Legend is a word we use easily. A team wins thirteen games – legendary. A guy tosses one good season of baseball – he’s a legend. A single Saturday afternoon thrill – legendary. But what of the legends who build quietly, year in and year out, until they touch us all. For sixty summers Jimmy Porter gently coaxed the kids of Carollton, Texas, to play the game he loved.
- He Sees More Deeply than Most
Willie Morris wrote 19 Best Sellers. When he died, he left something to help someone who had never read them. His corneas. Morris gave them to two men he had never met. One Black. One White. All three were born in Mississippi.
- Marbles
Naoma, West Virginia, is a marble shooters Mecca. This little town has had four national and one world champion. Before kids learn to tie their sneakers, they know the joy of knuckles in the dirt.
- Veteran’s Babies
I remember a man who said his father was a folded flag on the mantle. Let’s remember the bill some people must pay for patriotism. Red was the last vivid image Matt Keil remembers, the day he stopped walking, the day an Iraqi sniper shot him in the neck. Matt and his wife Tracy were determined not to let that war wound limit their lives. They longed to have a baby, but were told that might not happen. They tried anyway, even as Matt battled back to health. One day their doctor showed them three tiny hearts. Tracy was pregnant with triplets.
- Sing in the Shower and Dream
Most days you’ll find Jay Reinke singing to the audience behind his eyelids, the one that crowds his mind, while he measures floors for a living. Thirty years ago, he started performing the songs of Jay and the Americans, a pioneer rock group that twirled to stardom with Chubby Checker, opened for the Beatles and had 23 hits. This is for all of us who sing in the shower and dream.
- Music IS Life
What is it about creativity that keeps some folks active long after the factory workers have set aside their tools. Perhaps it’s that simple urge to make something that keeps tugging them back. Telling them to keep busy and stay alive. Stanley Chappell has a profile chiseled with age. A face Charles Dickens might have dreamed up. Ebenezer Scrooge on the day after. For most of last century, he hunched over musical podiums in Seattle, Washington, pouncing on notes like a bird of prey.
- Rockin’ Recliners
Slim and Zella Mae Cox have the most listened to furniture store in the country. Some people do come to buy furniture, of course, but if you want a sofa on Saturday afternoon, you’ve got to carry out the audience that’s sitting on it. There’s a lot more rocking here than La-Z-Boy recliners.
- Saving the First Draft of History
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.
- If America Had a King
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?
- The President Who Never Owned a Home
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…”
- D.C. Samaritan
There is a side of Washington, DC, we seldom see on Nightly News. It is far removed from the ruffles and flourishes of the Nation’s Capitol. Here, survival is no global affair. Calvin Woodland’s business is begging. For decades, he hustled these streets, raising money to help the drug addicts and dead end kids who lived in his neighborhood. Home was the grimy public housing projects southeast of the Capitol. Calvin Woodland represents something in short supply around here. A hero.
- An Image to Show They Lived
Most everywhere you go out west, you find that a photographer has been there before. People didn’t always care where they’d end up, but they wanted the folks back home to see they had arrived. Glenn Altman has been taking their portraits most of his 81 years, offering his neighbors something special — a beautiful image to remind the world they had lived.
- Until It’s Not Here No More
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.
- Found Art
Think of what you drive by every day and don’t see. Douglas Geiss notices more than most. He and his cousins live in a five acre forest filled with wonder. They found a mermaid riding a yellow submarine. And a fish made out of pick axes. Created by their grandfather, Nate Nichols, a farmer who also planted art. Nate would weld together whatever he saw in worn out tools. None of them made him much money, so every day for 25 years, he hid them in his woods.
“Everybody else looks up in the clouds and says, ‘Oh, that cloud looks like a dragon,’ Nate’s son Josh said. “My dad looked down at the ground and said, ‘That wrench looks like a monkey.’”
Nate Nicholls’ sculptures so filled his heart, he felt compelled to give them life. The farmer was working on a metal frog last summer when his heart failed and he died at 52. Last fall his children buried him beneath flowers he’d made from water faucet handles.
- YouTube Star
Here’s a story about one of the most popular people on the internet. He’s not a celebrity. Just an ordinary guy. Crafting an effective visual story about him involved more than an interesting headline. After a brief phone interview with a Kyle Lindsey, a young man who had become an YouTube star, I crafted a story outline. First, I tried to answer the “So What?” test. Why would anyone want to pay attention. How does a seemingly ordinary person become an internet star? Then, I searched for the surprises in the information I had gathered during my phone interview. Those would become the twists and turns in my tale. I stacked the surprises so they would flow logically from start to finish. (For example, you wouldn’t show a child going to school and then waking up.) Click to see the finished story:
- Lady Eye
Virginia Snyder looks like the little old lady Boy Scouts help across the street. You can’t always tell a book by its cover. Same with people. At retirement age, Virginia opened her own detective agency. With no prior police training, she became one of only two women in Floria to get a Class A Investigator’s license. The cases she handles are none too dainty — murders, muggings, drug sales. She keeps a trunk load of disguises for safety.
- Girls of Winter
When Ethel Lehmann was young, she was never more than a pebble kick from a ball park. She quit to have 5 kids. Now, she’s the first woman to try out for the Kids and Kubs, a team whose rookies are 75.
