Passed Made Present

The Lover

Mr. Barnes was known for his trademark “I love you” greetings which he bestowed on hundreds of commuters every morning from about 5am until 10am at the Crow Lane Roundabout.

There are a lot of rotaries in and around Boston. I drive through three each commute. Of the many interpersonal exchanges I’ve witnessed, the predominating theme is not love.

Johnny Barnes’s obituary in Bermuda’s Royal Gazette is a reminder that the unpleasantness we accept as normal could be otherwise.

The Economist eulogized Mr. Barnes with a parable, “Clothed with Happiness.”

This short film shows Mr. Barnes in action:

PS Boston drivers: note how Mr. Barnes extended all digits when he waved.

The Inventor

Who’s the most brilliant scientist to have immigrated to America?

Is that your final answer?

Did you consider the inventor of washable crayons?

Colin Snedeker came to the United States as a youth. After inventing a non-staining shoe polish, he went to work for the maker of Crayola Crayons. As his obituary in the Wichita Eagle tells it:

[H]e had run out of ideas as to what to make next… He went into the company’s complaint department, where they had all kinds of mail from people complaining about what was wrong.

Thus inspiration struck.

“He had that kind of mind that could just figure things out,” his sister said. Snedeker is just one of the brilliant minds America has been blessed with from abroad: since 2000, 40% of Americans who won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics have been immigrants.

Mr. Snedeker may not have been a Nobel Prize winner. He is, however, (yet) another immigrant who has improved our lives.

The Librarian

“Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in these books?” – Walter Dean Myers

Pura Belpré was the first Puerto Rican public librarian in New York City.

As this NPR tribute recounts, “Belpré could not find any books in Spanish – so she wrote them herself.”

Moreover:

Belpré travelled all over the city, from the Bronx to the Lower East Side, telling stories with puppets in Spanish and English. Nobody was doing that back then.

Today there is an award in her name, given each year by the American Library Association, to honor a Latino author.

The chances of winning this prize are, alas, not as slim as they should be: “the proportion of books for kids by Latino authors is so “shockingly low” that “it’s insane,” says the award official.

The problem is even larger. “Children’s and young adult literature… represent a stubbornly white world even as U.S. children are increasingly people of color,” Amy Rothchild concludes in FiveThirtyEight.

Ms. Belpré needs our help.

Roald Dahl

For many children Roald Dahl is synonymous with reading.

Fighter ace, surgical device inventor, FDR’s drinking buddy. And then there’s his services to literature, and literacy.

For Roald Dahl’s 100th birthday, the Oxford English Dictionary added several of his words – that’s how we’ve come to think of them – to their volumes.

He is rightfully known for his inventiveness with English. But as the Independent noted in Dahl’s obituary a quarter-century ago, “The quality of his writing is easily discernible by the fluency with which it can be read aloud.”

See for yourself by reading the passage below out loud. A lesser writer would have crammed it with detail or been oblivious to its rhythm:

Continue reading “Roald Dahl”

Tommy Kono

“Weight lifting is 50 percent mental and 30 percent technique. Power is only 20 percent, but everybody has it reversed.”

Grit is a popular topic in education these days,* and Tommy Kono’s life provides a case study: the man whose New York Times obituary twice includes the word frail was a world champion weightlifter.

His life offers instruction in irony, as well: Kono began lifting weights in the internment camp where his own country imprisoned him, then went on to serve that country’s military and represent it at the Olympics.

It also provides a notable example of cause and effect. Mr. Kono, recounting a conversation with someone who had attended one of his competitions in Austria, said: “He told me he was a 13-year-old boy in the audience that day and was so inspired he ran home and started working out.”

*What is grit? It’s passion and perseverance for long term goals, according to Angela Duckworth on the Freakonomics podcast “How to Get More Grit In Your Life.”