Author Mary Cronk Farrell

Today, please welcome Author Claire Rudolf Murphy. I invited her to tell you about her new book which combines her love of music with her passion for freedom and justice for all people. Claire...

When my dear friend Mary asked me to post on the Fourth of July I thought about the courage of the many Americans featured in my new book MY COUNTRY 'TIS OF THEE: HOW ONE SONG REVEALS THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS, illustrated by Bryan Collier.

They lived out courage as they stood up for equal rights, using protest verses to the famous melody to plea for their cause.
The courage of women in the 18th, and even 19th centuries, who wrote anonymous verses published in newspapers, demanding liberty for all Americans, not just white land-owning males. They knew if discovered they could be beaten, even divorced by their husbands or fathers for speaking out.
Two hundred years of courageous slaves who ran away, facing possible death on their quest to freedom.

The soldiers in the Revolutionary, Civil and all our many wars who had the courage to face guns to protect all our freedoms and the women and children who kept the home fires burning.
The decades of labor protestors, men, women and children, with the courage to march and picket for better wages and working conditions, at cost to their jobs and safety of their families.
The courage of the suffragists who marched in front of the White House, demanding the right to vote. When arrested, they almost died in prison and those that stayed home but almost lost their children, their husbands, their security.
The courage of Native American activists like Zitkala-Sa who lived on this land first, but were treated like second-class citizens and sent to reservations until allowed to become American citizens in 1925.
The courage of opera singer Marian Anderson who stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 and performed for 75, 000 people when the Daughters of the American Revolutions wouldn’t allow her to sing inside Constitution Hall because of the color her skin.

The courage of Martin Luther King, Jr. who kept speaking out, over and over, even though he knew his life was in danger. When he spoke at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, his voice carrying across the crowds, “Let freedom ring, let freedom ring, let freedom ring.”

Our moments of courage may not be as brave or big as though above, but I believe that to be a citizen means to live with courage, allowing every American the right to speak and live in safety. Fifty years ago the Freedom Summer volunteers, black and white, had courage while registering voters in Mississippi. They risked it all so “freedom could ring.”

Talking about my new book and encouraging teachers to get their students to write new verses to this famous song may not be courageous. But these new verses give me hope that the next generation will “let freedom ring.”

Spokane teacher Patty Driscoll’s 5th and 6th graders wrote this new verse with the help of their music teacher:

My country ‘tis of thee
Let us be bully-free
No teasing found.
We are not all the same
Stop causing all their pain
Differences are not to blame
Freedom all around.
Claire invites classes and individual students to write new lyrics for a cause they believe in. Check out Claire's website for contest details.

Winners will be posted on Claire's website and become eligible to win a book or poster of Aretha Franklin singing at President Obama's inauguration. The contest is open September 1 - October 30th, 2014. Enter here...

In parting, Claire says, Sing one of your favorite patriotic songs this day. Let freedom ring.

Sounds like a great way to celebrate! Thanks, Claire.

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If Reading is so Important...Why are we Failing Our Boys?

6/26/2014

You might not be surprised that boys don't read as much as girls. You might even think that's just the way boys are.

Research consistently shows they have lower reading skills and a worse attitude about books. The most recent studies come from the United Kingdom.

At age seven, there's already a gender gap of 7 percent fewer boys than girls reading at the expected level. By age 11, it's 8 percent; by age 13, the gap has increased to 12, and in high school it reaches 14.

And that's for the boys who have not dropped out of school. Last year the United States dropout rate reached its highest level in nearly 40-years and more boys quit than girls in every state in the nation.

But it's wrong to think poor reading is inherent in boys, and there's much we can do to help boys read more and better.

For one, we can help boys discover that reading is fun. They may not gravitate to novels like girls, but there's a lot of new and exciting reading material to interest boys of all ages. See lists by topic here. Librarians are excellent at knowing what books appeal to boys, and they're up-to-date on reading options for boys. That's their job.

I should say, used to be their job. The pandemic loss of school librarians due to budget cuts in the last five years means boys have very little help in finding something they might enjoy reading. I was incredibly demoralized when we lost the battle for librarians in my kids' school district. I cannot imagine attending a school without a librarian. It's like a car without headlights. And no spark plugs.

Sheila May-Stein writes a lovely story on her blog about how to approach a boy about a book. Click here for Random Thoughts of an Outlaw Educator.

A fifth grade teacher in Forth Worth, Texas, Donalyn Miller, motivates her middle school students to read 40 or more books a year.

"I'm invited to speak in schools that want to improve their test scores, but the kids don't have books to read and parent volunteers run the library. They don't get it....

