Father TimeI lost my dad last year.Sure, lots of memorable stuff happened to me in 2011. My daughters started first grade. I read and will never forget Unbroken. I did a pull-up for the first time!But Dad’s passing? That defines last year for me. It signals a shiftin all the many things uniquely us: Michigan football. ClevelandStadium mustard. Knowing how to parallel park, change a tire, andbalance a checkbook the “right way.” Handwritten letters on hisLudlow Antiques stationery to his homesick firstborn at U of M. An appreciation for Neil Diamond (shhh). And, did I mention, Michigan football?“Good job on the Today show, honey,” he’d say. “Very informative. Was that a new blouse?”I came to realize the expanse of the void when, late last fall, I got this job — the job of being the editor-in-chief of your Reader’s Digest, the most tru sted magazine in America. I was humbled by the opportunity. Incredulous, really. I texted friends, war-dialed my sister. But first I told Mom, who said the one thing I needed to hear: “I wish your father were here. He would be so proud, honey.”That’s my intent, as I shepherd Reader’s Digest and its website, books, and apps through the coming years. I hope to do him — and you —proud. Oh, and I’ll try to keep the Michigan football stuff to a minimum. Though Tom Brady? Michigan. I’m just sayin g’.The Titanic Coat: One Family’s LegendIn an inspiring follow-up to the Titanic story, Reader's Digest national affairs editor David Noonan tells of a family heirloom that survived the fatal tragedy on April 15, 1912.My great uncle Denis O’Brien boarded the T itanic as a third-class passenger at Queenstown, Ireland. He was 21, a jockey from County Cork who wasoffered a job riding horses for an American family. Hisolder brother Michael, my grandfather, who had made hisown trip across the Atlantic a few years earlier, waswaiting for him in New York. In one version of thestory—different family members recall hearing differentdetails over the years—Michael sent Denis a proper overcoat so he wouldn’t look too poor whenhe came through Ellis Island. That may or may not be true. What we know for sure is that Denis didn’t make it, though his overcoat did.As the ship was sinking, Denis, who is sometimes listed as Timothy O’Brien in Titanic passenger records, wrote a note to Michael. He gave the note and his overcoat to a woman in a lifeboat and asked her to see that his brother got them. She did. A photo of my grandfather wearing what we have always called “the Titanic coat” holds a special place in the family archives. In the picture, he looks small and dapper and not poor at all.No one knows what the note said—that part of the story got lost over the course of the past hundred years—and I often wonder what few words Denis chose that night. I also wonder what he was thinking later, as he stood on that tilting deck with no coat and faced the end of his too-short life in that cold ocean, beneath those cold stars.The Night I Met EinsteinWhen I was a very young man, just beginning to make my way, I was invited to dine at the home of a distinguished New York philanthropist. After dinner, our hostess led us to an enormous drawing room. Other guests were pouring in, and my eyes beheld two unnerving sights: Servants were arranging small gilt chairs in long, neat rows; and up front, leaning against the wall, were musical instruments.Apparently I was in for an evening of chamber music.I use the phrase “in for” because music meant nothing tome. I am almost tone deaf—only with great effort can Icarry the simplest tune, and serious music was to me nomore than an arrangement of noises. So I did what I alwaysdid when trapped: I sat down, and when the music started, I fixed my face in what I hoped was an expression of intelligent appreciation, closed my ears from the inside, and submerged myself in my own completely irrelevant thoughts.After a while, becoming aware that the people around me were applauding, I concluded it was safe to unplug my ears. At once I heard a gentle but surprisingly penetrating voice on my right: “You are fond of Bach?”I knew as much about Bach as I know about nuclear fission. But I did know one of the most famous faces in the world, with the renowned shock of untidy white hair and the ever-present pipe between the teeth. I was sitting next to Albert Einstein.“Well,” I said uncomfortably and hesitated. I had been asked a casual question. All I had to do was be equally casual in my reply. But I could see from the look in my neighbor’s extraordinaryeyes that their owner was not merely going through the perfunctory duties of elementary politeness. Regardless of what value I placed on my part in the verbal exchange, to this man his part in it mattered very much. Above all, I could feel that this was a man to whom you did not tell a lie, however small.