Bond of brothers

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.”

The post Heartwarming Stories of Relatives Who Found Each Other Through DNA Tests appeared first on Reader's Digest.

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.

The post This Couple Bought Their Dream Home in New Jersey—Then They Started Getting Ominous Letters in the Mail appeared first on Reader's Digest.

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 post Siegfried and Roy: What Happened the Night of the Tiger Attack? appeared first on Reader's Digest.

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.”

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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 70^th 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.

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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.

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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.

Feeling inspired? Learn two new things to do today to live a healthier life from our friends at Life Extension here.

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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.

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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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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.”

The post In Columbiana, Ohio, the Nicest Place in America, Nobody Gets Left Behind appeared first on Reader's Digest.

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.
• Join the Gift of Life registry.
• Donate blood and platelets as often as possible.

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.

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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.”

The post People Joined This Lunchtime Running Group to Stay Fit; Instead, They Helped Catch a Thief appeared first on Reader's Digest.

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.

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.

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Exorcism: A tale as old as time

Exorcism came to everyone’s attention with the release of the 1973 film, The Exorcist, which was based on the book, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. The author drew from the real-life exorcism of Roland Doe (more details to follow). But exorcism has been part of virtually every religion throughout recorded history. Ancient Babylonian priests performed exorcisms via a voodoo-like rite. Ancient Persians were saved from demonic possession via holy water, and the Bible recounts many times when Jesus Christ cast out demons from people believed to be possessed. These are the spookiest ghost stories from each state.

The post 12 Real Life Exorcisms That Actually Happened appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Our families lived more than 450 miles away, so a few weeks before Thanksgiving one year, my then-husband and I decided to invite a guest over for the holiday. I called a senior center in the Dallas area and they suggested Ilse, a woman I imagined would be quiet, soft-spoken, serene. I was wrong.

Ilse was a stubborn 78-year-old force of nature. She enjoyed complimentary gambling junkets to Las ­Vegas and kept a local bookie on speed dial. She favored sequined T‑shirts; her tiny wirehaired mutt, named ­Speckles; and spending time at the senior ­center. Describing this opinionated, four-foot-four woman as a fire­cracker would be like referring to the Olympic torch as a disposable lighter.

On Thanksgiving, within minutes of arriving, Ilse plopped her oversized purse on the kitchen counter and, with a wide, denture-filled smile, welcomed the glass of wine my husband offered. By the end of the evening, we felt as if this quirky septuagenarian were an old friend. Two weeks later, I invited her to lunch.

The more time I spent with Ilse, the more she became like a surrogate grandma, albeit a saucy one. She wasn’t afraid to share her opinion with others or to ask me when I was finally going to have children. “You’re not getting any younger,” she’d say.

I soon became her personal Uber driver (minus the fee), and I noticed that the more favors I agreed to do, the more she asked of me. Six months after we met, desperate for backup, I called her only child, Ralph. He claimed he didn’t have time to help. I questioned his “I’m too busy” excuse, but I kept my thoughts to myself.

A few months later, Ralph passed away. After the funeral, I realized Ilse was too distraught to be left alone and helped her hire a caregiver. Having known her for two years, I felt responsible for her. She was like family to me, and I was the only one left in her tribe.

Each time I stopped by her apartment, Ilse seemed more disconnected than the time before. Late one afternoon, she called from the emergency room to tell me she had tripped over her monstrous coffee table. Using the spare key she’d insisted I make months before, I searched her apartment for other trip hazards. The table had to go.

The next morning, Ilse called to ask about her table. She was angry and told me how upset she was that I had given away a family heirloom. Then she hung up on me.

When Ilse called that evening to apologize, I told my husband to say I wasn’t home. I was still angry and hurt.

The following day, I returned her call but was unable to understand what she was saying. I drove her to the emergency room, where the doctor confirmed she had suffered a mild stroke. During the next few days, I dropped by her apartment, but she was no longer the vibrant, obstinate Ilse I knew. At the end of the week, I received an early-morning call from her caregiver. “Please come over now,” the woman said, her voice ­matter-of-fact. “She’s passed away.”

When I arrived, I saw Ilse lying on her bed, motionless, her eyes closed. I sat on the edge of the bed and held her frail hand, too shocked to cry.

The morning after Ilse’s death, I pulled her will out of my file cabinet. Ilse had insisted I take a copy of it a year earlier. I read through it and stopped when I saw my name. She had left me $50,000. I didn’t remember her saying anything about her bequest. If she had, I would have insisted she donate the money to charity or give it to a friend she had known longer.

I knew I couldn’t spend what she had left me on myself. Ilse was a friend I’d helped out of loyalty and respect, not with the expectation of being paid.

Her attorney sent me a check, and I opened an investment account in her honor. Over the next 20 years, Ilse’s gift grew and gave me the opportunity to disperse funds in her name to a cause she cared about deeply: children.

Various families and charities benefited from her donations. Some families received funds to send their grade-schoolers to summer camp. Through the local food bank’s “Food 4 Kids” program, her donation provided children who relied on daily school meals with weekend backpacks filled with food to take home with them on Fridays.

A few days before my unconventional friend died, I heard her on the phone asking about “the odds.” I don’t know whether her last bet paid off—I didn’t ask her bookie when I met her at Ilse’s funeral. Yet the gamble I’d taken years before when I placed a call to the senior center and met Ilse had definitely made my life richer. I took a chance on humanity, and Ilse’s friendship was the jackpot.

