Welles Crowther was a young equities trader and former Boston College lacrosse player. On September 11, 2001, survivors in the South Tower’s burning 78th floor sky lobby saw a young man appear with a red bandanna over his face. One survivor remembered him saying, “I found the stairs, follow me. Only help the ones that you can help.” They got up and followed. He made at least two trips to that floor and guided as many as 12 people to safety. Welles could have saved himself, but he died when the tower collapsed. Only later did survivors identify him as the mysterious man in the red bandanna. Heroes don’t always get to see the difference they make.
In October 1860, an eleven-year-old girl named Grace Bedell in Westfield, New York saw a picture of Abraham Lincoln and wrote him a letter. She told him his face was so thin that if he let his whiskers grow, he would look a great deal better, and she would try to get her brothers to vote for him. Four days later, Lincoln wrote back. He was gracious, though he wondered if people might call it silly to start a beard now. Yet when he stopped in Westfield in February 1861 on the way to his inauguration, he wore a full beard and met his young correspondent. Never think your voice is too small to matter.
Rick Rescorla fought in Vietnam as a young Army lieutenant. Years later he was head of security for Morgan Stanley in the World Trade Center. After the 1993 bombing he was convinced terrorists would return, so he created a disaster plan and rehearsed it with employees, sometimes taking heat for it. On September 11, 2001, he led the evacuation of the South Tower offices. Survivors remember a calm voice over a bullhorn singing to steady the crowd. He was last seen climbing back up the stairs to sweep for anyone left behind, minutes before the tower fell. His preparation and courage are credited with saving thousands. Real love goes back for the ones still inside.
When Malala Yousafzai was eleven, she started writing an anonymous blog for the BBC’s Urdu site. Under the heading “I am afraid,” she wrote about her nightmares of being too scared to go to school because of the Taliban in her Swat Valley. She kept speaking up anyway. On October 9, 2012, two Taliban gunmen stopped her school bus, asked for her by name, and shot her. She was fifteen. She was flown to Peshawar, then to intensive care in Birmingham, England. By March 2013 she was back in school. On her sixteenth birthday she spoke at the United Nations. At seventeen she became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s deciding fear doesn’t get the final say.
Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, the daughter of a schoolteacher. She married Pierre Curie, and together they took up the study of radioactivity. Their early work was done under hard conditions. The lab setup was poor, and both had to do a lot of teaching just to make a living. Still, they pressed on and isolated two new elements, polonium, named for her home country, and radium. In 1903 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Then in 1906, Pierre was killed. Marie took his place as professor at the Sorbonne, the first woman ever to hold that post. During World War I she personally worked to use radium to ease suffering. Grief didn’t stop her. She kept doing the work God put in front of her.