“I don’t know anything about Bach,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve never heard any of his music.”A look of perplexed astonishment washed across Einstein’s mobile face.“You have never heard Bach?”He made it sound as though I had said I’d never taken a bath.“It isn’t that I don’t want to like Bach,” I replied hastily. “It’s just that I’m tone deaf, or almost tone deaf, and I’ve never really heard anybody’s music.”A look of concern came into the old man’s face. “Please,” he said abruptly. “You will come with me?”He stood up and took my arm. I stood up. As he led me across that crowded room, I kept my embarrassed glance fixed on the carpet. A rising murmur of puzzled speculation followed us out into the hall. Einstein paid no attention to it.Resolutely, he led me upstairs. He obviously knew the house well. On the floor above, he opened the door into a book-lined study, drew me in, and shut the door.“Now,” he said with a small, troubled smile. “You will tell me, please, how long you have felt this way about music?”“All my lif e,” I said, feeling awful. “I wish you would go back downstairs and listen, Dr. Einstein. The fact that I don’t enjoy it doesn’t matter.”Einstein shook his head and scowled, as though I had introduced an irrelevance.“Tell me, please,” he said. “Is there any kind of music that you do like?”“Well,” I answered, “I like songs that have words, and the kind of music where I can follow the tune.”He smiled and nodded, obviously pleased. “You can give me an example, perhaps?”“Well,” I ventured, “almost anything by Bing Crosby.”He nodded again, briskly. “Good!”He went to a corner of the room, opened a phonograph, and started pulling out records. I watched him uneasily. At last, he beamed. “Ah!” he said.He put the record on, and in a moment, the study was filled with the relaxed, lilting strains of Bing Crosby’s “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” Einstein beamed at me and kept time with the stem of his pipe. After three or four phrases, he stopped the phonograph. “Now,” he said. “Will you tell me, please, what you have just heard?”The simplest answer seemed to be to sing the lines. I did just that, trying desperately to stay in tune and keep my voice from cracking. The expression on Einstein’s face was like the sunrise.“You see!” he cried with delight when I finished. “You do have an ear!”I mumbled something about this being one of my favorite songs, something I had heard hundreds of times so that it didn’t really prove anything.“Nonsense!” said Einstein. “It proves everything! Do you remember your first arithmetic lesson in school? Suppose, at your very first contact with numbers, your teacher had ordered you to work out a problem in, say, long division or fractions. Could you have done so?”“No, of course not.”“Precisely!” Einstein made a triumphant wave with his pipe stem. “It would have been impossible, and you would have reacted in panic. You would have closed your mind to long division and fractions. As a result, because of that one small mistake by your teacher, it is possible yo ur whole life you would be denied the beauty of long division and fractions.”The pipe stem went up and out in another wave.“But on your first day, no teacher would be so foolish. He would start you with elementary things—then, when you had acquired skill with the simplest problems, he would lead you up to long division and to fractions.“So it is with music.” Einstein picked up the Bing Crosby record. “This simple, charming little song is like simple addition or subtraction. You have mastered it. Now we go on to something more complicated.”He found another record and set it going. The golden voice of John McCormack singing “The Trumpeter” filled the room. After a few lines, Einstein stopped the record.“So!” he said. “You will sing that back to me, please?”I did—with a good deal of self-consciousness but with, for me, a surprising degree of accuracy. Einstein stared at me with a look on his face that I had seen only once before in my life: on the face of my father as he listened to me deliver the valedictory address at my high school graduation ceremony.“Excellent!” Einstein remarked when I finished. “Wonderful! Now this!”“This” turned out to be Caruso in what was to me a completely unrecognizable fragment from Cavalleria Rusticana, a one-act opera. Nevertheless, I managed to reproduce an approximation of the sounds the famous tenor had made. Einstein beamed his approval.Caruso was followed by at least a dozen others. I could not shake my feeling of awe over the way this great man, into whose company I had been thrown by chance, was completely preoccupied by what we were doing, as though I were his sole concern.We came at last to recordings of music without words, which I was instructed to reproduce by humming. When I reached for a high note, Einstein’s mouth opened, and his head went back as if to help me attain what seemed unattainable. Evidently I came close enough, for he suddenly turned off the phonograph.