Cassandra Warren was in a rush and feeling a little overwhelmed with work and planning her 200-person wedding. As she was getting invitations for her nuptials in the mail one day last year, she hurriedly addressed one to her aunt and uncle in Eugene, Oregon, about 20 minutes from where she lived.
A week later, the invitation came back. She had mistakenly jotted down the wrong address.
A handwritten note was scrawled on the return envelope: “I wish I knew you—this is going to be a blast. Congratulations—go have dinner on me. I’ve been married for 40 years—it gets better with age.” A $20 bill was tucked inside.
Cassandra was at a bit of a professional crossroads and had been having a tough day. In fact, she’d been in “mid-meltdown,” venting to her then-fiancé, Jesse Jones, about her frustrations just as she opened the misdirected envelope. Then she read the note.
“It was kind of perfect timing,” says Cassandra, who works as a nanny. “I was really grateful for it.”
And the magic envelope wasn’t finished with its surprises. Cassandra looked closer and saw that the person had scribbled “Live long and prosper” on the envelope, a nod to Star Trek.
“We’re kind of Trekkies,” she says.
Cassandra, 26, and Jesse, 24, have no idea who the mystery note writer is. But they figure the Star Trek reference was because the person noticed the “fandom” corner of their invitation, which had both a Star Wars lightsaber and a Harry Potter wand.
“She assumed we’d understand her message,” Cassandra says. “Which we did.”
Cassandra and Jesse—who is a counselor for families with autistic children—went out to dinner the following night with a friend who was going overseas with the military. They happily put the $20 toward their bill.
Then Cassandra stopped by a store and bought another card—a thank-you card. She wrote her aunt and uncle’s incorrect address on the envelope again—this time on purpose—and addressed it to “Kind Stranger.”
Inside, she wrote, “Thank you for the note and taking the time to send it. Not many people would have done that. It was a big blessing after the day I was having. I am thankful for people like you still being in the world.” Don’t miss these other 15 real-life acts of kindness like this one that will warm your heart.
Jamie Whitmore, 43, isn’t used to slowing down. The professional triathlete turned Paralympic gold medalist has never met a challenge she couldn’t overcome, whether it was an XTERRA mountain bike race—or cancer.
In 2007, Whitmore was considered one of the most successful athletes in America. She was a six-time USA champion for XTERRA racing, a two-time European tour champion, and held a world title. Everything changed during a triathlon that seemed like so many others she had conquered.
“I got out of the water and onto my bike and something was off with my left leg,” Whitmore tells Reader’s Digest. “Once I got off the bike and began the running portion, I was shuffling. It was hard to pick my legs up. I knew something wasn’t right.” She avoided running for a while, focusing on her other two passions, swimming and biking. “I didn’t have any symptoms as long as I wasn’t running. I took a break from it, but every time I tried again the muscles were super tight and I had a lot of pain in my hamstring.” Assuming she’d simply pushed herself too hard in the last race, Whitmore shrugged off the pain.
It wasn’t until a sleepless night at a sports camp in Arizona that Whitmore says she knew something was seriously wrong. “I couldn’t sleep, and I was having a ton of sciatic nerve pain. I usually had it when I drove a long time or sat too long—it was more annoying than anything.”
The next morning she decided to try to go for a jog, and the pain immediately became excruciating. She opted instead to ride her bike, hoping that would ease the pain. “Once I got on my bike I was in so much pain I was bawling. I flew back home to go to a nearby hospital. I knew whatever was going on was bad if I couldn’t ride my bike.” Whitmore never thought her leg pain could be cancer—she thought she had pulled a muscle. Here are 10 surprising symptoms that turned out to be cancer.
After scans showed a grapefruit-sized mass near her ovary, she was referred to an obstetrician who performed an exploratory laparoscopy. “He said he thought it was cancer, but I began to bleed out during surgery, so he was unable to retrieve a sample to biopsy.” As her pain continued to increase, so did other symptoms. “I wasn’t able to use the restroom without pain; I was bed-ridden, unable to walk. No one could tell me exactly what was wrong.”
After a friend recommended she go to the University of California, San Francisco, Whitmore took his advice and was quickly admitted. “I met with an oncologist, and he said they would do a needle biopsy.” What doctors found during surgery shocked them all: Whitmore had spindle cell sarcoma, a soft tissue tumor that can start in the bone, and the tumor was wrapped around her sciatic nerve and touching several vital organs.
“They couldn’t cut it out for fear of bursting the tumor. It was near every organ I needed to live.” Spindle cell sarcoma is extremely rare, comprising only 2 to 5 percent of all primary bone cancers. Chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation are typical treatments for the disease. There are several types of cancer that have minor symptoms like Whitmore’s or none at all. Here are 30 cancer signs you don’t want to ignore.
When she heard the diagnosis for the first time, Whitmore says time stood still. “I couldn’t breathe. They were talking about treatment and I just started crying and saying ‘I don’t want to die.'” Doctors enlisted the help of several specialists to remove the tumor. “It was pressing against my rectum and bladder and had choked the blood supply of my sciatic nerve. I had no idea that when I woke up I wouldn’t have the use of my leg anymore from the knee down. When they told me I would need to bandage my foot to walk, I thought, this can’t be happening. I’m a professional athlete.”
Whitmore now had drop foot and had to learn to walk again with the help of a physical therapist. She also started radiation therapy, but four days in, doctors had more bad news: A scan had shown the cancer was back. “This time it was even more aggressive. They went in and took the rest of my sciatic nerve, a sacral nerve, and removed some cancer from my tail bone.”
Whitmore developed sepsis from the surgery and endured a grueling two-month recovery. “My scans were coming back clear of cancer, but now I had all of these other complications.” When she began to feel sick again, Whitmore was certain her cancer was back. Instead, doctors gave her unexpected news: She was pregnant—with twins. “That was a whole other freak-out,” Whitmore recalls.
Today, Whitmore is a mother of two sons and cancer-free. She’s competing again, and has won a gold medal in the Paralympics, nine world titles, and has set two world records. She travels as a motivational speaker when she’s not spending time with her sons. Whitmore has some words of advice for others with limitations: “Never let anyone tell you what you can and cannot do. You have to find out yourself. Some doctors told me I would never ride anything more than a stationary bike. And yet I rode my mountain bike 104 miles climbing from 9,000 feet to 14,000 feet. People with two good legs have fallen short of that task! You just can’t give up.” Here are 13 more motivational quotes from Olympic coaches.
In 2014, the Disney movie Frozen became the top-grossing animated movie of all time. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, and “Let It Go” won the Oscar for Best Original Song. The film contained all the elements of a traditional Disney plot—princesses and ball gowns, a handsome prince, a wisecracking sidekick, and a stream of upbeat songs. But throughout, these elements had been disturbed, just enough, to let something new and different emerge. We assume such original storytelling comes from the innate genius of its creators, but here’s how Frozen really got its fairy-tale ending.
It’s 2012, and the screening-room audience is all Disney employees. As the lights dim, two sisters appear on the screen against an icy landscape. Anna, the younger character, quickly establishes herself as bossy and uptight, obsessed with her upcoming wedding and her coronation as queen.
Elsa, her older sister, is jealous, evil—and cursed. Everything she touches turns to ice. She was passed over for the throne because of this power, and now she wants revenge. She plots with a snarky snowman named Olaf to claim the crown for herself, and she floods the village with vicious snow creatures. The monsters, however, are soon out of her control. They begin to threaten everyone, including Elsa herself. The only way to survive, Anna and Elsa realize, is for them to join forces. Through cooperation, they defeat the creatures, and everyone lives happily ever after.
