Gene Kranz: The Prototypical Flight Controller
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
Gene Kranz had always wanted to be a pilot, but his flying career almost crashed on take-off. Accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy, he flunked the physical due to diabetes.
“I had been working at the A&P warehouse and living on chocolate milk and brownies,” Kranz, 75, said. “We didn’t have money to go to college, so I thought my entire world had ended.”
When his high school teacher, Sister Mary Mark, heard the news, she sat him down for a talk. “She proceeded to give me a lesson in growing up, a lesson in the importance of absolute persistence, in never giving up,” he said.
In a life later crammed with critical, live-and-death decisions, Kranz said of this first crossroads, “I believe it was her getting me back on the right path to find another way to achieve my objective that was probably the most important event in my life.” Read More…
David Lim: The Phoenix of One World Trade Center
Friday, September 11th, 2009
Port Authority Police Officer David Lim felt the building shake at 8:46 a.m. “It was like a jolt and lasted about five seconds,” he said.
Sitting in his basement office (B-1 level) in Two World Trade Center (South Tower), Lim said he knew something was wrong. Within seconds a transmission crackled over his high-frequency radio – a report of an explosion on the upper levels of One World Trade Center (North Tower).
Since 6 a.m. Lim and canine partner Sirius, a specially trained bomb dog, had been doing what they did every day — checking for explosives in trucks entering the WTC basement.
“My first thought was that something had gotten through on one of the trucks,” he said. “At the time it seemed like the end of the world to me. I looked at Sirius and said, ‘Buddy, I think we missed one.’” Read More…
Lynn Harrell: Ambassador of Music, Citizen of the World
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
“For a young composer to feel the weight of that body, the finality, we know it affected him,” said celebrated cellist Lynn Harrell. He was describing the welter of feelings bearing down on 29-year-old Franz Schubert, one of six pallbearers carrying Beethoven’s coffin at his funeral in Vienna on March 29, 1827.
Of course, Harrell could have been speaking of his own painful youth. Like a pallbearer, he carried on his shoulders the deaths of two heavy figures. Read More…
Frances Hesselbein: Leadership Is Being, Not Doing
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
When Frances Hesselbein was approached by a neighbor to be a scout leader of a failing troop, she thought the idea was ridiculous. Not only had she never been a Girl Scout, she didn’t even have a daughter.
Busy assisting her husband in his business, Hesslebein agreed to help, and a six-week chore as a scout leader turned into an eight-year commitment. But she was just getting started with the Girl Scouts. Next, she became a local council executive director and then a national board member. In 1976 she was tapped to serve as CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, a position she held until 1990. Read More…
Stacy Allison: First American Woman to Summit at Mt. Everest
Friday, July 17th, 2009
It began with a small notice on a campus bulletin board. A rock climber, Curt Haire, was looking for a ride to Zion National Park in southern Utah in exchange for climbing lessons. Stacy Allison, a first-year student at Oregon State University in the late 1970s, was intrigued. She and a girlfriend decided to go.
“It was a fluke,” Allison said. “I had no idea that people climbed shear rock cliffs. He taught us very, very basic rock climbing, and that’s when I fell in love with climbing,” she said. “That’s when I knew that this is what I was meant to do.” Read More…