“Now, young man,” he said, putting his arm through mine. “We are ready for Bach!”As we returned to our seats in the drawing room, the players were tuning up for a new selection. Einstein smiled and gave me a reassuring pat on the knee.“Just allow yourself to listen,” he whispered. “That is all.”It wasn’t really all, of course. Without the effort he had just poured out for a total stranger I would never have heard, as I did that night for the first time in my life, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” I have heard it many times since. I don’t think I shall ever tire of it. Because I never listen to it alone. I am sitting beside a small, round man with a shock of untidy white hair, a dead pipe clamped between his teeth, and eyes that contain in their extraordinary warmth all the wonder of the world.When the concert was finished, I added my genuine applause to that of the others.Suddenly our hostess confronted us. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Einstein,” she said with an icy glare at me, “that you missed so much of the performance.”Einstein and I came hastily to our feet. “I am sorry too,” he said. “My young frien d here and I, however, were engaged in the greatest activity of which man is capable.”She looked puzzled. “Really?” she said. “And what is that?”Einstein smiled and put his arm across my shoulders. And he uttered ten words that—for at least one person who is in his endless debt—are his epitaph:“Opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty.”What It’s Like to Find a Stash of Cash…and Return ItMoney can't buy happiness, but as one Utah man learned, the act of giving it can make an indescribable difference.“It was the afternoon we closed on our new house, and I was in the workshop of the garage. I noticed a scrap of carpet sticking out of the ceiling; that was strange. I pulled on it, and an access panel to the attic popped open. I grabbed a ladder andheaded up.“I climbed into a space above the workshop that waswalled off from the rest of the attic. As my eyes adjusted tothe dark, I saw a metal container that I recognized as aWorld War II ammo box; my grandfather used to store tools in ammo boxes on his farm. I opened the lid and freaked out at what I saw: several rolls of money tied up in orange twine. Holy cow, I thought, I’ve found, like $800. Awesome!“But there was more than one box of money. I found another seven boxes full to the brim, plus two big black trash bags full of cash. In all, about $45,000. In my attic. I won’t lie, my first thought was that this was a blessing from God—the means to fix up this run-down house; to adopt a child, something we’d talked so long abou t doing; or just to use to make life easier for our two young sons, who were seven and four. But I knew as soon as I had indulged those fantasies that the right thing was to return the money to the prior owners. So I called them and asked them to drop by.“They were shocked, of course, not only about the money but that I was returning it. They had recently inherited the house and said it must have been their dad who had hidden the money. What made him do it? I thought about the hundreds of times he had gone to his shop, cut off a length of orange twine, and bound up a roll of money. I like to think he did it for his children.“There were balls of that orange twine still hanging on the wall of the workshop when we moved in. I used them to tie up Christmas presents last year, for my kids. I hope it reminded them of the gift greater than money that my wife and I gave them by returning the $45,000: the gift of radical honesty. We did the right thing, and our children will never forget that.”Our hero: Zakiya Harris, 33Where she lives: Oakland, CaliforniaHow she helps: Brings green job opportunities to urban youthsAs a girl growing up in Oakland, Zakiya Harris was drawn to nature; in college, she embraced a green lifestyle, avoiding chemicals in her food and beauty products and devoting herself to reducing her carbon footprint. Later, teaching in elementary schools in low-income neighborhoods, she was struck by her students’ lack of environmental awareness. But she also understood. “For many communities of color, these issues often take a backseat because residents are dealing with day-to-day survival,” she says.Harris was determined to teach children the benefits of sustainable living and in 2007 founded the grassroots group Grind for the Green (G4G), an organization devoted to educating kids about green issues as well as providing training in entry-level green jobs. She used hip-hop music as a hook. “We embraced it to make a deeper connection [with the kids],” she explains.One early project was a free solar-powered hip-hop concert—the first of its kind—in San Francisco. Solar panels atop a mobile trailer generated all the electricity for the equipment, and thekids set up concession stands offering organic food and smoothies made in bicycle-powered blenders. The event proved successful, spawning other G4G concerts and attracting concert organizers and promoters who wanted to collaborate with G4G. “We’ve been able to tap into a demographic that other environmental groups couldn’t,” Harris says.