The name of the movie is Frozen, and it is scheduled to be released in just 18 months.
Often, when a movie screening ends at Disney, people cheer or shout. This time, there are no cheers. As everyone files out, it is very, very quiet.
After the screening, the director, Chris Buck, and about a dozen other filmmakers gather to discuss what they saw. This is a meeting of the studio’s “story trust,” a group responsible for providing feedback on films as they go through production.
Disney’s chief creative officer, John Lasseter, begins. “You’ve got some great scenes here,” he says. “The dialogue between the sisters was witty. The snow monsters were terrifying. The film had a good, fast pace.” And then he begins listing the film’s flaws. After detailing a dozen problems, he says, “There’s no character to root for. Anna’s too uptight, and Elsa’s too evil.”
Others chime in: There were logical holes in the plot. There were too many characters. The plot twists were foreshadowed way too much.
Buck isn’t surprised. His team had sensed the movie wasn’t working for months. The film’s screenwriter had restructured the script repeatedly. The songwriters were exhausted from writing and scrapping song after song.
“There’s a lot of really good material here,” Lasseter tells Buck, “but you need to find the movie’s core.” Lasseter rises from his seat. “It would be great if it happened soon.”
From the beginning, the Frozen team members had known they couldn’t simply retell an old fairy tale. “It couldn’t just be that at the end, a prince gives someone a kiss, and that’s the definition of true love,” Buck told me. They wanted the film to say something bigger, about how girls don’t need to be saved by Prince Charming, about how sisters can save themselves. They wanted to turn the standard princess formula on its head.
“It was a really big ambition,” said Jennifer Lee, who joined the team as a writer after working on Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. “And it was particularly hard because every movie needs tension, but if the tension in Frozen is between the sisters, how do you make them both likable? The movie needed to connect emotionally.”
[pullquote] We can always find the right story when we start asking ourselves what feels true. [/pullquote]
“Creativity is just problem solving,” Disney Animation Studios (and former Pixar) leader Ed Catmull has said, and so each morning, Buck and his team of writers and artists assembled with their coffee cups and to-do lists. Songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez would videoconference in from their home in Brooklyn.
“Instead of focusing on the things that aren’t working,” Peter Del Vecho, the producer, said the morning after, “I want you to envision your biggest hopes. If we could do anything, what would you want to see on the screen?”
People started describing what excited them about Frozen. Some were drawn in because it offered a chance to upend the way girls are portrayed in films. Others were inspired by the idea of two sisters coming together.
“My sister and I fought a lot as kids,” Lee told the room. Then, when Lee was in her 20s, her boyfriend drowned in a boating accident. Her sister was there at a time of need. “There’s this moment when you start to see your sibling as a person instead of a reflection of yourself,” Lee said. “I think that’s what has been bothering me the most about this script. Siblings don’t grow apart because one is good and one is bad. They grow apart because they’re both messes, and then they come together when they realize they need each other.”
Over the next month, the Frozen team focused on the relationship between the movie’s sisters. In particular, the filmmakers drew on their own experiences. “We can always find the right story when we start asking ourselves what feels true,” Del Vecho told me. “The thing that holds us back is when we forget to use our lives, what’s inside our heads, as raw material.”
A few months later, songwriters Lopez and Anderson-Lopez were walking through a park in Brooklyn, and Anderson-Lopez asked, “What would it feel like if you were Elsa? What if you tried to be good your entire life and it didn’t matter, because people constantly judged you?”
Anderson-Lopez knew this feeling as a busy working parent. She felt other parents’ looks when she let their daughters eat ice cream instead of healthy snacks. She’d felt glances when she and Lopez let their girls watch an iPad in a restaurant because they wanted a moment of peace. It wasn’t her fault that she wanted to be a good mom, wife, and songwriter and that things like home-packed snacks and sparkling dinner conversation sometimes fell by the wayside.
She didn’t think she needed to apologize for not being perfect. And she didn’t think Elsa should have to apologize either. “Elsa is being punished for being herself,” Anderson- Lopez said to Lopez. “The only way out is for her to stop caring, to let it all go.”
They riffed, singing snippets of lyrics. What if they wrote a song that started with a fairy-tale opening? Then Elsa could talk about the pressures of being a good girl.
“She could change into a woman,” Anderson-Lopez said. “That’s what growing up is, letting go of the things you shouldn’t have to care about.”
She began singing, trying out lyrics for Elsa to convey that she doesn’t care what anyone thinks anymore.
Let it go, let it go. That perfect girl is gone.
“I think you just figured out the chorus,” said Lopez.
Back in their apartment, they recorded a rough draft. The next day, the Frozen team put “Let It Go” on the sound system at the Disney headquarters.
“Finally, it felt like we had broken through,” Lee said to me later. “We could see the movie. We needed someone to show us ourselves in the characters, to make them familiar. ‘Let It Go’ made Elsa feel like one of us.”
Seven months later, the Frozen team had the first two thirds of the film figured out. They knew how to make Anna and Elsa likable while driving them apart to create the tension the film needed. They had transformed Olaf into a lovable sidekick. Everything was falling into place.
Except they had no idea how to end the film. The group was so comfortable with its vision of the sisters that it had lost the ability to see other paths.
[pullquote] That’s what we need to do with the ending—show that love is stronger than fear. [/pullquote]
“We had to shake things up,” said Catmull, the studio’s president. “So we made Jenn Lee a second director.”
Lee was already the film’s writer. Naming her as a second director, with equal authority to Buck, didn’t add any new voices to meetings. But sometimes the best way to spark creativity is by disturbing things just enough to let some light through.
“The change was subtle but at the same time very real,” Lee told me. “I felt like I had to listen even more closely to what everyone was saying because that was my job now.” She understood that people were asking for clarity, for every choice to reflect a core idea.
A few months after her promotion, Lee received an e-mail from Anderson-Lopez. “Yesterday I went to therapy,” the songwriter wrote. “I was discussing dynamics and politics and power and who do you listen to and how do [you] start,” she typed. “Then my therapist asked me, ‘Why do you do [what you do]?’
“It all really comes down to the fact that I have things I need to share about the human experience,” Anderson-Lopez wrote to Lee. “I want to take what I have learned or felt and help people by sharing it. What is it about Frozen that you, Bobby, and I have to say? For me, it has something to do with not getting frozen in roles that are dictated by circumstances beyond our control.”
Lee herself was an example of this. She had come to Disney as a new film-school graduate with a young daughter, a fresh divorce, and student loans, and now she was the first female director in Disney’s history. Anderson-Lopez and Lopez had fought to build the careers they wanted, even when everyone said it was ridiculous that they could support themselves by writing songs. Now here they were, with the lives they’d wished for. For Frozen’s ending, Anderson-Lopez said, they had to find a way to share that sense of possibility with the audience.
“What is it for you?” Anderson- Lopez typed.
Lee replied 23 minutes later. All the members of the team had their own ideas. However, Frozen could have only one ending. Someone had to make a choice. And the right decision, Lee wrote, was that “fear destroys us; love heals us. Anna’s journey should be about learning what love is; it’s that simple. Love is a greater force than fear. Go with love.”
