There’s no question that Walt Disney’s life changed the world. As the mastermind behind Mickey Mouse and the entire Disney enterprise, his life’s work has inspired children and adults alike for decades. And when he passed away due to lung cancer in 1966, the world truly lost one of the greats. This exclusive, rare interview with the man himself gives you an insight into just how brilliant a visionary he was.
However, Disney made an impact in another (little-known) way, as well. Legend has it that he wrote one last message before being hospitalized prior to his death, says Disney historian Jim Korkis. Titled “TV Projects In Production: Ready for Production or Possible for Escalation and Story,” the note listed four names: Ron Miller, 2 Way Down Cellar, Kurt Russell, and CIA—Mobley.
Still, the note’s true meaning remained a mystery for decades. What did Disney’s last message to the world intend to convey?
According to former Disney archivist Dave Smith, who found the note, Disney was listing possible future projects for his franchise. And one name stood out: Kurt Russell’s.
Disney had expressed his awe of the 15-year-old’s talent before, praising him on television and personally ensuring that the boy received a studio contract. In October 1966, just months before his death, Disney even predicted “a great acting future” for Russell. But ultimately, it was Disney’s last words that ended up launching Russell’s career as an actor. And that’s not the only time Disney’s words proved life-changing—these timeless Walt Disney quotes continue to inspire people around the world.
Russell confirmed this suspicion in a 2013 episode of The View. “I assume, as [does] everybody else, that he was talking about some movie that he was thinking about having me in… I don’t know what to make of it other than that,” Russell said.
The young actor would go on to star in dozens of Disney films, including The One and Only and Original Family Band. So in the end, we have Disney to thank for one of the most memorable (and hunkiest!) talents on-screen. Of course, Disney fanatics may already be familiar with this story, but you may not know these mind-blowing facts you never knew about Disneyland.
They say everything is bigger in Texas. While that may be true, some of the best things in Texas are quite small. Case in point: tiny Mount Vernon, a town of just under 3,000 people tucked in the state’s northeast corner, about 100 miles from Dallas. You probably haven’t heard of it, unless maybe you like to fish for bass and know about Lake Cypress Springs, twice named the prettiest lake in the state by D Magazine. But if you do stumble upon Mount Vernon, you might just get a notion to stay.
That happens a lot around here, and it’s worth noting how remarkable that is. Across the country, small towns have become an endangered species. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, half of rural communities have fewer residents today than they did in 2000. But the population in and around Franklin County, where Mount Vernon is the county seat, is projected to grow by 7.4 percent in the next five years. What’s the source of Mount Vernon’s magic? Actually, there are a few.
One is the boomerangs—folks who grew up here but moved away, only to realize they missed their hometown’s unique sense of community. “My husband and I lived in Austin for a decade before I convinced him to come home with me,” says Lauren Lewis, a manager for a local restaurant and construction company. “I missed having that sense of place that comes with living in a town where you know everyone. Many of my closest friends have parents that are my parents’ friends, and our grandparents even hung out together. We grow strong roots here!”
Tom Wilkinson was born in Mount Vernon 87 years ago and moved back after he retired from his career as a college English professor in Dallas. Like many of his neighbors, Wilkinson can trace his ancestors back to the pioneers who settled here in the 1870s. And like many, he values the simple life you can’t easily find in the big city. “People are still polite; they hold the door open for you,” he says, “especially if you’re old and crotchety, though I like to think I’m not crotchety.”
But there are plenty of new names in the Mount Vernon booster club, and they’ve given the place a jolt of energy. Greg Ostertag landed here after 11 seasons in the NBA, mostly with the Utah Jazz. The towering seven-foot-two-inch former center grew up near Dallas and had settled in Scottsdale, Arizona. But he told his wife, Shannon Ostertag, on their very first date that he wanted to move back to Texas and become a gentleman farmer. (They both smirk at the term gentleman, as Greg likes to goof around and turns up in a few highlight reels getting into it with Shaquille O’Neal.) Shannon, a native Californian, had never even been to Texas, and she’d never lived in a small town. Her first glimpse of Mount Vernon was on the Internet.
Family HandymanMeet Greg Ostertag
“It’s got this great school system and this little Mayberry downtown,” says Shannon. In Scottsdale, her son, Trevor Ruelas, went to a high school that had more kids than the entire population of their new town.
Mount Vernon has the kind of big hearts you tend to find in a small town. For instance, when the local constable was diagnosed with cancer last year, ten-year-old Lola McKellar set up a lemonade stand to raise money for his treatments. In 2015, when a 350-year flood sent water rushing into local homes, an army of volunteers showed up to get a wheelchair-bound neighbor and his wife to higher ground, then came back to help rebuild. On the beams, volunteers wrote Bible verses: “He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and mire. He set my feet on solid ground and steadied me as I walked along.” (Psalm 40:2)
Family HandymanSmall Town Charm
Preserving and honoring the past has been key to helping Mount Vernon survive. The Ostertags and a few other families have restored and reopened some of the empty storefronts, including the old barbershop, built more than 100 years ago. After a nine-month renovation, it became a coffee shop called Watermelon Mills, named for the barber, William “Watermelon” Mills, who always had a pot of coffee on for his customers.
“When we opened, people would come in and point to a corner and say, ‘That’s where I got my first haircut,’” says Shannon.
The Ostertags also bought the old general store, M.L. Edwards & Co., and turned it into a combination bistro/boutique/event space. (Shannon even persuaded her ex-husband, Henry Ruelas, to move to town and head up the project.) Wander in on any given day and you might find a book club discussion, a Coffee Ladies meet-up, or a work session for the local genealogy group among the tables of people chatting over cups of coffee and plates of food. The space won an award from the Texas Downtown Association for best historical restoration for a town with fewer than 50,000 residents.
Family HandymanRestoring Mount Vernon, Texas
“I can only describe it as a butterfly effect,” says Amy Briscoe, who owns the local gym and a funky resale shop called the Emporium on Lower Main. “Once the Ostertags started investing, everyone else started stepping up their game—me included! Awnings were getting painted, storefronts were getting shined up, repairs that had long been forgotten suddenly got remembered. We saw a newfound sense of pride start to bloom.”
While Mount Vernonites have a healthy appreciation for their past, they embrace the new too. In 2006, a recruiter for the local hospital was trying to lure Dr. Jean Latortue, a Haitian native who had become a general practitioner in upstate New York. He and his wife, Marie Coq-Latortue, agreed that Mount Vernon, which they could barely find on a map, was not for them. But the recruiter kept pushing, even buying them plane tickets so they could see the place for themselves.
The couple’s plan was to show up and say thanks but no thanks. “Our minds were made up,” says Marie. But once they got to town, something surprising happened. “Before we knew it, in unison, my husband and I responded that we would think about it,” says Marie. They moved to Mount Vernon several months later. “God had a bigger plan, and we were part of it,” she says. When the hospital closed in 2014, the doctor couldn’t bear to leave his neighbors without medical care, so he opened the Franklin County Rural Health Clinic, with Marie heading up the local assisted-living facility.
“You can come to a small community like this and your individual effort actually makes a huge difference,” says Shannon.
Michael and Kathrine Lee chose Mount Vernon as the home base for their Pure Hope Foundation, which helps victims of human trafficking get a fresh start. The Lees bought a building to make a safe house for young women, and they are closing on a bigger property so they can help more people. “A lot of towns might push away from what we’re doing,” says Kathrine. “But here everyone has been amazingly supportive.”
In fact, when Michael pulled up in a U-Haul with a houseful of furniture donated by a local store, he got more than just a warm welcome. “The house we bought is right off the town square,” says Kathrine, “and he’s trying to figure out how he’s going to unload it all. The next thing you know, all the men from the bank walked over and asked, ‘Do you need some help?’ And in their suits and ties, they unloaded the furniture. It really is the definition of community here.”
When Shannon looks to the future, she has a vision for her adopted hometown. “I would love for Mount Vernon to have a square full of cars because all the businesses are open and people are hustling and bustling,” she says. “In my generation, kids would graduate high school and then leave because there were no jobs and no entertainment or culture. I would like for these kids that are approaching adulthood now to not leave. Especially mine.”
These days, there’s a lot going on, says Main Street Alliance manager Carolyn Teague. A new café is opening on the square. A film crew made a movie featuring hometown legend Don Meredith, a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1960s. Down the road, the Lowe’s distribution center is hiring. Sales tax revenue for the downtown has increased more than 275 percent in the past four years.
Now, Amy Briscoe says, “our downtown is the perfect balance of quaint small-town charm with a progressive something-is-about-to-happen vibe”—just as Shannon and others had envisioned.
“Trevor said to me, ‘Mom, I wish we had moved here when I was younger,’” says Shannon. “And I was like, ‘You know what? You’re right, buddy. I wish we would’ve moved here earlier too.’”
The Ostertags also made some improvements to their own home. One project they took on with the help of our colleagues at Family Handyman and Taste of Home was building an outdoor shed that doubles as a kitchen. Check out how the shed was built and how Taste of Home stylists made sure the design was not only welcoming but also functional.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Tom Frey reported to duty as a detective for the New York City Police Department. Like many on that fateful morning, he never imagined it would be the day his life changed forever. After the Twin Towers collapsed, Frey was assigned to Ground Zero where he set up DNA testing sites for families to bring personal items of loved ones to be tested and worked alongside a bucket brigade for rescue and recovery. When the debris was transferred to a landfill on Staten Island, Frey spent eight months painstakingly sifting through the dust and rubble, looking for human remains. “We worked for weeks with no days off, searching for body parts and pieces of the planes. In the very beginning, we only had paper masks at Ground Zero, but once we moved to the landfill we were given hazardous material suits. When the Red Cross brought us lunch each day we had to take the masks and hoods off to eat, and the white dust, asbestos, and whatever else from the rubble blew onto us and our food. It was really rough.” Even after the rubble had been cleared, Frey says he worked for years assisting in the identification of remains from the attacks and notifying families of victims.
“It caused a fire in my lungs”
In February 2016, Frey says everything “hit the fan.” After routine check-up and blood work with his doctor, Frey got a call from the nurse the following day. His white blood cells were elevated, and after more testing, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer common among first responders of 9/11 due to the toxic debris ingested when the towers collapsed. “I went through nine rounds of chemo and started having a little shortness of breath. I saw a pulmonologist who diagnosed me with pulmonary fibrosis—he said it was a combination of the debris dust and chemotherapy that caused it.” One of the chemotherapies Frey received contained bleomycin, and pulmonary fibrosis is a side effect. “I asked him what we do to treat it, and he said, ‘nothing.’ He said that the chemicals I breathed had created a sort of fire in my lungs, and it scarred them.”