"...The manner in which schools institutionalize reading takes this love away from children. As instruction becomes limited to test-taking drill and kill, we are slowly strangling the joy of reading out of students, and without quality instruction in how to read well, we are narrowing their possibilities as readers forever," Donalyn says.

Anthony Horowitz writes books that many boys devour. His series ALEX RIDER about a teenage spy has sold 12 million copies worldwide. Anthony says, "I can tell you if a school has a good library five minutes after entering it... It is in the eyes of the kids."

We didn't have a school librarian in my elementary school, but the public library was housed in our school building, and classes made regular trips down the hall to use it. Mrs. Orr, the librarian was one of the strongest pillars in my childhood. I wish every child had someone like her just down the hall.

Was there an important librarian in your life?

What can we do to help kids, especially boys, find something to read that will help instill a lifetime habit?

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The Story Behind the Poetry of Lady Liberty

6/20/2014

Replica of Liberty's Face

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,"

My visit to the Statue of Liberty earlier this week inspired me to learn more about the woman who wrote those famous words. They really struck me, almost to tears when I first heard them as a child. I marvel at them again now, and at the power of poetry to move people’s emotions and stir them to action.

Where does such power come from?

The author of the words, Emma Lazarus was born in New York in 1849 to a wealthy Jewish family. Her ancestors were Sephardic Jews who fled the Spanish
Inquisition for Colonial America. Emma was a curious, bright girl who loved reading, and started writing poetry at a young age.

Living in 19th Century America, she had at least two strikes against her. She was a woman, and she was Jewish. However, her father fully supported her writing, and self-published her first volume Poems and Translations: Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen.

T. Johnson - The New York Historical Society

At some point her poetry impressed Ralph Waldo Emerson and they began a long-term correspondence. In 1883, during the drive to raise money to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, Emma wrote “The New Colossus”.

She’d been hearing news of the vicious anti-semitic pogroms in Russia, and as Jewish refugees streamed into the U.S. from Eastern Europe, Emma was shocked. Poor, sick, and uneducated, they were nothing like her upper class New York social circle.

Many well-established Jewish Americans feared these immigrants would reflect badly on them and didn’t want anything to do with the newcomers. But Emma take a break from writing to help the Russian Jewish immigrants, giving of her own money and helping raise funds to feed and clothe them. She set up job training in the industrial trades, which grew into the Hebrew Technical Institute. And, she wrote poems and essays about their plight. "Until we are all free, we are none of us free," she said.

Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, many of Emma's poems appeared in American magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times. Her poetic dramatization of Richard Reinhard's 1877 Der Tanz zum Tode, celebrated the courage and faith of 600 Jews who were killed, many burned to death, in Nordhausen, Germany, in 1349. The massacre was one of hundreds throughout Europe during the plague, where Jews were accused of causing the Black Death.
Emma’s writings also spoke to the importance of literature to culture and the needs and rights of the artist.
But none of her work became as well-known as the poem which is engraved in bronze at the Statue of Liberty. Once posted at the foot of the statue, it has since been moved inside for protection against the elements.

The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Gloves world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin-cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"
Cries she
With silent lips.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Emma's poem gives me the shivers! It's message was never more important than it is today. Does it have any special significance for you? If so, I'd love to hear your story.

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Courage: Being Who You are Meant to Be

6/13/2014

Today, I'm thrilled to tell you about a new book, which is especially close to my heart because as a young woman in the early days of my career as a television news reporter, I briefly entertained the dream of working as a war correspondant.

REPORTING UNDER FIRE:16 DARING WOMEN WAR CORRESPONDENTS AND PHOTOJOURNALISTS, by Kerrie Logan Hollihan, is filled with historical photos, newspaper clippings and personal stories from the women journalists themselves.

The publisher Chicago Review Press describes the women chronicled in the book who risked their lives to tell wartime stories:

Each woman—including Sigrid Schultz, who broadcast news via radio from Berlin on the eve of the Second World War; Margaret Bourke-White, who rode with General George Patton’s Third Army and brought back the first horrific photos of the Buchenwald concentration camp; and Marguerite Higgins, who typed stories while riding in the front seat of an American jeep that was fleeing the North Korean Army—experiences her own journey, both personally and professionally, and each draws her own conclusions. Yet without exception, these war correspondents share a singular ambition: to answer an inner call driving them to witness war firsthand, and to share what they learn via words or images. Photojournalist Helen Jones Kirtland looking at a spent landmine,probably near Ypres, Belgium, 1919. (Library of Congress)

Kerrie Logan Hollihan

The book just came out two weeks ago, and I'm so pleased to introduce you to Author Kerrie Logan Hollihan

My thanks to Mary for asking me to guest blog this week.
She asked me to focus on courage, which got me thinking about the sixteen women I profiled. At that point I realized I never especially characterize these women as courageous, though of course they are or were. Other attributes come to mind: smart, articulate, resourceful, brave, bold, brash, stubborn. But were I to choose a single adjective to best describe the women in my book, it would be:

Authentic.