Later that month, Lee sat down with John Lasseter. “We need clarity,” she told him. “The core of this movie isn’t about good and evil, because that doesn’t happen in real life. And this movie isn’t about love versus hate. That’s not why sisters grow apart.
“This is a movie about love and fear. Anna is all about love, and Elsa is all about fear. Anna has been abandoned, so she throws herself into the arms of Prince Charming because she doesn’t know the difference between real love and infatuation. She has to learn that love is about sacrifice. And Elsa has to learn that you can’t be afraid of who you are; you can’t run away from your own powers. You have to embrace your strengths. That’s what we need to do with the ending—show that love is stronger than fear.”
“Say it again,” Lasseter told her.
Lee described her theory of love versus fear again, explaining how Olaf, the snowman, embodies innocent love, while Prince Hans demonstrates that love without sacrifice isn’t really love at all; it’s narcissism.
“Say it again,” Lasseter said.
Lee said it again.
“Now go tell the team,” said Lasseter.
In November 2013, Frozen was released. The prince wasn’t charming; in fact, he was the villain. The princesses weren’t helpless; instead, they saved each other. Finally, true love came from siblings learning to embrace their own strengths.
Charles Duhigg’s latest book explores the fascinating science of productivity and why managing how you think is more important than what you think. Learn more and buy the book here.
Each summer, as Lake Michigan finally begins to warm, I think of the men of the World War II cruiser USS Indianapolis and the worst disaster at sea in U.S. naval history. I go down to the lake and I wonder: How would I have survived what they experienced?
I don’t know the answer, but it’s the asking of the question that helps me recalibrate what could be called my moral compass.
On July 30, 1945, just over a month before the end of the war, the ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea. It sank in 12 minutes. Of the 1,195 men on board, only 316 were alive when help arrived four days later. Headlines of the disaster deeply disturbed Americans: How could this have happened so close to the war’s end?
Today, only 12 of those men are still living, and each July they meet in Indianapolis for a reunion, as they have periodically since 1960, to gather around memories of shipmates who were lost at sea and those survivors who have recently passed away.
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about 16 million Americans served in World War II, and of those, about 497,000 are with us today, in our neighborhoods, at our grocery stores, and at family gatherings. Around 350 are dying each day, meaning that sometime within this generation, all will be deceased.
I suspect that we’ll feel, then, that the 20th century has truly ended.
We’ll no longer be able to walk up to the gentleman we spy on our way to the dairy case, who is wearing a hat bearing the insignia of a World War II unit, and shake the hand of someone who fought Hitler.
When I first met the survivors of the Indianapolis in 1999 while writing a book about them, their story, the last major action of World War II, was rarely mentioned in high school textbooks. This is despite the fact that before its torpedoing, the ship had delivered components of the atomic bomb Little Boy to Tinian Island. The bomb parts were packed in a plywood case whose contents the sailors tried vainly to guess, having no idea their ship was delivering the atom to modern warfare.
Only 316 survived, including this officer (right) recuperating at the Peleliu Hospital.
As the men floated in the sea, they were blinded by sun; hounded by hallucinations, thirst, and hunger; attacked by sharks; and beset, finally, by the realization that no one was coming to rescue them. Some of them purposefully swam away to die, feeling all hope was lost. Others surrendered to the moment but did not give up, an important distinction. While still certain that rescue would never come, they carried on, assisting struggling shipmates even when it didn’t seem to matter. By becoming selfless, they apprehended who they were as individuals.
When they were miraculously rescued, having been spotted by a 24-year-old pilot named Chuck Gwinn, whom in later years they affectionately called their angel, they felt they had been reborn. The second half of the 20th century was powered by this restless energy, possessed by millions of other Americans also returning from war. When I ask the survivors about this ordeal’s effect on their lives, they consistently remark that since their rescue, they’ve “never had a bad day.”
Reflecting on their struggle to survive feels instructive. When I look at Lake Michigan each July, I imagine the men of the Indianapolis visible on the horizon: dark heads, struggling arms, a cry and whirl of a world being remade. I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness, accompanied by a desire to yell out that they will be rescued. At the same time, I know that many were rescued. But the sadness always comes.
What I feel I’m watching, in my mind’s eye, is the work of people struggling to stay alive and, in the process, struggling with what it means to be a moral person, even after they emerged from the crucible of the sea.
Capt. Charles McVay of the Indianapolis was court-martialed, making him the only captain in American history to be court-martialed for losing his ship in an act of war. Giles McCoy, a founder of the USS Indianapolis Survivors Organization, promised his captain that the Navy would exonerate him one day. But in 1968, outside his stately home in Litchfield, Connecticut, Captain McVay took his own life.
The 1945 Indianapolis crew greets sailors on the ship’s new version, launched in 2018.
The survivors and other advocates struggled for years to clear McVay’s name. When I asked McCoy why his shipmates stood behind the captain, he said, “The skipper never blamed anyone but himself.” This is despite the fact that the Japanese submarine commander who had sunk the ship, Mochitsura Hashimoto, testified during the court-martial that there was nothing McVay could have done to stop it.
McVay, steadfast in his own moral universe, believed otherwise. Forgive yourself, we want to say, but we know he won’t. His sense of duty was profound, and the survivors’ efforts to clear his name can be heard as an elegiac counterpoint to his suffering. Finally, on July 13, 2001, 56 years after the ship’s sinking, the Navy announced that McVay was not culpable for the disaster.
Last night I swam out beyond the buoys, looked up at the sky, and felt the dark, pliable hand of the night water take hold. I do this every year: Five minutes floating alone in the dark, unable to touch bottom, is the barest glimpse of the ordeal that those 316 men of the Indianapolis survived. But I recommend it.
Swim out where the bottom swoops to the deep and dog-paddle. Even though you’re certain you’re safe, the mind skips a beat. I promise, you’ll tell yourself: Tomorrow will be a good day.
I was flying around in a small four-seat Cessna with some friends at sunset. Daylight was running out, and as we were headed somewhere, I noticed a major decline in battery power. The alternator had died and we had maybe 20 minutes of battery left before all the lights would go out and we’d lose all radio contact with air traffic control. We were in a congested airspace and losing radio contact would be very dangerous. I turned the plane around and headed to my home airport at full power. I told my passengers that we just needed to return because of a simple warning annunciator. We landed without issue and for anyone concerned, the engine would have never failed because of the alternator but not having lights and radios would have been dangerous enough. My passengers thanked me for not freaking them out by sharing this information with them.—Reddit user ceplano
Aimee Spevak was supposed to be working. Actually, she was supposed to be on vacation—she had rented a cabin in the Pocono Mountains last August to get away from the New York City heat. But no one can ever truly break away these days, and Spevak, a freelance medical writer, found herself stuck inside on this lovely summer day, finishing an assignment. She procrastinated a little, surfing the Web now and then. When she checked her Facebook news feed, she was delighted to see a notification from her friend Michael Lythcott. Lythcott was an intrepid traveler. In fact, he and Spevak had trekked through Nepal together a few years back. Spevak knew he was in Bali now and was glad to take a momentary vicarious trip.
And then she read the post. Rather than seeing beautiful travel photos or a detailed narrative of Lythcott’s journey, Spevak saw a bright red background and a few stark words written in white: “Help. In danger. Call police.”