The post Here’s How a 78-Year-Old Gambler Brought One Woman Humanity appeared first on Reader's Digest.

The Farming village of Sodeto sits perched atop a dusty outcropping of land in northeastern Spain. It’s barely a dot on the map—consisting of about 240 people. Identical stone houses and barns sit in rows, and automobiles caked with mud line the grassy town square. There are no overt signs of wealth, but if you peek through any of the kitchen windows, you’ll see something odd: enormous flat-screen TVs and sleek marble countertops so freshly installed, they’d look more appropriate in a display condo.

At Bar Cañamoto, the town’s sole drinking establishment, you’ll usually find a half dozen residents drinking botellitas of Estrella beer after a long day of laboring in the fields. But unlike the locals in other towns, these farmers and truck drivers pay for their one-euro beers with 50-euro bills, and the mood is always jovial, like they haven’t a worry in the world. “People are happier now,” explains Pedro, a 33-year-old long-distance truck driver, as he breaks into a smile.

On December 22, 2011, at 9:57 a.m., the entire population of Sodeto became winners of the biggest lottery in the world. La Lotería de Navidad, or El Gordo (“The Fat One”), as it is known, dishes out as much as two billion euros every year in prize money, and in 2011, everyone in Sodeto held a portion of the winning number. As El Gordo was announced on television, Sodeto’s residents streamed out of their homes and into the square, embracing and shrieking in disbelief. “I had four tickets. How many did you have?” “I had seven!” “I had 12!”

Tears and champagne flowed as the realization set in that every single person in Sodeto had won a share of the largest amount of prize money, worth a combined 720 million euros. (Everyone, that is, except for one resident, but more about him later.) Here are the money mistakes even financial experts have made.

Spain’s lottery works differently from those in the United States. In 2011, there were 1,800 tickets with the first-prize winning number, 58268. Because buying a ticket can be prohibitively expensive for most people, local organizations buy tickets and divide them into less costly participaciones. In 2011, the Housewives’ Association of Sodeto had sold 1,200 participaciones to people who lived in town. Each winning participación was worth 100,000 euros.

Exactly who won how much is a secret. Suffice it to say, every single family in Sodeto had at least one winning participación, and some had bought enough to make them millionaires. If you have one of these traits, you could become a millionaire.

In an instant, Sodeto had become the subject of an unintentional social experiment: What happens when an entire debt-ridden farming community suddenly becomes incredibly wealthy? The press arrived quickly. Salespeople swarmed the town, flooding residents with offers of sports cars, diamonds, and exotic vacations. Bankers hawked various investments. Garbage bins that rarely needed emptying suddenly overflowed with flyers.

“Oh, it’s gotten better,” admits Herminia Gayán. Her family had four participaciones, so they won 400,000 euros. The 78-year-old grandmother sits at her long kitchen table in a floral smock and slippers stirring aioli for the dinner she’ll later serve to her family. Chicken sizzles in the oven, and wood crackles in the huge fireplace that dominates the front room of every house in Sodeto.

Gayán was one of the original settlers here. Sodeto was created in 1950, one of more than 200 planned communities created by former dictator Francisco Franco across the Spanish countryside to populate under-farmed areas. Gayán and her now-deceased husband were given a house, a barn, some land, and a few farm animals.

For the first four years, there were only seven families, working the land and fending for themselves. Eventually, more than 65 families settled in the town. “We had 14 cows in the backyard,” says Gayán proudly. Her blue-eyed son, a 54-year-old farmer named José and the town’s official pig slaughterer, chimes in when the lottery is mentioned. “You didn’t have anything before, and in this moment, you have everything,” he says, lighting a cigarette. The mother and son happily relive those first moments after learning about the victory but then grow serious. “As the hours go by, you calm down,” says José, blowing smoke into the roaring fireplace. “The people didn’t go crazy. They didn’t buy and spend.”

In fact, in the months after the win, there was no change at all, he says. But come April, the streets were filled with trucks and construction companies performing renovations on virtually every house in town. But beyond that, it’s hard to identify any major change in the sleepy village. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that nobody has stopped working—as farmers, truck drivers, and housewives.

As we talk, family and friends stream in and out. Perhaps it’s because Sodeto was a deliberately planned community, but there’s a familial sense of camaraderie and togetherness that is stronger here than in other Spanish towns. Yet after the lottery win, more often than not, it was a reporter and not a friend who wandered in, and one always armed with the same question: “Why didn’t you take the money and leave?” Gayán finds the inquiry perplexing. “Where would I go?” she asks with a shrug. “I won with all these people.”

Well, almost all of them. A converted barn owned by Costis Mitsotakis sits on a hill a mere two-minute drive from Sodeto’s center, a distance he says that may have cost him a winning ticket in El Gordo. The Greek documentary filmmaker moved here eight years ago to pursue a relationship with a resident, but it didn’t work out. He says that members of the Housewives’ Association never knocked on his door. “It took me a couple of days to discover I was the only one who had missed out,” he says. And yet in some ways, even Mitsotakis is a winner.

On the morning of December 22, he was in the village square with his video camera, capturing the jubilant celebrations. Those incredible shots are included in Cuando Tocó (“When Touched”), a documentary Mitsotakis made about Sodeto and El Gordo. His original intention was to document how the lottery would change the town, but his focus quickly shifted to why the town didn’t change more.