Authentic. That’s the “keyword” I’d plug in for every one of them. Here’s how I explain my choice in the foreword to Reporting Under Fire:

When my daughter was a junior at [an all-girl high school], someone wrote a lovely quote on a poster during pep week. It was from Judy Garland…It said: “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”
… Garland’s words came to me as I was putting the finishing touches on this book. In looking over the profiles I’d researched and written over nearly a year, I was struck by how each of these of these women is (or was) so much her authentic self….

To be authentic takes courage. To know who you truly are and to live your life acting on that self-awareness takes courage. You might be a war reporter who risks it all to do what you are called to do. Janine di Giovanni (now Middle East editor of Newsweek) “bears witness” to war’s impact on ordinary people. Sigrid Schultz was the first reporter to warn that Adolf Hitler was building concentration camps and isolating German Jews. Chicago Daily News reporter Georgie Anne Geyer was marked for death in Guatemala by the White Hand, ultra-right-wing terrorists.

Or you might be a big city dweller like my daughter, grown up now, who sees how authenticity and self-awareness matter in the jobs and private lives of modern women, surrounded as they are by bottom-liners and bottom-feeders. How to live courageously and meaningfully in a lousy world. How to be a first rate version of herself.

Photo below: Correspondent Martha Raddatz (right) in Afghanistan, May 2011, Producer Ely Brown (left) Courtesy Raddatz

ABC Chief Global Correspondent Martha Raddatz is a case in point: smart, plain-speaking, and unpretentious. She told me she loved to read biographies as a kid, that “…maybe that’s the first inkling you want to live a life that’s not the one you’re living.”

Martha left college to take a news jobs -- something she doesn’t recommend to others. That was about forty years ago, and she’s been reporting ever since. She thrives on what she does, as she said in a talk at her son’s college. “The one reason more than any other that I love the news business is because I learn something every single day. Every single day.”

Martha Raddatz is the real deal, as is every single woman in my book. Authentic. Courageous.

Thank you, Kerrie. And thank you for writing an excellent and exciting book on this important and inspiring topic.

I appreciate the quote from Martha Raddatz because that is also one of the reasons I loved working in the news business, and part of why I'm so happy writing books for kids. I'm hungry to learn, and writing allows me to share the interesting things I learn.

For more on REPORTING UNDER FIRE, here's what School Library Journal has to say.

"A well-researched and riveting book...the text is chock-full of their daring exploits—such as Sigrid Schultz cohosting an engagement party for top Nazi Hermann Göring—all in the name of landing their stories. Not only do readers gain a healthy respect for each reporter, but they also gain insight into global history. As such, the book reads like a narrative time line of world history, women's rights, and the field of journalism as a whole."

This is the kind of book that should be in every school library. I'm calling my local district to see if they have it. I challenge you to do the same.

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It's Not Every Day You Meet Heroes Like These

6/5/2014

This past week I had the extraordinary privilege of speaking to WWII POWs surrendered on Bataan and Corregidor and held prisoner until the end of the war.
Only a few of the men remain alive now, some seventy years after the war.

The POWs, their wives, children, friends and relatives gather each year to commemorate the sacrifice and service these men gave for our country. They endured starvation and torture on the Bataan Death March, in prison camp, hell ships and Japanese slave labor camps.

Totally honored & thrilled to sign a book for Bataan Death Survivor Phillip Coon

Mr. Coons, an infantry machine gunner in the army, was one of six Muscogee Creek members who fought in the Battle of Bataan and were forced on the Bataan Death march. Three of the men died in captivity. For more of Mr. Coon's story, click here.

The group of POWs that began meeting in the late 1940's has now morphed in to the Descendants Group--American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society. One of the group's goals is to keep alive the story of these men's courage and resilience in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked the Islands shortly after bombing Pearl Harbor. They especially want to get the word out to young people. History books may touch briefly upon the subject, but stories from the survivors have more impact.

That was Shayna Ross a student at Yamhill-Carlton High School in Oregon. I spoke with her at a Veteran's Day celebration where she heard first hand the experiences of American defenders of Bataan and Corregidor.

A new documentary on the topic was screened at the ADBC convention, Never the Same: A Prisoner of War Experience. Three-time Emmy Award-winning director Jan Thompson interviewed a number of POW's for the documentary. She also uses poems, songs and art work created by prisoners in the camps to help depict the brutality they experienced. You can view the trailer here.

