At the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Italian bobsledder Eugenio Monti was the most dominant driver of his era. During the two-man event, the British team of Tony Nash and Robin Dixon suffered a broken axle bolt on their sled in their first run, and without a replacement they were finished. Monti lent them one of his spare bolts. The British pair went on to win the gold medal, and Monti and his partner took bronze. Monti became the first person to receive the Pierre de Coubertin medal for sportsmanship.
In the early 1950s polio terrified American parents. In the last years before a vaccine, it paralyzed somewhere between 13,000 and 20,000 children every year. Jonas Salk developed a vaccine, and on April 12, 1955, the news came out that it was safe and effective. That same day, television newsman Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the patent. “Well, the people, I would say,” Salk answered. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” Historians point out that a patent may not have been possible anyway, but Salk’s answer captured a spirit that people still quote. He seemed far more interested in kids walking than in getting rich.
George Müller lived a wicked life as a young man in Germany before he was converted at about age 20. Later, as a preacher in England, he made a decision: he would never take a salary or ask anyone directly for money. He would tell his needs to God alone. In 1834 there was room for only about 3,600 orphans in all of England. Müller started taking them in at Bristol, and over his lifetime he built five large orphan houses and cared for 10,024 children. He never took out a loan or went into debt, and neither he nor the orphans ever went hungry. When he died in 1898, his own possessions were worth only a few hundred dollars.
In April 2020, during Britain’s first COVID lockdown, a World War II veteran named Tom Moore set out to walk 100 laps of his garden in Bedfordshire before his 100th birthday. Each loop was about 82 feet. His goal was to raise 1,000 pounds for NHS charities. People were so moved that donations poured in from everywhere, and in the end he had raised almost 33 million pounds. He became Captain Sir Tom, and his simple saying, “Tomorrow will be a good day,” spread across the country. He died in February 2021 at 100, remembered as a beacon of hope.
In July 1948, during the Berlin Airlift, American pilot Gail Halvorsen met about 30 hungry kids at the barbed wire fence at Tempelhof airfield. All he had in his pocket were two sticks of gum, so he broke them in half and passed them through the fence. The kids who got gum tore up the wrappers and shared the strips so the others could at least smell them. Halvorsen was so moved that he promised to drop candy the next day and told them they’d know his plane because he would wiggle the wings. He started tying candy and gum to makeshift parachutes, and the idea grew into Operation Little Vittles. He lived to be 101, still known around the world as the Candy Bomber.