Frey went home and researched the condition, and what he found shocked him. “It said I had three to five years to live. I thought I had written it down wrong. I went to my oncologist and told him what I read. I asked, ‘What do I do? This can’t be true.’ He said he was going to pray for me.” Pulmonary fibrosis is a progressive and fatal lung disease characterized by scarring in the lungs that reduces function. Symptoms include shortness of breath, dry cough, gradual weight loss, fatigue, aching joints, and clubbing of the tips of fingers and toes. About 200,000 Americans are affected by the disease, and 50,000 are diagnosed annually. There are many forms of the disease, and it can be caused by environmental exposure to toxins and certain medications, as in Frey’s case. Treatment options include medications to slow the progression of the disease, supplemental oxygen, steroids, and clinical trials. Shortness of breath is a symptom that should never be ignored—here are 58 others.
A new normal
After completing his chemotherapy treatment plan (minus the bleomycin), Frey began scouring the internet to learn more about pulmonary fibrosis. His searching led him to the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation, a site he says has made all the difference in his journey with the disease. “I saw that people on the website referred each other to the Mayo Clinic. I met with a doctor at the Jacksonville, Florida center and started a treatment plan. I started pulmonary rehabilitation and began using oxygen.” Frey’s cancer is now in remission and he will be eligible for a lung transplant once he has been cancer-free for five years. “I just keep moving. If you keep moving, you keep living.”
Many of Frey’s colleagues that responded to the World Trade Center attacks also have pulmonary fibrosis, as well as cancer due to the toxic chemicals they ingested during recovery efforts. “I know many from the police department have been diagnosed, and I’m sure the fire department is the same. A study recently came out showing that diagnoses’ are rising for the first responders of September 11th.” Frey’s lung function is currently at 50 percent, and he says it’s stable- a good sign. Here are 12 signs your lungs may be in trouble.
Today, the retired detective is an ambassador for the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation, traveling the country to encourage others with the disease. “It becomes an elephant in the room, you think maybe it will just go away, but it doesn’t. With every breath you know it’s there. If you have this, you have to go to the foundation’s website and get the resources. Go to the support group meetings. Doctors only have 15 minutes to offer you, but these people are going through the same thing. Some have lived with this for years. They give me hope.” Read on for 12 more secrets the government doesn’t want you to know about what happened on September 11.
Kim Stemple celebrating after a race. The simple message of the medals, she said, “is kindness.”
In 2012, Kim Stemple, a special-education teacher, found herself tethered to an IV in a Boston hospital being treated for one of several diseases she had been diagnosed with, including lupus and lymphoma. The normally ebullient Stemple was naturally getting very depressed. And then a friend gave her a medal. Make sure you’re aware of the silent lupus signs you shouldn’t ignore.
Before she got too sick to exercise, Stemple had been a marathon runner. The medal came from a racing partner who had just finished a half marathon in Las Vegas and hoped the keepsake would act as a kind of vicarious pick- me-up. It worked like a charm—and then some.
After Stemple hung the medal from her hospital IV pole, other patients said they wanted medals too. That got Stemple thinking. “A medal is a simple way to give a positive message,” she told pilotonline.com. And so was born her charity, We Finish Together, which collects medals from strangers— runners, dancers, swimmers, singers, and even spelling bee winners—and donates them to all sorts of people in need. Talk about meaningful acts of kindness that don’t cost a cent.
Recipients have included hospital patients, residents of homeless shelters, and veterans. Part of the process involves the donor writing a personalized note on the ribbon. “This gives them a connection to someone,” says Stemple. “If they receive a medal, they know someone cares.”
Can a simple medal really make a difference? Yes, says Joan Musarra, who suffers from pulmonary fibrosis. “I opened my package containing my new medal and the notes of positive, warm thoughts. I was overwhelmed,” she wrote to Stemple. “At that moment, I was sitting on my couch breathing through an oxygen cannula because my lungs have deteriorated so badly. It means so much to me to feel that I am not alone.” Read on for more moving stories about the kindness of strangers.
Phyllis and Darren Sudman brought their second child, Simon, home from the hospital in the fall of 2004. Everything was going along as smoothly as is possible with a newborn and a two-year-old—their daughter Sally. Like all new parents, the Philadelphia couple was busy trying to get Simon on a regular sleep schedule and encouraging Sally to bond with her new brother. Everything was going well—until the unimaginable happened.
“It was an exciting time,” Phyllis recalls. Simon was a healthy baby boy who scored high on the APGAR scale. (APGAR stands for “Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration” and is used to assess newborn health. The higher the APGAR score, the better the baby is doing.) “There were really no issues.”
And then, at four months, Simon died in his sleep. Doctors believed the cause to be SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), but the couple’s pediatrician told them to get their hearts checked. That’s when Phyllis learned she had long QT syndrome, a genetic heart condition marked by fast, chaotic heartbeats; it has been linked to up to 15 percent of all sudden infant deaths. Phyllis had no idea she had the condition because she had never experienced any symptoms. Research suggests that having your baby sleep like this can reduce the risk of SIDS.
“Once I was diagnosed, we knew we needed to do something more to make sure no other family had to go through what we did,” she says. The Sudman’s did something incredible: They founded Simon’s Heart, an organization that has since saved countless lives by raising awareness of sudden cardiac death, funding close to 19,000 free heart screenings (and counting) and providing 100 automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) in places where kids learn and play. AEDs can save someone in cardiac arrest by resetting the chaotic electrical activity in the heart—that’s why it’s crucial to know where the AED is at your gym. Basketball gyms may have the greatest need for these devices: A recent study found that the majority of sudden deaths in youth sports were heart-related and occurred most often in middle-school basketball players.
The group has been behind the passage of legislation known as Sudden Cardiac Arrest Prevention Act in 14 states—it encourages education on sudden cardiac arrest for students, athletes, parents, and coaches. Simon’s Heart also created Heartbytes, the first-ever youth heart digital registry of kids—their heart screenings, medical screenings, family history, and more—which researchers can tap for study data. So far, this data has been the basis of four studies presented at major medical conferences, and it’s helping change the standard of care. The Sudmans also created a crowd-funding platform to help youth facilities get AED devices.
The Sudmans and Simon’s Heart have even bigger goals: They’re hoping to change the standard of care for diagnosing newborns and young adults with conditions that can lead to sudden cardiac arrest and death. In the United States, children get a pulse oximetry exam at birth to check their blood oxygen level. This can reveal a congenital heart defect. After that, the doctor will listen to a newborn’s heart with a stethoscope, but research shows that a fuller heart screening—family history, physical exam, and a non-invasive measure of the heart’s electrical activity (ECG)—is much more effective at detecting heart conditions and preventing sudden cardiac arrest than just listening to the heart.
Steven A. Shapiro, DO, the Chair of Pediatrics at Abington Hospital-Jefferson Health in Abington, PA. has been involved with Simon’s Heart since the Sudman’s launched it. “If a baby dies of SIDS then mom, dad, and siblings should all get their hearts checked,” he says. There aren’t always warning signs, he says. The two most common risk factors are fainting during or after exercise and the sudden death of family member under the age of 50.
“The Sudmans could have crawled under a rock after Simon died and nobody would have blamed them, but instead they wanted Simon’s legacy to be that no other family goes through what they went through,” he says. “The legacy of Simon is to lessen the likelihood of a sudden cardiac event in childhood or young adulthood.” Just in case there isn’t an AED available, make sure you know how to perform CPR to help keep someone alive.
George Vorel, second from left, with employees who got a second chance. From left: Gregory Fowler, Kavin Mann, Zachary Allen, and Patrick Thunberg.
Jeramie Miller is the last guy you’d expect George Vorel to hire. After all, Vorel’s company, Envirosafe, is an industrial steel processor outside Pittsburgh where employees operate heavy equipment as they sandblast and paint steel used in bridges and buildings around the country. And Miller is a former drug user and dealer. What’s more, he introduced Vorel’s own daughter to heroin soon after she graduated from high school, in 1998.
It took Vorel’s daughter until 2005 to get clean. Once she was, she became a drug and alcohol counselor. Among her goals was to get her friend Jeramie clean too. He’d ended up in jail for selling and possessing drugs and aggravated assault, and she thought a job would help him get his life on track. “I remember her saying, ‘I’ll mention something to my dad,’” says Miller, now 40. “And I was like, ‘Huh? Are you sure? Your dad dad?’” Yes, George Vorel—the man who’d once chased this dangerous guy out of the house.
Vorel had always resisted hiring anyone with a record at Envirosafe. “This business is tough enough without bringing in addicts and criminals,” he would say. But Vorel, now 70, developed a newfound faith in his later years. Through his church, he became a teacher in a prison ministry. Empathy and forgiveness are important to him. “God equipped us to have a heart,” he says.
So Vorel offered Miller a job as a laborer and even invited his new employee to carpool. Miller was a nervous wreck the first time he settled into the passenger seat for the 70-minute trip. But “within five minutes, I relaxed,” he says. “I thought, OK, he’s human.”
Storytellers both, the men talked and talked. During their trips, Vorel would learn that Miller had once been a baseball phenom. Miller learned that he and Vorel both shared a birthday with Abe Lincoln: February 12. Soon, a genuine friendship flourished, as did Miller’s performance at work, where he was promoted to a supervisory role.
In part because of Miller’s success, Vorel hired more men with checkered pasts, including one who served time for homicide and another who was living under a bridge. Vorel, who runs the business with his son, estimates that of his 30 employees, 80 to 90 percent have backgrounds that would make it tough for them to get work. Men such as Gregory Fowler, Kavin Mann, Zachary Allen, and Patrick Thunberg all landed jobs they otherwise might not have. Thunberg was hired as a laborer in 2014 and has since been promoted to shop foreman. “We are saving lives, and that’s huge to me,” Vorel says.
In hiring former addicts, Vorel isn’t naive. He knows that many of them won’t work out. In fact, that’s what happened with Miller. After three and a half years on the job, he relapsed following the death of his grandfather. The company gave Miller several chances but let him go after a few positive drug tests. “It broke our hearts, but we had to send him on his way,” Vorel says. He is undeterred by Miller’s setback, and he still refers former inmates from the prison ministry to work at Envirosafe.
Miller now has a job painting trucks and is clean again. But he and Vorel realized that something was missing in their lives: their conversations. Now they meet for lunch a couple times a year and catch up just the way they did on their car rides, greeting each other with big hugs.