“Everyone had his or her feet on the ground after the lottery,” says Rosa Pons Serena. At 54, Serena has been mayor of Sodeto for 14 years, and she knows the town’s short history well.

“What we won was peace of mind,” she says. We’re walking through the town’s small visitors’ center, and she stops in front of a diorama of the hills and fields that surround Sodeto.

“Instead of the old irrigation system”—Serena points to miniature canals that snake through much of the diorama—“we’re modernizing.” She gestures to another part of the diorama, where fields are dotted with evenly spaced automated sprinklers. Nearly everyone in the town had invested heavily in these new systems, and many people were in debt. She explains that with an economic base in animals and agriculture, everything depends on the land—and sometimes it can be unkind. “When they played the lottery, many couldn’t plant, because there was a drought,” says Serena.

During that time, talk in the bar was tense, Serena recalls. The question patrons asked was always “How will I pay?” If conversation wasn’t about the irrigation systems and the drought, it would turn to the economic crisis in Spain or the fact that one by one, the youth of Sodeto were leaving to search for work in the nearby city of Huesca. “And then, in one second, all the mortgages disappeared,” says Serena.

No one took his or her winnings and split. In fact, three of the town’s young people actually returned to buy land and build houses. In a nearly deserted area of an economically depressed country, those suddenly blessed with the freedom to do anything simply chose to stay put.

For Serena, it’s not a mystery. “This morning, my neighbor called me to come have a coffee, and I went in my housecoat,” explains the mayor. “These little things give us our quality of life.”

And of course, there’s another question that these lucky residents have been compelled to consider: Why did the lottery land here, in Sodeto? The answer is usually a smile and a shrug. Serena is one of the few who are willing to give the windfall meaning: “It was a prize for those who stayed.” For Serena, Gayán, and their beloved neighbors, it’s simple: There’s nowhere else they’d rather be. Next, check out these small towns in America with the most millionaires.

Money-Saving Tips from Self-Made Millionaires

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Ways to Make Money Fast

The post How Everyone in This One Small Town Became Millionaires Overnight appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Death blew east on a savage wind, driving flames over foothills and across a river, spitting glowing embers and scrubbing the earth bare. It was coming for Don Andrews.

The firestorm shook the ground and roared as loud as a passing train. The windows on Andrews’s bulldozer shattered, flinging glass into his face. The blue-green shards were everywhere: on the floor, inside his helmet, in his skin and eyes. He was alone and blinded.

I’m not going to survive this, he thought.

Andrews, 60, wasn’t supposed to be this close to the edge. He’d been hired that day, July 26, 2018, by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) to work with two other bulldozer drivers to carve a thick ring of dirt around a subdivision of homes near the city of Redding. It was a fairly routine assignment—the containment lines were three dozer blades wide and designed to halt the advance of the wildfire, which was still miles away.

What Andrews didn’t know was that the Carr Fire—to that point a rather ordinary California blaze—had spawned something monstrous: a fire tornado the likes of which the state had never seen.

A freak of meteorology, it would annihilate everything in its path, uprooting trees and crumpling electrical towers. It was a vortex of air wrapped around a column of rising heat, flames licking its unseen walls.

Andrews hunkered down. He gripped the dozer’s protective foil curtains closed with his left hand to keep the wind from batting them open. With his right hand, he pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth. The heat seared his throat.

Temperatures within the tornado soared to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. A nearby Cal Fire truck exploded.

Andrews dialed 911. His singed hands trembled. A dispatcher answered, on the verge of tears. Dozens of others had phoned in already, describing the unfolding hell. Now here was a call from ground zero.

“I don’t know how long I can last,” Andrews told her. “I need to get out of here.”

“If you can, get out safely, OK?”

“I can’t. It’s all on fire around me. Don’t risk anybody’s life for mine.”

“Nobody is going to believe this.”

The wildfire had begun in typical fashion—­human error colliding with a dry landscape primed to burn. It hadn’t rained in the area since May, and winter precipitation had been 58 percent below normal. More than a dozen other wildfires were already burning across the state, so resources to fight this one were stretched. On July 23, an older couple driving home from a vacation cut through Redding. A tire on their trailer went flat, leaving the wheel to drag on pavement. Sparks flew into parched grass. The fire quickly spread.

Incident Commander Tom Lubas, a 23-year veteran of Cal Fire, and his colleagues set up a command center, called in more firefighters, and carved containment lines. But then the fire exploded from 4,599 acres to nearly 30,000.

Just after noon, Lubas handed off his incident commander role and left base camp at the Shasta County fairgrounds in Redding. Though he had worked in the morning, it was supposed to be his day off, and now he planned to shower and rest. From his truck window, Lubas watched as a 30,000-foot-tall convection column—a plume filled with ash, debris, and hydrocarbons—ballooned into the sky, sucking up the hot air as oxygen fed the fire.

As he drove, his truck registered the temperature outside: 113 degrees. On the coast, 95 miles to the west, it was 59 degrees. As the cool coastal air blew over Bully Choop Mountain and into the Sacramento Valley, the 54-degree difference caused warm air to shoot up in a vortex. As day turned to dusk, the convection column would rotate faster and faster, contorting into a cyclone.

