Tired from a full day’s work, Rosa Parks boarded a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955 and forever became one of the inspirational people who changed the world. When she refused to obey the driver’s order to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus so a white person could sit there, she was arrested for civil disobedience. Parks’ act of defiance, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed, are recognized as pivotal moments in the civil rights movement.
It was America’s deadliest wildfire in at least 100 years and the most destructive in California history. The Camp Fire started at 6:33 a.m. on November 8, 2018, touched off by faulty electrical transmission lines in the town of Paradise. It burned for 17 days and consumed 153,336 acres north of Sacramento. In all, the fire caused $16.5 billion in damage, destroying nearly 19,000 buildings, leaving 50,000 homeless, and killing 85. The beauty of this beautifully named place was gone.
Shane Grammer grew up 15 miles away in Chico, and he followed the news of the fire’s deadly path from Los Angeles, where the 47-year-old father of three works as a creative director for Disney’s theme parks. Grammer still has friends in the Paradise area. When his childhood buddy Shane Edwards posted pictures of his white chimney—the only part of his house to survive—Grammer felt helpless. And then he had an idea.
“I’ve got to paint that chimney,” he told Inside Edition. “I’m not trying to say anything. It’s just that I’m an artist. And it was an opportunity for me to express and be an artist.”
Grammer’s choice of black and white paint was deliberate: They’re the colors of smoke.
On December 31, amid the rubble, charred trees, and burned-out husks of cars, Grammer spent three hours spray-painting a strikingly eerie black- and-white image of a woman on the chimney—a reminder, perhaps, of the beauty of life, or even just of life itself.
Grammer posted the image on Instagram. The victims of the fire, especially, could not contain themselves. “Beautiful and haunting,” one said. Another posted, “You bring beauty and hope.”
Suddenly, Grammer realized that what he had thought was a purely artistic expression had morphed into something deeper, the hallmark of true art. “When the first mural moved so many people in this community, I knew I had to come back up,” Grammer told KRCR-TV in Redding. Over a period of three months he returned eight times, painting 17 portraits of victims and Biblical figures on walls, pickups, and shards of buildings. “There is hope,” he explains. “There is beauty in the ashes.”
Outside one house, he found a photo of an eight-year-old named Eleanor. Seeing it as a sign, he painted a mural of her on the lone wall of her home that was left standing. It was, Grammer says, “a stamp that life was here and that life can continue to be here.”
Some of Grammer’s beautiful paintings. On the left is his portrait of Eleanor.
The portrait had special meaning for the home’s owner. Eleanor’s father, Greg Weddig, recalls how she used to play just feet away from where the mural was painted. “She would constantly be digging in the mud. And it was right below the kitchen windows, so we could always keep an eye on her,” he says. “The tree that was there was this beautiful maple that just made everything in the kitchen red.” Eleanor herself returned once to admire the painting.
Grammer’s work in Paradise has now become a movement. He has traveled the world painting murals in dark places that sorely needed some light: an orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico; a youth ministry in San Francisco; a nonprofit for child sex-trafficking survivors in Cambodia. “I want to do something powerful and create art that moves people,” he says.
Ironically, that first painting, on the chimney in Paradise, survived only a few months—the bulldozer is a cruel art critic. Grammer couldn’t be more delighted. It means that the spirit of Paradise is rising again.
Colorado’s grays peak rises 14,278 feet above sea level, high enough that trees can’t grow toward the top, though there are plenty of shrubs, rocks, and boulders. It was in this unforgiving terrain that Bev Wedelstedt was unlucky enough to rupture the anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus in her left knee.
It was August 2018, and Wedelstedt, 56, was on her way back down the trail with three friends. A storm was brewing, and they were anxious to get off the mountain. When they approached a rocky drop of a couple of feet, Wedelstedt decided that instead of shimmying down on her butt—the safe way to go—she would leap. She landed on her left leg.
Then she heard the snap.
Every step after that was agony. Before long, she had to stop. As one friend ran down to get help, a number of other hikers, all strangers, attempted to help Wedelstedt down the narrow trail by walking on either side of her to support her weight, but that proved slow and dangerous. One man “was so close to the ledge I could see rocks tumbling down from where he stepped on them,” Wedelstedt says.
Finally, one hiker, Matt, asked her, “How do you feel about a fireman’s carry?” Before she knew it, he had lifted her over his shoulder. “Now, I’m not tiny,” says Wedelstedt, a former college basketball star. Matt clearly couldn’t carry her all the way down by himself. So six hikers and one of her friends took turns carrying her while she tried to make light of a difficult situation: “I told them I wanted to meet a lot of guys, but this isn’t the way I wanted to do it.” Three hours and two rock-strewn miles later, this human conveyor belt finally met the medics, who took Wedelstedt to the hospital.
She has mostly recovered from her ill-fated hike, but Wedelstedt knows she’ll never shake one thing from that day: the memory of the band of strangers who came to her rescue. “I’m still in awe.”
Pam Bales left the firm pavement of Base Road and stepped onto snow-covered Jewell Trail. She planned a six-hour loop hike through New Hampshire’s Mount Washington State Park. She had packed for almost every contingency and intended to walk alone.
A piece of paper on the dashboard of her Nissan Xterra detailed her itinerary: start up Jewell Trail, traverse the ridge south along Gulfside Trail, summit Mount Washington, follow Crawford Path down to Lakes of the Clouds Hut, descend Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail, and return to her car before some forecasted bad weather was scheduled to arrive. Bales always left her hiking plans in her car, as well as with two fellow volunteers on the Pemigewasset Valley Search and Rescue Team.
It was just before 8 a.m. on October 17, 2010. She’d checked the higher summits forecast posted by the Mount Washington Observatory before she left:
In the clouds w/a slight chance of showers. Highs: upper 20s; windchills 0–10. Winds: NW 50–70 mph increasing to 60–80 w/higher gusts.
Based on her experience, Bales knew that her hike was realistic. Besides, she had two contingency plans and extra layers of clothing to better regulate her core temperature as conditions changed; the observatory had described conditions on the higher summits as “full-on winter.”
The hike up the lower portion of Jewell was pleasant. Bales felt excited as she walked up into snowy paths. At 8:30 a.m., still below the tree line, she stopped and took the first in a series of on-the-trail selfies; she was wearing a fleece tank top and hiking pants, and no gloves or hat because the air was mild. The sun shone through the trees and cast a shadow over her smiling face.
Pam Bales took selfies at 8:30 a.m. (left) and 9:15 a.m. to document her climb up Jewell Trail on Mount Washington, which is known for its extreme weather swings.
Less than an hour later, she took another photo, after she’d climbed into colder air and deeper snows. She now donned a quarter-zip fleece top and gloves. An opaque backdrop had replaced the sunshine, and snow shrouded the hemlock and birch.
She still smiled. Above her, thick clouds overloaded with precipitation were dropping below Mount Washington’s summit, where the temperature measured 24 degrees F and the winds gusted about 50 mph in fog and blowing snow.
At 10:30 a.m., the weather was showing its teeth. Bales added even more layers, including a shell jacket, goggles, and mountaineering mittens, to shield herself from the cold winds and dense fog. She made her way across the snow-covered ridge toward Mount Washington and began to think about calling it a day. Then she noticed something: a single set of footprints in the snow ahead of her. She’d been following faint tracks all day and hadn’t given them much thought, because so many people climb Jewell Trail. But these, she realized, had been made by a pair of sneakers. She silently scolded the absent hiker for violating normal safety rules and walked on.
By 11 a.m., Bales was getting cold, even though she was moving fast and generating some body heat. She put on an extra top under her shell jacket and locked down her face mask and goggles system. Good thing I packed heavy, she thought. She decided to abandon her plan. Summiting Washington was just an option. Returning to her SUV was a requirement.
Strong gusts of wind screamed as they attacked her back and left side. The cloud cover had transitioned from canopy to the equivalent of quicksand, and the only thing keeping Bales on Gulfside Trail was the sneaker tracks in the snow. As she fought the wind and heavy sleet, her eyes searching for some type of shelter, the tracks made a hard left-hand turn off the trail.
Now she felt genuinely alarmed. She was sure the hiker could not navigate in the low visibility and was heading straight toward the challenging trails of the Great Gulf Wilderness. Bales stood there, stunned. The temperature and clouds were in a race to find their lowest point, and darkness was mere hours away. If Bales continued to follow the tracks, she’d add risk and time to the itinerary she’d already modified to manage both. But she could not let this go. She turned to the left and called out, “Hello!” into the frozen fog.
Nothing. She called out again: “Is anybody out there? Do you need help?”
The strong westerly winds carried her voice away. She blew into her rescue whistle. For a fleeting moment she thought she heard someone reply, but it was just the wind playing games with her mind. She stood listening, then turned and walked cautiously in the direction of the single set of tracks. Her bailout route would have to wait.
Bales followed the tracks gingerly for 20 to 30 yards, struggling to remain upright. She rounded a slight corner and saw a man sitting motionless, cradled by large boulders. He stared in the direction of Great Gulf, the majesty of which could only be imagined in the horrendous visibility. She approached him and uttered, “Oh, hello.”
He did not react. He wore tennis sneakers, shorts, a light jacket, and fingerless gloves. His head was bare. He looked soaking wet. Thick frost covered his jacket. His eyes tracked her slowly, and he barely swiveled his head.
A switch flipped. She stopped being a curious and concerned hiker. Her informal search now transitioned to full-on rescue mission. She leaned into her wilderness medical training and tried to get a firmer grip on his level of consciousness. “What is your name?” she asked.
He did not respond.
“Do you know where you are?”
Nothing. His skin was pale and waxy, and he had a glazed look on his face. It was obvious that nothing was connecting for him. He was hypothermic and in really big trouble. Winds were blowing steadily at 50 mph, the temperature was 27 degrees, and the ice pellets continued their relentless assault on Bales and the man who was now her patient.
The prospect of having to abandon him in the interest of her own survival was horrifying, but she’d been trained in search and rescue; she knew not to put herself at such risk that she would become a patient too. She also knew she didn’t have much time. As he sat propped up against the rocks, she stripped him down to his T-shirt and underwear. Because he wouldn’t talk and she was in such close contact with him, she gave him a name: “John.” She placed adhesive toe-warmer packs directly onto his bare feet. She checked him for any sign of injury or trauma. There was none. From her pack, Bales retrieved a pair of soft-shell pants, socks, a winter hat, and a jacket. She pulled the warm, dry layers onto his body. He could not help, because he was so badly impaired by hypothermia.
Bales next removed a bivouac sack from her pack, holding it firmly so the winds would not snatch it. She slid it under and around his motionless body, entombing him inside. She activated more heat packs and placed them in his armpits, on his torso, and on each side of his neck. Bales always brought a thermos of hot cocoa and chewable electrolyte cubes. She dropped a few cubes into the cocoa, then cradled the back of his head with one hand, gripped the thermos with the other, and poured the warm, sugary drink into his mouth.
Over the next hour, John began to move his limbs and speak. Slurring his words, he said that when he had left Maine that morning it had been 60 degrees. He had planned to follow the same loop as Bales. He had walked that route several times before. He said he had lost his way in the poor visibility and just sat down here. Even as he warmed up, he remained lethargic.
Bales recognized that he would die soon if they didn’t get out of there. She looked her patient squarely in the eyes and said, “John, we have to go now!” She left no room for argument. She was going to descend, and he was going with her. The wind roared over and around the boulders that had protected them during the 60-minute triage. She braced him as he stood up, shivering, and with a balance of firmness and genuine concern, she ordered, “You are going to stay right on my ass, John.” This wasn’t the way she usually spoke to people, but she had to be forceful. He seemed moments away from being drawn irrevocably to the path of least resistance—stopping and falling asleep. That was not going to happen on her watch.
She figured that the only viable route was back the way they’d come. As the pair retraced their steps on the ridge, visibility was so bad that they inched along. Bales followed the small holes in the snow that her trekking poles had made earlier. Leaning into the headwinds, she began to sing a medley of Elvis songs in an effort to keep John connected to reality—and herself firmly focused.
