
Tim and Wesley Friesen think the Wright Brothers intended to open the skies to everyone, not just professional pilots. They have formed a company called Wrong Brothers Aviation to prove their point. They teach non-pilots how to fly by themselves. The motorized hang gliders they use are so simple, they do not require a pilots license. One big drawback. A student's first flight is solo.