Sometime after 5:30 p.m., as Lubas finished grocery shopping, the sky grew dark. The fire’s behavior alarmed him, so he went back to work, driving to the hills northwest of Redding to assist in evacuating residents. But an hour later, he stopped. He was blocked.

Ahead of him, the tornado twisted. It was sinister and snakelike, a swirl of orange that seemed to fill the entire sky. Flames soared 400 feet in the air. It wouldn’t touch down for another hour, but it was rapidly gaining strength. The tornado would grow to 1,000 feet wide, the size of three football fields, and produce temperatures double those of a typical wildfire. Its howling obliterated every other sound.

Tom Lubas was in shock. Nobody is going to believe this, he thought.

“I’ll lead you out.”

Cal Fire captain Shawn Raley barked evacuation orders over the radio for the neighborhood of Sunset Terrace. The sky was red and the wind screamed, shaking the leaves off trees. New fires lit in shrubs and on roofs. A 24-year veteran of wildland blazes, Raley had seen nearly everything, including swirling eddies of air called fire whirls. But he hadn’t seen anything like this.

At around 7:15 p.m., he drove toward subdivisions tucked into wooded hills. He figured residents would need help escaping. His headlights barely pierced the smoke, but he could see three bulldozers inch past him on two-lane Buenaventura Boulevard. One was driven by Don Andrews, who was unaware of the dangers he was about to face; contractors Terry Cummings and Jimmie Jones drove the other two. They were under electrical lines, which were swaying in the wind, and Raley shouted at the men to move away.

In the driveway of a sprawling house, Raley spotted a Tesla with someone in the driver’s seat. Dr. Nanda Kumar, 62, had raced five miles home from Vibra Hospital of Northern California. His wife, Yasoda Thiruvoipati, 58, and daughter, Dr. ­Sushma Thiruvoipati, 29, hadn’t received an evacuation alert, and when the power cut out, their garage door wouldn’t open, locking their car inside.

“Go back!” Raley shouted at Dr. Kumar, sounding his siren.

“My wife and ­daughter are there, can they come in?” Dr. Kumar said, pointing to Raley’s vehicle. He figured they’d be safest with the captain.

“Come in my truck?” Raley asked. “Yes.”

The women jumped into the back seat, coughing. Nearby, flames that climbed 100 feet devoured their neighbors’ homes. Soon theirs would fall as well.

“I’ll lead you out,” Raley yelled to Dr. Kumar. “Take your car.”

Debris pelted the truck, cracking Raley’s windshield and shattering the other windows as the wind blew the vehicle off the road. The captain threw himself across the passenger seat, shielding his face, as the fire passed over them. Yasoda and ­Sushma screamed.

“Are you OK?” Raley shouted, though he knew the answer. He was embarrassed. He’d told this trapped family he would get them out safely. Now they were covered in glass and bleeding. Behind them, the trunk of Dr. Kumar’s Tesla was aflame.

“I need a water drop!”

The radio call from Redding fire inspector Jeremy “J.J.” Stoke couldn’t have been more urgent: “Mayday!”

The 37-year-old had cut short a family vacation with his wife and two children to come home and battle the Carr Fire. As the tornado descended, he was driving his truck south on Buena­ventura Boulevard. The ferocity of the thing defied his long experience.

“I need a water drop,” Stoke called out at 7:39 p.m., hoping a firefighting plane could bail him out. “I’m getting burned over.”

An engine captain responded immediately, asking for his location. There was no response.

The tornado had picked up Stoke’s 5,000-pound Ford F-150 truck as if it were a toy car, flipping it repeatedly and dragging it down Buenaventura Boulevard. The truck scraped the pavement, leaving a trail of red paint, before coming to rest in the woods.

The twister destroyed everything it touched, buckling an electrical tower into a jumble of steel, lofting a shipping container, and blasting the bark off oak trees.

“Come get us, grandpa.”

On Quartz Hill Road, 70-year-old Melody Bledsoe soaked blankets in her kitchen sink and draped them over her great-grandchildren, Emily and James “Junior” Roberts, who were four and five years old.

Melody’s husband, Ed Bledsoe, was a handyman who’d gone just down the road to pick up a paycheck. The family hadn’t been ordered to evacuate, and Ed didn’t know the tornado was headed their way until he got a desperate call from Junior while he was stuck in gridlocked traffic.

“Are you coming?” the boy asked, his small voice frantic. The storm was sucking air through the house, rattling the windows, and ripping through the trees outside.

“Don’t worry, Grandpa is coming.”

“You gotta come in the front door; the back door is on fire,” Junior said. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“That’s where I’m coming. Be ready. I’ll be there just as quick as I can. I’m waiting for the fire to pass.”

“Tell Grandpa I love him,” Melody said in the background, her voice barely audible.

“Everybody says they love you,” Junior said. “Come get us, Grandpa. There’s starting to be a lot of fire here.”

Then the call went silent.

“Don’t make mistakes.”

Shortly before 8 p.m., as the blaze spotted around bulldozer driver Terry Cummings in an open field near Buena­ventura Boulevard, the 44-year-old attacked the wildfire’s base.

Fire should have scared Cummings. The contractor grew up in the mountains in a logging and milling family. In 2005, his mother, sister, and brother died in a house fire ignited by a candle, and soon after, he shut down the family business. He’d chased wildfires ever since.