She was trying hard to stay on the trail, and trying even harder not to let John sense her growing concern, when he dropped down into the snow. She turned and saw that he seemed to be giving up. He curled in a sort of sitting fetal position, hunched down, shoulders dropped forward, and hands on his knees. He told her he was exhausted and had had enough. She should just continue on without him. Bales would have none of it. “That’s not an option, John. We still have the toughest part to go, so get up, suck it up, and keep going!” Slowly he stood, and she felt an overwhelming sense of relief.
Bales and her reluctant companion had traveled just under half a mile when they arrived back at the junction of Gulfside Trail and the somewhat safer Jewell Trail. It had been around 2 p.m. when they’d started down. The sun would set in three hours. Although the trees would protect them from the wind, it was darker under the canopy. Bales switched on her headlamp, but with only one light between them, she had to move slowly down a steeper section, then turn to illuminate the trail so John could follow. She offered continuous encouragement—“Keep going, John; you’re doing great”—and sang a dose of songs from the 1960s.
Their descent was arduous, and Bales dreaded that he would drop in the snow again and actively resist her efforts to save him. Just before 6 p.m., they arrived at the trailhead, exhausted and battered. Her climb up to the spot where she located John had taken about four hours. Six hours had passed since then.
Bales started her car engine and placed the frozen clothing she had taken off John inside so that the heater could thaw them. She realized he had no extra clothing with him.
“Why don’t you have extra dry clothes and food in your car?” she asked.
“I just borrowed it,” he told her. Several minutes later, he put his now-dry clothes back on and returned the ones Bales had dressed him in up on the ridge.
“Why didn’t you check the weather forecast dressed like that?” she asked. He didn’t answer. He just thanked her, got into his car, and drove across the empty lot toward the exit. Right around that time, at 6:07 p.m., the Mount Washington Observatory clocked its highest wind gust of the day, at 88 mph.
Standing there astonished and alone in the darkness, Bales said to no one, “What just happened?”
Bales wouldn’t get an answer until a week later, when the president of her rescue group received a letter in the mail, a donation tucked between its folds. It read:
“I hope this reaches the right group of rescuers. This is hard to do but must try, part of my therapy. I want to remain anonymous, but I was called John. On Sunday October 17, I went up my favorite trail, Jewell, to end my life. Weather was to be bad. Thought no one else would be there. I was dressed to go quickly. Next thing I knew this lady was talking to me, changing my clothes, giving me food, making me warmer. She just kept talking and calling me John and I let her. Finally learned her name was Pam.
“Conditions were horrible and I said to leave me and get going, but she wouldn’t. Got me up and had me stay right behind her, still talking. I followed, but I did think about running off—she couldn’t see me. But I wanted to only take my life, not anybody else’s, and I think she would’ve tried to find me.
“The entire time she treated me with compassion, authority, confidence, and the impression that I mattered. With all that has been going wrong in my life, I didn’t matter to me, but I did to Pam. She probably thought I was the stupidest hiker dressed like I was, but I was never put down in any way—chewed out, yes, in a kind way. Maybe I wasn’t meant to die yet. I somehow still mattered in life.
“I became very embarrassed later on and never really thanked her properly. If she is an example of your organization, you must be the best group around. Please accept this small offer of appreciation for her effort to save me way beyond the limits of safety. NO did not seem to be in her mind.
“I am getting help with my mental needs. They will also help me find a job and I have temporary housing. I have a new direction thanks to wonderful people like yourselves. I got your name from her pack patch and bumper sticker.
“My deepest thanks, John.”
In the nine years since she saved John, Bales has become something of a hiking legend. It’s a title she never sought or wanted, but one she certainly has earned. All that matters to her is that she was moved deeply by the man’s gesture and his reference to the fact that she made him feel that he mattered.
Some people have asked me whether I, in finally recounting this story for the public, tried to find John. The thought of searching for him felt wrong. As I’ve reflected more on this story and its relation to mental health, my response to that question has evolved. I have in fact found John, and he is very close by me. John is my neighbor; he is my good friend, a close colleague, a family member. John could be me.
At some point in our lives, all of us have found ourselves walking with a sense of helplessness through a personal storm. Alone, devoid of a sense of emotional warmth and safety and smothered by the darkness of our emotions, we’ve sought that place just off trail where we hoped to find some way to break free of our struggles. Sadly, some do follow through. Many are able to quietly self-rescue. Others, like John, are rescued by people like Pam Bales.
I paid off my student loans thanks to winning a trivia contest
In 2002, Saurabh Jindal was a recent college graduate and so broke he couldn’t even pay his graduation fees. Then he decided to enter a trivia contest called This Time, You Are the Champion, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. “I ultimately ended up winning the equivalent of $2,000 which was a substantial amount in India,” he says. “The winnings not only allowed me to erase my loan for college but it helped me make the Travel Talk app.” He adds that the win also made him a bit of a celebrity in his small town, garnering him invitations to speak at local functions. “Winning the contest was a great experience for me as it gave me confidence and made me feel happy to be in the limelight for a bit,” he says. Whether you’re thinking of going on a TV contest yourself or just enjoy the local trivia night at the bar, keep up your skills with these 50 trivia facts only geniuses get right.
The phone rings. I wait for the answering machine to get it, but for some reason, it’s not picking up. I exhale, annoyed because I know the call is either going to be for my wife, Susan (she’s the only one who receives calls on the home line, and she left to take Alyce to school ten minutes ago), or it’s the latest of 300 attempts to sell me something I have absolutely no interest in.
“Hello,” I say, an edge in my voice.
“Daddy, it’s me.” It’s Alyce, my 12-year-old daughter. “Mommy was just in a car accident.”
My heart stops and then begins pounding.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Is Mommy?”
A deep sob. “I don’t know … I don’t think so. Come quick.”
I sprint a few blocks to what looks like a shoot for a disaster movie. Fire engines, police cars, and ambulances are randomly parked in the street; helicopters circle. A city bus is on the wrong side of the road. In front of it are the smashed remains of Susan’s car.
Susan is pinned under the dashboard. There is no front windshield—no front end, for that matter. Alyce is standing on the corner crying, covered in tiny shards of glass but uninjured. Inconceivable.
Susan isn’t so lucky. But she is alive. It turns out she has broken nearly every bone in her body, and she will spend almost three months in the hospital.
More than two years later, Susan and I were at an event at our synagogue celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Our temple’s cantor and musical director, Danny, rushed up to us. He said excitedly, “There’s a woman here tonight from one of the church choirs who you have to meet!” He returned with an African American woman with a bright, glowing smile. She told us she lived in the apartment building by where the wreck had happened. That morning, she had rushed to the street, still in her bathrobe, and seen Alyce standing by the side of the wrecked car, crying. She approached her, asking, “Is that your mom in there?” Alyce nodded, and the woman said, “Let’s pray together.”
Sweet, innocent Alyce looked at this woman wearing a cross around her neck and said, “OK, but you should know I’m Jewish.” The woman smiled. She took Alyce’s hand, held it to her chest, and said, “That’s OK. In here we’re all the same.”
Alyce told her that she needed to call me, but her backpack with her phone was trapped inside the crushed vehicle. So the woman lent Alyce her phone.
After the accident, she said, she had continued to pray for our family.
We had our picture taken together, and as were saying goodbye, she hugged us all warmly. We realized we had never been formally introduced, so she said to me, “I’m sorry, I never got your name.” I told her it was Doug, and she paused, as if maybe she hadn’t heard me. I repeated, “Doug, like Douglas.”
She looked at us and said, “Wait, your name is Susan?” Susan nodded. “And your name is Douglas?”
The woman put her hand over her heart. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “My name is Susan Douglas.”
For more on this harrowing story, get a copy of Douglas Segal’s book, Struck.
When a baby orphaned monkey was severely bullied by other monkeys at a zoo in China, a kindhearted dog named Sai Hu came to his rescue. Whenever the little monkey senses he is in danger, he jumps up onto Sai Hu’s back for protection. Sai Hu chases away anyone who comes against the little monkey; he’s the best bodyguard any creature could ask for. Here’s what you need to know before adopting a rescue dog.
Top: Lifelong friends Alan Robinson (left) and Walter Macfarlane unknowingly took the same DNA tests. The results showed they were related. Bottom: When Walter (left) and Alan played high school football together, they had no idea they were actually related.
Walter Macfarlane, 76, and Alan Robinson, 74, have been friends for more than 60 years. They grew up a few miles away from each other in Honolulu and met in sixth grade. They played high school football together. They are so close, they’re Uncle Walter and Uncle Alan to each other’s kids. So imagine their surprise when they discovered they were, in fact, biological brothers.
“It did feel natural,” Walter says of the revelation. “We knew each other so well.”
It came about, as so often happens, by accident. Walter, a retired math and physical education teacher, knew that he had a complicated family tree. His mother had been young and unmarried when she gave birth to him during World War II, and because she couldn’t raise him on her own, the family pretended that his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his sister. Walter didn’t learn the truth until he graduated from high school. Even then, his mother never told him (or anyone else) who his father was.
So in 2016, when commercial DNA-testing kits were starting to take off, Walter’s daughter, Cindy Macfarlane-Flores, suggested he try a couple. When Cindy logged on to ancestry.com to check the results, she saw that a user named Robby737 and her dad shared enough DNA to be half siblings. When Cindy asked her parents whether they knew anyone who could have that username, her mother immediately thought of Walter’s friend, Uncle Alan. His nickname was Robby, and he used to fly 737s for Aloha Airlines.
Could that really be possible? Walter wondered. He spent ten minutes trying to get his friend on the phone. When Alan finally answered, he confirmed to Walter that his username was Robby737.
“I’m trying to act cool,” Walter says. “But I’m so excited inside, I’m gonna burst out. I think I said, ‘Oh, I think we’re brothers,’ in just a casual manner. Then he said, ‘Yeah, sure. OK, Walter.’ ”
“I was in denial,” Alan says. “We’ve known each other for so long, I thought he was just joking around.”
But Alan knew it was possible. He had been adopted as a baby by Norma and Lawrence Robinson. Several years before, Alan had taken the same DNA tests that Walter did to learn more about his ethnicity and medical background. But he’d never talked to Walter about it.
Soon after the phone call, the men compared their test results on 23andme.com and found that they shared several identical X chromosomes, meaning they had the same mother.
“If I wasn’t in that database, this never would have happened,” Alan says. “It was meant to happen.”
However, one person apparently worked very hard to make sure that it never happened: their mother. Walter knew his mother’s name was Genevieve K. Paikuli, but Alan’s birth certificate lists his mother as Geraldine K. Parker. The identical initials in the name listed as Alan’s mother led the men to believe that Genevieve had used a pseudonym when she gave Alan up for adoption. Alan also believes that his adoptive parents, the Robinsons, knew Genevieve was his birth mother and didn’t tell him out of respect for her wishes.
Neither brother knows why no one ever told them they were related, but they attribute it to the era’s social norms and the turbulent times surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war, which was still being fought when both men were born.
“We don’t know what transpired, but [we have] no bad feelings,” Walter says. “At that time, you had your own reasons why you did what you did.”
But they have gained much more than they lost. Thanks to their DNA test results and research by Cindy, they learned who their fathers were—both were military men from the mainland who had been stationed in Hawaii. Those discoveries led to more: Walter found out that he has four more half brothers and has since traveled to California to meet them in person; Alan has two half sisters, who plan on visiting him over the coming holiday season, and a half brother. “It’s mind-boggling,” Walter says.
Now that their family searches have come to a close, Walter and Alan just want to make up for lost time. They had fallen out of touch after high school, and although they eventually reconnected, they still didn’t see much of each other because they were busy raising their kids. “If we had known sooner we were brothers, we would have been contacting each other all the time,” Walter says. They are now. Both still live in Honolulu, about five miles apart, just like when they were kids. They talk on the phone weekly and go to lunch regularly. They’re even planning to take a cruise together.