Mikey Lythcott, a 39-year-old graphic designer, had indeed traveled to Bali. He and his friend Stacey Eno, 25, had landed on the Indonesian island just the day before. Excited for their adventure, the two Americans had rented a scooter on the outskirts of Ubud and driven into town, where they stayed until the wee hours doing what they both loved: chatting with strangers from all over the world.
It was pitch-dark, well past 2 a.m., when they hopped back on the scooter and headed to their hotel. Lythcott had placed his iPhone in the pouch of the scooter and was using it to navigate. As they climbed a hill past the rice paddies and the jungle, he glanced down at the GPS and back up at the road—a curve ahead. Lythcott tapped the brakes to make the turn. He didn’t tap fast enough.
He awoke sometime later to the babble of nearby water. He was flat on his back on a steep slope, surrounded by vegetation. The jungle. He tried to sit up, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. What happened? he wondered. Where am I? In an empty forest? Then it came to him. Bali! But why? He strained to think, but his mind was a fog.
Oh man … I was in a scooter accident, he thought. That much came back to him now, nothing more. Nothing about flying 150 feet through the air down this ravine, nothing about slamming into trees, nothing that explained the blood he could taste and feel, the dull pain all through his body.
He took stock. His glasses were gone. The scooter was gone, and with it his cell phone. His left wrist and torso were smashed up badly, as was his back. He couldn’t move his legs. Finally he remembered his companion. “Stacey!” She didn’t answer. “Stacey, where are you?” His voice came out surprisingly quiet. He’d learn later that both his lungs had collapsed.
“I’m right here.”
She was only a few feet away. Lythcott dragged himself toward her through the darkness until he was beside her.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “Why are we in the woods?”
“We were in an accident. Can you move?”
“No.”
“Stacey, I need you to get up and walk and get us help.”
“I can’t.”
This jolted Lythcott. No one knew they were there. They couldn’t walk. His back was probably broken. He was bleeding out. I think we might die here, he thought.
Making matters worse, he had begun sliding downhill along the wet jungle floor past thick-trunked banyan trees to whatever terrors lay below.
“I’m scared,” Eno said. She sounded farther and farther away. At last, Lythcott came to rest in a tiny depression on the hillside where he could grasp a tree root. There, in his nook, an eerie calm came over him. If he was going to die, let it be like this, in a peaceful place. Let him close his eyes and allow it to take him over.
No, he scolded himself. Stop thinking that way. You have to save yourself. You have to save Stacey.
But how would anyone find them? If only he hadn’t lost his phone in the wreck. Then he remembered—he had a second phone, the one with his American SIM card that allowed him to contact the United States. He felt around in his jacket pocket, and there it was! Carefully he pulled it out, powered it on, and turned on international data roaming, balancing the phone on his chest with his good hand. Battery charge: 42 percent.
He thought about googling the number for the local police and hoping that whoever answered spoke English. But even if the person did, what would he say? “I’ve been in an accident, and I’m … somewhere?”
He noticed a few of the apps he’d left open on the phone, including Facebook. An idea struck. Taking great care not to let the blood-slick phone tumble down the dark ravine, he opened a bright red backdrop on his status page and typed away. Less than two minutes later, Aimee Spevak saw the post.
At first, Spevak had no idea what to do. What could she do? Where in Bali was he? Then she remembered that Facebook has a function that allows you to call your friends. She gave it a try. To her immense surprise and relief, Lythcott picked up. Sometimes the incessant connectivity of the online world isn’t such a bad thing.
Lythcott and Eno, seen here on their way to Bali, were globe-trotters who met in Thailand and became fast friends.
“Aimee,” he said, “I’m in the woods. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what’s happening.”
“OK,” Spevak said. “Can you send me your location?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to call somebody, and we’ll get you out of there.”
After they hung up, Lythcott sent her his GPS coordinates on a map using Facebook’s “pin drop” function. Now one person in the world knew where he was.
Spevak, though, had no idea whom to call or how to proceed. But she knew who would: someone in Lythcott’s vast circle of friends from around the globe. She posted a screenshot of the pin drop to the Facebook comment thread and watched nervously as every few seconds another friend jumped into the conversation. “Mikey!! ARE YOU OKAY???” “Mikey, what police do we call???” “Do you know what to do here?” “?????”
Ricardo Mendes, wanting Lythcott to activate Apple’s Emergency SOS call, wrote, “PRESS THE OFF BUTTON OF YOUR IPHONE 5 TIMES QUICKLY.”
Kaitlin Haggard found all the local police numbers by district and shared them.
Leah Schlossman aired her frustration: “I can’t get through to any of these numbers and Michael’s line is busy.”
Misty McKenzie-Hill: “Please, please let him be OK.”
Emilie Stein: “Dude, I will fly out tonight and come get you if you need.”
Meanwhile, Stacey Eno continued to struggle. She was trying to scream for help, but each time it came out like a whimper. She was in and out of consciousness, confused and numbed by pain. Her face bones had been shattered. Some object had slammed into her mouth in the crash, slicing her tongue and loosening teeth.
“Stacey,” Lythcott said. “I’m trying to get help.”
Why aren’t either of us getting up? Eno wondered. Lythcott had said he thought his back was broken; what about hers? She tried to move her legs but couldn’t get them underneath her. Any movement made her feel as if she might fall down the steep incline to whatever dangers lay below.
She dug her fingernails into the soil and waited for the help that Lythcott hoped was on the way.
Only days earlier she had been in her classroom in Korea, where she taught English. Her family back in Michigan had thought she was crazy to travel to the other side of the globe for work and longed for her to come home.
Among those glued to Lythcott’s rapidly moving Facebook feed was Josh Hofer, an old friend who was sitting at his office computer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Like Spevak, he’d felt a jolt when he first read Lythcott’s post, then was relieved to see the pin drop Spevak had posted. But his enthusiasm quickly waned: The location was frustratingly vague. He decided to fiddle with it and opened up the pin drop on his phone instead of on his computer. Instantly it showed greater detail. He took a screenshot and sent it to the U.S. Consulate in Indonesia.
Out in Los Angeles, Paul Rocha was watching the thread with rapt interest. Lythcott had mustered sufficient consciousness to share that he could hear water nearby. Taking Spevak’s and Hofer’s screenshots, plus Lythcott’s hint about flowing water, Rocha created a map of his own, with a circle indicating the likeliest search area. Then he posted it to the thread.
In Prague, Lythcott’s friend Caitlin scrutinized the map and concluded that the crash must have occurred between a certain cooking school and a local bar.
A less sketchy picture of the situation was emerging gradually: Lythcott and Eno were outside of Ubud in the jungle near a place called Sweetwater Falls. On the comment thread, friends from all over the world had begun posting contact information for police, hospitals, and ambulance services in Bali, and many of them were bombarding those numbers with calls. Someone posted the number for the U.S. Consulate in Indonesia.
In Surabaya, Indonesia, one island away from Bali, Christine Getzler-Vaughan, a public affairs officer at the U.S. Consulate General, was monitoring the night-duty emergency phone when it began to ring. “My friend posted on Facebook that he’s hurt and needs help,” the caller said.
Getzler-Vaughan grabbed her notebook. “What’s his name?” she asked. “What’s his last known location?” The caller supplied as much detail as possible. Seconds after they hung up, the phone rang again: another of Lythcott’s friends. And so it went for the next two hours.