“I say, ‘I love you, man,’ and he says, ‘Hey, I love you, too,’” Vorel says. “That’s what I live for.”
I had very good parents. My mother came to this country from Scotland by herself when she was 11, and she didn’t have much of an education. My dad was kind of a street kid, and he eventually went into the insurance business, selling nickel policies door-to-door. It was the 1930s, a time when America was a lot more racist and segregated than it is now.
One day, my dad asked his boss, “What’s the toughest market to sell?” and the insurance guy replied, “Well, black people. They don’t buy insurance.” My dad thought, But they have kids; they have families. Why wouldn’t they buy insurance? So he said, “Give me Harlem.” He took the Harlem territory and sold nickel policies; every Friday, he would go around and collect the nickel and give his customers a receipt on the policy. Check out these 31 funny, heartwarming stories about dads.
Jay in his pre-fame days
When my dad died in 1994, I talked about him on The Tonight Show. I told the story of how he worked in Harlem and how he always taught us to be open-minded and not to say or think racist things. Then one day, I got a letter from a woman who was about 75 years old.
She wrote that when she was a little girl, a man used to come to her house to collect on policies, and he would always bring her a lollipop. She said this man was the only white person who had ever come to dinner at their house and the only white person she had ever had dinner with period until she got to be almost an adult. The man was very kind to her, she said, and his name was Angelo—was this my father?
The letter made me cry. I called her up and said yes, that was in fact my dad, and she told me how kind he had been to her family. Her whole attitude toward white people was based on that one nice man she met in her childhood, who always treated her with kindness and respect and always gave her a piece of candy and asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. From this experience, I learned a valuable life lesson: to never judge people and to be open-minded and kind to others. Next, read a heartwarming story about a woman who wrote a letter to her late father and got an incredible response.
When he first began to struggle to breathe three years ago, John Sousa blamed the trouble on spring allergies. But the wheezing continued into summer, so he began using an asthma inhaler. That didn’t help either because Sousa’s real problem was that his heart was failing—and he was just 41 years old.
Since Sousa couldn’t seem to catch his breath no matter what he tried, he went to see his doctor, who blamed the shortness of breath on an infection in his lungs. Sousa got prescriptions for antibiotics and steroids. “The medications the doctor gave me helped for a little bit, and then I just got worse. I knew something wasn’t right, he tells Reader’s Digest.
Next, his doctor ordered an EKG: “That was the first time we realized that my heart was involved,” he says. Once he saw a cardiologist, the news got worse. “They did an echocardiogram and blood work. They gave me a diagnosis of chronic heart failure. I was completely overwhelmed and in denial. I took the medications and reduced my sodium intake, but I kept thinking maybe it was a virus. I thought I would get better and go back to my normal life.” There are some real health benefits to cutting back on salt—check out the 15 ways your body changes for the better.
Though Sousa followed his doctors’ orders to exercise and eat better, his heart function continued to decline. “They made me wear a defibrillator vest that would shock my heart if it had an episode. I was losing weight. My cardiologist said they weren’t seeing the improvement they wanted, and they would be implanting a defibrillator. That’s when reality really hit home.” Once the permanent defibrillator was implanted, Sousa says the severity of his condition could no longer be denied. “I finally wrapped my head around it: This was something I was going to have to live with and manage.”
Shortness of breath, fluid retention, fatigue, and irregular heartbeat are often over-looked symptoms of heart failure. Here are some other silent signs of heart failure to watch for.
Heart failure specialist Andrew T. Darlington, DO with the Piedmont Heart Institute tells Reader’s Digest that Sousa’s initial reaction to the diagnosis is not unusual. “We think that the older population is most affected, but that’s not the case. It can affect anyone, and it does come as a shock to those who receive the diagnosis at a younger age.”
Dr. Darlington says the most common risk factors for developing the condition are high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and coronary heart disease. “There are some cases that we call idiopathic, where no traditional risk factors are identified, but in the vast majority of cases the patient has at least one.”
As for Sousa, his health history included struggles with his weight and high blood pressure. Once he was placed on Entresto, a medication that has been proven to keep heart failure patients out of the hospital and living longer, things began to turn around. “I noticed I could be more active than before. I would walk in our mall and I was able to increase my walking time to 30 minutes.” Sousa’s healthy lifestyle changes—exercise, healthy diet, monitoring his blood pressure—also began to help. Here are some heart-healthy findings that might just save your life.
Dr. Darlington says that heart failure is a chronic and progressive condition that weakens the heart and slows blood circulation. “Hospitalization of patients is the biggest prognostic indicator for us as medical professionals. Hospitalizations are a red flag because we know that up to 10 percent of patients who have been hospitalized with heart failure will die within 30 days after they’re discharged. There are about 900,000 hospitalizations for heart failure a year, and that works out to two a minute. We work really hard to mitigate a patient’s risk within that first 30 days out of the hospital.” For Sousa, changing the way he eats was key; check out the best and worst diets for heart health.
Today, Sousa says the diagnosis has changed his life for the better. “Once I realized that heart failure is manageable, and accepted that this is what I have, it made me appreciate my life more. I take my medications and do what the doctors tell me to do. I went from thinking I was going to die to realizing that I’m alive now, so I’m going to enjoy it.”
Bill McDonnell was going bonkers. Deer season had begun, but it was colder than usual, so here he was, sitting among the mounted bucks inside his rancher in Winchester, Virginia, watching winter through the windows.
Up until his late 80s, Bill hadn’t minded hunting in subzero temperatures, but he had slowed in the past few years. The snow-dusted mountains of the Shenandoah Valley were no place for a 92-year-old. He knew it. But man, did he want to get outside.
Then, on December 15, the forecast brightened, and before he announced his intentions, his wife, Joanna McDonnell, knew what he was up to. The couple went through an old song and dance whenever this happened.
“You’re not going,” Joanna would say.
“I’m going,” Bill would shoot back.
Joanna would try to bargain. “You’re not taking your gun. Stay on a trail.”
“I’m hunting,” he’d say.
“Take a friend,” she’d reply.
“They’re all dead.”
“Take Bill Jr.” (Not possible that day. Bill McDonnell Jr. would be at a football game.)
Joanna: “You’re a dang old fool!”
Bill: “Agreed.”
But this particular day, Joanna didn’t even try to talk sense into her husband. Bill had fought in World War II and Korea. He’d been a sailor, and after that a soldier. A “country boy through and through,” he might respect his wife’s wishes on most topics, but not when it came to the call of the wild. There was a place he hadn’t hunted in a long time, and he wanted to get out there once more before he was too old.
The next morning, Bill woke up at four, grabbed his muzzleloader, and steered his Jeep toward Shenandoah Mountain. At the end of the old Laurel Run logging road, he hit the trail on foot.
It was about 7:30 a.m. and 25 degrees when the sun peeked through the trees. Bill had strict instructions from Joanna to be out of the woods by 2 p.m. and home by 3 p.m.—plenty of time before sunset, in case he missed the deadline. Which he often did.
Not long into the hike, he came upon a path he didn’t remember. Maybe this was a secret route to the king of all bucks. He took it.
As the temperature climbed through the 30s, Bill veered off and back onto the trail, looking for tracks and rubbings on trees, signs that a buck might be over the next ridge. He wouldn’t kill it—he just liked to get a trophy in the sight of his scope, enough of a kick to feel the blood surging in his old veins.
Then, around 11 a.m., he emerged into a clearing along a ridgeline. He’d walked farther than he’d suspected. “What the … ?” he muttered.
It seemed that his path up the mountain had meandered quite a bit. There might be a quicker route back to the Jeep—as the crow flies, anyway.
When thoughts of shortcuts come to mind, Bill looks at his left hand and remembers a little mishap he had in Hawaii. He and Joanna had taken a once-in-a-lifetime vacation for her 80th birthday. They needed an extra bag, so he took a sidewalk to a nearby store, then realized he could get back to the hotel quicker if he jumped a barrier and scrambled down an embankment. But he tripped and broke his wrist and hand. With the pins now bolting the hand together, he was lucky he could still use the thing at all.
But on this day, eyeing the line the crow would fly, Bill couldn’t help himself. I’ll just be extra careful, he reasoned, and began cutting his own path.
Before his descent, Bill had picked up a call from Joanna. “Who might this be?” he’d answered.
“Sounds like you’re still alive,” she’d said.
Bill figured he could drop into the valley, hunt a bit, tackle the next ridgeline, then maybe hunt a bit more. But the farther he snaked down through the forest, the thinner and deeper the ridges became. Before long, the canyon narrowed to a rock chute. Next thing he knew, he was looking straight down from the top of a waterfall, 100, or maybe 200, feet high.
He looked to his right and saw a 20-foot-high wall of nearly vertical rock. Behind him, the ravine he’d followed down the mountain looked steeper and longer than he’d thought it was. To his left, the wall was slightly less vertical, slightly more creviced, slightly more covered in thick laurel roots.
He knew what he should do: go back up the ravine. But if he scaled that rock to the left, he could continue across and down the ridgeline. He would make it to the Jeep in time.
Bill began the climb, carefully plotting each step, grabbing the fattest root, tugging it to test its sturdiness, then heaving himself up to reach the next solid perch, and the next one, and so on. He tried not to look down.
He kept pushing upward until, finally, he hurled himself onto the shelf atop the rock wall. Everything burned. He needed a rest.
By the time Bill got going again, it was nearing 2:45 p.m. Descending into the valley, he came to a trail marked by white blazes. He remembered that one of his granddaughters had mentioned seeing a waterfall while she was climbing in the area, so he called her for advice. He described the ravine, the rock walls, and the white-blazed trail that he thought might take him back to the Jeep. “It looks pretty easy,” he said.
The search-and-rescue drone has a camera so powerful that “you can see the nose on a guy’s face on the ground from 400 feet up.” Here, it pinpoints Bill’s orange cap in the forest.
She didn’t remember the trail. “Grandpa,” she begged him, “go back to the ridgeline.”
But he wanted to take the trail. “I’ve got it figured out,” he said, then realized he was talking to air. His phone had died.
He dug into his pants for the GPS device he always brought in case of emergency and pushed the “on” button. Nothing. He had forgotten to charge it.
The trail looked to be angling downward in the right direction. Soon, though, it turned and began to climb away from the road where the Jeep was parked. So Bill decided to take another shortcut. He began bushwhacking, stopping occasionally to adjust course. He reached the valley. No road.
No, I’m not lost, he told himself. His eye caught a stand of tall trees. He remembered admiring the line of majestic oaks and pines earlier. Reach them and the car wouldn’t be that far off. He’d have to cover some ground, but part of it looked like an area loggers had clear-cut. How bad could it be?