“Our mother lived to be 92,” Walter says. “We have a few more years, hopefully. We have good genes.”
After he’d finished painting one evening at his new house in Westfield, New Jersey, Derek Broaddus found an envelope addressed in thick, clunky handwriting to “The New Owner.”
Dearest new neighbor at 657 Boulevard, allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood.
Buying 657 Boulevard had fulfilled a dream for Derek and his wife, Maria Broaddus. The house was a few blocks from Maria’s childhood home. Their three kids, who were five, eight, and ten years old, were already debating which of the house’s fireplaces Santa Claus would use.
The typed note went on:
My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.
The letter identified the Broadduses’ Honda minivan, as well as the workers renovating the home.
I see already that you have flooded 657 Boulevard with contractors so that you can destroy the house as it was supposed to be. Tsk, tsk, tsk … bad move. You don’t want to make 657 Boulevard unhappy.
Earlier in the week, the family had gone to the house and chatted with their new neighbors. The letter writer seemed to have noticed.
You have children. I have seen them. So far I think there are three that I have counted … Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them too [sic] me.
The envelope had no return address.
Who am I? There are hundreds and hundreds of cars that drive by 657 Boulevard each day. Maybe I am in one. Look at all the windows you can see from 657 Boulevard. Maybe I am in one.
Welcome my friends, welcome. Let the party begin.
A signature was typed in a cursive font: —The Watcher
It was after 10 p.m., and Derek was alone. He raced around the house turning off lights so no one could see inside, then called the police. An officer came to the house and read the letter. He asked Derek whether he had enemies and recommended moving a piece of construction equipment from the back porch in case the Watcher tried to toss it through a window.
Derek and Maria emailed John and Andrea Woods, the couple who’d sold them 657 Boulevard, to ask whether they had any idea who the Watcher might be. Andrea replied that a few days before moving out, they’d received an odd note signed “The Watcher.” She said that she and her husband had never received anything like it in their 23 years in the house and had thrown the letter away without much thought.
The Broadduses spent the next weeks on high alert. Derek canceled a work trip, and whenever Maria took the kids to the house, she would yell their names if they wandered into a far corner of the yard. The contractor arrived one morning to find that a heavy sign he’d hammered into the front yard had been ripped out overnight.
Two weeks later, another letter arrived. Maria recognized the thick black lettering and called the police. This time, the Watcher used their names, misspelling them as “Mr. and Mrs. Braddus” and identifying their three kids by their nicknames—the ones Maria had been yelling.
657 Boulevard is anxious for you to move in. It has been years and years since the young blood ruled the hallways of the house. Have you found all of the secrets it holds yet? Will the young blood play in the basement? Or are they too afraid to go down there alone. I would [be] very afraid if I were them. It is far away from the rest of the house. If you were upstairs you would never hear them scream.
Will they sleep in the attic? Or will you all sleep on the second floor? Who has the bedrooms facing the street? I’ll know as soon as you move in. It will help me to know who is in which bedroom. Then I can plan better.
Have a happy moving in day. You know I will be watching.
Derek and Maria stopped bringing their kids to the house. They were no longer sure when, or if, they would move in. Several weeks later, a third letter arrived.
Where have you gone to? 657 Boulevard is missing you.
Many Westfield residents compare their town to Mayberry, the idyllic setting for The Andy Griffith Show. Westfield is 45 minutes from New York City, and the town’s 30,000 residents are largely well-to-do families. The Boulevard is a wide, tree-lined street. Built in 1905, 657 Boulevard was perhaps the grandest home on the block, and when the Woodses put it on the market, they received multiple offers. The Broadduses won the bidding war and got the house for $1.3 million. They initially suspected that the Watcher might be someone upset over losing out on the house. But the Woodses said one interested buyer had backed out after a bad medical diagnosis, while another had found a different home. Andrea Woods thought it was more likely someone in the neighborhood.
The letters did indicate proximity. They had been processed in Kearny, the U.S. Postal Service’s distribution center in northern New Jersey. The first was postmarked June 4, before the sale was public—the Woodses had never even put up a for-sale sign.
A few days after the first letter, Maria and Derek went to a neighborhood barbecue. They hadn’t told anyone about the Watcher, as the police had instructed, and found themselves scanning the party for clues while keeping tabs on their kids, who ran guilelessly through a crowd that made up much of the suspect pool. “We kept screaming at them to stay close,” Maria said. “People must have thought we were crazy.”
John Schmidt, who lived two doors down, told Derek about the Langfords, who had lived in the house between them since the 1960s. Peggy Langford was in her 90s, and several of her adult children lived with her. The family was a bit odd, Schmidt said, describing one son, Michael Langford, as “kind of a Boo Radley character.”
Derek thought the case was solved. But detectives said they had already spoken to Michael. He denied knowing anything about the letters. Without hard evidence, there wasn’t much the department could do. Frustrated, the Broadduses began their own investigation. They set up webcams and employed private investigators, including two former FBI agents.
One of the agents, Robert Lenehan, recognized several old-fashioned tics in the letters that pointed to an older writer. Envelopes were addressed to “M/M Braddus,” and the sentences had double spaces between them. The letters had a certain literary panache, which suggested a “voracious reader,” and a surprising lack of profanity given the level of anger, which Lenehan thought meant a “less macho” writer. He didn’t think the Watcher was likely to act on the threats, but the letters had enough typos to imply a certain erraticism. Lenehan recommended looking into former housekeepers or their descendants.
The Broadduses’ housepainter noticed that the couple behind 657 Boulevard kept a pair of lawn chairs strangely close to the Broadduses’ property. One day he saw an older man sitting in one of the chairs. “He wasn’t facing his house,” the painter said. “He was facing the Broadduses’.”
Maria said she felt as if almost anyone could have been the Watcher, which made daily life feel like navigating a labyrinth of threats. She probed the faces of shoppers at Trader Joe’s to see whether they looked strangely at her kids and spent hours googling anyone who seemed suspicious.
But the Watcher left no digital trail, no fingerprints, and no way to place someone at the scene of a crime that could have been hatched from pretty much any mailbox in northern New Jersey. The letters could be read closely for possible clues or dismissed as the nonsensical ramblings of a sociopath. In December 2014, six months after the first letter had arrived, police told the Broadduses they had run out of options. Derek showed the letters to his priest, who agreed to bless the house.
The renovations, including a new alarm system, were finished, but the idea of moving in filled the Broadduses with overwhelming anxiety. They had sold their old home, so they moved in with Maria’s parents while continuing to pay the mortgage and taxes on 657 Boulevard. They told only a handful of friends about the letters, which left others to ask why they weren’t moving in—“Legal issues,” they said—and wonder whether they were getting divorced. They fought constantly and started taking medication to fall asleep.
“I was a depressed wreck,” Derek said. Maria decided to see a therapist after a routine doctor’s visit that began with the question “How are you?” caused her to burst into tears.
The Broadduses decided to sell 657 Boulevard. But rumors had already begun to swirl about why the house sat empty. They told their Realtor that they intended to show the letters to anyone whose offer was accepted. Several bids came in, but they were well below the asking price.
The media caught wind of the tale. “We do some creepy stories,” host Tamron Hall said on TODAY. “This might be top-ten creepy.” News trucks camped out at 657 Boulevard, and one local reporter set up a lawn chair to conduct his own watch. The Broadduses got more than 300 media requests but decided not to speak publicly. The attention forced Derek and Maria to sit down with their children to explain the real reason they hadn’t moved into their new home. The kids had plenty of questions: Who is the Watcher? Where does this person live? Why is this person angry with us? Derek and Maria had few answers.
“Can you imagine having that conversation with a five-year-old?” Derek said. “Your town isn’t as safe as you think it is, and there’s a bogeyman obsessed with you.”
From a safer distance, the Watcher was a real-life mystery to solve. A group of reddit.com users obsessed over Google Maps’ Street View, which showed a car parked in front of 657 with, one user thought, a man holding a camera. (Others, more rationally, saw “pixelated glare.”) Proposed suspects included a jilted mistress, a spurned Realtor, a local high schooler’s creative-writing project, guerrilla marketing for a horror movie, and “mall Goths having fun.”
Some people thought the Broadduses were wimps for not moving in. “I would NEVER let this sicko stop me from moving into a house.”
This irked the Broadduses. “None of them have read the letters or had their children threatened,” Derek said.
In Westfield, people were on edge. Mayor Andy Skibitksy assured the public that even though the police hadn’t solved the case, their investigation had been “exhaustive.” Then Barron Chambliss, a veteran detective who had been asked to look at the case, discovered something surprising: Investigators had analyzed the DNA on one of the envelopes and determined that it belonged to a woman. The police asked for permission to test Maria’s DNA. It didn’t match.
Chambliss decided to look more closely at neighbor Abby Langford, who worked as a real estate agent. Was she upset about missing a commission right next door? But her DNA sample wasn’t a match either.
One night, Chambliss and a partner were sitting in a van watching the house. Around 11 p.m., a car stopped out front long enough for Chambliss to grow suspicious. He says he traced the car to a woman whose boyfriend lived on the block. She told Chambliss her boyfriend was into “some really dark video games,” including one in which he was playing as a character: “The Watcher.” He agreed to come in for an interview on two separate occasions. He didn’t show up either time. But Chambliss didn’t have enough evidence to compel him to appear.
While the Broadduses continued to be consumed by stress and fear, for the rest of Westfield, the story became little more than a creepy urban legend—a house to walk by on Halloween if you were brave. In spring 2016, 657 Boulevard went back on the market. But potential buyers would back out once they read the letters.
Feeling as if they were out of options, the Broadduses’ real estate lawyer proposed selling the house to a developer, who could tear it down and split the property. But the two lots would be just shy of the 70-foot width mandated by zoning laws.
When the planning board met to discuss granting an exception, more than 100 residents showed up. Neighbors expressed concern that the plan might require knocking down trees and that the new homes would have aesthetically unpleasing front-facing garages. After four hours, during which there was little discussion of the reason the Broadduses sought to tear down their dream home in the first place, the board unanimously rejected the proposal.
Derek and Maria were distraught. “This is my town,” Maria said. “I grew up here. I came back; I chose to raise my kids here.” On top of the mortgage and renovations, the Broadduses have paid more than $100,000 in Westfield property taxes—the town denied their request for relief—and spent at least that amount investigating the Watcher.
Not long after, a family with grown children and two big dogs agreed to rent 657 Boulevard. The rent didn’t cover the Broadduses’ mortgage, but they hoped that a few years of renting without incident would help them sell. When Derek went to the house to deal with squirrels that had taken up residence in the roof, the renter handed him an envelope.
Violent winds and bitter cold
To the vile and spiteful Derek and his wench of a wife Maria,
You wonder who The Watcher is? Turn around idiots. Maybe you even spoke to me, one of the so called neighbors who has no idea who The Watcher could be …
The letter indicated revenge could come in many forms.
Maybe a car accident. Maybe a fire. Maybe something as simple as a mild illness that never seems to go away but makes you fell [sic] sick day after day after day after day after day. Maybe the mysterious death of a pet. Loved ones suddenly die. Planes and cars and bicycles crash. Bones break.
“It was like we were back at the beginning,” said Maria. The renter was spooked but agreed to stay. The Broadduses continued to press the case, sending new names to investigators whenever they found something odd.
Finally, this past July, a buyer purchased 657 Boulevard—for far less than the Broadduses paid for it.
The prosecutor’s office has kept the case open, but the Broadduses believe it is unlikely the Watcher will ever be caught. They can’t help but feel, as the last letter taunted: The Watcher won.
At his lavish 59th birthday party in the Mirage Hotel theater that bears the duo’s name, Roy Horn, the dark-haired half of the team, ushered in the early hours of the morning with 500 friends and fellow entertainers. He had spent the evening table-hopping and dancing, and at midnight raised a glass to his partner, Siegfried Fischbacher, in celebration of their 44 years together.