Getzler-Vaughan frantically multitasked, working by phone, text, and e-mail, receiving and parsing a landslide of information from the Facebook posse: screenshots, maps, tips, phone numbers, Lythcott’s date of birth, his family contacts, all with the aim of sending a physical search party to the correct location. Someone had even activated the U.S. State Department’s emergency operations center in Washington, DC. Getzler-Vaughan passed on what she knew to officials in Bali. At 5:29 a.m., less than an hour after his Facebook SOS, she texted Lythcott: “Someone from our office in Bali has the info your friends have sent us.”
“Can’t move,” he typed back. Then he added: “6 perrxcntt batt.”
Tempers were beginning to fray on Lythcott’s feed. His well-intentioned friends were clogging the thread by voicing concern or requesting updates. In so doing, they were burying important information Balinese authorities would need if they were to rescue him and Eno.
“For Christ’s sake, EVERYONE STOP POSTING,” one poster snapped. “Unless you have an update we need this thread to STOP NOW.” All capital letters—the Internet’s cue that you are raising your voice.
Another took exception: “Dude. Please stop yelling at everyone.”
The reply: “Our friend is in serious trouble and needs help. I will yell my face off if that helps to get a point across!”
Meanwhile, half a world away, Eno and Lythcott lay bleeding in the ravine. Any time Eno came to, she was overwhelmed by her fear of falling. “I’m slipping,” she said.
“Try to hang on,” Lythcott said. “Help is coming.”
“How long?”
He had no idea. By then, his phone battery had died. Now they were truly alone.
Lythcott was drifting in and out of consciousness when he heard the sound of brush rustling. He tensed up. Bali has snakes—cobras and pythons—and he wasn’t exactly in a condition to defend himself. He waited anxiously as whatever it was approached. Soon the sound turned into a murmur, then into voices. A search party!
Speaking little English, four rescuers carefully cradled Lythcott’s back and neck as they carried him up to a flatbed truck. Sometime later they placed Eno beside him in the cargo area. Her hair was soaked and matted with blood and grime. More blood covered her torso and legs. Lythcott barely recognized her.
At 8:14 a.m.—nearly four hours after Mikey Lythcott posted his plea for help on Facebook—Caitlin from Prague, who had been in constant touch with the hospital in Ubud, posted: “UPDATE—HE IS OKAY AND IN THE HOSPITAL!”
Friends from Portland to Pretoria, Seattle to Sydney, breathed a collective sigh of relief. Their sentiments could be summed up by a post from Jay Holmes: “Thank you, that’s what we all needed to hear.”
Eno spent eight days at a hospital in Bali before returning to her teaching job in South Korea. She had suffered a fractured wrist, shattered cheekbones, severe injuries to her mouth and tongue, and a badly broken nose. Lythcott’s condition was worse: internal bleeding, collapsed lungs, a broken wrist, broken ribs, a fractured back and skull, a perforated colon, a bruised liver. But three weeks after the crash, he was out of the hospital and recuperating at his sister’s house in Atlanta.
A miracle? Maybe. But there’s a lesson here too. As Georgia Chapman Costa, one of Lythcott’s Facebook friends, put it on the feed: “When people come together, wonderful things happen.” Even when they are coming together somewhere way out there in cyberspace.
After driving past a local homeless shelter with his dad, four-year-old Austin Perine wanted to do something to put a smile on the faces of those he had seen suffering. He used his allowance money to buy Burger King sandwiches to pass out to the homeless. He handed out each meal with a smile and said, “Don’t forget to show love!” After dipping into his allowance to feed the homeless for a few weeks, his story went viral. Burger King heard about it and decided to chip in to help Austin’s cause. His cause took of so much that his family established the Show Love Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to fighting homelessness. Read more about how Austin is helping to spread smiles and stop homelessness here.
By Mark Anthony DiBello, as told to Charlotte Hilton Andersen
Homeless doesn’t always mean living on the streets
I was homeless for the better part of 20 years and so I’ve lived a lot of places. Some of them are what you might think of as typical, like parks, beaches, overpasses, or shelters, but others might surprise you. When you’re homeless, your first priority is finding a safe place to sleep and sometimes that means you get creative. I’ve spent months living in an outdoor public bathroom, an airport, my car, a deserted cabin in the woods, and a storage locker (which felt so plush it didn’t really even feel like being homeless!). Perhaps the worst one was when I lived in a tractor-trailer; they accidentally locked me in for four days and I almost died.
Homeless doesn’t equal uneducated
When people think of a homeless person they don’t necessarily think of the guy who not only was a star high school athlete but also has a college degree—yet that’s exactly what I am. I have a Bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Miami. And I wasn’t the only one out there with similar credentials. There are plenty of extremely intelligent people who, for various life circumstances, end up homeless. And even the ones who may not have a formal education have to get smart in a different way if they want to survive.
There isn’t just one reason why someone ends up homeless
It might make you feel better to think that you can pinpoint the reason someone ended up homeless—say, drug abuse, mental illness, or criminal activities—because then you think that by avoiding those things you’re safe. In some respects that isn’t wrong and there are many homeless people who struggle with exactly those things. But the truth is that everyone makes bad decisions sometimes and whether or not your bad decisions end in homelessness has a lot to do with privilege and luck. Everyone is vulnerable. There but for the Grace of God go I… or you. P.S. Don’t forget the children, who are definitely not homeless through any fault of their own. You can help these children, just like this woman who throws birthday parties for homeless kids.
Not all homeless people are jobless people
Thanks to the high cost of living and low wages, it’s possible for someone to have a job yet not be able to afford a house. At this point, though, you might be wondering why I ended up homeless for so long, even with an employable degree. There isn’t a simple answer to that (see my last point) but the job market was very tight when I graduated and I was overqualified for most minimum wage jobs. And I did struggle with drug and alcohol addiction. I got sober in 1991, however, and still experienced stints of homelessness after that.
Some people are homeless by choice
The vast majority of homeless people are in that situation because they had no other choice but there are a few who would rather not be tied down to anything. My dad and stepmom kicked me out of the house when I was younger and at that time I decided that I preferred having the clouds for my roof instead of a plaster ceiling. Plus, I am very religious and Jesus was homeless so I figured if it was good enough for Him, it was good enough for me. That wasn’t always the case for me but there were times I preferred my freedom.
Homeless people are not going to kill you
Hollywood and TV shows give the homeless a bad rap, making them look like murderers and rapists, but the majority are simply trying to find food and shelter—just like you. You don’t need to be afraid of the average homeless person, you’re far more likely to be hurt by someone you know. In addition, a homeless person is more likely to be killed by a “normal” person than the other way around. There are some horrible people out there who get their kicks from abusing the homeless because they are easy targets.
There is a “homeless code”
If you learn one thing fast, it’s that no one is going to look out for you and so you learn to band together with other homeless people. We would do our best to help each other out, share tips, and stuff like that. Now there are even tent cities, homeless encampments, in some places. There’s also a healthy barter system where you can trade for things you need without money. I’m actually working on a book of tips for homeless people to help them survive on the streets—all the little things no one tells you but can make all the difference. Want to help make a difference? First you’ll need to learn what local food pantries wish you knew.
When you’re homeless one tiny mistake can quickly become a massive problem
When you have no safety net, the tiniest issue—an unexpected medical bill, an illness or injury, a lost wallet—quickly balloons into an emergency that can make you homeless, or if you’re already homeless, make your life infinitely worse. An example I like to share is when I was living in my car. One day it got towed for a parking violation and once you’re towed, you’re done. There are towing fees, impound fees, parking fees… before long you owe $2,000 on a $600 car. So now you don’t have a car or any of your stuff that was in it and you’re stuck sleeping out in the elements. Sleeping outside makes you get sick which leads to other problems… One tiny mistake can spiral into a life-ending problem.