As it turned out, the loggers had left behind a gnarly thicket of limbs and branches; laurel, prickly greenbrier, and other vines had sprouted up into a web of a billion needles in the pockets between the debris. Crawling through barbed wire in Korea, Bill thought, would be better than this.
He was moving slower and slower, Joanna’s 3 p.m. deadline having long since vanished. Eventually, the sun slipped below the mountain ridge behind him and the forest turned pitch-black. He hadn’t brought a flashlight. His quivering legs felt as if they’d stomped at least 15 miles.
There was only one thing to say: “McDonnell, you’ve really done it this time. You are one dumb son of a b——.”
Bill McDonnell Jr. was entering the football stadium at James Madison University when he got a text from his niece. She said she’d lost contact with her grandfather around 2 p.m. and no one had heard from him in hours. “I’m sure he ignored you and took the shortcut,” Bill Jr. told her.
An avid hiker himself, Bill Jr. knew his father could cover ten miles with all his winter gear on. But he had become more forgetful in his 90s. They agreed to call 911.
Bill Jr. headed to Winchester, where he found his mother in a panic, rifling through paperwork. She said she wanted to make sure she had the necessary documents in case her husband was dead.
Capt. Wesley Dellinger of the Shenandoah County Sheriff’s Office sprang into action when he got the call about a missing elderly man: not quite six feet tall, 200 pounds, lost in the forest. Having made a few wrong turns in these woods himself, he felt for the guy. “You think you’ve got it figured out,” he told one of his deputies, “then all of a sudden you don’t.”
He ordered a command post to be set up near the Laurel Run trailhead, and by 6:30 p.m., he’d assembled personnel from within an hour’s radius in every direction. But Bill’s last location was in an area far too rugged and remote to attempt a full ground search, especially under a moonless sky.
So the sheriff sent his deputies out to cruise the highways and back roads, hoping Bill might have found his way to a thoroughfare. Around 9 p.m., a helicopter from the Fairfax County Police Department arrived.
It was about 9:45 p.m. when Bill heard the whoop-whoop-whoop of a helicopter and looked up from his makeshift bed. He had never minded bedding down in dirt—make a little sleeping mat from branches (a trick he learned in the Army) and you’d be sawing logs all night.
Now, as the light from the chopper danced closer, Bill struggled to rouse his achy joints and get to his feet. He managed to lift his orange hunter’s hat to the sky and wave. “I’m here!” he yelled.
The chopper hovered directly above him. But the mix of tall trees and low laurel canopies were too dense for its searchlight to penetrate. The light dimmed, and the whir of the helicopter blades softened. Bill guessed they wouldn’t be back until morning.
He tried to go to sleep but couldn’t quiet his head. He hated that search crews were wasting resources and losing sleep because he’d taken one too many shortcuts. Joanna was probably terrified. He wanted to get up and power through the darkness, but he knew he’d only end up in more trouble.
Shortly after midnight, Captain Dellinger’s phone rang. It was the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, offering its search-and-rescue drone. At $94,000 (for the device, training, and maintenance), the quadcopter, as it is officially called, is the hot new gear all search-and-rescue chiefs want but few can afford.
The following morning, as the silhouette of the mountains emerged, teams of rescuers with bloodhounds started on the trail Bill had hiked. At the same time, Loudoun County master deputy Matthew Devaney and his copilot, Jamie Holben, set up a launch area for the drone, then waited for the signal to send it out.
This was the first time they would fly the drone in a real rescue situation. Any failure would be red meat for detractors, who called it a taxpayer-funded toy. The device has a three-mile line of sight and a high-def camera so powerful, Devaney says, “you can see the nose on a guy’s face on the ground from 400 feet up.”
At 9 a.m., it was time. As Devaney worked the joysticks, Holben called out adjustments. Threading the drone between tall trees, they sent it flying toward the search area.
At the same time, one of the tracking teams came upon a spot where some branches had been tamped down into a sort of mattress. They had heard the lost hunter was an old woodsman. Such a comfortable nest had to be the work of a master’s hand.
That morning, Bill had woken before dawn, replaying his wrong turns and imagining his wife’s despair. He never worried once that he wouldn’t find his way back, only about what would be waiting for him when he got there.
Just after 7 a.m., the sky lightened and the thicket around him began to reappear. He ate a few snacks and got ready to battle with the laurel.
The light was still bad, and each step took some thought to avoid thorns or a twisted ankle. After about 15 minutes, Bill came to a spot where he could see the landscape around him more clearly. There, only a few hundred yards away, was the line of trees he had been hoping to reach the night before.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” he yelled to the woods.
Within 15 more minutes, Bill emerged from the thicket and began a slow ascent to the ridgeline. He knew the trackers couldn’t be too far away. He began pushing himself harder. He’d better make it to the Jeep before they made it to him.
“Half hour more daylight and I would have been fine,” Bill told the rescuers when he emerged from the woods.
Now that the deputies had the drone up, they could see the forest as clear as a crow. But they saw little except white rock and scattered trees, and after about 20 minutes in the air, the battery slipped below 25 percent. They’d have to land the device and switch batteries if they didn’t get a bead on the lost man pretty soon.
The drone flew up and over a ridgeline capped by tall oak and pine trees, only about a half mile away. A neon-orange dot moved below. Zooming the camera in, the image became clear: The orange dot was a hunter’s cap.
“I think we have him!” Devaney shouted.
Down below, Bill began walking more briskly—the terrain was finally familiar, and he was sure he was less than a mile from the Jeep. He saw a large black animal bounding toward him out of the corner of his eye—a bear, maybe? He had seen some scat. But before he could reach for his gun, he realized it was a dog.
“Bill!” a voice called. “William! Bill McDonnell!”
“I’m up here,” he yelled back.
Damn trackers had beaten him after all.
It’s not that he wasn’t thankful for the “neat little contraption” that had helped rescue him, or for the young people who’d traipsed through the cold forest in search of an old-timer. It was more that he was embarrassed, and frustrated with all the fuss. Even the local news channels had shown up.
“Half hour more daylight and I would have been fine,” he told the rescuers.
The next day, Bill Jr. was tasked with sitting his dad down and having “the talk.” “I said, ‘The whole family was extremely scared, especially Mom,’” Bill Jr. recalls. “‘You can’t go out alone anymore.’”
Bill agreed to swear he wouldn’t go out hunting or hiking alone again.
But a week later, during a short hike—with company—he waffled a bit. “I need to keep that promise,” he said. “But the idea of it drives me crazy. I love walking around in these woods alone.”
Whenever Jane Lockshin went out to lunch with her elderly aunt Sylvia, she made a point to pick up the tab. After all, Sylvia Bloom was a modest secretary, a widow of more than a decade who lived in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment and took the subway everywhere, including to her job at a Manhattan law firm. She worked there— full-time—until she was 96. Simply put, Lockshin didn’t want Aunt Sylvia to blow her budget on lunch.
So when Bloom died in 2016, at 97, it was something of a shock to discover that she’d left behind a multimillion-dollar estate. Almost as shocking: She had chosen to give $8.2 million to charity. Six million dollars went to educational programs at the Henry Street Settlement, a social services organization in New York City. An additional $2 million went to scholarship funds, including at Bloom’s alma mater, Hunter College. “She had millions,” says Lockshin, “and no one suspected it.”
Bloom’s bequest to the Settlement, the largest in its 126-year history, will help fund a program for disadvantaged students. “The gift has been transformative not just because of the good we’ll be able to do with it,” says David Garza, the agency’s executive director, “but because of the selflessness and the humility behind it.”
Sylvia Bloom’s story is indeed extraordinary, but it’s not as uncommon as you might think. Working-class benefactors—secretaries, teachers, janitors, and more—make headlines with awe-inspiring regularity. In 2015, a retired grocer in Milwaukee left $13 million to a local Catholic high school. The year before, a former JCPenney janitor from Vermont left a nearly $5 million bequest to a local hospital. Their stories are as rich and as full as their hidden bank accounts. “In a world that is in many ways survival of the fittest, they’re certainly a special class of people,” says Garza. Try these ways to give back to charity without breaking the bank.
These unassuming philanthropists share some qualities. The most obvious is that they often have no children. That’s one reason many of them were able to save so much of their humble paychecks. It also means they had no direct natural heirs. “People who are single are thinking about what good they can do with their money and what legacy they want to leave,” says Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Often that legacy touches on helping the children they never had. As a kid in Milwaukee, Leonard Gigowski took the 6:30 bus every morning to get to St. Francis Minor Seminary, a Catholic high school that later became St. Thomas More High School. After a stint in the Navy, Gigowski went on to become a butcher and a grocer. He never married—and he never forgot St. Thomas More. Gigowski visited regularly and sometimes would eat lunch with the students in the cafeteria. One time, he stood up and started singing the school cheer. His “kids,” as Gigowski called them, grinned and joined him. On his 90th birthday, in 2015, administrators arranged a surprise assembly for him. The kids sang “Happy Birthday,” and Gigowski led them in prayer.
Three months later came the bombshell: Leonard Gigowski had passed away—and he’d left behind a $13 million scholarship fund for St. Thomas More. “I nearly fell off my chair,” Mary McIntosh, the school’s president, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Gigowski may have been humble, but he led a very full life. He was an avid ballroom dancer—he had a dance floor in the basement of his modest suburban home. He also loved pigeon racing. He had a coop in his yard and kept meticulous records on each of his birds. “He told me he loved being around God’s creatures and caring for them,” says his friend Jeff Korpal.
But the school was his passion. Larry Haskin, Gigowski’s friend and the lawyer who helped him set up the Leonard Gigowski Catholic Education Foundation, says there was no doubt that Gigowski had saved his money with the intent of donating as much as he could to the students of St. Thomas More. “He wanted to have the greatest impact possible on future generations,” Haskin says. “He felt he owed his long life to God, his Catholic education, and his deep faith, and he wanted to pass it on,” Korpal adds.
Gigowski had a lot in common with Margaret Southern, a special-needs teacher from Greenville, South Carolina, who died in 2012 at age 94. Southern loved children and animals. Before she allowed Mike Shain, vice president of wealth management at UBS, to handle her investments, she made him promise to take in her dachshund, Molly, if anything happened to her. “I know you’ll take care of her,” she told him.
In fact, Southern outlived Molly by several years and had her buried in her yard. But she continued to worry about animals, especially those that were homeless. When she died, she left half her $8.4 million estate to the Greenville Humane Society—even though she’d never had any direct contact with the organization—and the other half to the Community Foundation of Greenville, which distributed the money to organizations that benefit early childhood education and special education for children. She also left money to various friends and family.
