Let’s talk about Althea Gibson.

Sometimes I tend to hide the name of the person we’re talking about, because as soon as you see the name you’ll know the story. But honestly, I wonder how many people today will know who she was, or why we’re writing about her?

Althea Gibson was born August 25, 1927, on a sharecropper’s farm in Silver, South Carolina.

Three years old when her family joined the Great Migration north, settling in Harlem at the start of the Depression. She skipped school constantly, dropped out at 13, and was, by most accounts, heading in the wrong direction.

What saved her: a paddle tennis court on 143rd Street, set up by the Police Athletic League to keep troubled kids off the streets. Althea was immediately, obviously, preternaturally good.

A musician and PAL coach named Buddy Walker noticed her, bought her a secondhand racket, and brought her to the Cosmopolitan Club in Harlem, where members pooled money to give her a junior membership and lessons from the club professional.

She won her first junior ATA title at 15. She won it again at 16.

For the next seven years she was the top-ranked player on the African American tennis circuit — which existed because the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association ran its events at whites-only clubs and excluded Black players from competition.

Sugar Ray Robinson and his wife befriended her and introduced her to two Black physicians who had made it their project to develop Black tennis players: Dr. Hubert Eaton of Wilmington, North Carolina, and Dr. Robert Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. Each took her into their home, coached her, insisted she finish high school. She did, graduating at 22, then won a scholarship to Florida A&M, graduating in 1953.

But the USLTA remained closed to her. Tournament players were required to qualify through sanctioned events held at clubs where Black people were not permitted.

In 1950, Alice Marble — a four-time U.S. champion — wrote an editorial in American Lawn Tennis magazine calling the tennis establishment “unwilling to give an opportunity to a potential champion simply because of race.”

She said she was ashamed of her sport. The USLTA relented.

In August 1950, Althea became the first Black player to compete at the U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills, losing narrowly in the second round to the reigning Wimbledon champion.

A journalist wrote: “In many ways, it is even a tougher personal Jim Crow-busting assignment than was Jackie Robinson’s when he first stepped out of the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout.”

She struggled for the next several years — inconsistent, fading, by 1955 considering quitting entirely and joining the Army. Instead, the State Department recruited her for a goodwill tennis tour of Southeast Asia.

She came back transformed.

In 1956 she won the French Open.

In 1957, 69 years ago today, she walked onto Centre Court at Wimbledon as the top seed — the first Wimbledon final attended by Queen Elizabeth II as monarch — and defeated Darlene Hard 6-3, 6-2 in under an hour.

When the Queen handed her the trophy, Althea wept and said: “At last. At last.”

New York gave her a ticker tape parade — only the second Black American so honored, after Jesse Owens. She won Wimbledon again in 1958, and the U.S. Nationals again. The Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year both years.

Then she retired — not by choice.

Amateur tennis offered no prize money, and she was broke.

“The truth, to put it bluntly,” she wrote, “is that tennis doesn’t pay enough for me to eat.”

She played exhibition matches before Harlem Globetrotter games, recorded a jazz album, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, landed a small role in a John Wayne film.

In the 1960s she became the first Black woman on the LPGA professional golf tour.

Thirty years later, she suffered strokes and debilitating health problems; in 2001 her former doubles partner Angela Buxton received a phone call: Althea was broke, sick, unable to pay her rent or medical bills, and talking about ending her life.

Buxton — one of Althea’s few close friends on tour, both of them marginalized, one for being Black, one for being Jewish — launched a public fundraising campaign.

Think of it as a GoFundMe before there was GoFundMe. The tennis world raised nearly $1 million. It was enough to get Althea through her final years.

She died in September 2003, at 76.

Billie Jean King said: “If it hadn’t been for her, it wouldn’t have been so easy for Arthur, or the ones who followed.”

Before Serena Williams won her first Grand Slam in 1999, she’d faxed Althea a letter asking for advice. Althea wrote back. What they said to each other was never made public.

But I hope this newsletter lets a few more people remember Althea Gibson.

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7 other moments to know from history this week

• July 5: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” — Frederick Douglass, from the speech he delivered on this day in 1852 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society — an Independence Day address that has since been called one of the greatest speeches in American history.