“He was in great spirits,” remembers impersonator Frank Merino, an invited guest. “All of his friends were kidding around with him, and he was making jokes and being very playful.” One of the jibes was about his age and eventual retirement.
“I’ll retire only when I can’t do it anymore,” Roy shot back in his heavy German accent, alluding to the physical strength necessary to swing on ropes 30 feet above the audience and handle the 600-pound tigers that were the centerpiece of the act. To a man so fit and lithe, that day seemed a long way off. “It is incredibly dangerous, and we took Roy, this superman, for granted all of these years,” says fellow Vegas magician Lance Burton.
But less than 24 hours later, Roy lay near death in the trauma unit of University Medical Center. Even in a town famous for risky wagers, few were betting he would survive the night. In 30,000 perfectly timed shows with elephants, lions, tigers, cheetahs, and sharp-beaked macaws, Siegfried & Roy had never had a serious mishap. Their act, seen by some 400,000 people each year, was a pastiche of Vegas razzle-dazzle: daredevil theatrics, illusions and, of course, animals.
The lions and tigers were Roy’s domain, and his ability to communicate with them was marvelous and mysterious at the same time. Roy didn’t so much train the animals as bond with them through a technique he called “affection conditioning,” raising tiger cubs from birth and sleeping with them until they were a year old. “When an animal gives you its trust,” Roy had said, “you feel like you have been given the most beautiful gift in the world.”
But on the night of October 3, that trust was broken. Forty-five minutes into the show, at about 8:15 p.m., Roy led out Mantacore, a seven-year-old white tiger born in Guadalajara, Mexico. The 380-pound cat became distracted by someone in the 1,500- member crowd and broke his routine, straying toward the edge of the stage. With no barrier protecting the audience, Roy leapt to put himself between Mantacore and the front row, only a few feet away. The tiger kept coming. Roy gave him a command to lie down, and Mantacore refused, gripping the trainer’s right wrist with his paw.
“He lost the chain [around the tiger’s neck] and grabbed for it, but couldn’t get it,” says Tony Cohen, a Miami tourist who was sitting ten yards from the stage. With his free hand holding a wireless microphone, Roy tried repeatedly tapping Mantacore on the head, the sound reverberating through the theater. “Release!” Roy commanded the tiger. “Release!”
Mantacore relaxed his grip, but Roy had been straining to pull away, and fell backward over the tiger’s leg. In an instant, Mantacore was on top of him, clamping his powerful jaws around Roy’s neck. Now Siegfried, standing nearby, ran across the stage yelling, “No, no, no!” But the tiger was resolute, and dragged his master 30 feet offstage “literally like a rag doll,” as another witness recalls.
A couple of gasps went up in the crowd, though many people thought the incident was part of the act. “It wasn’t like he grabbed him viciously,” says audience member Andrew Cushman. “He just grabbed him by the throat and walked offstage.”
Siegfried would later say that Roy had fallen ill from the effects of blood pressure pills; Mantacore, he insisted, realized something was wrong and was only trying to protect Roy. But animal behaviorists put little stock into that notion. They say it’s more likely that Mantacore was on his way to delivering a killing bite, much as a tiger in the wild would bring down an antelope.
“They’re predators, so who can really know what goes on in their minds?” says Kay Rosaire, who runs the Big Cat Encounter, a show near Sarasota, Florida. “Even though they’re raised in captivity and they love us, sometimes their natural instincts just take over.”
Some members of the show who witnessed the incident say the cat didn’t necessarily mean to kill, but was confused by the break in the routine and angry at being disciplined. They believe the stress of the situation caused Mantacore to turn on the man who had worked with him almost daily from the time he was six months old.
Whatever the cause, horrified stagehands backstage sprayed the tiger with a fire extinguisher to get him to free Roy. When that failed, they beat the animal about the head with the butt end of the extinguisher. Mantacore finally ran to his cage. The tiger, they later learned, had torn Roy’s jugular vein, barely missing the carotid artery.
“There was a lot of blood,” reports dancer Mike Davies. “A lot.” Roy, still conscious, muttered, “Don’t shoot the cat.” A crew member managed to temporarily stop the severe bleeding, while cast members formed a prayer circle. Meanwhile, a trauma team assembled at University Medical Center, and as Roy labored to breathe, an ambulance screamed through the neon night. Before the story hit the papers, producer Kenneth Feld had canceled the 13-year-old show, telling more than 200 cast members to look for other work. Siegfried & Roy, the most popular act in the history of Vegas, was apparently over.
The news spread quickly through the all-night community, and vigils sprang up at the hospital and at the Mirage. Along the Strip, few performers were more admired than these two, who met as young men working on a German cruise ship. When they brought their magic act to Vegas in 1967 they helped transform a town then ruled by crooners, off-color comics and topless dancers. In 1988 they signed a record-breaking, five-year, $57 million deal with casino developer Steve Wynn to stage a Broadway-meets-Barnum & Bailey extravaganza at the Mirage, then still under construction.
Soon they were Vegas royalty, living in an opulent compound they called the Jungle Palace, where a replica of the Sistine Chapel adorned the ceiling—as well as a separate 100-acre estate, Little Bavaria, outside of town. There, 63 tigers and 16 lions, none of them declawed, had the run of the properties, including Roy’s bedroom and the pool. Roy meditated with at least one tiger every day.
While enormously wealthy, Siegfried and Roy were also incredibly generous. In particular, they were benefactors of the local police canine corps and the USO. As they told interviewers over the years, they were awed that, in Vegas, two sons of abusive, alcoholic fathers—both soldiers in Hitler’s army—were able to achieve their dreams and so much more.
Siegfried, who was always somewhat wary of the big beasts, was the intense, quiet one, the consummate magician and technical wizard, the brain behind the disappearing acts. Roy had his own animal magnetism and could command the big cats with the flick of a finger. Siegfried and Roy, says their friend Robin Leach, “are so closely intertwined they’re like brothers. Without one, there isn’t the other. They have an extraordinary relationship—the real meaning of the word love—that most people would want, particularly married couples.” Or as Siegfried puts it, “It has always been about together.”
At the hospital the night of the attack, Siegfried was in shock, recalled his friends Robert and Melinda Macy, who wrote a souvenir book Gift for the Ages with the pair. On the way to the trauma center, paramedics had stanched Roy’s massive blood loss, and he was immediately taken into surgery. There, the medical team had to bring him back from the edge at least three times.
Shortly after 11:30 p.m., they wheeled him out of the unit and into another part of the hospital. But early the next morning, Roy suffered a “pretty big stroke,” in the words of one physician, and was returned to surgery at 9:30, where doctors performed a large decompressive craniectomy, temporarily removing about a quarter of his skull to relieve swelling on his brain. (The excised portion was placed in a pouch in his abdomen to keep the bone tissue alive.) He suffered some paralysis on his left side, and his windpipe was crushed. Placed on a ventilator, he was unable to swallow or speak.
Yet amazingly, he responded to Steve Wynn only days later, squeezing his hand once for “yes” and twice for “no,” and answering in the affirmative when asked if he could handle such an ordeal. He also indicated that he wanted to see his pug-nosed dog, Piaf, who was brought to the hospital for a visit. “It is all but miraculous that he is alive,” his neurosurgeon, Dr. Derek Duke, told the press.
Late in October, Roy Horn was strong enough to be airlifted to the UCLA Medical Center, where he continued to make progress. And all the while, Siegfried stayed by his side. The first time he put a pen in Roy’s palm, Fischbacher touchingly recounted that his friend wrote, “Siegfried, it is nice to hold your hand.”
According to the duo’s manager, Bernie Yuman, Roy was taken off the ventilator in mid-November. His cognitive skills were “intact, perfect,” Yuman said. The entertainer was writing prolific notes, giving orders in them, even asking for a Madonna CD.
In the months following, the duo’s camp was largely silent, as was the show’s producer, Kenneth Feld, owner of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Feld had troubles other than Roy’s injuries: Animal rights groups have loudly insisted that show tigers should be retired. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture did open an investigation into a possible violation of the Animal Welfare Act, since regulations call for sufficient distance between animals and the viewing public in live-animal shows. With the stakes so high, the Mirage refused to release a tape of the near-fatal performance.
While Siegfried and Roy’s spokesmen couldn’t promise that the live show would come back, if anyone can make a full recovery from such a horrendous blow, says Bob Macy, it is Roy.
And it may not be his last. Because of the loss of blood and oxygen to the brain, physicians said that Roy could have experienced some irreversible paralysis and brain damage, and may always need assistance even with basic activities, including walking. Often in cases like Roy Horn’s, a patient also exhibits residual effects of brain injury such as speech difficulties, memory problems, emotional instability, and impaired critical thinking skills.
“My impression is that he had a significant injury that may prevent any type of return to their act,” says Catherine Cooper, MD, an anesthesiologist in Richmond, Virginia, who has studied stroke and brain injury cases. “His motor function is unlikely to improve substantially, and although his mental function is already better than initially feared, his neurological recovery will be a slow process, measured in very small accomplishments.”
But they are evident. By late January, his tracheal tube was out, allowing him to talk and ask for two of his favorite foods, pistachio ice cream and Wiener schnitzel. His mobility, too, had improved. Siegfried reported that Roy was standing up, and Yuman hinted he could be walking soon.
Still, those bright signs might not be enough to ensure Roy’s return to the stage, and he may finally be ready to take that retirement he spoke of at his birthday party. If so, he will likely find some way to contribute, his friends say, if only at the “Secret Garden,” the lush animal habitat behind the Mirage where Mantacore now paces and fixes his visitors with icy blue eyes.
Siegfried says he would never take another partner. There’s no need, he says; Roy will be back. “Roy is bigger than life. He always explained to me, ‘Life is full of miracles.’ ”
* * *
Controversy and rumors still surround exactly why the attack happened. In a recent ABC 20/20 documentary, Siegfried & Roy: Behind the Magic, Roy says that he became dizzy and suffered a stroke on stage that resulted in him falling to the floor. He claims that Mantacore saw he was in distress and dragged him to safety offstage. But, one of the trainers, Chris Lawrence, says that Mantacore wasn’t acting as a hero at all, rather that he became confused and deliberately attacked Roy on stage that night. Lawrence said that Mantacore missed his mark and Roy directed him in a way that he wasn’t used to, which caused the tiger to lung towards Roy, Roy fall on the ground, and Mantacore attack him. He thinks that the pair never admitted the truth about the attack because they didn’t want to ruin the image they had built around their relationships with the tigers.
The duo did get back on the stage one more time in 2009 for a final show. After the show abruptly stopped in 2003 from the attack they wanted to end their performance days on a high. Even though the pair wasn’t able to move around and perform illusions quite like they used to, they still put on a great show and even brought Mantacore out for one final trick on stage.
The moon was hanging low in the South Carolina sky as Misha Marshall finished loading her pickup. Then she led Gandalf to his cage in the back. It was 3 a.m. on Tuesday, March 20. Misha’s husband, Chuck, came out to see her off. “Don’t expect to go up there and find that lost Boy Scout in the woods, because it’s just not going to happen,” Chuck said. A retired paramedic and firefighter, he had seen more amazing things than a kid surviving three cold nights in the mountains, but he didn’t want his wife to be disappointed in herself or her dog.
Three days earlier, 12-year-old Michael Auberry had vanished from his troop’s campsite in Doughton Park, 7,000 rough acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. A massive search had been launched, but there was barely a trace of the boy.
Misha, a corporate tax manager, and Gandalf, her two-year-old Shiloh Shepherd, had trained for a year with the South Carolina Search and Rescue Dog Association. But this was their first real job, and Misha worried that she’d miss Gandalf’s subtle signs. A search dog doesn’t learn specific signals. He doesn’t act like a pointer spotting quarry. Animal and human work together intuitively.
