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The Value of Heroes
The saying, "The sun never sets on the British Empire" was true as recently as 1937 when tiny England did, in fact, still have possessions in each of ...
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The Power of Encouragement
When I was nineteen, I spent every Saturday from 1 a.m. to 10 a.m. in the control room of a low-power, Christian radio station on the AM dial in Oklah...
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Margaret, Mabel and Jimmy
Jimmy was an abandoned baby. Mabel, a widow deep in poverty with two hungry children of her own. Washing other people’s laundry ten hours a day, Mabel...
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Eisuke’s Little Girl
Eisuke had a university degree in economics and another in mathematics but his true love was his music. His wife, Isoko, was the granddaughter of Zenj...
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Racism and the Grapes of Wrath
When we think of the civil rights movement, we remember the early 60's and men like Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, impassioned leaders who ...
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Cohen of China
“The bullet that caught me in the left arm had made me think. Supposing it had been my right arm and I carried my gun that side, I'd not have b...
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The Rainbow and the Woodster
Until recently, I always assumed that rainbows disappeared from sight long before they touched the earth and that searching for the end of the rainbow...
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Singing in the Face of Danger
In 1965, a tiny American combat unit entered a clearing in Viet Nam’s Ia Drang valley and was quickly surrounded by nearly 2,000 enemy troops. The ens...
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Japanese Sunshine
In 1946, as Japan rose from the rubble of a devastating world war, Masaru Ibuka and his partner opened a repair shop among the broken fragments tha...
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Gift of a Jew
It’s 1933, the lowest point in America’s Great Depression, when Max Gaines loses his job as a novelties salesman and is forced to crowd into his mothe...
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American Indian Eloquence
America's Thanksgiving holiday originated when the Pilgrims gave thanks to God for sending them an Indian friend named Squanto. This much you alre...
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The Loneliest Man
Excruciatingly shy, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson lived a lonely childhood. Bullied and tormented by the older children because of his severe stammer...
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No Plan for Success
It was all a big mistake. A shipment of pocket watches arrived at the train station addressed to a jeweler in Redwood Falls. The startled jeweler told...
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Sam's Heart and Soul...and Sigh
From the day that Susy was born until her thirteenth birthday, her father, Sam, wrote innocent and exhilarating adventure stories for children. Toward...
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Emily Lives Inside Herself
Born into a wealthy family in 1830, Emily has her photograph taken at the age of 18, then lives a remarkably uneventful life until she quietly passes ...
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Griswold's Billion Dollar Prank
You are Pierre Lorillard IV, heir to a vast tobacco fortune. As a Lorillard, you move in the highest social circles and are considered to be a pi...
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Have You Never Been to NeverLand?
"I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can bec...
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Joe Is Not Your Average Boy
Joseph is a weak and sickly Hungarian teenager with a dream of adventure. Rejected by the Hungarian Army because of his poor eyesight and fragile fram...
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Thumbing Through The Diary Of A Genius
"Our first interest began when we were children. Father brought home to us a small toy actuated by a rubber string which would lift itself into th...
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Martin's Very Big Day
His name was Martin, and in the early 1500's he wrote a thing that changed our world forever. As Martin dipped pen in ink that momentous day, he ...
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Moon River
Remember Andy Williams, the silver-voiced crooner who had his own TV show back in the 1960's? How about Alice Cooper, the first of the gory, 70...
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Never Had a Chance
Orphaned at the age of 7, she's a black, self-made millionaire who offers powerful advice to all who will listen. "There is no royal flower-strewn...
To read the rest of this story, purchase Invisble Heroes at Wizard Academy Press.
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Dark with Smoldering Eyes
He was a 25 year-old Scot, she, a 36 year-old American with 2 children. They met when she was traveling alone in Paris; she divorced her husband to ma...
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Not All the Rich Are Whiners, Willie
William K. Vanderbilt Sr. is a forgettable man, best remembered for whining that "inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness."
Piffle, ...