“Our events are co mpletely produced by young people,” she adds. “We say, You go be the translators. Make this cool and relevant to your age group, your neighborhood.“No one can tell me that poor folks or folks of color don’t care about the earth,” she adds. “I’ve seen communities become engaged once they’ve been empowered by education and learn a way to do something about it.”It Happened to Alexa: Helping the Families of Rape SurvivorsOur Heroes: Alexa, Stacey, and Tom BranchiniWhere they live: Lewiston, New YorkHow they help: It Happened to Alexa FoundationOne September morning in 1999, Stacey Branchini woke up to a nightmare when she picked up the phone and was informed that her daughter Alexa, 18, had been raped inside her dormitory on the campus of Boston University, where she had just begun her freshman year. While her daughter’s attacker was arrested later that night, his trial didn’t take place until a year and a half later in January 2001. In the intervening months, Stacey, her husband, Tom, and her daughter faced a traumatic legal process. The family flew to Boston for each part of the trial. When they would land at the airport, “my daughter would break down in front of us,” says Stacey. “We were appalled to learn how poorly [she was] being treated by the sy stem.” Alexa, who testified at the month-long trial, says, “I wouldn’t have testified if my family hadn’t been with me.”Her experience cost the family dearly in other ways as well, especially in travel expenses and lost income. Tom says now that he’d shake his head and say to his wife, “What would people do if they couldn’t afford this? We’ve got to do something.” Two years later, the Branchinis started the It Happened to Alexa Foundation to help families who might endure the same hardships. The only organ ization of its kind, the foundation provides funding for victims’ families so that they are able to accompany their loved ones to court. In its first year, the foundation dispersed $7,400; in 2009, more than $100,000 was raised to help 174 victims and their family members and friends. Alexa is now pursuing her PhD in criminal justice and is dedicated to assuring rape survivors that, despite their ordeal, they are not alone.Ainsworth, NE: A Better Library and PoolFrom rib-fests to basket raffles and more, Ainsworth had been raising funds for its town-improvement projects – including an expansion of the public library and the construction of a new community swimming pool – since before the We Hear You America campaign came along. But its residents stil l rallied to secure enough votes in last year’scampaign to win a prize, giving a boost to both theseinitiatives. The library upgrade will be the first projectcompleted, while additional fundraising is ramping up for thepool.“It got really exciting. We all thought we could do this…kids were talking about it at school, and telling their parentsand grandparents to vote,” said Debbie Hurless at the Economic Development Center of Ainsworth. “People without computers were going to the library to vote… and people who had never even used a computer before were now signing on to vote!” According to Hurless, it was a normal day in Ainsworth when you heard people walking around town asking, “Do you know what place we’re in today?”Life Lessons from America’s Winningest High School Basketball CoachLate last year a new champion earned the title of Winningest High School Basketball Coach of All Time—and she’s a 73-year-old Texas grandmother named Leta Andrews. In the midst of both March Madness and Women’s Histo ry Month, it seems only fitting to celebrate Coach Andrews and her Granbury Lady Pirates by gleaning some life lessons from her winning ways:Do what you love. Andrews originally got her degree in elementary education, but knew right away that being just a teacher was the wrong fit. She missed the sport she’d grown up playing and needed to find a way to incorporate basketball into her career. After going back for a second degree, Andrews was able to teach and coach on the high school level. Forty-nine years later, she still hasn’t thought about retiring.Adversity will make you stronger. Over the course of her career, Andrews has encountered more than a few male coaches who have marginalized both her success and women’s sports in general. Andrews lets their snubs roll right off of her like beads of sweat on a player’s back. “They have to deal with it, not me,” she told NPR’s Michel Martin. Instead, such slights make her work even harder to ensure her players believe they deserve as much success as any man, on and off the court.There’s no I(phone) in team.On