A mountain girl from Asheville, North Carolina, Misha grew up with working dogs-German shepherds and collies. Even as a child, she could get these no-nonsense animals to do tricks no one in her family could, like make them line up and roll over. She could, she says, “feel like them.”
When she was ten, her little collie, Laddie, ran away. Misha asked herself, If I were a puppy, where would I go? At the end of the block, across the main road, was a goldfish pond. She walked straight to the pond, looking nowhere else. Laddie was there-stuck fast in the mud.
Misha found Gandalf in a kennel in Tennessee when he was six weeks old. A little ball of black fur with oversize feet, he looked more like a bear cub than a puppy. A gentle, laidback bear. Misha, a big fan of J. R.R. Tolkien, named him Gandalf, after the wizard in The Lord of the Rings, because she believed he was special.
After leaving home that March morning, Misha rendezvoused with her team of six other handlers, and they headed north. A sister squad in North Carolina had been searching through the night. Misha’s team would take over later that morning.
Doughton Park is located in a bowl on the side of a mountain. It’s traversed by heavily vegetated, treacherously steep ridges rising 2,400 feet. Rock overhangs look down into caverns snarled with wild rhododendron thickets and deadfall. Slippery moss and waterfall spray threaten footing, and thundering streams could drown out a child’s cry for help.
Knowing how unforgiving the terrain was, park rangers had quickly called in search-and-rescue squads, some working with bloodhounds, from two neighboring counties to scour a 30-mile network of trails.
All they found the first day was some spilled potato chips. The chips were west of Michael’s campsite along a fire road that ran deep into the park. Tactical trackers found footprints leading to another path and then to a stream about a quarter-mile from the camp. It was a fairly good trail, but they lost the tracks at the creek.
As the sun began to set and the chill of an early-spring night set in, someone found the lid of a tin mess kit 100 yards upstream from where the footprints disappeared. A well-meaning but inexperienced volunteer brought the kit back to the base camp, ruining the trail for the bloodhounds.
After nightfall, a state highway patrol helicopter scanned the forest with infrared scopes. Rangers parked their biggest vehicle at the campsite, turned on the flashing lights and blasted Michael’s name over a loudspeaker.
Michael had been wearing an insulated red coat and good boots, but even the searchers were falling into streams and getting wet. They continued through the night.
The next two days, results were much the same. High-angle rescue teams rappelled down cliffs to see if Michael had fallen. Divers dragged the dam at an abandoned fish hatchery with hooks and anchors. They checked logjams on creeks. They looked beneath every waterfall. On Sunday a Boy Scout sock was found in a creek. That was all. Through the night and into Monday, 566 trained rescuers searched the woods.
Misha and her teammates arrived at the staging area around 7 a.m. on Tuesday, day four. It was overrun by media trucks and satellite dishes. There was a huge mobile command center. Red Cross food tents and official vehicles were everywhere.
The team huddled with members of the North Carolina squad, who’d just returned after spending the night combing the ridges. They told Misha that the terrain was so rough, you had to go on your hands and knees much of the time. None of their dogs had found a trail of scent on the ground. Now a dog would have to pick up the missing boy’s scent in the air after four days, a challenging task for even the keenest animal.
The North Carolinians did provide Misha’s team with a bonus. They’d obtained an unwashed T-shirt from Michael’s backpack that hadn’t been touched by anyone else. They had handled it with gloves, carefully cutting it into smaller pieces and sealing them up in plastic bags.
At 8 a.m. the searchers were briefed on every detail about Michael. Misha studied his picture. She wanted to lock his image in her mind, the way Gandalf would lock in his scent.
The base camp command center sent out one dog team at a time to assigned territories. Misha and Gandalfalong with Erin Horn, a nursing student, and Danny Gambill, a volu11teer firefighter-were directed to area 51, one of the steepest.
The three checked the map. Area 51 was an elongated north-to-south rectangle along a trail. The team decided to hike to the top of their zone, then let Gandalf zigzag his way back down. They estimated they had about 70 acres, 1 percent of the park area, to search. A sweep would take them at least eight hours.
It was a mild 50 degrees, but the night before, the mercury had dropped below freezing. Michael had basic Scouting skills, and searchers hoped he’d found shelter. He had read and loved the books Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain, about young boys surviving in the woods alone. But three days had passed now, and the cadaver dogs had been sent for.
Misha concentrated on the search ahead. She didn’t want anything negative to cloud her focus. Michael is alive, she told Gandalf. We’re going to find him.
She took out the bag containing the shred of Michael’s shirt and let Gandalf sniff it. Head up and nose high, the dog started up the trail. Misha, Erin, and Danny followed.
Gandalf fringed the trail, switching from side to side, funneled ever upward by the steep rock walls and sheer drop-offs. Erin was navigating with the map and a GPS device. After about an hour, they stopped and conferred. According to the GPS, they had gone up about 5,900 feet, putting them at the top of their assigned area It was time to turn back and begin their descent. But the team agreed to go up a little higher, just to be sure.
Another 15 minutes or so of climbing couldn’t hurt. It would be good to overlap another search area, they reasoned. They chose a spot about 200 yards away, crossing and recrossing Basin Creek, picking their way over stones and fallen logs.
While Erin was studying the GPS, Danny was scanning his side of the trail. The searchers headed up the right bank of the creek. All of a sudden, Misha saw Gandalf’s head soap up, but she couldn’t spot a thing in the underbrush.
The wind was coming toward them now, around the shoulder of a cliff. Gandalf was about 30 yards ahead, working the bank of the stream where it turned beneath a wall of rock. Misha saw him quickly lift his head again. Was that the sign she’d been waiting for?
Gandalf trotted to the left, out of sight behind the cliff face, and Misha scrambled up the trail behind him. She turned the bend, and there-50 yards up on the ledge, in a direct line ahead of Gandalf-was a boy in a red jacket. He was dazed from hunger and fatigue.
Misha and Danny began yelling, “Michael, is that you? Michael?”
The boy turned silently toward them. Danny clambered up the steep embankment to help Michael down. Working her way halfway across the creek, Misha passed the boy to Erin. The team carried him to the bank and set him down next to Gandalf. “Are you okay with dogs?” Misha asked. He nodded. “Well, this is Gandalf,” she said as the dog nuzzled the boy.
While the rescuers contacted the base camp, Michael ate a few peanut butter crackers they’d given him. He set the rest of the crackers down, and Gandalf snatched them up. “Is a helicopter coming to get me?” Michael asked. ”I’d like a chopper ride.”
The terrain was too rough for a helicopter to land. Rangers came up to carry Michael out. After they arrived, Misha struggled to hold Gandalfback as he tugged at his leash. He wanted to follow the boy. Misha had never seen her gentle giant act this way. He was obviously proud of himself “gloating” is what dog handlers call it. It was the equivalent of an NFL receiver dancing in the end zone.
Michael was dehydrated, hungry, exhausted and freezing. He had firstdegree frostbite, and it would take a couple of weeks for the feeling to return to his toes. After a short stay in the hospital, he was discharged in good health.
As it turned out, Michael’s experience was nothing like his novels. Unlike their protagonists, he had not been lucky enough to find a cave or a fishhook-shaped twig or any other tool that would have helped him. But he had remembered that it was important to stay warm and hydrated. He used leaves as insulation at night, and he sucked on icicles. Michael earned his Wilderness Survival Merit Badge last summer. He now knows the biggest mistakes he made: not staying in one place and not making enough noise to attract attention. He plans to never get lost again. He is grateful to everyone who looked for him, he says, but maybe no one more than Gandalf.
Back at the base camp, Misha finally got a strong enough cell signal to call her husband. “I can’t tell you much right now,” she told him. “But Gandalf has just found that Boy Scout.”
“Yeah, right,” Chuck said. Then he realized she was serious. “Well, I guess that’s the last time I’ll tell you what you and Gandalf can’t do.”
Camp Sweeney, Gainesville, Texas: When endocrinologist James Shirley Sweeney of Gainesville, Texas, opened the doors to Camp Sweeney in 1950, he knew he wanted to provide a recreational outlet for children with diabetes; it’s unlikely he could have foreseen what his humble idea has grown into nearly 70 years later, let alone the changes in medical science that have altered the lives of the thousands of kids he has helped.
At a glance, Camp Sweeney looks like a typical summer camp: Set upon 400 acres of land with mature trees, a large lake and green grass stretching to the distance, swarming with kids doing crafts, water sports, dances and talent shows. If you spend a little time there, you’ll notice there’s one key difference, one that makes its campers feel safe and at home like no other place. In-depth type 1 diabetes education and around-the-clock testing and monitoring conducted by medically trained staff.
In 1950, when the camp was founded, many children with type 1 diabetes weren’t expected to live to adulthood. Synthetic insulin had yet to be developed and that first summer 60 kids attended the camp for an experience that would define their young lives.
“Synthetic insulin revolutionized the prognosis for children with type 1 diabetes — in the beginning the prognosis was poor and ended up in death before adulthood,” said Billie Hood, business manager of the camp. “Dr. Sweeney wanted a place where kids could be kids again, so he got together with investors and oil barons and created the Southwestern Diabetic Foundation with the sole purpose to fund Camp Sweeney.”
Today, Camp Sweeney—and the entire diabetes world—is far different.
In 2019, the camp hosted 720 kids, from thirty-five states and five countries. People with diabetes live long, full lives, and camp is more about giving kids with the disease a place to totally be themselves, rather than a singular experience to take with them on their short journeys.
There are three camp sessions offered per summer, and current Camp Director Dr. Eddie Fernandez hasn’t missed a day of camp in the thirty-five years he’s volunteered. A pediatrician with his own practice in Dallas, Dr. Fernandez says that half of the campers utilize scholarships to fund their session, though you’d never be able to tell the difference between those on scholarships and those who paid their own way.
“Foster kids come free, too,” said Dr. Fernandez. “That’s the beauty of what we do. It’s the same struggle with diabetes whether you’re rich or poor.”
When camp isn’t in session, the staff is on a search to add more members to the team—but they’re very specific in what they’re looking for.
“Many of our staff members are pre-med or have a social work background, but what we are looking for is a willingness to sacrifice for someone else,” said Dr. Fernandez. “These campers are waking their staff members throughout the night to do blood testing, so we need someone who is very sacrificial and wants to bring joy to others—and that’s what we try to inspire in the campers.”
During the summer, Dr. Fernandez sleeps at camp, leaving early each morning to see patients at his own clinic, only to return back at camp by 2:30 pm each afternoon.
“It’s tiring, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” he says.
Outside the world of summer camp, there are people who don’t have or aren’t focused on diabetes. That’s not true of Camp Sweeney and what sets it apart, according to Hood.
“For three weeks, these kids feel like everybody is doing the same thing,” she said. “At school, they have to leave class to go to the nurse, and they have to integrate diabetes into their lives. There’s a sense of alienation. Here, everyone is on a meal plan, everyone tests their blood or wears an insulin pump.”
Today, Camp Sweeney provides more medical monitoring than it did during its early years.
“Studies show that if you can manage blood sugar on a constant in-range level you can reduce, reverse or even eliminate complications,” Hood said. “We’re not just changing the methods of caring for type 1 diabetes, but the thought process behind it.”
While the medical science has changed, the essential benefit of Camp Sweeney has persisted: the friendships made, and hope given.
Imogene Parker was one of the very first campers at Camp Sweeney in 1951. She is now a volunteer that speaks to the campers about her own life with type 1 diabetes.
“I’ve been a diabetic for over 71 years and they saved my life,” she said. “When I was a young child, the only person I knew with it was an older man, and everyone said that he was dying of diabetes. I thought I was going to die too, but they gave me hope that I could live—and I’m still here.”
Parker recently attended a 70th reunion for campers.
For parents of type 1 diabetic children, Camp Sweeney offers the assurance of 24-hour monitoring and access to hospital care, with an on-site hospital equipped to handle emergencies. Campers are trained to be diligent in checking their own blood sugar five-to-seven times daily, and more if necessary. Urine tests are conducted daily, and medical staff reviews test results prior to each meal to prescribe insulin dosages.