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Paul's Adopted Son
Paul Compton had a wife and four daughters, and in later years, a fourteen-year-old son added himself to the dinner table. That son was me. My own mot...
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Pointing Chris Like a Gun
Just as the UPS package hits the bottom of the post office mailbox, Chris realizes what he has done. Most people would have simply shrugged and said, ...
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Prejudice Meets the Truth
I am small enough to have absurd little prejudices, but I'm also big enough to admit it. Oddly, though, I have none of the traditional stupid prej...
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Nathan's Little Flags
Twice each day, Mocatta, Pixley, Montagu, Nathan, and "Yankee" meet at Nathan's place on St. Swithin's Lane in London. During these meetings,...
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121,000 People Build a Statue
America did not become what it started out to be, and I, for one, am glad. When Thomas Jefferson penned the Constitution in 1787, only white, male lan...
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Secret Hiding Place
Elias was Irish-Canadian. Flora was German-American. Little Elias was the fourth of their five children. Inept at almost everything, he was scorned by...
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June, 1999
“Is this William Lederer?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Hello, my name’s Roy Williams and I’d like to include the letter you wrote to Admiral Davi...
To read the rest of this story, purchase Invisble Heroes at Wizard Academy Press.
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What Was I Thinking?
“Band-Aid Beige” is the only way to describe the color of the car I just bought. My friend Tony calls it “Caucasian.” Either way, I’m pretty sure it’...
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An Old Mustang Revertible
I have a 1971 Mustang with a canvas top that folds down behind the rear seat. Ask me why I chose to restore this particular year, make and model of ca...
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Willie and His Bank Balance
“It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for. Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness.” — William K....
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A Single-Eyed Brazilian
Paulo Freire was born in northeastern Brazil in 1921. When he was eight, the depression of 1929 struck his family hard and Paulo knew hunger for the f...
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World of 2,000 Pages
In his real life, John Lang lived a life full of romance, adventure and intrigue in the country of Islandia, on the southern portion of Karain in t...
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Wieners, Beans, and $530 Million
Evan Chrapko and his brother, Shane, sold their two year-old internet business for more than half a billion dollars.
Internet. That's t...
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Friend of Booker T. Washington
Julius was born in Springfield, Illinois, in a house directly across the street from where Abraham Lincoln had once lived. A small influence, surely, ...
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Tom and His Editors
"Asking a writer what he thinks about editors is like
asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs." John Osbourne
Tom is steaming with ou...
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A Society and Its Heroes
Heroes are dangerous things. Bigger than life, highly exaggerated and always positioned in the most favorable light, a hero is a beautiful lie.
<...
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An Island in WWII
The Associated Press may own the copyright, but I own the actual photograph. I'm not really sure why I bought it, though. You can't even see t...
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Priorities
Remember James Cramer, the guy I told you about in a MMMemo a few months ago who started a multi-billion dollar consulting firm by leaving free stock ...
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Curiosity and a Cat Named Adrian
"Curiosity killed the cat," is an expression often quoted by the terminally dull, but I've never been able to make any sense of the statement. To ...
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That Rascal Tom
Tom was sent to prison for rustling cattle, poaching, extortion, robbery and attempted murder. But Tom was sneaky enough to escape from prison. Not on...
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Carrying Boxes With Cornelius
Cornelius Vanderbilt was in the first grade the year George Washington died. Five years later, Cornelius quit school at age eleven and set out to make...
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Feynman’s Pendulum
Well, I did it.
I actually did it.
I put the lime in the coconut and drank’em both together. I put the lime in the coconut; it mad...
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Unlikely Parentage
One year before Tim Paterson developed his “Quick and Dirty Operating System,” the US military created a powerful new programming language called “...
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What Makes Alexander Great?
Alexander is a dreamer who inspires everyone around him with visions of grand possibilities. Always the first over the wall of an enemy city, Alex is ...