“It’s a wonderful surprise to wake up and find a very unassuming woman who cares greatly for our community and its children,” said Susan Shi, PhD, founder and chair emerita of the Institute for Child Success, a recipient of $25,000.
Southern’s wealth also came as a shock to most who knew her. She lived in a modest town house and got around Greenville in a gray 1980s-model Cadillac. Her money came from a few shares of stock left to her by her husband, who had died in 1983. She added to that through the ’80s, if only to feather a nest for others to use.
“What’s exceptional is she didn’t spend it on herself, and she was able to accumulate a lot of money that she wanted to direct to her dearest charities,” Bob Morris, president of the Community Foundation, told the Greenville News. “I haven’t met a lot of people like that.”
Did their generous natures help Southern and these other extraordinary givers live so long? It’s possible. Studies have found that people who are charitable, whether it’s via volunteering or donating money, tend to have lower blood pressure, less stress, and longer lives. One 2011 study even found that older volunteers had a lower risk of dying in a four-year period than nonvolunteers.
They certainly understood the importance of planning for the future. Careful, conservative investing—putting money in the stock market and leaving it there to grow—has always been the ticket to a comfortable retirement, and that’s how these working-class benefactors built their legacies. For instance, when Sylvia Bloom was a young legal secretary, part of her job was to keep track of her bosses’ stock purchases. She’d take note of which stocks the lawyers were buying and buy a few shares for herself. “She invested in the market and didn’t spend it,” says Lockshin. “She followed the rules.”
Ronald Read was a blue-collar guy with blue-chip smarts. A gas station attendant and JCPenney janitor in Brattleboro, Vermont, he read the Wall Street Journal every day, following his investments in Ford, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and CVS Health. When he died in 2014 at age 92, he was worth $8 million.
But while he had watched his money carefully, he rarely touched it. After one of his last meetings with his attorney, Laurie Rowell, she insisted on walking her frail client to his car. They proceeded up a steep hill, passing empty parking spots as they went. When they got to Read’s 2007 Toyota Yaris, Rowell realized why he had chosen that spot: There were no parking meters at the top of the hill. “You would have thought he was penniless if you met him,” she says. (In fact, Read didn’t even want his lawyer to walk with him to the car, because he thought she might charge him for the time.)
Read’s frugality was sometimes mistaken for actual poverty. One morning, the man ahead of him in line for coffee noticed Read’s tattered clothes and promptly paid for his drink. He got his coffee that day, and most others, at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, which served some of the best java in town. “That coffee shop was beloved by a number of people,” says Rowell. “They took good care of him.” When Read died, hospital officials were surprised that he had left the bulk of his estate, nearly $5 million, to the hospital.
“Some of us knew he had some investments,” his stepson Phillip Brown told the Brattleboro Reformer, “but obviously he had a whole lot more that we didn’t know about.” Check out these bizarre things you didn’t know you could donate.
Not every working-class benefactor scrimped and saved. Kathleen Magowan, a teacher from Simsbury, Connecticut, had no idea she was rich until just before she died in 2011, at age 87. Not long before she passed away, she visited a small law firm for help managing her estate. When they asked how much she thought it was worth, Magowan guessed around $40,000. The real number: $6 million.
Magowan’s twin brother, Robert Magowan, had always managed their finances. They had lived together until he died in 2010. “She never had a demand for that kind of money,” her attorney, Louis George, told the Hartford Courant.
Some would go on a shopping spree if they became millionaires overnight. Magowan turned to charity. Her will outlined $5 million in bequests to 15 organizations, along with gifts to relatives and neighbors. She left close to half a million each to her alma mater, the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford; the McLean nursing home where she spent her final days; and the Simsbury public schools, where she had taught first grade for 35 years.
“All of us remember her very much as the schoolteacher who always had a twinkle in her eye,” Deene Morris, the former fund-raising director at McLean, told the Hartford Courant. “She loved engaging in conversation with all sorts of different people, and everyone loved talking to her. A schoolteacher. That’s how she lived in our hearts.” Next, read up on these 15 ordinary people who changed the world.
Any day that I had to go to the airport was the worst day of my life, and as a traveling appliance salesman, I had to fly quite a bit. On this day in 2010, I was assigned to a middle seat. I was so big I couldn’t fit down the aisle facing forward, so I walked sideways, like a crab. I could see the other passengers’ fear like cartoon thought bubbles above their heads: “Please, God, don’t let that humongous guy be in the seat next to me!” I was five foot ten and weighed between 340 and 360 pounds; the exact number depended on whether you took my weight before or after one of my gargantuan meals.
When I finally squeezed into my seat, the seat belt wasn’t long enough to fit around my 52-inch waist. They never were.
The flight attendant said they had run out of seat belt extenders. They were going to have to get one from another plane.
More than 30 minutes passed.
“Great,” said the slender man in the window seat next to me. “I’m going to miss my connection because you’re so fat!”
I wanted to die. Right there, in that seat, I wished my life would just end.
I woke up the next morning knowing that I needed to change. I started looking for signs that might lead me toward a better life—and immediately a sign showed up. I turned on the TV and happened to catch an interview with former president Bill Clinton. He looked fit and full of energy, about half his former size. He said he’d been under the care of a doctor who put him on a whole-food, plant-based diet. That was all it took, he said. He lost weight without feeling hungry, and he was healthier and stronger than he’d been since his twenties. I never imagined my sign would come from Bill Clinton, but here he was.
I had no idea what a “whole-food, plant-based diet” was, but I ran with it, even though I couldn’t actually run to save my life. I went online and searched for a doctor who could help me. I came across Preeti Kulkarni, a naturopathic doctor. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but I felt hopeful when she agreed to see me the next day.
O’Grey at 340 pounds, the day before the plane trip that ultimately led him to Peety
So tell me about yourself,” said Dr. Preeti (as she liked to be called). I told her I had type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. I was on all sorts of meds for those.
“If you stick to what I tell you, there’s a good chance you won’t need any of those in a few months,” she said. “At every meal, just make sure that at least half your plate is full of fruits and vegetables and the rest is beans and rice or any other food that is not from an animal. If you do that, you’ll start feeling better. And with exercise, I think you’ll be really surprised how quickly things can change.”
She suggested I start with 20 minutes of light exercise twice a day. “Something you can enjoy, like taking a walk,” she said. “And I recommend that you go to a shelter and adopt a dog.”
“Exercise?” I said. “A dog?”
“A dog is a good companion,” she said. “Plus, you live in an apartment, which means the dog has to be walked. So you walk your dog twice a day, and that will be your exercise.”
“I’ve never owned a dog. What about a cat?” I asked.
“Have you ever seen anyone walk a cat?”
And so a few days later, I drove up to the Humane Society Silicon Valley in San Jose, California, near where I lived. I had already spoken with Casaundra, who was in charge of adoptions. She said she had the perfect dog for me, but she offered some advice: “Don’t look him in the eyes at first.” I knew that wouldn’t be a problem—I had trouble making eye contact with anyone. “Let him sniff your hand. Don’t try to pet him right away. Just give him a second. He’s a real sweet dog once he knows you.”
That didn’t sound like the happy golden retriever I’d had in mind.
Casaundra stepped out of the room, and I took a deep breath. My heart was pounding. Then I heard footsteps approaching. Dog nails on concrete. The handle on the door turned. The door cracked open. A black nose tried to push its way in, and then the door opened all the way. There he was: a large black-and-white dog with a big round body, shuffling into the room with his head hung low. He looked up at me and then dropped his head with a clear look of disappointment. Like, Really? This loser?
I suppose I looked at him the same way.
“He’s a border collie and Australian shepherd mix, to the best of our knowledge,” Casaundra said. “As you can see, he’s middle-aged and overweight, and that means he’s in need of a new routine, just like the one you told me you needed. Raider’s out of shape. His joints are swollen. He needs to start walking again.”
“Raider?” I asked.
“Like the Oakland Raiders. His owners were fans.”
I looked at him, petting him in silence. I wondered how many other dogs had come through here, and I wondered how many other humans, like me, were skeptical of the whole dog-human matchmaking process.
I didn’t want to let Casaundra down. I thought, This is what she does for a living, and she feels really strongly about this. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt.
“Why did someone give this dog up?” I asked.
Casaundra flipped through a few pages of notes on a clipboard. “There was a divorce. He was not being cared for the way that he needed. He spent a lot of time in a backyard by himself after his primary caregiver went off to college. And the family just felt like maybe there was a better home for him somewhere else.”
Raider sniffed my shoes. He looked up, and I scratched him behind the ears. He seemed to like that. When I stopped for a moment, he lay down on the floor near my feet.
After less than a year together, both O’Grey and Peety were slimmer, healthier, and happier.
“Aw, look at that. He likes you already,” Casaundra said. “I have a good feeling about this. Just be patient. You have to understand that his whole life has been uprooted. It’s going to take him some time to adjust.”
“The poor guy,” I said. It hit me how tough this dog’s life had been. I looked down at Raider, and suddenly the sadness in his eyes didn’t look like a reflection on me. It looked more like he was just done and ready to give up and die.
Like me.
I started to tear up.
“Can I ask you something?” I said to Casaundra. “Can I change his name? I’m a 49ers fan. We hate the Raiders.”
Casaundra laughed. “Yes, you can change his name. It might take him a while to respond, but why not? Fresh start.”
I named him Peety, after the dog in The Little Rascals, and we took it slow, just as my doctor and Casaundra had recommended. We had to. Peety weighed 75 pounds when a healthy weight for him was more like 50 pounds. But on our first walk together, Peety took the lead. We made it halfway down the block and then came back. Luckily for me, he didn’t walk very fast. You could practically hear my footsteps on the sidewalk as I swung each leg forward—thump, thump, thump, like the giant from “Jack and the Bean Stalk.”
The next day we made it to the end of the block. Soon he would lead me around the block. Then he’d want to keep going, and I would tag along.
At the same time, I was following Dr. Preeti’s instructions for plant-based eating. Maybe five or six days after eliminating animal products from my diet, I woke up feeling like a new person. I rolled out of bed with ease. My knees weren’t sore. I had also put Peety on vegan dog food. He appeared thinner and seemed to have a spring in his step. And he had stopped scratching all the time and shedding everywhere the way he had when I first brought him home.
At my second office visit with Dr. Preeti, I weighed five pounds less than the week before. “I’m actually surprised it’s not more,” I said, “because I feel different. I feel lighter.”