“We work one on one with them to gain insight into the things that give them anxiety. We teach them how to serve one another and identify the good that they possess within. They build real relationships based on sacrificing for one another, and when they go back to school they have learned how to build the relationships that pick them up when they fall- and they fall often,” Dr. Fernandez said, adding, “The only time these parents sleep is when their kids are at Camp Sweeney.”
Learn more about how to minimize the damaging effect of sugar brought to you by our friends at Life Extension here.
Nano Corona, Okeechobee, FL: In 2010, cattle rancher Nano Corona was thrust into an unexpected battle for his life.
At 49, Corona had hardly ever been sick and was an avid cyclist, but was having trouble swallowing. Trips to the doctor brought a shocking verdict: esophageal cancer.
“I was diagnosed in August and started chemotherapy that September,” said Corona. “A year later, I had surgery and did another six months of chemo.” He is now in remission after the grueling battle.
The experience left Corona with a desire to give back to those in the same situation locally, in his small community of Okeechobee, Florida. “I have a great family and surgeon, and I’ve been blessed by our Lord and Savior—it made me want to do something when I got out to help,” he said.
Corona originally hoped to raise money by starting a cycling event called Ride for the Fight in the city of 6,000 nestled on the northern banks of one of the country’s largest lakes. But, when you’re a rancher, why ride bikes when you can ride bulls?
The fundraiser evolved into a rodeo; when you Ride for the Fight, it’s a battle to stay upright. Over the last six years, Corona has raised over $175 thousand dollars to help those with cancer do everything that you need to get done outside of getting treatment, and that’s a lot.
“We can’t help you with treatment, but we do just about everything else,” said Corona. “We help with rides to and from treatment, grocery bills, electric bills, rent and house payments—the odd things that no other groups will cover.” The organization has also covered travel expenses for those wanting to reunite with family members or take a vacation after treatment. “When I was in chemo, I’d lay there and talk about the beach trips we used to take. I’d say, when I got well enough, I would go back. We can send you on a trip after treatment that you’ve been dreaming of. We’ve flown people out to see family or flown family in to see them. We don’t really have guidelines, because each need is so unique.”
While the rodeo grabs headlines, Ride for the Fight is not limited to one event—the organization also holds cross-fit competitions, air boat events and poker runs.
Ride for the Fight was there when local Sara Jackson needed it.
“My step-son, Connor, has a birth defect called a chiari malformation. He has hydrocephalus, Asperger’s Syndrome and high functioning autism,” she said. The eight-year-old had 22 brain surgeries in the last two-and-a-half years, causing his mother to miss over two months of work. Jackson started a fundraiser in her honor to offset costs, and when Corona saw the fundraiser he wanted to know how he could help.
“He sat with me in a local sweet shop and asked what we needed to get Connor and his mom back on their feet. He paid their water, electric and phone bills, along with her car payment for two months. He helped dig her out of a hole after she missed so much work,” said Jackson.
Four years ago, Debi Large was given three to six months to live after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, a fast-growing form of brain cancer. Large has beaten the odds to the shock of her treatment team, and she credits Nano Corona for helping her stay focused on surviving the unthinkable.
“When I got diagnosed, I wasn’t afraid of the cancer because I have God in my life,” she said. “Money was more of a problem than having cancer.”
Upon hearing of Large’s diagnosis, Corona drove to her home.
“When he came out to the house, I was struck by his calming and gentle presence. He had such love in his eyes. He told me, ‘You’re going to get through this. What can we do for you? We are here for anything you might need on this journey.’ Then he handed me a $500 check and told me to use it for whatever I needed. It took such a load off of my shoulders.”
When Large began receiving chemotherapy and radiation treatments three hours away in Miami, Corona covered her hotel expenses for many of the 23 months of treatment.
“Sometimes you feel guilty taking help from someone. They’ll say they’re willing to do anything you need, but they don’t really mean it. Not with Nano. He told me he really wants to help. He even covered my mortgage for a month. All I had to do was be concerned with getting rid of cancer,” said Large.
Corona’s assistance didn’t end with financial help—when Large’s treatment prohibited her from driving for a year, Ride for the Fight partnered with one of Large’s friends and purchased her a golf cart—perfect for traveling to visit friends in her gated community.
“That was an incredible blessing,” she said. “I’ll just never forget when he walked through my door for the first time. He brought a sense of peace and calm and was such a reassuring and encouraging presence. God has blessed that man, and he has, in turn, blessed me.”
Learn more about how to minimize the physical and economic impact of cancer from our friends at Life Extension here.
People’s Health Clinic, Park City, Utah: Park City, Utah, is an outdoor sports and entertainment utopia. Some 600,000 people a year pass through to visit its world-class ski resorts, which hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics, or attend the Sundance Film Festival. For many of the 8,000 full-time residents, something is missing: Regular access to quality healthcare.
As with many communities that thrive on tourism, those working in hospitality comprise the city’s most vulnerable residents—they’re the housekeeping and resort staff that make Park City and Deer Valley ski resorts into winter paradises; they’re the landscapers and restaurant workers that help make the area’s streams sparkle with activity all summer. Access to preventative and maintenance healthcare was once unattainable for those working hard to ensure residents and tourists enjoy the best of Park City, until a few concerned citizens took action.
It was an unlikely trio: A Catholic priest, physician and a local businessman who held a health fair out of a rented van in a parking lot. The first event was 20 years ago and over 700 people showed up—it was then they knew something more must be done for the underinsured of their community.
“Our local Catholic priest, Bob Bussen, noticed a lot of his parishioners had no access to healthcare,” said Dr. John Hanrahan. “We got a group together and set up a mobile van because we knew there was no way to reach the population that needed us by television or newspaper.”
The movement picked up steam and soon the three founded The People’s Health Clinic. The newly formed clinic collaborated with local healthcare group Intermountain Health Care to create a health clinic with only two requirements for treatment: you must be uninsured and live in Summit or Wasatch county.
“We believe down to our core that everyone deserves quality healthcare, not just those who can afford it,” said Beth Armstrong, executive director of People’s Health Clinic.
Over the two decades, the clinic has existed, the number of services it provides has grown drastically.
“At the start, our patients couldn’t afford blood tests or medications, and now they have access to four-dollar prescriptions through Walmart, and we have grants to pay for lab work. I can now provide the same care at the clinic that I provide in my private practice,” said Dr. Hanrahan.
“We do almost everything. We provide chronic illness care to those with diabetes or high blood pressure. We offer prenatal and women’s healthcare, pediatric care, along with both vision and dental care. We see about 40 patients a day, and we take walk-ins, too,” said Armstrong.
The clinic runs on less than a million dollars per year, made possible by grants and partnerships and 150 volunteer physicians.
“That’s how we’re able to do this, with our volunteer physicians, many are pediatricians,” Armstrong explained.
One of the few paid medical staff members is Rachelle Flinn, PA-C, the clinic’s clinical services director who has served in many capacities at the clinic.
“I started my time at People’s Health Clinic as a volunteer medical interpreter in 2012,” she said. “I transitioned to a part-time, then full-time employee. I took a hiatus to complete graduate school, and I returned as the Clinic Coordinator and Physician Assistant in 2017 and now I am the Clinical Services Director. People’s Health Clinic is a special place for me personally because its mission and success are a source of pride in our community.”
It’s often the most vulnerable in the community—children—who benefit the most from the clinic, particularly when it comes to their young teeth.
“We see a lot of children on our dental days, and most have never seen a dentist,” said Armstrong.
There are 28 million people with no insurance in America, and the clinic has 9,800 patient encounters each year.
“I think every day, what would they do without us?” said Armstrong.
Yet, those who use the clinic’s services also give back as much as they can.
“About 80 percent of them make a donation when they have a visit- a dollar or 20, whatever they can afford,” said Armstrong.
The clinic takes no federal funding out of a commitment to ensure they are able to serve all people. “Parents are fearful of applying for Medicaid, so they come to us. Almost all – 93 percent of them have at least one job, and most of them have two or three,” said Armstrong.
For his part, Dr. Hanrahan has long vacated his post as the clinic’s medical director, but he continues to give back as one of the volunteer physicians. After all, he and his patients are all part of one community, working hard to keep Park City humming and healthy, helping each other when needed.
“There has been incredible support from the community here. Our patients are the backbone of our resort community,” said Hanrahan.
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Austin McGee, 20, was on his family’s heavily wooded farmland in Tennessee when he heard a soft buzzing nearby. “I heard it a few times, but it sounded more like a bug, so we ignored it,” he recalls. McGee would regret that decision.
He and a friend had traveled deep into the woods on the family’s 500 acres of land to retrieve some scrap metal to repair his father’s tractor. “After I heard the sound, I reached down to pick up the piece of metal at the top of the pile and felt a bite,” he says. “I pulled my hand back, and there were two small bloody fang marks.”
McGee never saw the snake that bit him, but the size of the fang marks combined with the buzzing sound confirmed that it must have been a baby rattlesnake. “I instantly told my friend, ‘I just got bitten by a rattlesnake,'” he recounts. Snake bites made the list of the 12 most dangerous bites you can get—here are the rest.
McGee and his friend made it back to his parents’ house, where they told them what happened and headed for the hospital. “The whole way to the hospital my finger was throbbing with my heartbeat,” he says. “It just felt like I had smashed my finger really hard. At that point, it wasn’t too swollen yet, but I was getting nervous.”
Once McGee arrived at the hospital, it took a few hours for doctors to be certain how to treat him—giving time for his finger to swell to disturbing proportions. “They took lots of blood for testing and then gave me a lot of anti-venom. They gave me over half a million dollars of anti-venom, at least three days’ worth,” he says.
He was released from the hospital after two nights but followed up with doctors to be sure his finger was healing. “One doctor told me I was going to lose my finger, and one told me he thought it would make it,” he remembers. “I was pretty sure I was going to lose it, too. I didn’t know a finger could do that.” Recovery for McGee has been slow but steady: “The fourth night after I was bitten was the worst; it felt like I was sticking my finger into lava. It was crazy how much it hurt.” McGee never expected to encounter a rattlesnake on his family farm—here’s why so many snakes are on the loose.
When Reader’s Digest spoke to McGee, it had been about a month since the bite, and he said his finger wasn’t swollen anymore but was still difficult to bend. “I’m back to work now and life as usual,” he says. “It looks like this will be a slow recovery process, but I’m living my life. My finger still has a crater in it at the bite site. It’s funny, I’ve lived on this farm my whole life and I’ve only seen one rattlesnake.”
McGee advises others who have been bitten by a snake to seek treatment fast. But you’re better off not getting bitten in the first place, he says: “If you’re in a wooded area, stay away from places that snakes might be, and kick around the area before putting your body there. Listen closely and pay attention to noises you hear. If I had kicked the metal pile before reaching into it, maybe I would’ve scared the snake away. Maybe I wouldn’t have been bitten.” Read on to learn how another man survived a rattlesnake bite with no way to call 911 or get to a hospital.
Everyone in Columbiana knows Ryan Houck. He’s not a politician or a prominent businessman or a beloved local doctor. He’s not the baker who donates freely to support causes of every kind. He’s not the real-estate developer who offers a year rent-free to promising entrepreneurs who may not have the resources to get started on their own. And he’s not the local philanthropist who returned to town after a lifetime away and donated $500,000 to rebuild the beloved Firestone Park.
The Main Street Theater is the heartbeat of Columbiana, where everybody who wants a star turn gets one.
He’s just a kid. And when you talk to his parents, they’ll tell you that on most days he doesn’t do much. He has a rare disease called Miller-Dieker syndrome that has limited his ability to move or speak. But that’s not why people know him in this growing town of 6,200, about 80 miles southeast of Cleveland. They know him because he’s a star.
When Ryan was born, his diagnosis sent his parents Dan and Meghan reeling.
