Where a Game is Not a Bottom Line  

by | Jul 14, 2026 | Blog, Hiding in History's Shadow | 0 comments

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.

  • Mobile Doctor

     We’ve got better medicine these days, but perhaps something has been lost along the way.  There’s a doctor who’s trying to bring back that personal touch.  Dr. Jim Anderson drives the office to his patients.  “I get less for a house call than an Airconditioning repairman,” he smiles.  He does his own repairs on the mobile clinic to keep patient costs low. 

  • “When My Kids Smile, the Terrorists Lose”  

    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. Her husband, Robert, was left to care for a 2-year-old daughter and a baby boy with Down syndrome.

    Five years later, the Alonso’s spent that 9/11 anniversary in the park, near a memorial that their neighbors built to Janet and all the other parents from their New York City suburb who went to work that day but never came home.

    Robby wandered to a wall filled with names as his father and sister played catch nearby. “Right here,” he said, pointing to Janet Alonso’s name etched in marble. 

    “This was my mommy.”

    The little boy leaned over and scraped his fingers back and forth across his mother’s name. His father watched, then rubbed his own hands together, as if he could scour away painful thoughts.

    Robby drew his fingers to his mouth, kissed them and gently pressed them on his mother’s name. “Mama,” he whispered.

    We all think about 9/11 once a year. The Alonsos live it every day.

  •  Saving Soles and Souls  

     Most people only witnessed the tragic events of 9/11.  It was my fate to live it.   I moved to New York City at the beginning of the century to work full time for the TODAY Show.  A year later, I was standing outside a little chapel that survived the hell that leveled skyscrapers of concrete and steel. 

    Terrorists had crashed planes into the World Trade Center.  A dozen modern buildings toppled all around, but St. Paul’s — pieced together with brick and timber — stood without so much as a broken window.

    The Rev. Daniel Matthews, rector of the parish of Trinity Church, walked with me through the church’s graveyard, which was covered in ash. The dust of the dead had settled in the chapel cemetery.

    Matthews stopped to dust off a headstone. “You know what everyone in the neighborhood is calling St. Paul’s, don’t you? The Little Chapel That Stood.” He looked up and smiled.

    “The most astounding thing for me was not the soot and the dust, but the paper,” he continued. “There must have been 10 million pieces. Everybody’s desk wound up flying out the window.”

  • Old School Football

    When Stan Smagala was born, some football teams still wore leather helmets.  At 43 he finally made the team.  At the time, he became the oldest college football player in the country.   To be able to play, Stan set aside his successful insurance business and became a full time student at Moraine Valley Community.  The campus malt shop had changed a bit in 23 years, but not Stan.  He was convinced he could still play football.  He practiced with his son until he could run 40 yards in 4.6 seconds.  Stan made the team, but he broke his ribs, jammed two fingers and sprained his ankle.  Football isn’t his only passion.  He likes to stay up until 4 in the morning, playing base in a band.  Stan showed up for this first game four hours later.  

  • Missing Mom on 9/11

    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.”

  •  9/11 Story that Inspired “Come from Away”

    Americans open their hearts and wallets all the time, but rarely do we hear about what the world gives to us and that seems just as important.  On the eve of 9/11 there were some villages in Newfoundland, Canada, where unemployment hovered as high as fifty percent, but that remote island in the North Atlantic—Canada’s poorest province—set a mark for charity, worthy of the history books.  I was one of the first to tell their story, traveling to Newfoundland as winter set in.  Later, it became a hit Broadway musical.

    LET’S MEET THE REAL PEOPLE WHO HELPED US IN THAT DARK HOUR. 

  • Road to Nowhere

    You ever wonder why cowboys seldom sing songs about a bus?  Buses fill the lonesome spaces the stage coach left behind.  Yet, there are no tales of Bus drivers derring-do. No teary eyed nostalgia.  Bus drivers may not have settled the west, but they sure move it around.  

  • Choices in the Autumn of Life

    The autumn of life brings choices.  Decisions.  Emil Kech was 73.  Age was beginning to nag him like a bad cold.  An arthritic ankle threatened to lock Keck out of the forest he loves.  Emil and his wife Penny were the only workers in the U.S. Forest Service who lived full time in the wilderness.  

  • A Coach for Those Who Will Never be Stars

    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.  

  • Lawyer Sawyer

    Josh Powell was born in Kentucky hill country and raised on a farm.  He worked his way through law school in Atlanta, landed a job with one of the city’s best known law firms and then gave it all up to run a one-man sawmill.