Now the field around him was a sea of rippling orange, the embers and flames seemingly alive. He couldn’t breathe from the smoke. He flagged down Andrews and Jones and led their dozers back to Buenaventura Boulevard. He figured they could wait between the steep banks on either side of the road. The air would be clear, and their engines could cool down.

But as they drove north, the tornado descended again, its edges glowing red. It whipped rocks into Cummings’s windshield like bullets, shattering the glass. It was as dark as midnight. Then it picked up the front of his 25-ton bulldozer, pivoted it clockwise, and dropped it on the hood of a nearby truck, which was crushed and aflame. The driver must be dead, Cummings thought.

He reached for the fire shelter tucked behind his seat but nabbed his gear bag by accident. He held it in front of his face to protect his airways. White blisters bubbled on his fingertips. His skin felt like it was melting.

“No, Lord,” he screamed. “Not like this!”

Now, it seemed, he was going to die the way his family had. The tornado sucked Cummings halfway out the shattered window, his body drawn by a gravity he didn’t understand. He gripped the window frame. Jagged glass pierced his left leg as he pulled himself back inside.

Reaching up, he tried to unfold the fire curtains over his dozer’s open windows. But the third-degree burns on his fingers prevented him from undoing the clasps. He grabbed a knife and cut them. Reaching his fire shelter, he pulled its cord as best he could.

“Be calm. Don’t make mistakes,” he repeated to himself.

“The fire is here.”

Steve Bustillos sat cringing in the driver’s seat of his truck—the one that sat mangled and flaming under Terry Cummings’s dozer.
A retired San Jose police officer, Bustillos, 55, hadn’t evacuated in time, because he didn’t know he needed to. The fire had moved that quickly. As he drove out of his gated neighborhood just after 8 p.m., he called his wife, who was receiving treatment in the Bay Area for endometrial and lung cancer, both stage IV.

“It might be over,” he told her. “The fire is here.”

Now he was in grave trouble. The fire spreading in his pickup fed off spilled diesel, torching paperwork, jewelry, and guns in the back seat. Bustillos’s hair looked as if someone had taken a blowtorch to it. He knew he couldn’t stay put.

So he climbed outside, grabbing a suitcase filled with clothing, and made a desperate move, crouching in the blade of Cummings’s bulldozer, which provided some protection from the wind. He held the luggage in front of him. Fifteen seconds passed, or possibly 15 minutes. He wasn’t sure.

Embers floated through the air as the wind shifted. Fire danced through the grass and in the trees. Then the temperature dropped, perhaps by as much as 50 degrees. Bustillos saw Cummings sprinting down the street under his semi-deployed fire shelter.

“Get me out of here!” Cummings yelled at a man driving a Cal Fire truck, his voice cracking. “I’m burned really bad.”

Bustillos hopped into a second truck. Then he saw the driver’s face. He knew that expression from decades in law enforcement—the look when someone wearing a uniform, which meant they were supposed to keep people safe, knew that it might not be possible.

“Where’s Don?”

The tornado had blasted across fields, leveled neighborhoods, and rendered the landscape smooth and alien. Two and a half hours after forming, it was finally dissipating.

Down the hill, Commander Tom Lubas watched people stream out of hillside neighborhoods. Their stares were vacant, like those of soldiers returning from battle.

Lubas helped spray down the back of Dr. Kumar’s Tesla, which was still flaming. The family had survived, and Lubas now directed their savior, Captain Raley, to set up a triage area for burn victims. Lubas ordered five ambulances, then left to continue evacuating more residents.

“Where’s Don?” Andrews’s colleague Mike Merdock kept asking. Eventually, Merdock was able to drive up Buenaventura Boulevard and find the bulldozer. He figured Andrews was dead, that he couldn’t possibly have survived. But as he grabbed the back of the contractor’s shirt to haul him out of his vehicle, Andrews twitched.

Together, they drove out of the decimated area. All that was left, for as far as they could see, was ash. In all, the Carr Fire killed eight people, including Jeremy “J.J.” Stoke, Melody Bledsoe, and her great-grandchildren Emily and James “Junior” Roberts, and ruined more than 1,000 homes over 38 days. But as they drove out, all Don Andrews could think was, How did anyone live through this?

The post This is What Happens When a Wildfire Combines With a Tornado and No One Has Time to Evacuate appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Family matters

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of family is “a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head.” Of course, we know that family is so much more than that. It’s a dynamic full of ups, downs, triumphs, and struggles. And there isn’t a singular way to become a family, either. The path to finding one’s “people” can be a journey in and of itself. For these 25 celebrities, adoption led them to the folks who would be the most formidable of their lives. The stories of these 6 foster kids finding their forever home will melt your heart.

The post 25 Famous People You Didn’t Know Were Adopted appeared first on Reader's Digest.

The Man at the Market

When the supermarket clerk tallied up my groceries, I was $12 over what I had on me. I began to remove items from the bags, when another shopper handed me a $20 bill. “Please don’t put yourself out,” I told him. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “My mother is in the hospital with cancer. I visit her every day and bring her flowers. I went this morning, and she got mad at me for spending my money on more flowers. She demanded that I do something else with that money. So, here, please accept this. It is my mother’s flowers.” – Leslie Wagner, Peel, Arkansas. Here are 30 more acts of kindness you can do in two minutes or less.

