In the summer of 1964, a geographer named Donald Currey was studying ancient bristlecone pines below Wheeler Peak. He found a tree local mountaineers called Prometheus. Accounts differ on what happened next. Some say his coring tool broke off in the tree. Others say he wanted a full cross section. Either way, with Forest Service permission, the tree was cut down. When they counted the rings, Prometheus had 4,862 of them. It was estimated to be about 4,900 years old, the oldest tree anyone had ever dated. Today its stump is all that’s left. Something that survived nearly five thousand years was lost in an afternoon because nobody realized what they had. Don’t wait until it’s gone to treasure what God put in front of you.
Going into the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, nobody was talking about Billy Mills. The favorite was Australia’s Ron Clarke, the world record holder. With one lap to go, Clarke was leading with Mills right beside him. Then Clarke moved out around a lapped runner and pushed Mills into an outer lane while Gammoudi of Tunisia shot past on the inside. Mills looked done. Instead he found another gear, sprinted past both of them, and won by three meters. Afterward somebody asked Clarke if he’d been worried about Mills. Clarke said, “Concerned about him? I never heard of him.” Mills’s win is often called the greatest upset in Olympic track history. God loves to use the people nobody saw coming.
Kurt Warner went undrafted out of Northern Iowa. The Green Bay Packers brought him to camp and cut him. So he took a job at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Falls, stocking shelves for $5.50 an hour, sweeping floors and bagging groceries. He didn’t give up on football. He played in the Arena League and in NFL Europe, and in 1998 the St. Louis Rams signed him. When starter Trent Green hurt his knee before the 1999 season, Warner got his shot. He was named league MVP that year, then threw for a Super Bowl record 414 yards in a 23-16 win over the Titans. Your stocking-shelves season is not the end of your story. Keep working faithfully where you are.
In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was working in his London lab when he noticed something odd. A mold had accidentally grown on one of his culture plates of staphylococcus bacteria, and around the mold there was a clear circle where the bacteria had died. Plenty of people would have thrown the dish out as spoiled. Fleming got curious instead. He experimented and found that the mold stopped the bacteria even when diluted 800 times. He named the active substance penicillin. It took years and other scientists to turn it into a usable medicine, but in 1945 Fleming shared the Nobel Prize, and penicillin went on to save countless lives.
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.