And by the way, if you don't have your copy of PURE GRIT yet, Women's eNews published an excerpt this week. Read it here...

Up next week--> a new book featuring American women war correspondents.

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This is Intensified Living!

5/31/2014

Badger Mountain, Tri-Cities, WA

On my various road trips over the last month to promote my book, I've greatly enjoyed the different cities and communities I've visited. In each one I'd find myself proclaiming, "Oh, it would be so great to live here."

In Tri-Cities, Washington, the hiking trail up Badger Mountain was terrific, as was the view from the top.The river is a beautiful green oasis snaking through the region. I found myself thinking, "It would be so great to live here and have access to this trail and this view."

Alki Beach, West Seattle, WA

In Seattle, I went for a walk on Alki Point and reminisced about when I used to live nearby and take my young son to play on the beach.

It's also a great place to walk, run or cycle, with great views of the city and Puget Sound. Part of me wished I still lived there.

View of Seattle from Alki Beach Trail

View from Chuckanut Drive

Then came our visit to Bellingham, Washington, one of the most spectacularly beautiful places in the world, though I might be a bit partial to the region after growing up in Whatcom county, in the shadow of Mount Baker. Mike and I love to visit Fairhaven, an historic part of the city where we get lost for several days in the stacks at Village Books. Our Drive home took us along scenic Chuckanut Drive which overlooks Chuckanut and Samish Bays with views of the San Juan Islands.

Our current trip took us south and through Bend, Oregon, where we stopped at an Italian coffee shop, started wandering the streets and found a little courtyard just off the Deschutes River, where we sat in the sun and almost ended our trip right there it was so beautiful.

Deschutes River

Trail along the American River, Rancho Cordova, CA

A 14-hour day of driving brought us to Sacramento, California, and a visit to the home of relatives near the American River. Their home backs up to a trail for walking, running, cycling and watching wildlife. Out for a walk I saw a young deer, numerous wild turkeys and luckily, none of the rattle snakes who live there.

Enjoying the lovely views, the atmosphere and people of all the places I've been visiting the past month or so, I couldn't help comparing them to where I live in Spokane.

Everywhere else seemed so fresh and exciting. Here, or there would be a great place to get out and exercise. This place or that would be so relaxing, so close to nature. Wow, what great restaurants and shops they have in this town.

It made me realize that I have come to take for granted the lovely views in my own city, the places to exercise not far from my front door, the opportunities to observer nature in my own backyard.

Rick Steves says travel is intensified living. And I have found that to be true on my recent road trips. It has opened my senses to the world around me and helped me more fully appreciate both the strange and distant and the well-known close up places.

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What you don't know about head injury...could kill you

5/22/2014

photo by Katherine Johnson

Carla's 14-month-old son Corey fell off a swing in the back yard and died of a head injury. You want to think such a thing could never happen in your family, that it was a freak accident...

But in reading Carla Killough McClafferty's book subtitled CONCUSSION AND FOOTBALL'S MAKE-OR-BREAK MOMENT, it's clear the risk of death and brain damage is higher than I ever imagined. Especially for kids who play football, but also for kids who play soccer or ride bicycles, or swing on swings...

Corey suffered a minor bump on the head the day before he fell from the swing. After he died, the doctor told Carla that the two falls were a factor in her son's death. But she didn't really understand what had happened until some twenty-five years later when she researched this book.

Carla Killough McClafferty

"I studied what happens in the brain when one is a victim of Second Impact Syndrome or SIS. I understood in a different way exactly what happened in my son's brain in those minutes immediately following his fall."

"In the end, the research was much more personal than I thought it would be."

FOURTH DOWN AND INCHES tells of a Purdue University study of the Jefferson High football team in Lafayette, Indiana. The study showed brain impairment not just in the boys who suffered concussions during the season, but also in boys who suffered repeated hard knocks to the head, but never showed any signs of concussion.

"At first we thought the scanner was broken," one researcher said, referring to the boys' functional MRI test results.

Before, during and after the 2009 season, the players underwent two tests. One measured how well they remembered words and shapes during a 20-minute test, as well as the speed and accuracy of their responses. MRI scans showed brain functions like thought, speech, movement and sensation.

When the before and after test results were compared, four boys who experienced lots of hard impacts to the head (as measured by an accelerometer in their helmets) but no concussions, showed the same neurological changes to the brain as three boys who had been diagnosed with concussion during the season.

The risk then, for these players of suffering SIS is huge. A player might sustain a life-altering injury without showing any outward sign.