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Defending a Woman's Honor
Andrew marches cheerfully behind George Washington as they go to bravely fight the British. When it's discovered that the 13 year-old boy is an ex...
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Aboard the Whaling Ship Pequod
Howard Schultz agreed to serve on the board of a strange new Internet company because he was certain that by giving online shoppers an opportunity to ...
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History’s Greatest Hoax
Bill is a merchant, married to the woman who became pregnant when they were both eighteen. He lives an obscure life and dies at age fifty-two, h...
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Tigers in the Mind of Borges
- A Safari into the Imagination of a Literary Legend
Throughout his lonely childhood, his dull Swiss teachers insisted on pronouncing his first and last name as though both rhymed with "forge." Never onc...
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B’B’B’Bennie and the Jets
I stand on an island in New York Harbor, quietly gazing upwards at the torch of Lady Liberty, when my ears catch the sound of a distant rumble. The n...
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A Simple Telephone Call
Antonio Meucci is an Italian immigrant who cannot speak English. When his wife begins to suffer from crippling arthritis, he sets up a telephone link ...
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Ted and the Redhead of 1886
New York City, 1886: As dock workers unload crates containing the Statue of Liberty, a young railway agent named Richard Sears is launching the compan...
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Words, Like Boulders Down a Mountainside
Speaking of schoolchildren 60 years ago, the great Russian poet Kornei Chukovsky said, "When they read to me poems that have been taught to them in sc...
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Chariots of Fire
I finally figured out how the movie Chariots of Fire received its name. The main character, Eric Liddell, is a student whose running makes him...
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Is Happiness a Reasonable Goal?
One of my great joys is to monitor the online discussions between Wizard Academy graduates. From astrophysi...
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Listening to Ted
Ted was a crusty old war veteran and a maestro of profanity. Born into a family long on children and short on money, Ted grew into a salty, mean, wily...
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Were You a Happy 2 Year-old?
Do you remember when your mind was fully open and you saw the world through eyes of wonder? Everything was new when you were two. And anything was pos...
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The Best Salesman I Ever Knew
Charlie Myers’s job was to sell used cars from a dumpy car lot on the wrong side of town. And sell them he did. Charlie knew nothing at all about cars...
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Poem in Stone
White Wind is duty, pure and clean.
Yellow Fire has high and lofty dreams.
Red Earth is all adventure; Tom Sawyer to the c...
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Sneaking Into Prison Camp
“The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold, wet day.
I sat there with Sally.
To read the rest of this story, purchase Invisble Heroes at Wizard Academy Press.
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Dark Water, Strong Current
- A Word of Advice for Those Who Occasionally Struggle Against the Blues
Alone or in public, when something good happens and I'm happy, I do a perfectly ridiculous little dance. Pennie calls it my "dance of delight." I...
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Gabrielle, the Orphan Girl
“What am I bid for this classic Shagger?” I’m sitting in the third row at the famous James C. Leake auction in Tulsa watching a tuxedoed, Briti...
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How 'Bout Those Canadians, Eh?
I wear a little Canadian flag on the lapel of my sport coat these days as a statement of my admiration for the people of Canada. Having traveled to Ca...
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Nine Irishmen
It’s 1848. Nine Irishmen have been captured, tried and convicted of treason against Her Majesty, the Queen. They are sentenced to death. The...
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Using Your Ruby Red Slippers
Dorothy’s dream is to get to Kansas, but the people around her are all little Munchkins who have never heard of Kansas and would never consider leavin...
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The Seventh Wonder of the World
You’ve heard of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but you probably can’t name them. This is because the Seven Wonders are utterly irrelevant to ...
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A Haircut and a Barber’s Boy
It all began when an abusive policeman walked out of a barbershop without paying. An adolescent boy followed the officer outside and made a disparagin...
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Life is a Carnival Ride
"Life is truly a ride. We're all strapped in and no one can stop it.... I think that the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hai...
