October 1, 1987 – Salem Hospital – Salem, Illinois: The baby was born without legs. Her Romanian-immigrant parents were shocked and overwhelmed. There was no money or insurance to raise a handicapped child, so they abandoned the baby in the hospital. The following...
September 7, 1854 – London, England: The most dreaded disease of the age, cholera, was back with a vengeance. There were more caskets than the horse-drawn hearse wagons could carry away. In Soho, one of London’s poorest neighborhoods, more than 500 people died in five...
1976 – Clanton, Alabama: The phone rang. “Oh Lord, no! Nannie B is gone. She shot herself,” screamed her grandmother. Five-year-old Liz was too young to understand what had happened. But she and her four-year-old sister cried anyway. Liz spent her early...
September 4, 1993 – Yankee Stadium – Bronx, New York City: He stood on the mound in the eighth inning at Yankee Stadium. For a long moment he studied the scoreboard in center field and thought back on his life – just six outs away from pitching a no-hitter – a dream...
More than 30 years later, Bob Brenly still gets letters from pastors. They want him to know that they used what happened to him in September 1986 as a teaching moment in a sermon. Mike Krukow, a San Francisco Giants pitcher, would agree. After that bizarre major...
1926 – Masonic Home and School, Ft. Worth, Texas: The Masonic Home Orphanage, which sat on 200 acres in east Ft. Worth, was started in 1900 for the purpose of housing and educating the orphans of Free Masons. The facility, a lonely depressing place, was home for...