A different study at Virginia Tech study is that the helmet accelerometers showed they young boys experienced impacts of the same severity of force as high school and college players. One hit was so hard, it would be like running into a brick wall at 20-miles an hour.
Carla says her book is not an attack on football. The reality of repetitive head trauma is balanced with love of the game.

"In FOURTH DOWN, I present the facts, then leave the reader to draw their own conclusions. The point of the book is to look at the cutting edge research on concussions and head injuries and how these issues affect people. I address recognizing a player with a concussion and what the experts say they should do after a concussion. My hope is that the book will inform young athletes about the issues so they understand why they shouldn't ignore symptoms of concussion."

Along with the danger of SIS comes the specter of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or CTE, which boxers commonly suffer and has recently been diagnosed in some pro-football players.

CTE can be diagnosed only after death and has been discovered in the brains of men who died and donated their brains to science. CTE is irreversible and progressive brain damage that results from repetitive brain trauma.

When a teenage rugby player died in 2006 after a concussion, his parents donated his brain for study. Scientists were surprised at what they found--the first evidence of CTI suffered by a teenager.

Delving into the personal side of the science of head injury was not easy for Carla, but she says, "The emotional cost of writing this book is worth if even one athlete tells a coach that he might have a concussion and does not return to play too soon, risking second impact syndrome."

"I don't think I'm courageous at all. I was willing to go where the research took me. The book allowed me to get to know the parents of Nathan Stiles and Eric Pelly, both teen athletes who lost their lives as a result of concussions. As they shared with me the lives and deaths of their children, I grieved with them and for them. Although Corey has been gone for more than 25 years, his loss is always with me and times like this bring it back to me with fresh pain."

FOURTH DOWN AND INCHES: CONCUSSIONS AND FOOTBALL'S MAKE-OR-BREAK MOMENT by Carla Killough McClafferty received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, selection by the Junior Library Guild and the ALA YALSA Nominee List for 2014 Nonfiction Award.

Top photo thanks to Katherine Johnson https://www.flickr.com/photos/aka_kath/

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Would you risk your life for a better high school? Barbara Johns did.

5/16/2014

You’ve heard about Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus, but does the name Barbara Johns mean anything to you?

Long before the Montgomery Bus Boycott 16-year-old Barbara took a courageous stand for civil rights when she led fellow students to boycott their segregated high school in the town of Farmville, Virginia.

Here’s a photo of the high school for white students in Farmville in 1951, it had had plenty of classrooms and a gymnasium, cafeteria, infirmary, and other resources.

Photo Courtesy of the National Archives

Courtesy National Archives

Barbara’s younger sister Joan Johns Cobb describes the situation at the school for black students.

The school we went to was overcrowded. Consequently, the county decided to build three tarpaper shacks for us to hold classes in. A tarpaper shack looks like a dilapidated black building, which is similar to a chicken coop on a farm…. In winter the school was very cold. And a lot of times we had to put on our jackets. Now, the students that sat closest to the wood stove were very warm and the ones who sat farthest away were very cold…. When it rained, we would get water through the ceiling. So there were lots of pails sitting around the classroom. And sometimes we had to raise our umbrellas to keep the water off our heads. It was a very difficult setting for trying to learn.

The author of the new book THE GIRL FROM THE TAR PAPER SCHOOL, Teri Kanefield says Barbara Johns risked her life, “but she wasn't afraid. She truly believed she was on the right side” the morning she stood up at a school assembly, asked the teachers to leave the auditorium and then asked her fellow students to walk out in protest.

Barbara was a quiet, studious girl. But the morning of April 23, 1951, she took off her shoe and pounded it on the podium to get her point across. "Don't be afraid, just follow us out," she said.

Courtesy Joan Johns Cobbs

That day, when the curtains opened it was my sister on stage rather than the principal. I was totally shocked, said Joan Johns Cobb. I remember sitting in my seat and trying to go as low in the seat as I possibly could because I was so shocked and so upset. I actually was frightened because I knew that what she was doing was going to have severe consequences.

Because at the time, you still read of lynchings…. And so therefore, everyone was afraid that he or she would be lynched. Even, at the time, for talking back to a white person or in the case of the black men, speaking to a white woman. So we all lived with that type of fear. It was real. It was scary.

Students remained out of school and after two weeks, NAACP lawyers joined the effort, filing a petition in court to desegregate the Prince Edward County schools. In reaction someone burned a cross in the schoolyard, a black minister supporting the strike received death threats and a homemade bomb died out on his doorstep.

Barbara received several threats and her parents sent her out of town to live with an uncle and finish high school.

The legal challenge to segregated schools failed, but three years later, Barbara was one of the plaintiffs in Brown vs Board of Education which outlawed school segregation throughout the land.

