Gotta have sole

Nicholas Lowinger started donating his used clothes to a homeless shelter near his Rhode Island home when he was a small child. One day, he was present when a boy received a pair of his old boots. The boy was thrilled with the boots even though they were used and too big for him. Nicholas was touched by the boy's enthusiasm and decided to do something more.


So for his bar mitzvah project in 2010, Nicholas launched Gotta Have Sole, Inc. The mission statement of his non-profit's organization is to provide children living in shelters across the United States with brand-new footwear to call their own. Since then, he has gained private and corporate sponsors and has given away tens of thousands of shoes in dozens of states.



Nicholas' story and his organization have been featured on the Today Show and he has been given a Nickelodeon HALO Award. His organization has now branched out to include Gotta Have School , clubs, and other ways of harnessing support for others. He has recently been awarded an AXA Achievement Scholarship which he plans to use to pursue his desire to become a social entrepreneur and to be part of the solution to end global poverty.

These ladies share the joy!

I just read a short Facebook post about an inspiring young lady from Pennsylvania. Instead of spending time and money on a standard bachelorette party, she and her bridesmaids treated women at a local shelter to a day of pampering. A wonderful way to share her joy on this occasion!

I wondered how many other women, on a day that was supposed to be all about them, were equally unselfish. I found this article from 2015 - a bride-to-be and her bridesmaids prepped dinner at a local Salvation Army. Clothing she received as engagement and shower gifts was donated to Dress for Success. 

A hero even before the Olympics

As this New York Times article reveals, 18-year-old Yusra Mardini is a swimming champion with a unique story. She'll compete in the Rio Olympics, not for her homeland of Syria, not for Germany, the country which has taken her in and enabled her to continue training, but for a new entity: a refugee team. These are athletes who are currently stateless or would otherwise not be allowed to compete under their home country's banner. Until I read this article, I didn't even know such a team existed. Kudos to the IOC for making that happen.

But back to Yusra and her unique story. Last August, she and her sister fled their country's civil war. In Turkey, they boarded a dinghy built for 6 people along with 18 others in the hopes of reaching mainland Europe. Twenty minutes in, the engine died. Then the dinghy started taking on water.

Afraid to go back and unwilling to wait for help that probably wouldn't come, Yusra, her sister, and two men jumped out of the dinghy into the Aegean Sea. They swam. They pulled and pushed and swam with that dinghy in tow for over three and half hours. Partway through, the two men stopped from sheer exhaustion and allowed themselves to be dragged along. But the two Mardini sisters kept swimming. The dinghy made it to the shores of Greece.

Unbelievable story, right? An Olympic medal may or may not be in her future, but this young lady has my vote as true Olympic hero.

Nicholas Winton, Or how an unmarried stockbroker rescued hundreds of foreign children

Last night, Michael and I watched Nicky's Family on DVD (thank you, Netflix.) It was the story of Nicholas Winton and the lasting effect of his pre-WWII efforts.

Back in December 1938, British-born Nicholas was packing for a ski trip to Switzerland when a friend named Martin Blake called and asked to meet him in Prague instead. Martin was involved in with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and needed Nicholas' help in figuring out how best to aid Czech people fleeing the German annexation of the Sudetenland. So, the ski trip was off.

Nicholas was moved by the plight of these displaced Czech people, their desperation. They expected that war would soon be upon them, and young parents were understandably anxious about the safety of their children. Using Martin's contacts and then establishing his own official network (including a spy and some fake documents and rubber stamping), Nicholas created the pipeline called the Czech Kindertransport which functioned until the Nazis shut it down at the start of war on Sept. 1, 1939. His work resulted in 669 Czech children, mostly Jewish, being transported safely by rail and boat to England and placed with British families for the duration of the war.

Many of the parents who sent their children off to the homes of foreign strangers themselves perished in the war and the Holocaust. It is therefore believed that Nicholas' program saved the lives of those 669 children.

A humble man, Nicholas never spoke of his efforts afterward. It wasn't until 1988 that his wife discovered a scrapbook he kept with photos and names of each of the children. She led the effort to contact these now-grown children and organized the first of many 'family' reunions. When he died at age 106, Nicholas' 'family' had grown to a world-wide, multi-generation family well over 5000 strong.

All because one man decided to do One Right Thing.

The TBR in 2015 list

For Christmas, Mike gave me "By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review." The volume is a compilation of 65 interviews of writers, artists, historians, and others. The focus of the interviews are books - favorite reads in the last year, favorite childhood books, which books most influenced career choice, that sort of thing.

It was a great way for me to add to my 'To Be Read' list. 

Books written by fellow local authors Eric Buffington, Heather L Adams, Regge Episale, Eugenie D. West, and John Koloski were already piled on my pseudo-desk, waiting for me. After reading "By the Book," I added dozens more to the TBR list, at this point still a list on the public library's website.

There's an interesting mix there of print and audio books, fiction and non-fiction, adult and juvenile literature. There's inspirational, fantasy, historical, and literary, some poetry and short stories - just about any genre imaginable. And with authors like Hilary Mantel, Laurie Halse Anderson, Elmore Leonard, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Laini Taylor, Alice Munro, Thomas Merton, Margaret Atwood...

It's going to be a very good year.

The more I read...

...the more I realize just how much I don't know.

This morning, I finished "The Girls of the Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II" by Denise Kiernan. This fascinating book focuses on the real-life activities of nine women who worked at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the 1940s. The women were employed because of their particular skills - secretaries, a statistician-mathematician, a janitor, a chemist, a pipe inspector, two machine operators, and a nurse. Later revealed to be one of the main manufacturing sites for the Manhattan Project, none of the employees at the time knew exactly what the plant made - they just knew that it was part of the war effort. None of them saw the whole operation, and each employee signed a pledge of secrecy (and were reminded repeatedly) regarding how vital their silence was regarding the small bits of information they did know. Folks who talked about their job to other employees or to townsfolk were immediately dismissed. Somehow, the secret held. Amazing.

Even more incredible to me was the way these women were recruited.They were approached individually, usually by a boss, an acquaintance, or a military official, and asked if they would like to be part of a special project to help the war effort. Their new job would require that they leave their current work and home setting. They would board a train and travel to an undisclosed location, live in an unnamed town for an uncertain amount of time, perform tasks that must remain secret, and never speak to anyone about what they did all day long, not even their own family or spouse. The work would be steady and the pay terrific. Everything would be arranged for them. All they had to do was say yes.

And they did. Eventually, tens of thousands of women with an adventurous spirit and a desire to work for a quick end to the war leaped into these jobs. Makes me wonder how many of us today would leave the comforts of home for such a big unknown.

I never heard of Oak Ridge Tennessee or the contribution of these women until I read this book. Thank you to Denise Kiernan for shedding light on these women's personal experiences and on those of the dozens of other women mentioned, but not closely followed, in the book.