A few days later, I went to take Peety for his morning walk and he backed right out of his collar. He’d lost so much weight that it slipped off. My pants were almost falling off me too. I tightened my belt as far as it would go, but I realized that if my belt were to slip, my pants would fall to the floor. That would not look good in the middle of an appliance store. I needed to go clothes shopping—something I had avoided for years.
I would have ordered clothes online, but I didn’t know what size I was anymore. At Men’s Wearhouse, the bending and squatting, dressing and undressing in the tiny dressing rooms left me overheated and miserable. This wasn’t a victory lap. It was awful. I bought three pairs of pants and a few shirts and spent nearly $200. It felt like a rip-off. For the most part, what’s available for men over 300 pounds is the equivalent of a muumuu: low-end, loud Hawaiian-print shirts.
Sitting on the couch that night, I thought maybe I should give it all up. Maybe I was too far gone.
Then Peety jumped into my lap. He started licking my face, which made me laugh. I petted him, and he pressed himself into my belly and lay down on top of my thick thighs as if he were a tiny puppy snuggling up in a blanket. And then he looked up at me as if I were the greatest guy in the world.
“Oh, Peety,” I said. “Are you sure you’re not disappointed you wound up with me?”
He kept looking at me with those beautiful dark eyes. And then he smiled. I’d heard people talk about dogs smiling before, and I thought they were nuts. But he did. He opened his teeth slightly and pulled up the corners of his mouth.
Suddenly I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I was thinking about Peety’s happiness. “I’m sorry, son,” I said to him. “I promise I won’t let you down.”
Over the next weeks, Peety kept pulling harder and harder on the leash, raring to go. There were times when I couldn’t keep up, even though I’d dropped five pounds a week pretty consistently since I started the plant-based eating and walking. The misery of headaches, abdominal pain, and overall discomfort I’d lived with for years just disappeared. I felt good. Not just better, but really good.
I started taking Peety to different parks. I found one, Penitencia Creek County Park, just over a mile from our condo. According to the website, it was home to a stunning pond full of ducks and other wildlife, with golden mountains off in the background. How could something like that exist so close and I hadn’t even known it was there?
When we arrived, it was as if Peety had googled it on his own. He kept choking himself at the end of the leash trying to run ahead. I picked up my pace the best I could, trying to give him some slack. I thought about how Peety’s whole life had been lived pent up, caged up, or tied to the end of a leash. How could anyone allow a dog to get so out of shape that he didn’t even want to run? Changing Peety’s diet and taking these walks had freed him. Maybe it was time to let him experience what freedom really felt like.
We stopped, and I unhooked his leash. Peety took off like a sprinter at the Olympics: head down, body forward, legs moving so fast they almost overtook him. He flew down the path and didn’t slow one bit as he approached the edge of the pond. Instead, he leaped. My jaw dropped open as he sailed out over the pond. He must’ve traveled seven feet through the air before he landed in a great big belly flop. Peety swam so hard he practically lifted his whole front end right out of the water, beaming with pride and excitement.
“Woo-hoo!” I yelled.
O’Grey is now training for marathons with his new workout pal, Jake.
When he heard me, he swam to shore, ran out of the water, beelined right to me, and launched into a reverberating full-body shake of biblical proportions. He completely drenched me with mud and pond water, and not for one second did it make me angry. In fact, I laughed. I loved it. And in that moment, I realized I loved him.
I was still laughing as he turned around and ran back into the water for another swim. Peety did the swim-to-shore, shake-off, and run-back-into-the-water thing about eight more times before I was able to get him to sit and rest for a minute. He was panting like crazy, but between the sparkle in his eyes and the sight of his tongue hanging out of his big doggy smile, I knew he was perfectly OK.
He looked up at me like I was the greatest guy in the world—and that’s exactly what I wanted to be for him. I wanted to fulfill Peety’s every dream. He’d come into my life, and simply by being here, he rescued me. And in that moment, I felt like the two of us could have done anything.
“Want to keep walking?” I asked him.
Postscript: O’Grey and Peety walked together for nearly five years, until Peety died of cancer. Today, O’Grey weighs about 180 pounds, competes in marathons, and trains with his energetic Lab mix, Jake. Still, to this day, Peety is never far from O’Grey’s mind.
If you need a refresher on what happened at Chernobyl, here’s the history: The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, is the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. It all started at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when a routine safety test at the plant went horribly wrong. A bad combination of faulty design and human error caused one of the four nuclear reactors to overheat and explode, starting a fire and spewing radioactive material into the air. To this day, the site contains harmful levels of radiation, making Chernobyl—and the 1,600 square-mile “exclusion zone” surrounding it—one of the world’s most dangerous tourist destinations.
He’d spent seven hours clambering up the mountain through ice and snow, and now an exhausted Daniel Mazur sensed that success was near.
Although it was ten degrees below zero near the top of Everest, the soft morning light revealed clear blue skies for miles around. This is perfect—we’re definitely going to summit today, the climbing guide told himself, digging his crampons into the ice and taking a few more cautious steps. He and his companions were less than
three hours away from the spectacular 29,035-foot summit.
It was 7:30 a.m. when Mazur climbed onto a narrow ledge called Mushroom Rock to rest and offer encouragement to his SummitClimb teammates, Andrew Brash of Canada, Myles Osborne of England and their Sherpa guide, Jongbu.
As the men looked out on the snow-covered peaks below, Mazur suddenly saw a flash of bright yellow to his left. Was it a tent? No way, he thought, squinting to take a closer look. No climber would camp out at this altitude. The yellow blur moved again, and Mazur’s jaw dropped in amazement. What the hell? he wondered.
Perched precariously on the edge of a jagged cliff was a man sitting cross-legged, trying to change his shirt. His thick snowsuit was unzipped to the waist and he had no hat, gloves, or sunglasses.
Without an oxygen mask, sleeping bag, food or water, there was no reason for Lincoln Hall to be alive at 28,000 feet, and he seemed to know it. Pulling his frostbitten hands out of his shirt, Hall looked up at Mazur.
“I imagine you are surprised to see me here,” he said.
Hall had been alone on the mountain since 7:30 the night before. Following an arduous climb up the north ridge, he and his teammates had reached the summit at nine that morning. After celebrating the glorious view of the earth’s curve and posing for victory photos, they started on their descent, hoping to reach camp before dangerous afternoon storms rolled in.
But at 28,000 feet, Hall’s feet had stopped moving and he was overcome by a deep fatigue. He turned to one of the Sherpas he was climbing with. “I need to lie down—I need to sleep,” he told him.
With 25 years of experience behind him, Hall was a seasoned mountaineer. He had climbed Everest once before, in 1984, but failed to summit. Now, although he didn’t have the presence of mind to realize it, he was suffering from cerebral edema, a severe form of altitude sickness. The condition causes the brain to swell and leads to a stumbling, intoxicated gait, hallucinations and, eventually, death.
In fact, this area of the mountain, right below the summit, is known as the “death zone.” It is incredibly steep and icy, requiring climbers to use fixed ropes and ice axes to hack their way to the top and then back down again. And because of the high altitude, if a climber is going to get sick, it usually happens here.
Normally, the descent from here to advanced base camp takes about two hours. But Hall was weak and increasingly uncooperative as the edema overtook him. Two Sherpas had to lower him down between them, wasting precious daylight, while the rest of the group kept going.
After nine hours, Hall went limp. He appeared to be dead, and the Sherpas were ordered by their leader to leave him on the mountain. It’s not uncommon for people to freeze to death climbing in the mountains, but these people froze to death—and then came back to life.
Checking one last time for signs of life, one of the men poked Hall in the eye. When there was no response, they gathered his backpack, food, water, and extra oxygen and returned to the high camp.
Just hours before, another climber, a German man named Thomas Weber, suffered similar symptoms, then collapsed and died, less than 20 yards from Hall. And ten days before, David Sharp, a climber from Great Britain, had become seriously ill from the high altitude and died beneath a rock overhang. Forty other climbers, intent on reaching the summit, had passed by, refusing to help.
Reaching the top or saving a life
Almost any experienced climber who’s been to Mount Everest knows somebody who didn’t make it back. Two of Dan Mazur’s friends, Rob Hall (no relation to Lincoln Hall) and Scott Fischer, died in the notorious snowstorm that killed six other climbers in 1996. Their bodies and nearly 200 others are scattered across Everest’s treacherous slopes, preserved for eternity in snow and ice.
“There are times when you literally have to step over somebody’s body to get to the top,” says Mazur. “It’s a grim reminder that you should never lose respect for the mountain.”
Near the peak on that crisp, clear May morning—”a mountaineer’s dream,” Mazur describes—he and his team members quietly realized they had a choice to make: Should they phone in Lincoln Hall’s predicament to his group, 7 Summits, and continue on? Or stay with him, until help arrived?
Mazur had reached the summit once before, in 1991. But for Brash and Osborne, who had spent $20,000 each to make this expedition, it was the dream of a lifetime. In the end,
Mazur knew, there was only one possible decision to be made. “Luckily,” he says, “everyone made the right one.”
Osborne spoke first. “We can’t leave the guy,” he said. They all agreed.
Not only was Hall frostbitten and disoriented, he could slip and plunge down the 8,000-foot Kangshung Face at any moment.
“We found him sitting on a three-foot-by-three-foot platform covered with snow and ice,” says Mazur. “It’s hard to believe he didn’t roll over the edge
during the night.”
The men got Hall away from the cliff’s edge and helped him back into his snowsuit. Rummaging through their backpacks, they shared their oxygen, lemonade and Snickers bars.
“Can you tell me how you got here?” asked Mazur.
“No,” said Hall.
“Can you tell me your name?”
Hall hesitated, then broke into a grin. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “My name is Lincoln Hall. Can you tell me how I got here?”
Thank God, he’s coming around, Mazur thought. But Hall wasn’t coherent for long.
“This is a great boat ride we’re on!” he kept saying. Still hallucinating, he stretched out his arms like he was about to do a backflip. He tried again to remove his snowsuit, then lunged for the cliff.
“Whoa! Where do you think you’re going?” Mazur grabbed him in a bear hug and tackled him onto the ice. Does this guy have a death wish? he wondered.
Then he flashed on his late friend Scott Fischer, who died on Everest. When climbers came across Fischer’s body, he was partially undressed, a bare arm sticking out of his unzipped down suit. Mazur knew it was common for people in the last stages of hypothermia to tear off their clothes. He also knew they tended to act like three-year-olds having a tantrum. Hall was belligerent—he wasn’t listening, or maybe he wasn’t capable of processing what was being said. Either way, Mazur decided, “I wasn’t going to let this guy we were trying to save kill himself.”