Teri Kanefield says Barbara Johns is a reminder that every single day, history is being made. “It has taken almost a half century for her [Barbara] to be widely recognized as a true American hero. This makes me believe there are Barbara Johnses among us now, but we are not recognizing them as visionaries and heroes.”

One of the author’s favorite aspects of the story is that young people convinced the adults to take action.

Tomorrow is the 60th Anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling on Brown Vs Board of Education. Today the Christian Science Monitor reports that since then, any gains in racial integration in American schools have mostly been reversed.

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The Last Desperate Days on Corregidor

5/1/2014

"Situation here is fast becoming desperate," General Jonathon Wainwright cabled General Douglas MacArthur May 3, 1942.

The next night the Navy risked a daring mission, as Submarine Spearfish glided past a Japanese minesweeper and destroyer, to surface. A small boat motored out to meet it carrying 25-passengers, including eleven nurses. Read more about Spearfish rescue...

What would turn out to be the last U.S. mail shipment to leave Corregidor was also taken aboard, including some hastily scrawled letters to family. Army Nurse Hattie Brantley didn't bother. "I couldn't write a letter to my family. What was I going to say?"

The Spearfish dived 200 feet below the sea, stealing away toward Australia, leaving fifty-four army nurses and twenty-six Filipina nurses behind.

In the next 24-hours over May 4 and 5, the Japanese hammered Corregidor with some 16,000 shells, then as the first landing force took the beaches, nurses on duty in Corregidor's underground hospital destroyed records, keeping their gas masks handy.

Army Nurses Alice Zwicker confided in her diary, "Even all the rumors of what the Japanese may do to all of us and especially the women mean little or nothing to me at the present. Just end this awful destruction and find help for these patients who need the barest essentials so badly."

Another nurse ventured into the main tunnel just before the surrender. Dirty, hungry and exhausted men filled the passageway. "Some asked for water, some for food, and the pity was that we had very little of either. Some were swearing, some staring into space. She hurried back to the nurses' lateral, where her off-duty colleagues huddled, starved for food and for news.The next wave of Japanese rolled tanks onto Corregidor's beaches and Wainwright imagined the wholesale slaughter that would befall his men, and "...I thought of the havoc that even one tank could wreak if it nosed into the tunnel, where lay our helpless wounded and their brave nurses."

He sent men out with white flags at 10A.M.

Most nurses heard the news over the tunnel radio. Surrender would come at noon May 6. "Now our facial expressions were stony, and we avoided letting our eyes meet," said Army Nurse Denny Williams. "Not only our own hopeless fear, but collective fear, with it's power to panic, passed from person to person like a current, lurching and jolting on-off on-off, but always more intense until I had visions of our soldiers fighting until all were dead outside and the enemy came inside, screaming and brandishing swords and bayonets. I wondered if I would die and how I would die. I hoped to be quiet and brave."

The women had arrived in the Philippines unprepared for war, but learned quickly when driven to the limits of endurance nursing wounded and dying American soldiers. Now they would face the horrors of prison camp for three years before General MacArthur would reclaim the Philippines and liberate them.

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That phone call you never want to get...

4/24/2014

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GABE ~ June 1996-April 2008

It was nearing midnight six years ago today when I got the phone call. You know the one. The one you never, ever want to receive. I’d been out celebrating with a friend whose new book had just came out, and had just settled into bed, ready to drift off to sleep.

“Gabe’s not doing well,” she said.

The tremble in her voice told me this was the worst kind of news. Gabe was in the hospital, but he’d been in before, and I’d never thought for one second that his life was in danger.

Gabe was the eleven-year-old son of a very close friend. The family lived directly across the street from our house and I’d known Gabe since he was born.

When I got off the phone my heart was beating so hard and fast, it seemed it would bust right out of my chest. My thoughts were completely incoherent. I knew I should get dressed and go to the hospital. But for a few moments I couldn’t even think how to put on a pair of pants.

I dedicated my book PURE GRIT to Gabe because of the courage he demonstrated living with epilepsy. For several years, his seizures were controlled by medication.

But they grew worse and occasionally, the medication didn't work. Gabe loved basketball, and he would take to the floor with his team, even though he knew he might have a seizure on the court at any time.

He didn't have grand mal seizures, but he would lose consciousness momentarily, freeze when all the other players ran down the court. His arm would stiffen out to the side. It might seem a small thing, but it's a huge risk to a child with epilepsy. It would have been easier to not to play, not to take the chance you might look strange in front of your friends and a whole gym full of strangers.

Over time, stronger and stronger meds helped less and less. Doctors urged Gabe's parents to consider surgery to excise a part of his brain where the seizures originated. Brain surgery is always high risk. Anything might go wrong, but even a successful surgery could compromise Gabe's motor skills. He was a natural athlete and loved soccer, as well as basketball.

