Reconnecting with Winners

One of this morning's e-mails was titled "RTNDF - Reconnect with a Winner." It began, "Recently we sent a packet to all scholarship and fellowship winners to find out about your recent activities and to find out where your path has taken you since you were selected an RTNDF winner."

I immediately thought of my long-time mentor Barney Oldfield, former treasurer of the Radio and Television News Director's Foundation.

We didn't get the annual Oldfield Christmas Card this year, but I knew he'd established an incredible website a few years ago so I googled it and there was the news: Barney Oldfield, age 93, died on April 29, 2003 at Cedars-Sinia Medical Center. Here's what the AP wrote:

"Barney Oldfield, a retired Air Force colonel who was a publicist and press agent for stars such as Errol Flynn, Elizabeth Taylor and Ronald Reagan during their Hollywood years, died Saturday in Los Angeles, a friend said."

Barney and his wife Vada had no children, but cared enough about future generations to set up more than 100 scholarships including the one I received. How did a retired military man have the means to establish millions of dollars of scholarships?

In his words, "For those who have never given scholarship establishment serious thought, thinking it beyond their grasp and resources, let nothing deter you. By using the cumulative method and taking one's time, it's relatively easy to do; and there's hardly anything equal to it in satisfaction when it materializes and becomes operational."

That's true. Barney's example and counsel were instrumental a dozen years ago when I served as executor of a friend's estate. With a single legal document we put a long-term plan in place. It took about a decade to accumulate, but now interest from his gift enables the Hanna Boys Center in Sonoma, California to award the Richard K. Gaskins memorial scholarship each year.

Thanks, Barney. Without you I might not have chosen my first career as a journalist. I definitely wouldn't have had that four year RTNDF scholarship to the University of Utah, and I certainly wouldn't have thought it possible to help endow a scholarship.

Comment?

Living for Now

"Although we cannot change the past, we can learn from it and build up skills and useful insights from it. The past is over, the future is unknown and so the only time we can truly affect is now."
--Instant Meditation by John Hudson

Oh, and the answer to the quotation below? B. Dr. King. (Notice I formed the question before most the 40-year anniversary publicity started to hit the media. Perhaps it only takes one mention of an upcoming event to get your minding ticking away at possibilities?)

Related resources at UEN:

• African American History - Liberty - Themepark
  
• Civil Rights - Liberty - Themepark
  
• Speaking/Presenting - Communication - Themepark
  
• United States - Home & Habitat - Themepark

Found while looking for something else: Juan Williams on Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready

Who said it?

Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

A. Ronald Reagan
B. Martin Luther King, Jr.
C. Jimmy Carter

E-mail your answer

First Schwinn

We were mortgage poor. We had a new house on the hill with a beautiful view of sunsets on the Great Salt Lake, yet not enough money for a new bike. But as it turns out that was good. For a while I rode my big sister's old bike. It was something to learn on and it was the beginning of an adventure.

We lived on a steep stretch of Center Street at 1147 East in Bountiful. One day as I rode down the hill the chain broke which meant I had no coaster brakes. As I crashed a sharp edge of the chain guard gouged into my right thigh. The ten widely-spaced stitches I got that day formed a Scorpion-shaped scar which is still faintly visible.

Later I entered the KUTV / Walt Disney Greyfriar's Bobby coloring contest and won the second place prize -- a red Schwinn bike. It had a fancy Bendix "automatic" two speed hub -- just push back on the pedals and it would toggle between the first and second gears. The bike was a little big for me, but I grew into it.

If a new bike had just shown up for a birthday or Christmas, I'd have at lost least half a dozen great memories, probably more. The obvious ones are:

• Crashing my sister's broken-down bike -- a great way to get rid of a piece of junk.
• Getting stitches -- a little scary yes, but frankly I liked all the attention.
• The fun of entering the coloring contest.
• The surprise and thrill of winning the bike.
• Not just winning it, but riding it, appreciating it, remembering it.
• It gave me a story tell. The scar continues to fade, but the adventure remains vivid.

Music and Transplants

If you've read Dan's Cancer Weblog you know that author is in preparing for a BMT - bone marrow transplant. Since Dan's my long-time friend and brother-in-law I find myself seeking information that may be useful to him. Here's something I stumbled across while looking for something else on the Pioneer Library's EBSCO service:

"It may be difficult, but in troubled times, researchers say, people need to take comfort from life's simplest pleasures. In a small study at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, Dr. O. J. Sahler found that bone-marrow transplant patients who listened to music reported less pain and nausea, and their transplants took less time to become functional." -- Newsweek; 2/24/2003, Vol. 141 Issue 8, p50, 2p, 1c

Writing and Healing

I'm continuing to browse through Chia Martin's Writing Your Way Through Cancer. She lists these advantages of writing -- advantages, it seems to me, that appy to almost everyone and may accrue from writing as well as other forms of self expression including drawing, painting, photography, exercise, biking, swimming, fishing, walking, conversation.

Martin says writing:
-strengthens the immune system
-encourages uninhibited expression
-objectifies experience ("...coaxes monsters out of our mind and into the light of reality allow us to see their true nature.")
-generates personal power
-stimulates a mood of healing
-enables de-stressing
-opens a doorway into insight and personal introspection
-clears the mind
-costs nothing, is portable, and available to almost everyone

"You have something to say. It is unique, authentic, soley yours."
--Chia Martin