Homelessness and poverty kills
I can’t tell you how many people I saw die from a lack of simple medical care. A cut, a broken bone, or an illness left untreated can become infected and deadly very quickly. Once, when I was being mugged, my attacker broke my jaw. I tried to manage but the pain was so immense I couldn’t eat or sleep. The ER did set my jaw, thankfully, or else I probably would have died from it. While you may think that hospitals are required to treat everyone, they discourage you from coming in for little things; when they do help, they don’t always do a complete job. They just want to help you enough to get you out of there, not to help you get better. There are shining examples of healthcare workers doing their best to help, like this doctor who dedicated his career to treating the homeless.
Dental problems are the worst problems
When you think of everything you need to be healthy, a dentist isn’t usually the first thing you think of. But your teeth are an essential part of survival. Unfortunately, when you’re homeless, simply taking good care of your teeth is tough, much less getting dental care like root canals or crowns. Between a steady diet of junk food and a lack of access to toothbrushes and floss, many homeless people have to deal constantly with rotting, painful teeth. And when your teeth hurt, everything is harder.
Looking homeless is often worse than actually being homeless
If you look (and smell) homeless, everyone automatically assumes the worst about you, and it becomes that much harder to find a job or an apartment or get medical care. Plus, police or security guards immediately see you as a problem or potential criminal. One of the best things I learned was to keep a cheap gallon jug and use an outdoor spigot to shower every few days. A bar of soap can last you months that way. Being clean can make the difference to being allowed to sit for a few hours nursing a coffee in a warm fast-food restaurant and getting kicked out as soon as you walk in. This is why it was so powerful for a paster to give homeless women free makeovers along with their food.
Being homeless doesn’t have to be a life sentence
About five years ago, I decided I was done being homeless. I was able to start a side business that I could do online, from anywhere, helping people get on reality TV and game shows. (Fun fact: I won $50,000 on Wheel of Fortune and I’ve appeared on over 12 reality shows!) This money allowed me to start a new life. But I’m the exception to the rule. Escaping homelessness, once you’re trapped in the cycle, is incredibly difficult, and resources to help the homeless are terribly underfunded and under-served. If I’m being totally honest I still feel like I’m one mistake away from being out on the streets again and that’s terrifying.
How to help
People often ask me what they can do to help the homeless and I always say, “Just look around you!” When someone has so little, it doesn’t take much to help. You can start by not judging the homeless. Don’t say that they deserve to be in that situation—no human being deserves that. After that, donate to causes that support the homeless in your community, like local churches, job outreach programs, or other charities. If you’d donate to someone after a natural disaster, donate to a homeless person, they are living a natural disaster every single day. Looking for ways to help? These random acts of kindness can change someone’s life in an instant.
Getting back in the dating game after decades of marriage is a challenge for even the most practiced flirt. After my divorce at age 40, I fantasized heading out to bars, whooping it up at late night parties, and endless hours in local coffee shops hoping to catch the eye of the cute guy at the next table. But in reality, I was working full time with a young daughter and didn’t have time for any of that. Instead, I needed the matchmaking to be efficient, so online dating fit the bill—but it only worked once I learned a few tricks.
With his amazing ability to move a sword with seemingly superhuman speed and accuracy, Japanese Iaido Master Isao Machii holds multiple world records, including the fastest 1,000 martial arts sword cuts and the fastest tennis ball cut by a sword. But to truly appreciate Machii’s superpower, check out this video, which shows him slicing and dicing a tiny plastic pellet fired at him at more than 200 mph. Humans aren’t the only ones, these animals have unusual superpowers, too.
Some fireworks mishaps are extremely disappointing, like the time when San Diego accidentally set off all its July 4 fireworks at once, bringing an 18-minute planned-show to a close in a matter of seconds. But if no one gets hurt, we consider it a “win.”
Unfortunately, that was the case when then-teenager Mackie Hill took a hit from what she describes as a “ball of fire” back when she was in high school in the mid-aughts.
It happened at a backyard party in Pennsylvania, where New Jersey native, Mackie, and her friends had traveled to see an amateur backyard fireworks show. (More types of fireworks are legal in Pennsylvania than in New Jersey.)
Although it seemed like a perfectly good idea before the fact, “as things were getting set up and about to start, I had a bad feeling,” Mackie tells Reader’s Digest. It was such a bad feeling, in fact, that Mackie decided to head into the house to watch from inside. “While walking back towards the house, I heard the fireworks starting to go off behind me and turned around to see them,” she recalls.
Big mistake.
It was at that moment that a stray firework was flying directly at Mackie, and, before she had a chance to react, she was hit in the chest. Making matters worse, she was wearing a halter top. In her panic, she forgot all about “stop, drop and roll.” Instead, she tried to smother the fire with her hands, but she realized the actual firework was still on her skin.
“It was literally melting into my skin,” she recalls. “I had to find a way to pull it off with my bare hands.” At that point, Mackie must have gone into shock because although she was later diagnosed with deep second- and third-degree burns, she managed to walk herself inside the house, where she found a bathroom and cleaned the soot off of herself. Then she proceeded to hide her injuries from her mom…until she couldn’t take the pain anymore.
“After I reluctantly told her, she made me go to the hospital,” Mackie says. That’s where she was diagnosed with burns so deep, her doctor was amazed that she’d managed to treat her burns herself so effectively they were already beginning to heal. (Not surprisingly, burns are one of the most common firework injuries.) “It is now a decade later and I am happy to say, I only have one small scar on the base of my wrist as proof of the incident.” To stay safe this Independence Day, avoid the 8 most dangerous types of fireworks.
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was six years old when she posed for this 1935 photo with the dog who was the first of her many beloved canine companions. An animal lover from the beginning, the future 35th First Lady of the United States became an accomplished rider of horses, winning several national championships by the time she turned 11. Born in posh Southampton, New York, Jackie grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she attended Miss Chapin’s School, took ballet and French lessons, developed a lifelong appreciation for literature, and was named 1948’s Debutante of the Year. Don’t miss these rarely seen photos of John and Jackie through the years.
Environmental activist, chemist, and committed vegan Pat Brown wanted to save the planet by changing the way people eat. Agriculture accounts for about 9 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and some estimates show that nearly half of the entire land area on Earth is actively in use to raise animals for food. Enter Brown’s Impossible Burger. Now carried by Burger King, the meatless burger is praised for looking, tasting, and “bleeding” like a normal burger, and consumers are loving it. The company is currently valued at over $2 billion, though Brown says on his website that his main motivation is to save the plant—one bloody burger at a time. Here’s what’s really in those “Impossible” meatless burgers.
Published originally in a pulp magazine called All-Story in 1912, Tarzan of the Apesby Edgar Rice Burroughs was the first novel about a white child who was raised by primates after his parents died. He grew up to usurp the alpha male ape as king of the jungle after learning their ways. He swung from vines, had a trademark call of the wild, was eventually introduced to a bunch of abhorrent humans and the less abhorrent Jane, the love of his life, and finds out he is the heir to a title and a fortune. The series was an immediate massive hit and Burroughs capitalized on that popularity by writing two dozen sequels.