  • Dust Bowl Survivors

    The Great Depression did not begin with the Stock Market Crash.  It began with dust.  Dust that swept from a hundred million acres.  Texas to Montana.  Day after day for 10 years.  It fell on the Great Plains like a coffee colored snow.  Killing cattle and covering crops.  12 million tons of dust fell on Chicago.  4 pounds for every person in the city.  The rest soared on toward the Atlantic.  Ships 300 miles east of Philadelphia had dust on their decks.  Most farm families moved to California, but some stayed.  And survived. 

  • An Artist Who Paints with Nature  

    Jimmy Lee Suddeth drew his first picture in the dirt.  It washed he away with the evening rains.  He never had time for formal training.  Never went to town for art supplies.  He made his own from nature. Now his paintings, made entirely of natural material, hang in art galleries and fetch big bucks.  

  • Migrant Mona Lisa Update

    Florence Thompson’s picture haunted the nation.  Her grandson saw the photograph hanging inside a G.I.’s tent in Vietnam.  The face had been printed black and the Black soldier who owned it swore she was Black.  Florence and her story had not yet been found.  But that frozen moment of her life, that picture, writes its own story in each of us.

  • Millionaire Monks

    Father Bernard McCoy found printer cartridges “sinfully expensive.” So he convinced his fellow monks at Our Lady of Spring Bank Abbey to form a company called Laser Monks, vowing to ship all sorts of products for less. The monks became millionaires. It didn’t last.

  • Urban Pioneers

    Who does not yearn to live life more simply?  To find a place where time is not sliced too thin for thought.  Daniel Stalb and his wife Kristen decided to try.  They managed to live a comfortable life by doing what seemed to he impossible, living off the land in the middle of the city. They plowed up their lawn.  Planted a big garden and set out to feed their family of four on what they produce in their backyard.

  • Beyond Sight

    Pete Eckert began to see the day he went blind.  Photography may be the least likely career for a man who has no sight, but Eckert believes you don’t have to see — to have a vision of what life can be.  “I found that my other senses brought enough information to my mind’s eye to establish some kind of link to the outside world, a visual link,” Eckert says.  He takes pictures in familiar places. Places he’d been before going blind. A braille compass helps him find the light.  Eckert memorizes the room, making mental notes of where sounds bounce off corners.  When he hears something, he automatically translates that into a visual image.  Blindness rewired his brain to feel the sounds that bounce off bones.  Sort of like an X-ray.  What he “sees” is stunning.

  • Any U.S. College for Free

    /A small town is booming after years of decline, all because of a promise made and kept. Most of us have people who set the pace for our lives. Claiborne Deming leads with hope.  He has given the kids in Eldorado, Arkansas, a promise.  Anyone who goes to high school for four years, can attend any college in the country on his company’s dime.  

  • Freebytes Computers

    Charlie Shoefield and his friends wondered what happened to all those old computers littered along the information highway.  Left to gather dust when companies upgraded their systems.  They set out to find them.  Fix them up and give them to charity.  The kids sold some of their old computers to pay the rent on their repair shop.  Started scrounging tools from neighborhood businesses.  And then went out looking for more obsolete computers.  Charlie persuaded 27 companies in Atlanta to give him 150 computers.  He and his pals were just 15.  They gave back something rare.  Something most adults cannot do.  “Some can,” admits Charlie, “but they’ll charge $150 an hour to do it.”  That’s too expensive for the 34 charities that lined up for Charlie’s services, so many he formed a non-profit company called “Freebytes.”  All together, the kids had worked a thousand hours — for free.

  • Puppets

    Mike Manteo has hung onto his childhood things.  They hang in the dust-combed darkness of his electrical shop.  Puppets.  The last of their kind. Carved from solid oak, dressed in buffed brass.  Polished and repaired by a proud man who found in them the adventure he dreamed for his own life.

  • Thriving on $5,000 a Year

    Folks in Missoula, Montana, know Kim Williams well.  Each season she shops the back yards and the alleys bartering for fruit and vegetables others let rot.  She lives on $5-thousand dollars a year.  Kim and her husband Mel don’t merely survive.  They have a good time.  They believe small moments of life are just as important as the big news on this planet.  Not more important, but just as important.  

  • Saved from Extinction

    St. Catherine’s Island, Georgia, is the last great barrier island untouched by real estate development.  For nearly a century, the place was a rich man’s playground, last owned by Edward J. Noble, the fellow who made millions by punching little holes in candy and calling them Life Savers.  Today, his island is saving life itself. 

  • Breakfast for Less than a Tip

    Franny Ward charges only $1 for breakfast at her restaurant in Yates Center, Kansas, a price unchanged for years.  Coffee is dime, if that’s all you’re going to have.  How does she stay in business?  She sells 200 meals a day.  That’s enough for Franny.  If folks can’t come, she brings the food to them.  Charges an extra dollar.