“Come on,” Mazur told his teammates, “we’ve got to keep him away from the ledge.” It looked like they’d have to anchor Hall to the mountain, to keep him from lunging off. They drove an ice axe into the snow, then attached a “sling,” mountaineers’ lingo for a strong nylon tether, which they tied to him with a figure-eight knot.
Calling for help
With the injured climber secured, Mazur radioed down to high base camp, where their team’s cook was waiting. “Go over to the 7 Summits camp, get their guys out of bed and get them on the radio,” he said. “Hurry!”
Ten minutes later, the head Sherpa on Hall’s team came on the radio.
“Lincoln Hall is in big trouble and needs your help,” said Mazur.
There was a long pause. “You mean he’s alive? How alive is he?”
“Well, he’s moving around, he’s talking,” said Mazur, exasperated. “We need extra food, water, and oxygen to get him down. Otherwise, he’s not going to make it.”
Mazur insisted the man put Hall’s leader, Alex Abramov, on the phone.
“You’ve got some guys in high camp, right? Send them up!” he told Abramov. The Russian climber agreed to send all the Sherpas he could gather.
“You can’t blame the Sherpas for leaving Hall on the mountain,” says Mazur. “It’s their job to help us climb, but it’s not their job to die.”
For more than four hours, Mazur and his team waited, stomping their feet and pacing on the small snow-packed ledge to stay warm.
“We were all pretty quiet,” recalls Brash, who had spent years training to climb Everest. “It was disappointed silence. We knew we weren’t going to get to the summit.”
At that point, no one knew if Hall was going to live. He shivered uncontrollably and his head jerked up and down. He was suffering from snow blindness, common at high altitude on such a bright, clear day. His fingers were so frozen they looked like pale yellow wax.
The team was relieved when two Italian climbers suddenly appeared on the ledge.
“Good morning!” said Mazur. “We’ve got a guy in trouble here! Can you help?”
The men kept moving toward the summit. “Sorry, no speak English” was all they said. Mazur would spot them later at base camp, speaking English very well. “All I can say is, God bless their souls.”
It was almost noon when a dozen Sherpas finally arrived to help take Hall down the mountain. With a guide on either side of him, he was able to walk down to high camp. From there, he rode a yak to base, bumping down the mountain on a saddle made of foam sleeping mats.
Back to the base and back to health
It took Mazur and his team two days to make their own way down. As soon as they arrived, they went to visit Hall, who was recuperating in his tent before the 100-mile trip to a hospital in Katmandu.
I hope that after all this, he’s a nice guy, Mazur thought.
He wasn’t disappointed. Although Hall was still groggy and slurring his words, they clearly understood when he said thank you for saving his life.
Hall would need surgery to amputate the tips of six fingers. Still, he knows he’s a lucky man, that he could very well have become the 12th person to die on Everest this year—the deadliest season since the 1996 tragedy. Although his rescue is miraculous, it has sparked a debate about climbers who leave behind the sick and injured in pursuit of Everest’s grand prize.
Even Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to reach Everest’s summit in 1953, chimed in with disgust when he learned that 40 climbers had passed by Britain’s David Sharp.
“People have completely lost sight of what is important,” he told a New Zealand newspaper. “In our expedition, there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die.”
Mazur doesn’t know whether much can be done to prevent future deaths. The allure of the world’s highest peak is so great, he knows, climbers will continue to gamble everything for a few minutes at the top.
“It’s such a personal challenge—once you’re up there, you feel as though you could do anything,” he says. “Sure, I wish I could have reached the summit again. But there’s no way we could have left Lincoln Hall on that ridge. If we’d done that, the odds are he wouldn’t be alive today. And I would have to live with that for the rest of my life.” Stories like this one are one of the main reasons some experts believe that climbers are ruining Mount Everest.
An hour above Camp IV on the Southeast Ridge of Mount Everest, Panuru Sherpa and I passed the first body.
The dead climber was on his side as if napping in the snow, goose down blowing from holes in his insulated pants. Ten minutes later, we stepped around another body, her torso shrouded in a Canadian flag, an abandoned oxygen bottle holding down the flapping fabric.
Trudging nose to butt up the ropes that had been fixed to the steep slope, Panuru and I were wedged between strangers above us and below us. The day before, at Camp III, our team had been part of a small group. But when we woke up this morning, we were stunned to see an endless line of climbers passing near our tents.
Now, bumper-to-bumper at 26,000 feet, we were forced to move at exactly the same speed as everyone else, regardless of individual strength or climbing ability. In the swirling darkness before midnight, I gazed up at the string of lights from climbers’ headlamps rising into the black sky. Above me were more than a hundred slow-moving climbers. In one rocky section, at least 20 people were attached to a tattered rope anchored by a single badly bent picket pounded into the ice. If the picket popped out, the rope would instantly snap from the weight of two dozen falling climbers, and they would all cartwheel down the face of the mountain to their deaths.
Panuru, the lead Sherpa of our team, and I unclipped from the lines, swerved out onto open ice, and began soloing—a safer option for experienced mountaineers. After twenty minutes, we encountered another corpse, sitting in the snow, frozen solid as stone.
Several hours later, before we reached the Hillary Step—a 40-foot wall of rock and the last obstacle before the summit—we passed yet another corpse. His stubbly face was gray, his mouth open as if moaning.
Later I would learn the nationalities and names of these four climbers: Chinese Ha Wenyi, 55; Nepali-Canadian Shriya Shah-Klorfine, 33; South Korean Song Won-bin, 44; and German Eberhard Schaaf, 61. All four had died just days before—between May 18 and 20, 2012, as had two people on the other side of Everest. Because it’s dangerous and difficult to transport bodies down the mountain, most people who perish there remain where they fall, although some are eventually moved by ice and wind, covered with snow, or pulled to the side of the trail. Some have even been pushed into crevasses by other climbers in a kind of makeshift mountain burial.
April and May 2012 became the third-deadliest season on Everest. As I cramponed past the icy corpses, I thought of the shattering sorrow their families and friends must have felt when they heard the news. I, too, had lost friends to the mountains.
A mountain mobbed
Exactly why these four individuals died wasn’t clear. However, many recent deaths on Everest have been attributed to a dangerous lack of experience. Without enough training at high altitude, some climbers are unable to judge their own stamina and don’t know when to turn around and call it quits. “Only half the people here have the experience to climb this mountain,” Panuru told me.
How different it was 50 years ago when, on May 1, 1963, Jim Whittaker, accompanied only by Sherpa Nawang Gombu, became the first American to reach the summit of the world, climbing the Southeast Ridge.
Three weeks after that ascent, Americans Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld clawed their way up a completely new route, the West Ridge. On that same day, Barry Bishop and Lute Jerstad made the second American ascent of the Southeast Ridge. The two teams met below the summit, but by then it was dark, and they were forced to bivouac at 28,000 feet—a risky, last-ditch option never before attempted. Without tents, sleeping bags, stoves, Sherpas, oxygen, water, or food, they weren’t expected to survive.
Amazingly all four men lived—although Unsoeld and Bishop lost 19 toes between them. The American expedition of 1963 became a tale of heroic success.
Our National Geographic–supported team was on Everest to mark the anniversary of that expedition. Yet as we witnessed, the mountain has become an icon for everything that is wrong with climbing. Unlike in 1963, when only six people reached the top, in the spring of 2012 more than 500 mobbed the summit. When I arrived at the apex on May 25, it was so crowded that I couldn’t find a place to stand. Meanwhile, down below at the Hillary Step, where only one person at a time can climb up or down, the lines were so long that some climbers waited more than two hours—shivering and growing weak, even though the weather was excellent—to proceed. If these throngs of climbers had been caught in a storm, as others were in the deadly season of 1996, the death toll could have been staggering.
Everest has always been a trophy, but now that almost 4,000 people have reached its summit, some more than once, the feat means less than it did a half-century ago. Today, roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are there as part of guided climbs, in which a leader takes a group of clients—many without basic climbing skills—up the mountain.
Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many of these guided climbers naively expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions. The two standard routes, the Northeast Ridge and the Southeast Ridge, are not only dangerously crowded but also disgustingly polluted, with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and pyramids of human excrement befouling the high camps. And then there are the corpses.
Clearly, the world’s highest peak is broken. But if you talk to the people who know it best, they’ll tell you it’s not beyond repair.
The guide dilemma
Russell Brice, 60, runs Himalayan Experience, the largest and most sophisticated guiding operation on Everest. Himex, as it’s known, has led 17 expeditions to Everest, and Brice is famous for running a tight ship. Despite the relatively large size of Brice’s teams—as many as 30 clients matched with 30 Sherpas—they leave a small footprint on the mountain, removing all of their excrement and rubbish, a practice not followed by most teams. “We can manage the numbers if all the operators talk to each other,” Brice insists. “It’s all about good communication.”
If only it were that simple. There are other factors at work. One is advances in weather forecasting. Lack of precise meteorologic information once led expeditions to attempt the summit whenever their team members were ready, meaning groups were staggered. Today, with hyper-accurate satellite forecasts, all teams know exactly when a weather window will open up, and they often go for the top on the same days.
Another factor: Low-budget outfitters don’t always have the staff, knowledge, or proper equipment to keep their clients safe if something goes wrong. The cheaper operators often employ fewer Sherpas, and those they do hire sometimes lack experience. “All of the clients who died on Everest this past year went with low-budget, less-experienced operators,” says Willie Benegas, 44, an Argentine-American high-altitude guide and co-owner, with his brother Damian, of Benegas Brothers Expeditions, which has led 11 trips to Everest. The brothers say that Nepalese outfitters need to be held to international standards, and that Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, which regulates climbing on Everest, should promote better education for Sherpas.
Steps to fix Everest
To prevent crowding on the mountain, some have proposed limiting the total number of permits per season and the size of each team to no more than ten clients per team. Others are skeptical. “That will not happen,” says New Zealander Guy Cotter, 50, owner of Adventure Consultants, which has led 19 expeditions to Everest. “Everest is big business for Nepal, and they will never turn down the money.”
Another way to make the mountain safer is with technology, says Conrad Anker, 50, who led our expedition in 2012. The mountain is already high-tech—everyone at Base Camp has access to a cell phone or the Internet—but last summer in a meeting with the Nepalese ministry, Anker proposed something new: identification cards issued with every climbing permit.