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A Tale of Two Eddies
“Easy Eddie” O’Hare is a dirty lawyer in the pay of Chicago’s Al Capone. Not wanting to see his son get pulled into a life of criminal activity, Easy ...
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The Real Ichabod Crane
“He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have s...
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A Magical Christmas Letter
While traveling in France, Mr. William Lederer witnessed an incident involving an American sailor that touched him so deeply he sent the following ...
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Teedie the Asthmatic
Teedie is a scrawny teenage boy with bucked teeth and asthma, but he has the heart of an overcomer. While the other boys sneak glances at Connie Bode...
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A Message to Garcia
On December 1, 1913, a little more than fourteen years after Elbert Hubbard first vented his frustration in "A Message to Garcia," he penned the follo...
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George Just Wants To Be Left Alone
George has been without a Daddy since he was ten years old. A quiet boy, George mostly likes to put seeds in the ground and then watch over them as t...
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Below Deck in a Storm at Sea
Ted pursued a Ph.D. in English literature at Oxford for awhile, but dropped out when he decided that his studies were "astonishingly irrelevant." In...
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Eddie's Song
Have you ever heard someone singing a song and then found yourself singing it all the rest of that day? Songs are funny things, even when they're ...
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See the Angel?
"The greater danger, for most of us, lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark......
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Charlie and Fred
Orphaned at the age of 9, Fred survived by selling newspapers on street corners and working long hours for the railroad. Later as a struggling teenage...
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Strangers on the Beach
It is a cold Thursday morning in December, and I’ve had three days of poor fishing. Water is freezing in hoof prints on the road. I am looking toward ...
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Johnny and Sam
Mason, New Hampshire. Summer, 1788. Thirteen year old Johnny Chapman meets young Sam Wilson while visiting his cousin Betsey at her family’s farm. ...
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The Exact Science of Creativity
It was during the Business Topology module of the Magical Worlds curriculum that John Quarto-vonTivadar raised his shy hand and quietly asked, “Have y...
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Encourager of Others
The world's most widely recognized sculpture, The Thinker, would probably never have come into existence had Rodin not received encouragement from...
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Who the Heck is Kary Mullis, anyway?
I was reading a collection of quotes recently when I discovered one that made me smile: "There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for...
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Space We’re Afraid to Face
“One of the things we run away from in this culture is solitude,” says Anne Luther, “We use substances or activities to fill the empty space that we’r...
To read the rest of this story, purchase Invisble Heroes at Wizard Academy Press.
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Right Where You Are
James Cramer dreams of managing a multimillion-dollar stock portfolio. He wants to be a force on Wall Street and speak with a voice of thunder.
To read the rest of this story, purchase Invisble Heroes at Wizard Academy Press.
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Pull the Trigger and Ride the Bullet
My best friend, Tony, is a deep recluse. Such a recluse, in fact, that no one in recent years has been able to completely confirm his existence. I’m...
To read the rest of this story, purchase Invisble Heroes at Wizard Academy Press.
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Ernie and Laurine
“Just as I was to enter the 7th grade at St. Mel’s I was stricken with rheumatic fever and was confined to bed for almost a year and was in a wheelcha...
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Finegal or Abraham?
- The Choice of Florence Balcombe
For the past several months, Florence Balcombe has been dating Finegal O'Flahertie, the baby boy of Speranza, an unconventional poetess who fights...
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Is Ours an "Any Road Generation?"
- In 1967, the Jefferson Airplane said, "Go ask Alice." So I did. Here's what I learned:
Abundant money and miraculous technologies confront us daily with an excess of options, while in the quiet shadows a debilitating apathy moans and whi...
To read the rest of this story, purchase Invisble Heroes at Wizard Academy Press.
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Birth of the Counter-Culture
- Remembering the Real Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs
It was a parenthesis in the evening news, October 21, 1969. Walter Cronkite, filling the left side of 60 million black-and-white TV screens, said, “Ja...
To read the rest of this story, purchase Invisble Heroes at Wizard Academy Press.
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