Ryan Houck days after birth (left) and in 2019 at the Crown Theater (right)
“All the dreams and aspirations you had for your child kind of vanish,” Meghan says. “We lost that hope of seeing him play in a baseball game or going to his school programs and seeing him on stage.”
The Houcks retreated into themselves and mostly stayed at home with Ryan. They didn’t even discuss how they felt about Ryan’s diagnosis for fear of upsetting each other. Then, in 2015, when Ryan was just 18 months old, a local company called Crown Theater Productions announced that it would be putting on a musical and that all the actors would be people with special needs. The show was Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and the company needed someone to play King Triton, the merman-demigod who wields a lightning-shooting trident. The director thought Ryan would be perfect for the part.
So, one night in October, Ryan went on center stage, strapped to his mother, and acted out lines boomed by his father backstage. He stole the show.
“It was like watching him hit that home run that we thought we would never get to see,” Meghan says.
Ryan with mother Meghan and father Dan during the 2015 production The Little Mermaid Jr.
Nestled in the green, rolling hills of eastern Ohio, about halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Columbiana is a small town that’s been going through some changes. Downtown, restaurants now outnumber antique shops. There’s a new housing, golfing, and shopping development where Firestone Farm once stood. Men who used to gather for coffee in the morning outside of a place called Newtons now do it at McDonald’s, or not at all.
But one thing isn’t changing: Nobody gets left behind, from blue-collar workers, to retirees, to folks who sometimes need a little extra accommodation. In Columbiana, our Nicest Place in America for 2019, giving back without wanting anything in return is a way of life.
Downtown Columbiana
A spirit of community infuses this town, just as it has for the better part of a century, ever since tire magnate Harvey Firestone donated 52 acres of land to create the sprawling Firestone Park. Time and again, residents come together to boost their neighbors, whether it’s volunteering with Project MKC to deliver diapers to needy moms or donating money to help the Columbiana Community Foundation offer more service grants.
Renovated Firestone Park
Greg Aker, a pastor at the Upper Room Fellowship, a church in town, says that in Columbiana, no matter your station, you get pulled along by your neighbors’ kindness. “Whatever you did for the least of these brothers, you do unto me,” he says, quoting Jesus, adding quickly that “brothers” in this case is everyone, not just the faithful. “Columbiana is a community imbued with faith, but you don’t need to be a person of faith to be embraced by the community.”
“A certain morale, an ethic, is instilled in everyone here from a young age,” is how Mayor Bryan Blakeman puts it. “It’s a pay-it-forward mentality.”
***
On April 1, 1953, the Manos Theater opened on Main Street in Columbiana, bringing Tinseltown to small-town America. Ava Norring, a budding starlet who had a minor role in 1952’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, attended the grand opening in a gown, accompanied by a coterie of tuxedoed men. They cut a ribbon and immortalized her footprint in concrete. By the time Don and Dawn Arthurs bought the building in 2007, it was the kind of place that, if you used your imagination, you could tell had once been glamorous.
Manos Theater in the 1950s
Don had made good as one of the founders of nearby Youngstown’s Turning Technologies, an education technology company. Unlike many people his age (Don was 30 then), who left Columbiana for bigger cities, he decided to stick with his hometown. The Arthurs family wanted to use the theater to enrich town life and to spread a message of love and inclusion. But the timing could not have been worse.
“It was a really bad time to buy a building,” Don says. This was before the financial crisis, when real-estate prices and interest rates were high. Plus, they had to spend a year and a half renovating. “When people ask me if I have a good idea for a business, I say, ‘Don’t start a theater.’”
Inside the Crown Theater in 2019
The stream of folks who initially came to see first-run movies slowed to a trickle. A café they opened next door was forced to close. “The decision was, Do we continue to take from our retirement to make a failing business continue?” Don says.
But the decision wasn’t just about business. As devout Christians, they believe it’s important to make a positive impact in their community and, as musicians, they wanted to do that through the arts.
“This is our service to the community,” Don says. “It’s our ministry.”
So they pivoted away from first-run movies and formed Crown Theater Productions to put on live shows at the theater. Things really got going when, in 2015, Debbie Salmen, Don’s cousin and the executive director at the theater, saw a production of Disney’s The Lion King in Canton, in which the actors were all special-needs students.
“There were no costumes and they just sang some verses, but when I saw it I knew we had to do something like it,” Salmen says.
Debbie Salmen, Erich Offenburg, Don and Dawn Arthurs at the Crown Theater
The Arthurs are huge Disney fans, so they decided to try The Little Mermaid. They had no idea what they had gotten themselves into.
“Ava, this little girl, came in with headphones on—she doesn’t like noise,” Salmen says. “We were playing Little Mermaid music in the background, thinking, This will be cool, and she starts screaming her head off, saying, ‘I hate that song!’”
Another actor was confined to a wheelchair and there was no way to get the person on stage.
“Our goal is to make every actor successful, one way or another, with accommodations, however it’s going to be,” says Erich Offenburg, the theater’s artistic director. In Columbiana, nobody gets left behind. The theater company set about raising money for a wheelchair lift.
Don Arthurs at the Crown Theater
For Ava, Offenburg took baby steps and, “Now, this little girl, she’s an actress,” says Salmen. “It went from night to day.”
Offenburg has a background in special education and has applied the same principles to his theater direction. All actors have an individualized plan tailored to their strengths and are assigned an attendant who helps make them successful on stage.
“We have folks who are nonverbal, we have folks who are not very sociable, we have folks who can’t see, we have folks who can’t hear,” said Offenburg. “Some kids, once they learn the part and know what’s going on, the attendant ends up standing off to the side. In some cases, you’re literally feeding every word to the actor.”
It works.
“To me, it feels very dazzling,” said Gabriella Levine, 19, who was Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and Miss Hannigan in Annie. “I love singing to a lot of people and I want to sing out my heart to them.”
Annie Jr. cast.
For many of the families, the theater is a place where their special-needs members can find community after they’ve exited the school system.
“Dustin doesn’t have a lot of extra activities in life, so when we heard about this, we came,” said Jill Snyder of her son, Dustin, 23. “It’s a godsend. He turns into a different person when he comes to the theater.”
For Seth Rossi, 14, it was just a matter of teaming up with the right creative partners.
“When Seth was little, we were looking for something for him to be involved with. He’s artsy. He’s a born actor,” said Erin Rossi, Seth’s mom. Seth has trouble hearing and being understood when he talks. In Disney’s Mulan, Seth was Mushu, the male lead. “After that play, I went to the restroom and I heard people out there talking about how he stole the show,” says Rossi. “It was awesome.”
People in town say that the special-needs shows are the best ones at the Main Street Theater. At first, Crown did one a year with a single performance. Then two shows, two performances. Shrek, the theater company’s ninth show, will run on October 24 and 25 and will be performed three times. After putting $1 million into the theater and the business, Don says that the venture now turns a small profit and will sustain itself into the future.
The success has been part of an overall rejuvenation of the town.
Rollin Gosney, another native son of the rising generation, has been buying up properties all along Main Street. His vision for the area is dependent on the success of the theater: “Upscale family entertainment, food, nightlife.”
Rollin Gosney on Main St.
He’s offering a year rent-free to any business that wants to launch on Main Street and has a good plan.
“I don’t think anybody should be left behind,” said Gosney, adding, “We all have our hurdles.”
One success is Birdfish Brewing Company, a microbrewery that now has two locations in town, a feat given that Main Street was dry until recently. When Jared Channel and brothers Jon and Josh Dunn opened the first location almost five years ago, they were barely making ends meet and could afford to keep the doors open only two days a week. But they wanted to share whatever success they had, so they started Tips for a Cause, a program to donate a day’s tips every month to a different charity.
Birdfish Brewing donate their tips to charity.
The American Cancer Society received $1,038 the first month. The Akron Children’s Hospital recently got a check for $3,779.
“We opened a business to have fun, and if we can help the community, too, why not?” Jared Channel says. They don’t just donate money. They also give the grains left over from the brewing process to Hogan’s Baking Company. Owner Shawn Hogan then shares the love by giving 1,000 hot dog buns to the annual picnic fund-raiser for Heroes and Halos, a nonprofit that supports families with special needs—everyone from children with autism, parents with dementia, or a relative with cancer.
Shawn Hogan believes in sharing bread.
When asked why he pitches in, Hogan hesitates, almost as if the answer is too obvious to put into words. “When there’s a need,” he says, “you help out.”
The proceeds go toward helping Heroes and Halos put on its annual special-needs ball.
“Everything that we do is free for our families,” says Kelly Hephner, who heads up the organization. “We have people who donate ball gowns and tuxes and suits. We have a DJ who donates his time. People come in and donate the same things every year: desserts, macaroni and cheese, salads. People just line up.”
One local makes a unique donation.
“We had a young lady who has hip dysplasia, so one hip is higher than the other,” Hephner says. “We have a seamstress in town and he ripped apart a dress and sewed it on her so she could feel beautiful for the ball.”
It’s the kind of thing you do when you live in Columbiana.
In November 2018, an ice storm left tens of thousands of people without power or heat. The town owns its own utilities and had power back up before the private companies in the area. When emergency authorities called Columbiana to check in, instead of another town that needed help, they found a helping hand. A regional warming and aid-distribution center was set up at the Upper Room Fellowship.
“We got all the residents from [the neighboring town of] East Palestine from old-folks’ homes and put them up in our facility,” says city manager Lance Willard. “We needed food too. We called Greenford Christian Church and they have a food pantry and we said we have 11,000 people without food and they said, ‘You know where the key is.’”
Aker, the pastor at the Upper Room Fellowship, says that many of the churches in the area have a strict philosophy of focusing on three things: a relationship with God; a relationship within the congregation; and a relationship with the wider community, regardless of faith.
“If the church isn’t making an impact out on the world, what are we doing?” said Aker.
Vicki Ritterspach (left) at The Way Station
Across the street from the Upper Room Fellowship is a nonreligious aid organization called the Waystation. In 1987, a Sunday-school teacher named Jim Couchenour Sr. went searching for his alcoholic friend. Couchenour found him in a local dive bar called the Way Station, along with others in need of counsel. Couchenour became a teetotaling regular, setting up what he called his “bar ministry.” When the bar shut down, he bought the building that housed it and turned it into a clubhouse of sorts for people to come get sober, with the help of a sympathetic ear—Cheers without the booze. The clubhouse eventually outgrew its original mission, and today the Way Station’s services include a thrift store, a food pantry, a support group, a treatment facility for teens addicted to drugs and alcohol, and a jobs center.
“We do a gala every year, and it’s supported by all the businesses in the area,” says Vicki Ritterspach, Couchenour’s daughter, who runs the Waystation. “They all know what the Waystation does. There’s not this ‘not in my backyard’ attitude. People in Columbiana genuinely care.”
Perhaps Columbiana’s greatest symbol of this giving instinct is Firestone Park. Harvey Firestone was born on his grandfather’s farm here in 1868, and while he set up his manufacturing business in Akron, Ohio, he never forgot his hometown. He vacationed here (often with fellow industrialists Henry Ford and Thomas Edison), and in 1933 he donated part of the family homestead to create this oasis. It features a pool and waterslide, baseball and football fields, a track, and walking trails lined with deep brick gutters filled with fresh spring water—relics from the days when folks would water their horses here.
This crown jewel had tarnished a bit over the years. Pat Tingle, who was born, raised, and married in Columbiana, noticed the changes in 2000. An educator, she spent most of her adult life moving around the country with her husband, Brad Tingle, an executive with UPS. When Brad retired, there was only one place he wanted to be. “My husband said, ‘Let’s go home,’” Pat says.
Pat Tingle at Firestone Park
The Tingles lived happily in Columbiana for many years. But Brad died in 2014, and their son, David Tingle, passed away three years later. “When I lost them both, I wanted to do something special for them and something special for the town,” Pat says. She cashed in some savings, added much of her husband’s life insurance money, and donated her remarkable nest egg—$500,000—to spruce up the family’s favorite spots.