Hollywood came calling
Not counting the adult films, there have been at least 45 movies starting with 1918’s silent Tarzan of the Apes and including a bunch of cheesy adventures in the 1930s and 1940s with Johnny Weissmuller and a softcore romp with Bo Derek in 1981 that featured the characters from Burroughs’ books. There was also a 1966-68 NBC television series starring Ron Ely as the savage swinger and an animated children’s program in the 1970s. The most well-know adaptation is likely the Disney animated movie made in 1999, which like many other Disney films and Disney rides, feature real-life places.
Tarzan’s image, according to the Los Angeles Times, has been used to sell everything from T-shirts to vitamins and chest wigs. In Japan, a fitness magazine was even named after him. The Southern Californian community, Tarzana—where Burroughs built his office in 1926 and was buried—is also named after the lord of the jungle. There is no denying that Tarzan is one of the most beloved and enduring characters in the whole of literature.
Burroughs’ inspirations
The author who originally wrote under a pseudonym because “he thought writing was a lark” and a “silly profession for a big vigorous outdoorsman, as he fancied himself to be,” according to a Los Angeles Timesinterview with Scott Tracy Griffin, who wrote Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration, a scholarly coffee-table book published when the first novel turned 100 in 2012. Griffin says Burroughs was always “canny about his inspirations.” He “was a very well-read man” who “studied Greek and Latin through his school years, did research in the Chicago Public Library” and “had a very firm grounding in the classics.”
Burroughs usually claimed Tarzan was based on classic tales and mythology, often citing the story of Romulus and Remus. According to Britannica.com, they were the twin grandsons of King Numitor, who was deposed by his brother, and fathered by the war god Mars. They were sentenced to death by drowning as infants so as not to leave any rightful claimants to the throne. But they wound up floating down the Tiber River to the site where they would later found Rome, only surviving by being suckled and fed by a she-wolf and a woodpecker.
Many believe Burroughs was so specific and canny about the origins of his idea because he was plagued by accusations of copying Rudyard Kipling, whose Jungle Bookwas published many years earlier in 1894 and featured Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves, befriended by other animals, and eventually faced with both internal and external human dilemmas. (Coincidentally, it was also turned into a Disney cartoon and a live-action film.) Kipling himself once accused Burroughs of jazzing up the Mowgli plot in order to make Tarzan a hit, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Possible real-life Tarzan
But like a good book, the plot thickens. It turns out Kipling might have been wrong, at least partially, and Burroughs might have hidden his actual inspiration for the hero. It wouldn’t be the first incidence of a writer basing an iconic character on a real person.
Enter the 14th Earl of Streatham, William Charles Mildin. According to a 1959 article by journalist Thomas Llewellyn Jones in Man’s Adventuremagazine, Mildin’s shocking tale of survival and primates sounds pretty familiar.
To recap, Tarzan aka John Clayton was the child of aristocrats. The family was marooned in Africa and, after both of his parents perished, he was left to fend for himself in the jungle. He learns survival skills from a family of apes who call him Tarzan, meaning “white of skin.” He eventually tangles with a bunch of other humans including his shady family members and his beloved Jane and learns about his moneyed heritage.
Both came from English nobility
A Telegrapharticle explains that the earl’s story surfaced when family documents were released after his son died in 1937. Lord Mildin left 1,500 handwritten pages of memoirs. Tarzan’s real identity was Lord Greystroke. (Lord Greystroke is, however, a made-up name.)
Both were shipwrecked in Africa
The Earl also spent more than a decade, 15 years to be exact, in the wilds of Africa after a job on a boat went terribly wrong. His papers begin: “I was only 11 when, in a boyish fit of anger and pique, I ran away from home and obtained a berth as cabin boy aboard the four-masted sailing vessel, Antilla, bound for African ports-of-call and the Cape of Good Hope …”
His ship was destroyed during a three-day storm and he claimed he survived by clinging to a “piece of the wreckage.” He washed ashore somewhere between Pointe Noire and Libreville in French Equatorial Africa, according to The Telegraph. The original Man’s Adventure article said official insurance documents proved the Antilla had been totaled in 1868.
Clearly, if he was the prototype for Tarzan, this is where Burroughs took some liberties. Mildin was 11 and had run away from home; Tarzan was a small child who was stranded with his parents.
Both palled around with primates
The papers say he did not seek out natives as he “had always heard they were savages — headhunters and cannibals.” Mildin’s memoirs claim he took up with a group of apes after they provided him with food. According to a fanzine called ERBzine article, which reprinted Llewallan Jones’ 1959 article, the journals stated: “For some strange reason, I was not afraid of these strange creatures. They were hideous to look upon but seemed gentle and harmless.”
He writes that they gave him nuts, grubs, and roots. He was starving so he ate the castoffs, which apparently were rejected by his system at first. “I was terribly ill afterwards and the apes appeared to understand this. One ancient female hunched her way over to me and cradled me in her arms.”
He “gathered branches to make a crude treehouse.” He returned the favor to the family by making fire and stealing weapons from a native settlement: “I found new and easy ways to root under logs for grubs and dig for roots with a sharp-tipped stick. He talks about dressing their wounds with cool moss or wet mud.
Mildin brags that he was “unusually strong and agile for his age” but never claims he became the leader of the animals. “The brutes came to look upon me, not as a leader for I could not match their feats of strength and endurance, but as a mute well-intentioned and helpful counselor,” says an excerpt in the ERBzine piece.
Unlike Tarzan, he did not speak to the apes but did figure out some form of communication. Sounds wild, but scientific experiments and studies like the long-term one with Koko The Gorilla prove apes can be taught sign language. Once Mildin became a teen, he claims he left the beasts and moved in with a native tribe.
Both were swingers
Albeit different kinds, but Mildin was a bit of a player before he re-entered the realm of the white man. He alleges he married five local women and sired four children during his time in the village. His papers allege that the barren wife was speared to death in a ritual as it was the tribe’s custom to punish sterility.
When bad blood began to boil again with rival tribes, according to the ERBzine article, Mildin fought alongside his adopted people and taught them the art of “surprise attacks.” After he tired of war, he went full deadbeat dad, deserted them, and worked his way slowly up the coast until reaching a trading post some 250 miles away. Within months, he had returned to his homeland to claim his title, estate, and white male privilege. Warring tribes in that part of Western Africa at the time is a verifiable fact and according to the ERBzine article, there was an 1884 report from Fort Lamy that confirms Mildin came through there to get home.
According to the Reporter-Herald, the story goes a little differently. They mention that Mildin returned to London 15 years later but it was after being captured by adventurers and returned to civilization. If you remember, Tarzan also spends time in civilization, eventually learns of his nobility, and was often hunted by other humans.
Either way, Mildin made it home to his family fortune and title. He married again and had one son, Edwin George, in 1889. He died in 1919 and his son died in 1937 never having married.
No proof
Given that most of the players in this scenario died before this theory could be proven, there’s no way to 100 percent know that Mildin’s story helped in at least part to spark Tarzan’s creation. Mildin’s detailed papers were only released, per his will, when his last legitimate heir had passed away. However, the broad details of his marooning in Africa and his return, a few decades before Burroughs wrote the book, were covered in several articles in The London Times and romanticized in English illustrated papers and magazines, according to ERBzine. We’ve already established that experts believe Burroughs was a very well-read man who did lots of research. And if he did reach out to Mildin, it is entirely possible that Burroughs agreed to keep it a secret because Mildin knew the details of his papers, largely admitting the existence of his illegitimate African-based children, would complicate his will.