Jim and the Job

My neighbor, Jim, had trouble deciding if he wanted to retire from the construction field, until he ran into a younger man he’d worked with previously. The young man had a wife and three children and was finding it difficult to make ends meet, since he hadn’t worked in some time. The next morning, Jim went to the union office and submitted his retirement paperwork. As for his replacement, he gave them the name of the young man. That was six years ago, and that young husband and father has been employed ever since. – Miranda MacLean, Brutus, Michigan. 

A Family’s Food Angel

While going through a divorce, my mother fretted over her new worries: no income, the same bills, and no way to afford groceries. It was around this time that she started finding boxes of food outside our door every morning. This went on for months, until she was able to land a job. We never did find out who it was who left the groceries for us, but they truly saved our lives. – Jamie Boleyn, Emmett, Idaho. These 12 heartwarming stories will restore your faith in humanity.

Color Me Amazed

I forgot about the rules on liquids in carry-on luggage, so when I hit security at the airport, I had to give up all my painting supplies. When I returned a week later, an attendant was at the baggage area with my paints. Not only had he kept them for me, but he’d looked up my return date and time in order to meet me.  – Marilyn Kinsella, Canmore, Canada

Seven Miles For Me

Leaving a store, I returned to my car only to find that I’d locked my keys and cell phone inside. A teenager riding his bike saw me kick a tire and say a few choice words. “What’s wrong?” he asked. I explained my situation. “But even if I could call my wife,” I said, “she can’t bring me her car key, since this is our only car.” He handed me his cell phone. “Call your wife and tell her I’m coming to get her key.” “That’s seven miles round trip.” “Don’t worry about it.” An hour later, he returned with the key. I offered him some money, but he refused. “Let’s just say I needed the exercise,” he said. Then, like a cowboy in the movies, he rode off into the sunset. – Clarence W. Stephens, Nicholasville, Kentucky. Take a look at these incredible photos of heartwarming moments.

The Little Lift

One evening, I left a restaurant just ahead of a woman assisting her elderly mom. I approached the curb and paused to see if my arthritic knees could climb it. To my right appeared an arm to assist. It was that of the elderly mom. My heart was so touched. – Donna Moerie, Goldsboro, North Carolina

Bounty For a Navy Wife

I was balancing caring for a toddler and working a full-time job, all while my Navy husband was on extended duty overseas. One evening, the doorbell rang. It was my neighbor, a retired chief petty officer, holding a breadboard loaded with a freshly cooked chicken and vegetable stew. “I’ve noticed you’re getting a little skinny,” he said. It was the best meal I’d had in months. – Patricia Fordney, Corvallis, Oregon. Here are 10 life-changing acts of kindness you can do right now.

My Granddaughter’s Dress

I saw a dress in a consignment shop that I knew my granddaughter would love. But money was tight, so I asked the store owner if she could hold it for me. “May I buy the dress for you?” asked another customer. “Thank you, but I can’t accept such a gracious gift,” I said. Then she told me why it was so important for her to help me. She’d been homeless for three years, she said, and had it not been for the kindness of strangers, she would not have been able to survive. “I’m no longer homeless, and my situation has improved,” she said. “I promised myself that I would repay the kindness so many had shown me.” She paid for the dress, and the only payment she would accept in return was a heartfelt hug. – Stacy Lee, Columbia, Maryland

White Shoulders

A woman at our yard sale wore a perfume that smelled heavenly and familiar. “What are you wearing?” I asked. “White Shoulders,” she said. Suddenly, I was bowled over by a flood of memories. White Shoulders was the one gift I could count on at Christmas from my late mother. We chatted awhile, and she bought some things and left. A few hours later, she returned holding a new bottle of White Shoulders. I don’t recall which one of us started crying first. – Media Stooksbury, Powell, Tennessee. Try these effortless ways to be nicer to people.

Breaking Bread

Last December, before work, I stopped at a deli and ordered an everything bagel with cream cheese. It was toasty warm, and I couldn’t wait to dig in. But as I left the store, I noticed an older indigent gentleman sitting at the bus stop. Knowing it would probably be his only warm meal of the day, I gave him the bagel. But all was not lost for me. Another customer from the deli offered me half of her bagel. I was so delighted because I realized that in one way or another, we are all looked after. – Liliana Figueroa, Phoenix, Arizona

“I Can Still Help”

As I walked through the parking lot, all I could think about was the dire diagnosis I had handed my patient Jimmy: pancreatic cancer. Just then, I noticed an elderly gentleman handing tools to someone working under his stalled car. That someone was Jimmy. “Jimmy, what are you doing?” I yelled out. Jimmy dusted off his pants. “My cancer didn’t tell me not to help others, Doc,” he said, before waving at the old man to start the car. The engine roared to life. The old man thanked Jimmy and drove off. Then Jimmy got into his car and took off as well. Take-home message: Kindness has no limits and no restrictions. –Mohammed Basha, Gainesville, Florida.  Start giving these 10 little compliments to people every day.

Top Note

When my husband died unexpectedly, a coworker took me under her wing. Every week for an entire year, she would send me a card saying “Just Thinking of You” or “Hang in There.” She saved my life. – Jerilynn Collette, Burnsville, Minnesota

He Kept an Eye on Me

Driving home in a blizzard, I noticed a vehicle trailing close behind me. Suddenly, my tire blew! I pulled off the road, and so did the other car. A man jumped out from behind the wheel and without hesitation changed the flat. “I was going to get off two miles back,” he said. “But I didn’t think that tire looked good.” –Marilyn Attebery, Spokane Valley, Washington. Being kind to strangers is great, but don’t forget these ways to be nicer to yourself.

