In the summer of 1940, Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat in Kovno, Lithuania, when Jewish refugees from Poland began crowding outside his consulate. Many of them held questionable visas to the Dutch island of Curacao, and they needed permission to pass through Japan to get out of Europe. With no clear instructions from Tokyo, Sugihara decided to help. He wrote transit visas for hundreds and hundreds of people, and before his consulate closed that fall he even gave visas to refugees who lacked proper travel papers. Tokyo sent a cable reminding him of the rules. He kept going. In 1984, Yad Vashem honored him as Righteous Among the Nations.
In the early 1980s in Perth, Australia, a young doctor named Barry Marshall teamed up with pathologist Robin Warren, who had spotted curved bacteria in stomach biopsies. Marshall became convinced those bacteria caused stomach ulcers. Nearly everybody said that was impossible. His papers were rejected, his results were doubted, and he was told the bacteria were harmless. He couldn’t get an animal to catch the infection, so he used himself. He drank the bacteria, got sick, and a biopsy proved the infection and the damage to his stomach. Years of patient work followed, and in 1994 a major medical meeting agreed that the treatment for ulcers was getting rid of the bacteria. In 2005 he and Warren won the Nobel Prize.
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.
Born into slavery, young Booker T. Washington heard about Hampton Institute in Virginia and decided he would get there somehow, even though it was about 500 miles away. In 1872 he set out with almost nothing, walking and begging rides. When he reached Richmond he was out of money and slept under a sidewalk. He finally showed up at Hampton dirty and hungry, and the head teacher wasn’t sure about him. After a while she told him the recitation room needed sweeping. He swept it three times and dusted every bench, table, and desk four times. She inspected it, couldn’t find a speck of dust, and said, “I guess you will do to enter this institution.” He called that sweeping his college examination.
Lou Gehrig played 2,130 games in a row, a streak so long that people called it unbreakable. On September 6, 1995, Baltimore’s Cal Ripken Jr. played his 2,131st straight game. When the game became official in the middle of the fifth inning, the numbers on the warehouse beyond right field flipped from 2,130 to 2,131 and Camden Yards erupted. The ovation would not stop until teammates Rafael Palmeiro and Bobby Bonilla physically pushed him out of the dugout to take a lap around the field shaking hands with fans. Ripken said he never really allowed himself to think about the streak. He just showed up and played, day after day.