Jane of the Jungle
Pretty sure this tale has you wondering about Jane. But sadly for fans of Tarzan’s lady friend who first appeared in Tarzan of the Apes — A Romance of the Jungle in 1912 in All-Story, she does appear to be a pure figment of Burroughs’ imagination. Jane’s introduction was such a hit that it spurred Burroughs to write a bunch of tales about the pair’s life together in the jungle. Perhaps best of all, she inspired one real-life Jane, Jane Goodall, to live among the apes in Africa. “Silly man,” Goodall is reported as saying by the Jane Goodall Institue. “He married the wrong Jane.” We guess we can add Tarzan and Mildin to the list of classic cartoons and their real-life inspirations.
Amelia Earhart once said, “a single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees.” We couldn’t agree more with this statement. Over the last ten years, as co-founders of Kind Campaign, we have toured the globe, speaking in over 500 schools across four countries, connecting with millions of people with a mission to spread kindness.
As we reflect on the incredible ways we’ve witness kindness manifest itself in innumerable forms, we’re sharing some of our top insights from the decade of work we’ve done in the business of kindness.
Kindness isn’t just about grand gestures
Kindness comes in all shapes and sizes, and it’s important to remind people of this because kindness is accessible to everyone. Kindness can be as simple as smiling at a stranger, holding the door open for someone, saying “hi!” to a classmate or coworker, or paying it forward in some other way. We still remember specific acts of kindness shown to us over the years, so we know we can vouch for others that the ability of small acts of kindness can truly change someone’s day (or even their life).
Above all else, people will never forget how you made them feel
As Maya Angelou powerfully said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
We can recall a specific assembly a couple of years ago. There was a girl named Rachel who came to the front of the room to share with her peers just how alone she feels at school—how she feels misunderstood and cast aside. After, she sat back down in the bleachers where she was sitting alone. We watched a girl from the opposite side of the gym walk across the bleachers to sit next to her. That simple gesture has stuck with us for years. That beautiful soul was making a statement: I see you. I am here for you. She said that not only to Rachel but to the entire school, by simply sitting next to her.
We always say that kindness has a ripple effect because it isn’t only the moment of giving and receiving kindness that has an impact, but the feelings that kindness leaves us with. Connected. Inspired. Motivated to pay it forward.
Kindness just feels better
Participating in gossip, drama, and bullying has negative physical and emotional effects—not just on the victim, but even on the aggressor (see a theme here?). There may be an initial high or sense of validation when you release hurtful words that are charged by emotions, but those feelings are almost always followed by regret and shame. On the contrary, you feel good when you are kind.
Apologizing is one of the greatest healers
We have witnessed time and time again the power of saying “sorry” during our Kind Campaign Assemblies. As we give each girl the opportunity to apologize to someone, we see both the giver and receiver of the apology feel instantly happier and more connected. Two out of every three girls apologize to someone during or after a Kind Campaign Assembly. Just like kindness has a ripple effect, taking responsibility for your actions does, too.
While we can’t take back the words we said or things we did, we can claim ownership of them and recognize the person or people we affected. By doing so, you won’t have to look back on a certain chapter of life and feel regret.
Kindness wins
Every school we walk into, no matter the size, tone, community, or social dynamics, feels triumphed by kindness. Once we educate, offer the resources, spark conversations, and ignite the healing process from the negative effects of bullying, we see students and teachers compelled to create safer, more supportive school hallways. Almost all of the students who participate in our assemblies have shared with us that they feel compelled to be kinder after experiencing a Kind Campaign Assembly, and agree that they do not want to participate in gossip or drama after experiencing a Kind Campaign Assembly.
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Lauren Paul and Molly Thompson are the co-founders of Kind Campaign, the nonprofit organization that brings awareness and healing to the negative and lasting effects of girl-against-girl bullying through in-school assemblies, educational curriculums, documentary film, and global movement. Please visit findingkind.com to book an assembly today!
Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, otherwise known as Camilla Parker Bowles, is a down-to-earth country girl who has won the hearts of the British people with her natural, genuine demeanor—just as she did her now-husband, Prince Charles when they met nearly 50 years ago. Although she was born into an upper-class family, Camilla never puts on airs. “I have so many friends who, if I ever even vaguely look like getting uppity, which touch wood I never have, they would just say, ‘Look, come on, pull yourself together! Don’t be so bloody grand!'” she said in a rare interview in the Daily Mail’s You Magazine. A former flatmate even says she kept her bedroom in a state of chaos, reports Vanity Fair. On the other hand, these myths about the royal family are totally false.
Do you live in a place where people are kind? Where neighbors are friends and strangers are welcomed? Then you might live in one of the Nicest Places in America! Keep reading to see which place in your state we named the “nicest,” and click through to read each of their stories and vote on which one is your favorite. These stories will warm your heart and restore your faith in humanity, and the winning place will end up on the cover of Reader’s Digest!
Nelson Mandela, the legendary leader who helped to end apartheid in South Africa and later became the country’s first black president, had largely withdrawn from public life by 2011. But he agreed to one last photoshoot: A portrait-sitting for photographer Adrian Steirn’s “21 Icons” project, a multimedia series highlighting those who played a role in shaping modern South Africa. Steirn, one of South Africa’s leading photographers, captured Mandela at his boyhood home in the village of Qunu, located in the nation’s Eastern Cape Province. The photoshoot would become one of Mandela’s last.
Adopted at birth, her adoptive parents had encouraged her to find her biological family since childhood, but Briana Reavis, 32, was hesitant. “I didn’t want to find things that I didn’t want to know, or shake up anyone’s life.” She was aware that the Ancestry DNA kit she took might provide links to those who shared her DNA, but that wasn’t her motivating factor for taking the test. “It really had nothing to do with my biological family—I just wanted to know where my ancestors were from. I never thought I’d meet my biological family,” Reavis explains.
When she received a message that a DNA match had been located, Reavis began an adventure of a lifetime. Her biological mother, father, and two half-siblings were found. “The day my biological father contacted me was the day my adoptive dad passed away. It was like God was winking at me, telling me that even though I just lost my dad, I had gained another.” Today, Reavis and her birth family continue to make up for the 30 years they lost, with her adoptive mother and biological family even vacationing together.
“I’ve never looked like anyone in my family, and now I have a whole bunch of people who look like me, and they’re my family. It’s like I was born all over again, as an adult,” Reavis shares. Before you take a DNA test, check out these surprising facts.
Both Mary Boleyn and her younger sister, Anne, had affairs with King Henry VIII, but only one married him. That sister wasn’t Mary—she was married off to one of the King’s friends in 1521. That left Anne, and well, lucky her…it wasn’t long before Henry grew tired of her and her inability to produce a living male heir. Henry set his sights on his next wife and had Anne imprisoned on trumped-up charges. In 1536, he had her beheaded, the likely reason she is one of the royal ghosts that still haunt Britain to this day.
Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, otherwise known as Camilla Parker Bowles, is a down-to-earth 
Do you live in a place where people are kind? Where neighbors are friends and strangers are welcomed? Then you might live in one of the Nicest Places in America! Keep reading to see which place in your state we named the “nicest,” and click through to read each of their stories and vote on which one is your favorite. These stories will warm your heart and restore your faith in humanity, and the winning place will end up on the cover of Reader’s Digest!