  • Alone with the Beauty She Creates

    The mirrors seldom see movement.  The doors are mostly closed.  But music comes from a solitary window, six hours a day, seven days a week.  Inside, Charlotte Bergen lives her life alone with the beauty she creates. Four times a year, the reclusive woman emerges from her home and heads to Carnegie Hall where she conducts the American Symphony Orchestra. It’s an expensive treat.  She pays for herself.

  • A Tugboat with Sails  

    There was a time when ships chased and caught the wind for profit, carrying cargo to the world.  Like skinny ties, the past is circling back again.  In Norfolk harbor, Virginia, there’s a tugboat unlike any other.  It’s called a Tugantine.  Part tugboat.  Part sailboat.  It started as a joke.  When her captain, Lane Briggs, noticed a 28 percent saving in fuel, the sails stayed on.

  • Young at Heart Singers

    The Young at Heart Singers in North Hampton, Massachusetts, have been entertaining the world for four decades.  This is not your typical senior citizen chorus.  They give their own take on contemporary songs at the top of the charts.  You won’t believe how GOOD they are.

  • Hocus Pocus

    A real life Harry Potter and his friends learn magic in a school millions pass by every day.   Like the best magic, it hides in plain sight. 

  • Woman who Saved the Elks

    For more than half a century, Mardy Murie lived beneath the spidery ice crystals and the ghost trees of the Grand Tetons.  Some say she is a treasure in these mountains.  She and her husband, Olaf, wrote their names across the history of conservation in America. They came to the Tetons in 1927.  Raised a family in the wilderness following the dwindling elk herd.  Their research saved the elks for all time.  

  • Combat Comic

    Bobby Henline is the kind of guy who could make the faces on Mount Rushmore grin.  He fought on the front lines in Iraq during Dessert Storm.  Went back after 9/11 three more times. Then a roadside bomb blew off his face.  He survived.  What’s he doing now?  Making us laugh.  

  • Honeymoon Trail

     Memory is too fragile a thread from which to hang history.  The old west is different from what we see in the movies.  It was America’s forge, and the pioneers who passed through it had spirits of hammered steel. Mormon settlers in northeastern Arizona traveled along a dusty 70-mile wagon trail to reach the St. George Temple in Utah. The trail eventually became known as the “Honeymoon Trail” because so many newlyweds made the passage. 105 years after its opening, I joined a wagon train, where Mormon couples still re-enact the romantic journey of their forebears. 

    https://youtu.be/5B_Cn7igIpo

  • Woodstock

    My most memorable big crowd gathered in a muddy field called Woodstock, with signs promising “Peace and Love.”  That was 55 years ago today.  I went “back to the garden,” for an anniversary concert 25 years later.  It was still muddy.   Rained most of the day, but more than a quarter of a million people partied on.  Paramedics were busy fixing broken ankles and arms.  750 people were taken to the hospital.  Some concert goers set out islands of straw to keep from sliding away. Others folded up tents and beat feet for home.  A few looked to the skies for a face wash.  And stuck it out.  Re-staging Woodstock was a lot like trying to recapture the moments of a senior prom.  Like music, it can’t be touched.  Only felt.

    • Mobile Doctor
      We’ve got better medicine these days, but perhaps something has been lost along the way. There’s a doctor who’s trying to bring back that personal touch. Dr. Jim Anderson drives the office to his patients. “I get less for a house call than an Airconditioning repairman,” he smiles. He does his own repairs on the mobile clinic to keep patient costs low.
    • “When My Kids Smile, the Terrorists Lose”  
      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. Her husband, Robert, was left to care for a 2-year-old daughter and a baby boy with Down syndrome. Five years later, the Alonso’s spent that 9/11 anniversary in the park,… Read more: “When My Kids Smile, the Terrorists Lose”  
    •  Saving Soles and Souls  
       Most people only witnessed the tragic events of 9/11.  It was my fate to live it.   I moved to New York City at the beginning of the century to work full time for the TODAY Show.  A year later, I was standing outside a little chapel that survived the hell that leveled skyscrapers of… Read more:  Saving Soles and Souls  
    • Old School Football
      When Stan Smagala was born, some football teams still wore leather helmets.  At 43 he finally made the team.  At the time, he became the oldest college football player in the country.   To be able to play, Stan set aside his successful insurance business and became a full time student at Moraine Valley Community. … Read more: Old School Football
    • Missing Mom on 9/11
      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… Read more: Missing Mom on 9/11

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