My Commander’s Call

It was one of my first missions on a gunship during the Vietnam War. I was scanning for enemy fire when I spotted a bright object that looked as if it were coming straight at us. “Missile! Missile!” I shouted into my interphone. The pilot jerked the airplane as hard as he could, dumping guys from one side of the craft to the next. Well, turns out the “missile” was a flare we had just dropped. Suffice it to say, the guys weren’t pleased. Back at the base, my commander put an arm around my shoulder. “Sergeant Hunter,” he said, “you keep calling them like you see them. Better safe than sorry.” That kind act gave me the confidence to be one of the top gunners in my squadron. – Douglas Hunter, Fort Walton Beach, Florida

21 Apples From Max

When my grandson Max told his mother, Andrea, to donate any check she would give him for his 21st birthday, Andrea got an idea. She handed Max’s brother Charlie a video camera. Then she took out 21 $10 bills from the bank and bought 21 apples at the supermarket. When they spotted a homeless man, Andrea told him, “Today is my son Max’s 21st birthday, and he asked me to give a gift to someone to help him celebrate.” She handed the man a $10 bill and an apple. The man smiled into the camera and announced, “Happy birthday, Max!” Soon, they passed out their booty to men and women waiting in line at a soup kitchen. In a unified chorus, they wished Max, “Happy birthday!” At a pizza parlor, Andrea left $50 and told the owners to feed the hungry. “Happy birthday, Max!” they shouted. With one last $10 bill and apple, they stopped at Andrea’s sister’s office. Unable to contain her laughter or her tears, she bellowed into the camera, “Happy birthday, Max!” –Dr. Donald Stoltz, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Don’t miss these 21 acts of kindness that changed these people’s lives.

How Did She Know?

I was driving cross-country to start a new job. What began as a fun adventure turned into a nightmare when I realized I had run through most of my money and still had a ways to go. I pulled over and let the tears flow. That’s when I noticed the unopened farewell card my neighbor had shoved in my hand as I left. I pulled the card out of the envelope, and $100 dropped out—just enough to get me through the remainder of my trip. Later, I asked my neighbor why she had enclosed the money. She said, “I had a feeling it would help.” – Nadine Chandler, Winthrop, Massachusetts

Raised Right

Children were playing at the recreation area of an IKEA store when my five-year-old granddaughter motioned for a small boy to stop. She knelt down before him and retied his flopping shoelaces—she had only just learned to tie her own. No words were spoken, but after she finished, both smiled shyly, then turned to race off in different directions. – Sheela Mayes, Olla, Louisiana. Take a look at these 8 acts of kindness that turned into good karma.

Blanket Statement

When I was seven, my family drove to the Grand Canyon. At one point, my favorite blanket flew out the window and was gone. I was devastated. Soon after, we stopped at a service station. Moping, I found a bench and was about to eat my sandwich when a biker gang pulled into the station. “Is that your blue Ford?” a huge, frightening man with a gray-and-black beard asked. Mom nodded reticently. The man pulled my blanket from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. He then returned to his motorcycle. I repaid him the only way I knew how: I ran up to him and gave him my sandwich.
Zena Hamilton, United Kingdom

Just Driving Through

When my friend and I were injured in a car accident, a family from out of state stopped to help. Seeing we were hurt, they drove us to the hospital and stayed there until we were released. They then took us home, got us food, and made sure we were settled in. Amazingly, they interrupted their vacation to help us. –Cindy Earls, Ada, Oklahoma. Check out this story of how this generous man let a stranger borrow his car.

Butterflies of Support

I was four months pregnant with our first child when our baby’s heart stopped beating. I was devastated. As the days went on, I was nervous about returning to work. I’m a middle school teacher and didn’t know how I could face kids. This past May, after four weeks of recovering, I walked into my empty classroom and turned on the lights. Glued to the wall were a hundred colored paper butterflies, each with a handwritten message on it from current and past students. All of them had encouraging messages: “Keep moving forward,” “Don’t give up on God,” and “Know that we love you.” It was exactly what I needed.
Jennifer Garcia-Esquivel, San Benito, Texas

Twice as Nice

Two firefighters were waiting in line at a fast-food restaurant when the siren sounded on their fire truck parked outside. As they turned to leave, a couple who had just received their order handed their food to the firefighters. The couple then got back in line to reorder. Doubling down on their selfless act, the manager refused to take their money. –JoAnn Sanderson, Brandon, Florida. These are the nicest places in America, according to our readers.