- Eagle Flight
Forty percent of the kids in this Newark, New Jersey neighborhood did not finish high school back in the 1980’s. Russell White changed that back in the 1980’s. He made thousands of street kids a startling offer. Learn to fly an air plane. For free. Some kids flew solo before they turned 12. His Eagle Flight has sent 6 kids on to the Air Force academy. The rest? 8 out of 10 go to college.
- Forest Folks
The Hoh rain forest. A cathedral of trees. It lies between Seattle and the sea. No place in the continental U.S. gets more rain. 2 feet some months. Marilyn Lewis and her daughter lived alone in this wilderness. They are the 4th generation of women out here.
- Wetsuit CEO
A new way to bond with your boss. Forget golf. Go surfing. Out in San Diego, opportunity comes in waves. More than 300 biomedical companies now have people in that surf around San Diego. The best ideas don’t always come in labs under artificial light. Out here they can meet the kind of people who are determined not to follow the same path, but leave a wake.
SURF’S UP.
- Town Denial (Susan Smith Murders)
Susan Smith murdered her two little boys. Strapped them into their car seats. Stepped out and pushed them into a lake. She told police she was carjacked. A black man drove away with her sons still inside. For nine days, Smith made dramatic pleas on national television for their safe return. After an intensive investigation and nationwide search, she finally confessed to drowning her two sons. Was sentenced to life in prison without a chance of parole until she was past childbearing age. I covered that sad saga for 9 months.
- Everglades Photographer
Clyde Butcher lives in a wide river of grass. He is determined to save its beauty. One photograph at a time. Butcher is as comfortable in this swamp as any man easing into a bath. He spends his days deep in the Big Cyprus National Preserve searching for what others have not seen. Sometimes the place never seen is the place we simply pass by.
- The Last Unmapped Place
Dave Williams has a job that would frustrate Daniel Boone. He must find 55 surveyor’s benchmarks in a forest bigger than Connecticut. They are the size of a silver dollar.
- Homemade Jamz
Elvis Presley grew up listening to old blues players and used their sound to revolutionize music. Now it may be happening again in Tupelo, Mississippi. It’s not the King that got kids hopping like crickets on hot corn. It’s a 16 year old, who sings like he’s had seven wives.
- Monks of Waelder, Texas. (Cowboy Monks)
Everything the monks of Waelder, Texas, touch makes a lot of money. A LOT of money. So much for that vow of poverty.
- Robo Legs
We all remember what happened when two lights blinked bright in Boston’s old North Church. Paul Revere rode away and the American Revolution began, but 25 years before that fateful night, John Childs jumped from the same belfry three times, holding a big umbrella with wings, thus surviving one of the world’s first parachute jumps.
Nearly three centuries later, Army Ranger Monty Reed wasn’t so fortunate. He broke his back when a parachute failed to open. After decades of rehabilitation, he made an amazing recovery and then created something for those who cannot walk.
- Put Me In Coach
Lance Hershberger coached high school baseball in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In his spare time, he looked for little kids who’s abilities do not measure up to their love of the game. One year Lance watched four baseball teams tie for the Fort Wayne high school championship. Nearly every player was one he had coached.
- Who Created Baseball?
See this guy. Abner Doubleday. Say his name. What comes to mind? Inventor of baseball. Right? Every year, nearly 300,000 people pass through the Baseball Hall of Fame in upstate New York, built to honor this Civil War Hero. Thank Al Spalding for that. He manufactured Sporting equipment and saw dollars draining away when an English employee, Henry Chadwick, pointed out that baseball came from Great Britain. Kids there called it Rounders. Spalding argued the game was one hundred percent American. Chadwick explained that Rounders is played with a bat and ball, a pitcher and a batter who runs counter clockwise around the bases. Case closed. Not quite.
- Cops n’ Cons
Time to play a football classic. No, not the Cotton Bowl. One you may not have seen. In 1977, a few Tulsa police officers saw a Burt Reynold’s movie called “The Longest Yard,” in which a jailed football player organizes a prison team to play a team of guards.
The officers were inspired to stage their own game between police and convicts. The result is Tulsa’s annual Cops-Cons Football Game to benefit Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.
Officer Ron Mayfield, a running back, said the game can have its tense moments. “We meet a lot of guys that we personally have put in jail. It makes for an interesting game, but at the end it’s like old friends” who have learned to laugh together. I was the play by play announcer back then. The memory still makes me smile.
The Cons have two big advantages: Time to practice together – two hours a day, five nights a week – and a high percentage of returning starters. Unless a player is paroled or gets into trouble, he has a lifetime contract.
- Surviving an Earthquake
Betty Kelly still cannot cross a bridge without flinching. Even now. 33 years later. On this day in 1989, Betty and her husband were driving high over San Francisco Bay, just as an Earthquake struck. A section of the Bay Bridge dropped like a deadly trapped door. The Kelly’s honked their horn to warn others. But Anna Annalonghu died. Everything Adeen Murphy owned was 4 flights up a twisted staircase. Adeen had lived through a thousand air raids in World War Two London, so she crossed police barrier and found something she had bought only a week before — $2-thousand dollars worth of Wedgewood China.
- Ballet Dancer
Elliot Feld would hide his dance slippers in a brief case, so his neighbors would think he had an ordinary job. He would become one of America’s finest ballet choreographers, but ballet is still out of the question for most of the kids in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. Too expensive. He did not recruit from the specialized schools for the performing arts. He traveled to the public classrooms to look for ordinary 8 year olds with potential.