Gabe's courage was often invisible. And it's hard to put into words. You would have had to live with him day in and day out to understand the courage it took for him to go to school when the meds made him drowsy, for him dribble a ball down the court when he'd had five seizures his last game. To see his strength, you would have had to be there when he went in to the hospital to have his brain mapped with electrodes.

You would have had to see Gabe's face as he was wheeled away from his mom and dad and into surgery where the doctors would cut into his brain to understand that kind of courage. I mostly heard about it from his mom.

Every night, she had the task of asking him how many seizures he had that day and recording the number, if it hadn't been too many to count.

Gabe had a hilarious sense of humor. He had bright blue eyes and a sweet, sometimes goofy smile. He used to shoot baskets at the hoop on the street for hours. He loved to watch LaBron James play ball.

Everyone was so excited the night he came home from that surgery, head shaved with a row of stitches across his scalp. Smiling.

It was a year later when it became clear the surgery hadn't ended the seizures. One day Gabe had so many, he was hospitalized and doctors put him into a coma to stop them. It was a tragic fluke that Gabe suffered an allergic reaction to the Propofol they used to knock him out. His doctors had never seen it happen before.

I doubt there's a parent alive who has not wondered how they would go on living if their child died. I never want to find out, but I have witnessed it now.

After Gabe died, I learned the profound journey it can be to closely accompany a mother through such a loss. To witness such indescribable pain moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day, and year to year as it gives way ever so gradually to healing, is to witness a miracle of courage.

And so I dedicated PURE GRIT, not only to Gabe, but to his mother Cheryl. It's a small way to honor them and give thanks for how they have inspired me and enriched my life.

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You won’t believe how a losing 6th grade history fair project out-gunned the Navy

4/17/2014

The story of the USS Indianapolis was not pretty. Sunk by the Japanese at the close of WWII, only a quarter of her crew survived. Her captain was court-martialed and killed himself, possibly to escape the shame.

Then in 1997, a sixth grader, Hunter Scott, interviewed survivors of the disaster for the school history fair. He thought they were heroes and that their captain got a bum deal. His project won the school fair, the country fair and then lost the state fair to a rock collection.

But the boy believed in his project and continued his research, as well as his efforts to tell the true story of USS Indianapolis.

The historical relevance of the ship was assured because of its secret mission, transporting the atomic bomb to the Mariana Islands in prep for the bombing of Hiroshima. As it turns out, that is but a footnote in the nearly unbelievable tale of this ship and men who sailed aboard her.

I learned about it in the book Left for Dead: A Young Man’s Search for Justice for the USS Indianapolis by Pete Nelson. The book combines the story of the survivors of the U.S. Navy's worst loss of life on a single ship with the story of Hunter Scott crusade to bring them the honor they deserved.

After delivering the bomb, the Indianapolis set a leisurely course to the Philippines for some gunnery practice. The Indy was a cruiser, without the heavy armor of a battleship. At this point in the war, most of the fighting had moved to the far eastern Pacific closer to Japan, so the ship sailed without an escort. Though Japanese submarines had been sited earlier on the route, that information was classified and Captain Charles B. McVay wasn’t told.

Captain Charles B. McVay

It late July, a mere 12-degrees from the equator, as the ship sailed through the muggy heat, air-ducts, water-tight doors and hatches were opened to cool the lower decks. Still, many sailors carried their blankets topside and found a space to catch the breeze and get some sleep.

Shortly before midnight on July 29, a Japanese submarine surfaced, and the captain, looking through his binoculars saw a black dot on the horizon. He thought it was fate, for as he watched, the moon come out of the clouds right behind the ship. Silhouetted on the vast dark ocean, the Indianapolis sailed straight toward him. He gave the order to dive, and then to fire.

At 12:02 the first torpedo hit, ripping off the front starboard corner of the Indianapolis and igniting a tank of highly volatile aviation fuel. Seconds later, two more explosions rocked the ship. Bulkheads collapsed, the ship took on water and the engines drove the Indy down. It took only twelve minutes to sink.

About 300 men died outright or went down with the ship; 880 were thrown into the sea. They huddled together in groups and tried to stay afloat in the oil-slick, shark-infested waters. Some were burned or otherwise injured; many had no life-jackets. The worst-off got to rest in life rafts, safe from the sharks. But there had only been time to cut loose a few of the rafts and there were too few survival provisions for the number of men in the water.

One of the radio operators encouraged those around him, telling how he had sent out the SOS and their location. They must simply hang on until rescuers arrived.