“The Everest ID would contain data that could save the life of a climber or Sherpa,” Anker explains. It would have the climber’s photo, of course, but more important, it would also have a QR code—a type of bar code. “Scanned with a smartphone, the QR code would reveal information such as age, experience, health history, allergies, emergency phone numbers, everything,” Anker says that bureaucrats just looked at him with blank faces when he tried to explain the benefits of the ID.
Despite all the problems on the mountain, Everest still stands alone. I’ll never forget the breathtaking view from our perch at Camp III, clouds rolling up the Western valley like a slow-motion reverse avalanche. Or the visceral relief of a cup of scalding soup at Camp IV. Or the crunch of my crampons in the crystalline labyrinth of the Khumbu Icefall just above Base Camp. I’ll always treasure the memory of climbing with friends.
Around 2950 BC, MerNeith, the daughter of one pharaoh, wife of another, and mother of another, is believed to have ruled Egypt in her own right for some period of time. The first female pharaoh whose reign was confirmed by scientific evidence was Sobekneferu, who ruled Egypt between 1806 and 1802 BC, following the death of her brother, Amenemhat IV. These are just two impressive women in history—here are 20 confidence-boosting from seriously awesome women in history.
She was only the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic… ever
Amelia Earhart is best known for being the first woman to complete the feat, but it wasn’t like a whole slew of men had accomplished the task before her. She was only the second person ever to do it! The first was Charles Lindbergh, who made the flight in May 1927. Earhart did it in May 1932. She completed the flight in just shy of 15 hours—quite the accomplishment for our list of inspirational female firsts, dating from ancient Egypt to today.
These EMTs returned from the hospital to make sure their patient’s lawn didn’t die.
On a steamy July day in Bayonet Point, Florida, Gene Work and his brother-in-law, Mark Rouco, were resodding Gene’s yard. It had grown brown and patchy in the heat, and the homeowners’ association had threatened to impose a hefty fine if the situation wasn’t remedied. The new sod was sitting in the driveway on four pallets, but the job was slow going. Gene, then 40, wasn’t feeling right. He went inside to take a break and collapsed on the couch, clutching his chest. His wife, Melissa Work, called 911 quickly. Find out the reason a 9/11 first responder has decided to tell his story 18 years later.
Even though he was staring down death, Gene had one thing on his mind: that lawn. If the sod wasn’t put down that day, it would die. “While he was having his heart attack, literally in and out of consciousness, he kept begging me to have it put down because he didn’t want it to go to waste,” Melissa wrote in a Facebook post.
Soon Pasco County Fire Rescue arrived and took Gene and Melissa to the hospital, leaving Rouco behind to tackle the yard. Within an hour, he had managed to remove the old grass. He was about to lay the new sod, which he feared would take him well into the night, when two emergency vehicles appeared. Seven men—the same ones who had treated his brother-in-law—got out. Gene had told them how badly he’d wanted to get the sod down, so they had returned to help. The job was done in under two hours.
Meanwhile, Gene had surgery to insert stents in his heart, alleviating a potentially deadly blockage. He’s home now, fully recovered—and enjoying his beautiful lawn.
The Works are still amazed that those EMTs went above and beyond their job description. “These men,” Melissa told tampabay.com, “saved Gene’s life, and then came back to save his grass. That’s just so awesome.” Read on for more inspiring true stories about the kindness of strangers.
Greg Zanis works with victims’ groups and reads obituaries to learn about each victim.
Twenty years ago, 15 wooden crosses appeared on a hill overlooking Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado. It was April 28, 1999, eight days after a pair of students had shot and killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher before killing themselves. At first, the crosses seemed to be part miracle, part mystery. Before long, their creator stepped forward: Greg Zanis, a carpenter from Sugar Grove, Illinois, who had driven them nearly 1,000 miles to Colorado.
Since Columbine, Zanis has built and delivered more than 26,000 crosses—Stars of David and crescent moons, too—to communities across America grieving in the wake of violence, natural disasters, and other catastrophes. He brought them to Paradise, California, after wildfires wiped out most of the town; Pittsburgh, where 11 worshippers were killed in a synagogue; Sandy Hook, Connecticut, when 26 children and staff were gunned down in their school; and Las Vegas, where 58 people died while enjoying a music festival.
One place Zanis, 68, never expected to plant his crosses was in his own backyard. On February 15, 2019, he was in his workshop when he heard sirens scream past his window. He looked out to see dozens of first responders racing down the street. Later that day, he learned that a disgruntled ex-employee had walked into the Henry Pratt manufacturing plant in Aurora, Illinois—just 15 minutes from where Zanis lives—and killed five former coworkers. Zanis found himself with the same sickening reaction he’d witnessed in so many towns around the country: How could it happen?
“This is home,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “It was not supposed to happen here.”
In 2017, 638 Chicagoans were murdered. Zanis honored each one on a vacant lot.
And yet it did. Soon, his phone began to ring: When would he set up his crosses? Zanis worked through the night, building five monuments to the deceased. Each was four feet tall, weighed about 30 pounds, and featured the victim’s name and photo and a big red heart. “My simple message is just that heart on the cross,” he told CNN. “Love your brother, love your neighbor. Don’t judge them. Life isn’t that complicated. Hate and revenge is.”
Zanis loaded the crosses carefully into the back of his white pickup and drove to the plant. He already knew where he’d place them: on the sidewalk out front, next to a chain-link fence. As he always does, he arrived quietly and left without a word. His work was done. Read up on more stories about the kindness of strangers that will have you tearing up.
Zanis understands more than most how the families feel. He began building crosses to honor his father-in-law, who was murdered in 1996. Tragedy struck him again in 2018, when he buried his 37-year-old daughter, who died of a drug overdose. A few weeks after her death, he was in Parkland, Florida, with the 17 crosses and stars he’d made for the victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
“When I went to [Parkland], I was a mess,” he told the Tribune. “But I can’t allow myself to get consumed in my own grief. I’m offering these families hope. It helps me, and it helps them. I know that for a fact because when I leave there, they are smiling.”
Despite having seen and experienced so much grief, Zanis insists he has no agenda. He isn’t advocating for one thing or another. “I’m not a gun issue guy. I’m not a church guy,” he told the New York Times. “There’s no interest here other than helping people remember.”
I’m willing to go out on a limb here and guess that most stories of kindness do not begin with a formerly drug-addicted celebrity bad boy turned Marvel movie megastar. Mine does. You may or may not be a fan, but I am: His name is Robert Downey Jr., and it was the early ’90s (I was barely 20 years old, and he was years away from donning the Iron Man suit) when this story took place.
It was at a garden party for the ACLU of Southern California—my stepmother was the executive director of the organization. I was escorting my grandmother to the event.
There isn’t enough room in this story to explain to you everything my grandmother was—I would need volumes. So for the sake of brevity, I will tell you that she was beautiful even in her 80s, vain as the day is long, and whip smart, though her type of intelligence did not include recognizing young celebrities.
I pointed out Robert Downey Jr. to her when he arrived, in a gorgeous cream-colored linen suit, with Sarah Jessica Parker on his arm. My grandmother shrugged, far more interested in piling her paper plate with cheese. He wasn’t Cary Grant or Gregory Peck. What did she care?
The afternoon’s main honoree was Ron Kovic, whose time in the Vietnam War left him in a wheelchair and whose story had recently been immortalized in the Oliver Stone film Born on the Fourth of July. I mention the wheelchair because it played a role in what happened next.
After the speeches concluded, we stood up in our front-row seats to make our exit. But as she rose, my grandmother tripped and fell smack into the wheelchair ramp that provided Ron Kovic with access to the stage. I didn’t know that wheelchair ramps have sharp edges, but they do—at least this one did, and it sliced her shin right open. The blood was staggering.
I’d like to be able to tell you that I whipped into action—that I quickly took control of the situation, tending to my grandmother and calling for the ambulance that was so obviously needed—but I didn’t. I sat down and put my head between my knees because I thought I was going to faint. Did I mention the blood? Luckily, somebody did take control of the situation. That person was Robert Downey Jr.
He ordered someone to call an ambulance, another to bring a glass of water, and another to fetch a blanket. He took off his gorgeous linen jacket, he rolled up his sleeves, and he grabbed hold of my grandmother’s leg. Then he took the jacket, which I’d assumed he’d taken off only to get it out of the way, and he tied it around her wound. I watched the cream-colored linen turn scarlet with her blood. He told her not to worry and that everything would be all right. He knew, instinctively, how to speak to her, distract her, and—most critically—play to her vanity. He held on to her calf, and he whistled. He told her how stunning her legs were. She said to him, to my humiliation, “My granddaughter tells me you’re a famous actor, but I’ve never heard of you.”
He stayed with her until the ambulance came, and then he walked alongside the stretcher holding her hand and telling her she was breaking his heart by leaving the party so early, just as they were getting to know each other. He waved to her as they closed the doors. “Don’t forget to call me, Silvia,” he said. “We’ll do lunch.” He was a movie star, after all.
Believe it or not, I hurried into the ambulance without a word. I was too embarrassed and way too shy to thank him.
We all have things we wish we’d said, moments we’d like to revisit and reenact. Rarely do we get that chance to make up for those times when words utterly failed us. But I did—many years later.
I should mention that, later, when Robert Downey Jr. was in prison for possession of heroin, cocaine, and an unloaded .357 Magnum handgun found in his car, I thought of writing to him. I wanted to remind him of that day when he was humanity personified when he was the best of what we each can be. On that day, he was the kindest of strangers.
But I didn’t.
Some 15 years after that garden party, ten years after my grandmother had died, and five since he’d been released from prison, I saw him in a restaurant. I grew up in Los Angeles, where celebrity sightings are commonplace and where I was raised to respect people’s privacy and never bother someone while he’s out having a meal. But on this day, I decided to abandon the code of the native Angeleno and my own shyness, and I approached his table.
I said, “I don’t have any idea if you remember this …,” and I told him the story.
He remembered.
“I just wanted to thank you,” I said. “And I wanted to tell you that it was simply the kindest act I’ve ever witnessed.”
He stood up and he took both of my hands in his and he looked into my eyes and he said, “You have absolutely no idea how much I needed to hear that today.”
Your kitty’s irritated nip at your hand may leave only a small puncture wound. But that wound can be tricky to properly disinfect and that means the risk of infection is high—as many as 
If you need a refresher on what happened at Chernobyl, here’s the history: The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, is the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. It all started at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when a routine safety test at the plant went horribly wrong. A bad combination of faulty design and human error caused one of the four nuclear reactors to overheat and explode, starting a fire and spewing radioactive material into the air. To this day, the site contains harmful levels of radiation, making Chernobyl—and the 