bus rides to away games, Andrews confiscates her players’ cell phones. Texting, she says, interferes with teambuilding, and you can’t win without a unified team that knows how to communicate with each other. Socializing is an important ingredient to success, and when we focus on ourselves (or our electronics) rather than others, we miss out on valuable connections and experiences.Winning is everything.It just depends on how you define “winning.” For Andr ews, victory on the court is the logical result of lots and lots of hard work and preparation. She believes in tough love to get her players focused on playing their absolute best, individually and as a team. While a winning season is the immediate goal, ultimately Andrews hopes all of her players will carry the values inherent in team sports with them long after graduation.Focus on the here and now. A few years ago, when Andrews became the winningest girls basketball coach in history, the town of Granbury mistakenly touted her as the winningest coach, period, on the local water tower. Instead of correcting the tower, the town left it in error as inspiration. Andrews claims local pride didn’t make her feel any pressure to reach the next level any more than her age and accomplishments lead her to consider retirement—who has time for such distracting thoughts? As always, she’s too busy thinking about how to win the next game.Crescent City, CA: Restoring a Devastated HarborThe Pacific Ocean earthquake on March 11, 2011 did more than devastate Japan; it also generated a tsunami that pounded California’s coast, destroying Crescent City’s Harbor District. Since Crescent City relies heavily on the harbor for recreation, tourism, and commercial fishing industries (one of the area’s key economic engines), “the community realized it had to come together and work together… to come back,” said CharlesSlert, the town’s mayor.Crescent City received a $5 million National Emergencygrant to fund a labor force of 350 for Harbor District cleanup,but none of the money could be used for materials. “It wasquite a unique situation,” explained Slert. “We had a laborforce and the man power, but no materials.” Fortunately, Crescent City ‘s ci tizens had rounded up enough votes in the We Hear You America campaign to earn a $10,000 award just after the tidal wave hit. The town decided to use the prize money to buy rebuilding materials from local vendors.“We’re very honored to be awarded this generous contribution from Reader’s Digest and it made a difference in our timely recovery from the tsunami damage,” said Slert. December 1st marked“the beginning of crab season, and we’re thrilled we made that deadline. We have resilient people that have fa ced heavy storms and difficult challenges with the economy… The contest strengthened a sense of community pride… and showed that we need to put our heads, hearts and labor force together to make things possible.”Rancho Cordova, CA: Making the Holiday Season SpecialIn 2011, residents of more than 50% of the cities, towns and villages in the U.S. cast their votes in the inaugural Reader’s Digest We Hear You America campaign. The top 20 vote-getting towns received grants that allowed them to kick off (or complete) projects to make their communities even better places to live. This is one of those towns.Want to help your town get the support it deserves? Vote inthe 2012 We Hear You America campaign now!This year, the holiday season will be particularly special inRancho Cordova, CA: There’ll be a new 30-foot tall,sparkling Christmas tree (replacing the tree that vandalsdestroyed last year) and the town will open its first-everoutdoor holiday ice rink, an unusual facility in California. “We’re excited t o give everyone a lift during the holidays…and something new to the city,” said Robert McGarvey, the town’s mayor. “It will be a true holiday spectacular with an open invitation to the entire Sacramento region.”Some of the tree’s ornaments celebrate the s ource of these seasonal treats: They display the logo of We Hear You America. Rancho Cordova received $40,000 in seed money from the campaign –and since then, matching funds from corporate donors have enlarged the coffers. With a 2-to-1 business-to-reside nt ratio, Mayor McGarvey explained that Rancho Cordova is a “different kind of community than many others,” with professional enterprises playing a central role in community life.According to Shelly Blanchard, the executive director of the Cordova Community Council, the town has a “great belief in citizen-driven problem solving. When people gather in a common cause… there is great power to be found in the community.” It was this same spirit that helped Rancho Cordova incorporate eight years ago as one of California’s newest cities, then receive an All-American City title last year, and finally become a winner in the We Hear You America campaign.Galesburg, IL: Funding Youth Programs。