Nelson goes into detail about the horrors the men faced as they waited. The burned and bleeding, those with broken limbs and dazed from concussions were the first to die. Daylight brought sunburn and thirst and no rescue. The second day brought dehydration, hunger and nasty disputes. The third day brought hallucinations, and loss of the will to live. Every day the sharks came. They swam in circles around the groups of men. Without warning a man would scream, then disappear into the deep. Men went out of their minds.

The United States Navy did not even know the Indianapolis was missing. It would be more than 50-years before the Navy discovered that the SOS message had been received by four different people. Hunter Scott discovered that in each case, it had been ignored.

On the fourth day after the ship sank, survivors were sighted by chance, and planes and boats headed to the area to save them. The last of the 317 men alive was picked out of the ocean on the fifth day.

Survivors aboard the USS Bassett. Rescued after four days in the ocean.

Survivors arriving on Guam after rescue.

The Navy needed a scapegoat for this disaster and court-martialed the captain for not ordering a zig-zag course to avoid enemy torpedoes. The surviving men knew their captain was not to blame, and tried in vain for years to clear his name.

Then in 1997, 11-year-old Hunter Scott heard Indianapolis disaster mentioned in the movie Jaws and decided to interview survivors for his history fair project. That set him on a course of friendship with the men and finally the exoneration of Captain McVay.

I recommend this book because it's an important story that honors the survivors of the USS Indianapolis.There are recommend this book for two things the author does very well. One is the way he describes the science of how the human body reacts when deprived of drinking water while suspended in salt water. The second is his explanation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as it was suffered by the survivors of the Indianapolis, and how, when in 1960, the men began to gather and talk about what had happened they began to heal. That healing was also helped in 2001 when, after Hunter Scott took their case to Congress, the crew of the Indianapolis were finally awarded a Navy Unit Citation.

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Sit still: Turn Your Fear into Wisdom

4/3/2014

Graphic from dangerandplay.com

I click open my novel to start revising and my heartbeat goes-- fight-or-flight, fight-or-flight, fight-o-flight!

I jump up and go to the kitchen to microwave my cup off coffee. Even though it hasn’t cooled.

In the moment of facing the page, I am like a mouse bolting from the swoop of a hawk. My amygdala (reptilian brain) fires a message to my sympathetic nervous system telling it that my body is in acute danger. This message is so commanding, I jump up and leave the room.

I wrote about this fear a few months ago when I asked the question: What would you do, if you weren’t afraid. I’m exploring it more deeply today and asking: Why does part of my brain think revising a novel is a threat to my life? And what the heck am I going to do about it?

First, I’m going to remind myself it’s not me. Fear happens to everyone.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we
want and what we're afraid of is about the width of
an eyelash. ― Jay McInerney

What I want is risk. What I fear is failing. What I
want is fresh air, currents, and mountains. What I’m
afraid of is heights, drowning, and change. – Lakin Easterling

Fear of failure is part of the human condition, so I accept it. But acceptance isn’t standing on the doorstep, neither in nor out. Stepping into fear is crossing the threshold between the conscious and unconscious mind.

When I feel my heart going fight or flight- fight or flight- fight or flight, acceptance means taking a deep breath and sitting still. Not scampering to the kitchen and not forcing myself to get started on that revision no matter what it takes.

Sitting still, breathing deep, feeling fear. Feeling my rapid heart beat, feeling my quickened breath, feeling the nerve endings in my skin waking up. Letting the fear rise. Listening to what it’s trying to tell me. This what’s called getting to know yourself.

In decades past, this was woo-woo, some silly sh%t therapist’s would tell you to do. In this decade it’s imperative.

It’s imperative because if we don’t listen to the fear and learn, we will act on it. Everybody knows we humans don’t make good decisions with our amygdala.

We need to act under the power of our prefrontal cortex deeply engaged with our heart.

Sitting still and getting to know our fear gives our frontal lobe time to overrule our flight or flight, reptilian brain. Don’t worry, it will still work if you’re about to be hit by a car.

When we get familiar with our fear, we begin to realize that most of it is a lie. We’re afraid of things that might happen. Afraid of things we imagine. Afraid of things we can do absolutely nothing about.

That’s when our heart opens. Sitting still with an open heart, using our prefrontal cortex our actions will be wise.

When I feel my heartbeat speed up, and my breath quicken, I don’t say to myself, Mary, don’t be silly, revising a novel will not kill you. Rather, I see it as an opportunity to learn something about myself and to open my heart. I take it as an opportunity to practice acting from a place of wisdom.

Make sense? A bunch of hoo-rah? Let me know what you think.

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World War II Fly-Girls Denied Recognition for 70-Years

3/27/2014