“I always tell people I’m never sorry I came back. There’s something very good and solid about Columbiana,” Pat says while eating ice cream on one of the new park benches overlooking Mirror Lake and a plaque that honors her son’s memory.
“I dedicated it to him and the people of Columbiana who grew up with this park and the future generations who will grow up with it,” she says. “Everyone has a place here.”
Even folks who aren’t from town get caught up in the spirit. When you visit Columbiana, everyone will tell you that you have to go see Hippley Gardens. It’s not a place on any map, and you have to walk through some driveways and backyards to get there, but you will be most certainly welcome—and it’s worth the trespass. John Hippley runs a landscaping business and owns a few properties in town. In 1999, he decided that since the county had no botanical garden, he would build one himself in the adjacent backyards of the homes he owns.
“I got started by accident, and people started coming, and as more people came, I thought, Let’s just keep going with this thing,” he says.
John Hippley at Hippley Gardens
First it was an elaborate outdoor miniature train set, complete with tunnels and a water wheel. Then he added a full-sized dollhouse. After that, the children’s garden, with a life-sized Monopoly board and a piano that you play by walking on it, like in the movie Big. Then came the yellow brick road, surrounded by life-sized characters from the Wizard of Oz. There’s the old, red pickup truck that’s been turned into an elaborate planter. There’s the basketball court and the clubhouse, with a pool table and arcade games. All are open to the public and free to use—even for events like weddings.
Hippley Gardens
Hippley spends much of his spare time and money on the garden. He keeps his landscaping employees busy in the winter by having them help build the structures. More is planned, including a “ruin garden,” which will be a garden growing in the “ruins” of an old building. It will house an amphitheater, and Hippley plans on letting Crown Theater Productions make use of it. Best of all, Hippley is creating a foundation that will own the park and maintain it for the citizens of Columbiana and their guests in perpetuity.
The town has so much that other places lack—thanks to the generosity of its residents. The police department now has a K-9 unit, a dog named Csuti, trained to sniff out opioids. Getting Csuti cost $60,000, but to the residents of Columbiana, it was a necessity. The money was raised in two months.
“The smallest donation I got was $5, a woman on a fixed income who has been long retired,” says Columbiana Police Chief Tim Gladis. “Tornadoes, floods, fires, there’s never a shortage of people who want to help. In fact, we often get more people than we can actually deploy or need.”
Gladis didn’t grow up in town, but that’s no matter in the Nicest Place in America. Just ask Ruichiro Takamoto. He came to Columbiana as an exchange student from Japan and lived with the mayor, Bryan Blakeman. His story is almost too perfect to believe.
“Everybody said hi and talked to me even though I couldn’t really speak English,” he says.
He quickly became part of the fabric of the school community. He joined the cross-country team and was an immediate star. That helped him get a date for the homecoming dance and gave him the confidence to do something few American teens would do in a new school: try out for the football team.
The roster had long been decided, but the coach gave him a shot. He turned out to be such a good kicker that they let him join the team. He saw his first action on homecoming weekend. In that game, he scored on his first extra-point attempt and, at half time, he was named homecoming king.
“These are kids in their senior year of high school,” says Blakeman. “They took every other person and decided to choose him.”
Walking the red carpet at Crown Theater
From the next generation about to take the wheel to those currently running the town, everyone is made to feel like they’re an important part of this community.
Jerry Sherrill, a welder whose daughter, Codi, is one of the special-needs actors, says that everyone gets treated the same. “The guy next door is the same as the guy that owns the business. Everybody seems to help one another in some fashion.”
Codi, 21, is a part of the fabric of town life too. In addition to starring in the Crown Theater shows, she’s also on a cheerleading squad and has a job at the local McDonald’s.
Everybody wants to be a part of things, locking arms in community.
For Caleb Clapsadle, one of the theater kids, it was intuition that brought him into that community. Before the theater, his only experience in front of a crowd had been reading a Mother’s Day poem at church, and it didn’t go well.
Caleb has Asperger’s syndrome and often has trouble connecting with others. “He just kept his head down and read it as fast as he could,” says his mother, Carla Clapsadle. “When he finished, he said, ‘I’m never going to talk out in front of everybody again.’ ”
But his mom heard about the Crown Theater special-needs show and asked him if he wanted to try out. Caleb was supposed to go trick-or-treating that night, but something told him to try again.
“It’s like my heart was saying goooooo,” he says. “And I did, and I’m not stopping.”
Anytime you put a rabbi and a minister in the same sentence, it sounds like the start of a well-worn joke. But instead of walking into a bar, these two people of faith met in a parking lot outside a clergy meeting. And it wasn’t a joke, but a life-changing moment in a suburb of Philadelphia.
Reverend Karen Onesti, then senior pastor at United Methodist Church, and Rabbi Andrew Bossov of Adath Emanu-El synagogue, both in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, knew each other in passing from their monthly interfaith meeting. On this evening ten years ago, however, Rev. Onesti could tell something was up with Rabbi Bossov. So she approached him in the parking lot and asked him how he was doing.
“Not so well, unfortunately,” Rabbi Bossov replied. “I need a new kidney.” His kidneys were failing, the result of an experimental drug he’d taken more than a decade earlier for his colitis. Facing dialysis, the rabbi had already joined the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) registry, but the line was 70,000 people deep at the time. He’d also been working with close friends and relations to find a live donor, but so far, he hadn’t found a match. The statistics are grim for people in Rabbi Bossov’s situation: in the U.S., 20 people die every day waiting for an organ donation.
Rev. Onesti didn’t hesitate: “I’ll give you one of mine,” she told the rabbi.
Writing in the journal Reform Judaism, Rabbi Bossov reported that “the year that followed had many twists and turns as we navigated the arduous path toward donating and receiving an organ. Being accepted for transplant was one thing, but being approved for surgery was another, and there were no guarantees.” Rabbi Bossov began dialysis, and Rev. Onesti discovered she needed major surgery of her own (a hysterectomy) before she could be eligible to donate an organ.
But eventually, both Rabbi Bossov and Rev. Onesti were cleared, and their surgeries were a success. More than a decade later, the kidney is functioning perfectly, and the rabbi is grateful “beyond words” every single day. “If there was a psalm praising our Creator for the success of a living kidney donation, I’d sing it every morning right after the prayer of gratitude,” he writes.
Today, both the rabbi and reverend lead happy and healthy lives, and their friendship has deepened over the years. Rabbi Bossov calls his functioning kidney, “Lefty,” because it was Rev. Onesti’s left kidney. Although Rabbi Bossov has since relocated to Chicago, he and Rev. Onesti still see each other several times a year. And occasionally, they make public appearances together to advocate on behalf of live organ donation. Bossov notes that anyone interested in live organ donation can take the following steps:
Sign up to donate healthy organs and tissues in the event of a tragic, sudden death and inform next-of-kin of your desire to be an organ donor.
The leading causes of kidney failure are diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity. Simple blood and urine tests can tell how well the kidneys are working. The screening is vital because those with early kidney disease don’t know they have it. Pay attention to your health and see a doctor if you notice any of these warning signs of kidney disease.
Kyle Cassidy and three other members of the Annenberg (Lunchtime) Running Group were stretching on the grounds of the University of Pennsylvania, waiting for a few stragglers. The Penn colleagues and other community members meet three days a week for a roughly 30-minute jog and an occasional lecture. That’s right—during some runs, one of them delivers a talk; topics range from the brain to Bitcoin.
Not your normal exercise chatter. But on this day last January, it would not be their normal run.
The first clue that something was off was the man who sprinted past them. “Probably running a 7:15 pace,” Cassidy told Runner’s World admiringly.
Cassidy discovered why the sprinter was so fleet of foot when another man ran by, yelling, “Help! He took my phone and laptop!”
At that, the group did what running clubs do: They ran, trailing the suspect down the streets of Philadelphia until he ducked into a construction site. The runners split up. Cassidy ran around to the far side of the site to cut the thief off while the others wandered the neighborhood hoping he had dumped the loot in a backyard.
No luck. So they decided to ask residents whether they’d seen the guy. When they knocked on the door of one row house, they were in for a surprise. Unbeknownst to them, the perp had already emerged from the construction site—and was hiding behind a bush by that very house.
As the owner opened the door, the suspect darted out from behind the bush … and right into the arms of campus police, who’d joined the chase shortly behind the runners.
The members of this running group are not hard-core jocks. But they do understand the benefit of a little exercise.
“Running is typically a useless sport where you turn fat cells into heat,” Cassidy told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But occasionally it can be useful, and here was one of those opportunities.”
Since the age of three, Chelsie Hill had dreamed of becoming a dancer. “The only thing that I loved was dance,” she told CBS News. That ambition nearly ended one night in 2010. Hill, then a 17-year-old high school senior in Pacific Grove, California, was in a car accident that put her in the hospital for 51 days and left her paralyzed from the waist down. For most people, that would have dashed any hope of a dancing career. For Hill, it was the beginning. Far from being an obstacle, her wheelchair emboldened her. “I wanted to prove to my community—and to myself—that I was still ‘normal,’” she told Teen Vogue. “Whatever normal meant.”
Normal for her meant dancing, so Hill did it in her wheelchair right alongside her nondisabled high school dance team. “Half of my body was taken away from me, and I have to move it with my hands,” Hill told Today. “It definitely took a lot of learning and patience.”
After graduation, Hill wanted to expand her dance network to include women like her. She met people online who had suffered various spinal cord injuries but shared her determination, and she invited them to dance with her. “It was such an amazing experience.”
Hoping to reach more people in a larger city, Hill moved to Los Angeles in 2014 and formed a team of dancers with disabilities she calls the Rollettes, a sly nod to the Rockettes. “I want to break down the stereotype of wheelchair users and show that dance is dance, whether you’re walking or you’re rolling,” she told CBS News.
Dancing on wheels, the Rollettes discovered, can be just as fast-paced, artful, and fulfilling as the foot-based variety. In disabled dance competitions around the country, the six-member team (there are also a number of auxiliary members) grooves to Selena Gomez and Ed Sheeran tunes, rocking their upper bodies, jerking their heads to syncopated beats, striking poses, and steering their wheelchairs in well-timed, dynamic, highly choreographed routines. They’re having fun, and as the audiences’ exuberant reactions indicate, the fun is contagious.
Chelsie Hill, flanked by fellow Rollettes Samantha Lopez and Conner Lundius, wants her dancers to feel empowered.
Hill has attained what many of us never will: her childhood dream. She’s a dancer. But the Rollettes have helped her find something else just as fulfilling. Every year she holds a dance camp for wheelchair users of all ages and abilities with an eye to helping them find their inner Ginger Rogers or Julianne Hough. She calls it the Rollettes Experience, and in 2019, 173 participants from ten countries attended.
For many, it was the first time they’d felt they belonged. “I had a girl say it was the most empowering thing when she rolled into a room and everyone was at eye level,” Hill told CBS News. Steph Aiello told Teen Vogue that working with Hill challenged her to be more independent. “My injury doesn’t stop so I can live my life, so why am I going to stop living my life because of my injury?” she said.
Edna Serrano says that being part of the Rollettes team has given her the courage to get behind the wheel of a car. “I didn’t know I could do so many things that these girls have taught me,” she says. “I didn’t know I could be sexy. It’s so powerful to have [my teammates] in my life, because they’re my teachers. I have more confidence.”
The dancers aren’t the only ones feeling inspired. One woman saw a YouTube video of the team competing (google “Rollettes tournament”) and commented, “You guys are so awesome!!!! I’m in tears cuz you rock! To be in a wheelchair and still be so beautiful makes me know I can be beautiful too! Thank you! Feel free to come find me.” Next, here are the daily mantras to remember to make your own goals a reality.
Nano Corona, Okeechobee, FL: In 2010, cattle rancher Nano Corona was thrust into an unexpected battle for his life.
Good bosses respect their employees and practice transparency. Great bosses inspire, are part of the team, go above and beyond to make their employees’ lives easier and better, and always follow these 