Designated Driver

I’d pulled over onto the side of a New Mexico road and was suffering a panic attack when a minivan full of kids pulled over. A woman got out and asked if I was OK. “No,” I said. Then I laid out what had happened: I was delivering books for a publishing company. My next stop was way, way up this long and winding and, to me, very treacherous road. I couldn’t do it. “I’ll deliver the books for you,” she said. She was a local, and the roads were nothing for her. I took her up on the offer and never forgot the simple kindness of a stranger. – Doreen Frick, Ord, Nebraska

A Christmas Story

In January 2006, a fire destroyed a family’s home. In that fire were all the belongings of a six-year-old boy, including his Christmas presents. A classmate from his school who had a birthday around then asked her parents if she could give all her gifts to the boy. That act of kindness will forever warm my heart because the boy is my grandson.  – Donna Kachnowski, Lebanon, Connecticut

She Gave Me Direction

As I left a party, I got on the wrong freeway and was immediately lost. I pulled over to the shoulder and called my roadside-assistance provider. She tried to connect me to the California Highway Patrol, but that call never went through. Hearing the panic in my voice, she came up with a plan B: “You’re near this office,” she said. “I’m about to go off shift. Stay put, and I’ll find you.” Ten minutes later, she rolled up. She guided me not only to the right freeway but all the way to the correct freeway exit. And then, with a wave goodbye, she drove back into the night. – Michelle Arnold, Santee, California. Next, check out these 50 random acts of kindness that don’t cost a cent.

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In her 17 years on this earth, Shreyaa Venkat has done more to help the planet and the people living on it than many adults two, three, and four times her age. The non-profit organization she founded, NEST4US, has helped tens of thousands of people in the United States. Through NEST Nurtures, they’ve served over 12,000 homeless people in the Washington, D.C. area by providing food and other supplies. NEST Tutors is a free tutoring program designed to help low-income kids in 19 local schools. NEST Kares collects school supplies for at-risk kids, makes blessing bags for the homeless, and provides disaster relief assistance. NEST Buddies provides a “birthday in a box” to low-income children and families.

Yes, she runs four different volunteer programs…in all her spare time as a high-school senior. Kids can do a lot of good in the world, like this 9-year-old who started her own charity!

A fifth-grader on a mission

Venkat’s passion for helping others started as soon as she could walk, as her parents, active volunteers themselves, brought her along on their various projects, like these creative ways to volunteer. By fifth grade, she’d developed such enthusiasm for it that she started organizing her own service projects in her community. “I like doing good things but I’d rather do them with friends,” she explains. “It brings me so much happiness and joy to help.”

Soon she was recruiting not just friends and family but the community as a whole, including businesses.

She gets big results by starting small

NEST4US was born when she realized how much food waste there is, how many hungry people there are, and how simple it would be to use the former to help the latter. “There was a homeless man standing on a corner in D.C. and he was holding a sign that said ‘Hungry Need Food’,” she remembers. “So I gave him my lunch—it was just a banana, a granola bar, and a water—and his whole face just lit up. I found out he hadn’t eaten in a week! It was so easy, it only took me 30 seconds, and it really helped him.”

Hunger is just one of the many harsh realities of living on the streets. But the ease of this small act inspired her to find a way to get food to the people who need it the most. True, this is a question politicians, community and religious leaders, and others have been wrestling with for, well, thousands of years. But she didn’t overthink it, she decided to just act.

All you have to do is ask

How would she accomplish this huge task? Many kids her age have a hard time just talking on the phone but talking to strangers is not a problem for Venkat, who says she emails, calls, and talks to business owners in-person to solicit donations. From there, volunteers pick up the excess food—everything from bagels to bagged salads to hot entrees—and deliver it to local shelters and food pantries.

“We have 1.5 times the amount of food we need to feed every person on the planet, it’s just a matter of distribution,” she says matter-of-factly. “Thankfully there are so many people who want to help, all you have to do is ask them.”

You can start helping right in your own kitchen with these 9 tips to reduce food waste at home.

Celebrating her birthday at a homeless shelter

As the success of NEST Nurtures took off, with hundreds of volunteers helping to feed thousands of hungry people, Venkat decided to branch out with her volunteer efforts, starting three other branches of NEST. Serving others had become such a way of life for her that she even celebrated her 13th birthday at a homeless shelter, bringing the party to them instead of expecting gifts for herself—a tradition she and her sister have continued ever since.

It’s the personal touch

Attached to every bag of food or donations is a hand-written note with a message of love, affirmation, optimism, and sometimes colorful drawings. It’s all too easy for people living on the margins of society to feel like they are invisible and no one even sees them, much less cares about them. Venkat knew they needed more than just food, they needed nurturing. So she recruited volunteers aged 4 to 70 to write the messages which are then attached to the donations.

Recently a homeless man at a shelter approached her to say that he had kept every single one of the notes he’d gotten, saying, “They really help lift me up, to know people care about me.” The notes may be a small “extra” but they provide that human touch. “To everyone who says they don’t know how to help, I tell them to write notes of encouragement—anyone, anywhere can do this and it really does mean a lot,” she says.

Who doesn’t love a little note of encouragement? Check out how one genius teacher used notes for addressing her students’ mental health issues.

“It’s changed me as a person”

As much as she has helped others, they’ve helped her too, she says. Not only does she get a lot of joy and personal satisfaction from her volunteer work but she says running NEST has taught her important life skills like time management, public speaking, writing, and leadership. “What it’s really given me is this perspective, of putting other people first,” she says.

Her next steps

Shreeya graduates high school this year and she’s already got big plans. She plans to study at the John Hopkins University—one reason is for their excellent biomedical engineering and public health programs. But that’s not all! “It’s also because it’s in Baltimore and I know Baltimore has a large homeless population so I can continue my work there,” she says. “Whatever I do in the future, I know I want to keep helping people.” Read on for stories of 15 ordinary people who changed the world.

Shreyaa Venkat has been nominated as of L’Oreal’s 2019 Women of Worth

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