by peteblack4ua@gmail.com | Jan 14, 2019 | Beating the Odds, Courage Under Fire, Iron-willed
March 23, 2002 – Innova Fairfax Hospital – Falls Church, Virginia: After reading the MRI, the doctor turned to former Army Four-Star General Hugh Shelton and grimly commented, “General, I am going to put it to you straight. You are never going to walk again. You may...
by peteblack4ua@gmail.com | Feb 27, 2018 | Adversity, Courage Under Fire, Iron-willed
The Birmingham Preacher Christmas night, 1956 – Birmingham, Alabama: The late-night explosion reduced the small house to shambles and rattled windows a mile away. Ku Klux Klan members had placed 15 sticks of dynamite beneath the home of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth,...
by peteblack4ua@gmail.com | Dec 27, 2017 | Iron-willed, Never Lose Heart, Overcoming Adversity
1401 A.D. London, England: King Henry IV declared that religious heretics would be burned at the stake. Seven years later, the Roman Catholic Church, at that time England’s official church, used its considerable influence to have a law passed that made it a crime to...
by peteblack4ua@gmail.com | Aug 29, 2017 | Determination Despite the Odds, Iron-willed, Overcoming Adversity
When Diana Nyad was five years old, her father, who was of Greek descent, pointed to her name in the dictionary – Diana, a Greek goddess, and said to her, “Some day you will be a famous swimmer like Diana.” By the time Nyad discovered that her Greek namesake had...
by peteblack4ua@gmail.com | Aug 13, 2017 | Iron-willed, Persistence, Refusing to Quit
To the loggers and company officials at Maxxam Lumber in Humboldt, California, 23-year-old Julia “Butterfly” Hill was an “extremist tree-hugging hippy radical environmentalist.” To the environmental activists at Earth First, she was a courageous, inspirational,...