• July 6: “I remember coming into the fete and seeing all the sideshows. And also hearing all this great music wafting in from this little Tannoy system. It was John and the band. I just thought, ‘Well, he looks good, he’s singing well and he seems like a great lead singer to me.’” — Paul McCartney, recalling the afternoon of this day in 1957, when he arrived by bicycle at the garden fete of St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, Liverpool, and first heard a 16-year-old named John Lennon performing with his skiffle group, the Quarrymen.

• July 7: “Dear Mr. Andropov, my name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old... I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not?” — Samantha Smith, in the letter she wrote to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov in November 1982. Andropov wrote back personally and invited her to visit the USSR. On this day in 1983, Samantha and her parents flew to Moscow.

• July 8: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” — The inscription on the Liberty Bell, rung on this day in 1776 to summon the citizens of Philadelphia to the State House yard — now Independence Square — where Colonel John Nixon read the Declaration of Independence aloud for the first time to a public audience.

• July 9: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” — Bertrand Russell, from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, released at a press conference in London on this day in 1955. The document was co-written by Russell and Albert Einstein — whose signature was his final public act before his death three months earlier — and signed by nine other leading scientists and Nobel laureates, warning that a war fought with hydrogen bombs could end the human race.

• July 10: “To be given the opportunity to make the last kick to win a World Cup is an unspeakable emotion.” — Brandi Chastain, who on this day in 1999 scored the decisive penalty in the shootout that gave the United States its second Women’s World Cup title, defeating China 5-4 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena before a crowd of 90,185 — the largest audience ever to attend a women’s sporting event.

• July 11: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” — Note accompanying the gift of a year’s salary given to Harper Lee at Christmas 1956 by her friends Michael and Joy Brown, who wanted her to have time to write. The result: To Kill a Mockingbird, published on this day in 1960, which won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than 40 million copies.

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It was the summer of 1950:

• Frank Borghi was driving a hearse for his uncle’s funeral home in St. Louis.

• Joe Gaetjens, who had been born in Haiti, was washing dishes in New York — part of how he was paying his bills while studying on a scholarship at Columbia University.

• Walter Bahr had just finished the school year teaching high school in Philadelphia; Gino Pariani was working a factory job in St. Louis.

What all four of these men had in common — along with a few others who will come into the story shortly — is that at the midpoint of the last century, they were among the best players in America in a sport that almost nobody else in America cared about: soccer.

They played in semi-professional leagues — the kind where the players held day jobs and played on weekends for modest pay. They were big fish in some very small ponds, but that was enough for them to get noticed by the United States Soccer Football Association — the governing body that ran American soccer on an annual budget of less than $50,000.

And by “noticed,” we mean “recruited to play for the American team in the 1950 World Cup.”

Quick stage-setting: This was to be the first World Cup since 1938 (because: World War II), and the entire idea of the World Cup had been kind of hanging by a trans-Atlantic string even before that.

FIFA had nearly gone broke during the war years, and when peace finally came no country wanted to host the resumed tournament, until Brazil stepped up. The Jules Rimet Trophy — the actual physical cup awarded to the winner — had spent the war years hidden in a shoebox under an Italian official’s bed to keep the Nazis from melting it down.

Anyway, the U.S. needed a team — and if there’s a joke that U.S. soccer fans hate to love about how soccer is the sport of the future in the USA, and always will be — in 1950 that would have seemed wildly optimistic.

Outside of immigrant communities and a few die-hard fans, not many people cared. And faced with fielding a national team, a selection committee picked the squad from players in the semi-professional leagues.

Their coach told reporters: “We have no chance. We’re like lambs going to the slaughter.”

One promising player couldn’t make the trip at all because his employer wouldn’t give him time off. The team trained together exactly once — the day before they left for Brazil.

Arriving for their first game, they lost handily, 3-1 to Spain.

Then, on June 29, 1950, they played England.

England was making its World Cup debut; England’s Football Association had boycotted every previous tournament, considering it beneath them. Their roster included many of the best players in the world. But against the Americans, they rested Stanley Matthews, widely considered the finest footballer alive, thinking there was no chance they’d need him.

The bookmakers had England at 3-1 to win the entire tournament. The Americans were listed at 500-1.

The Daily Mirror wrote before the match that “the only unanswered question seemed to be the size of the American’s defeat.”

The next day, however, the Associated Press reported what actually happened in the game — to a U.S. audience that was largely learning about its existence for the first time:

RIO DE JANEIRO, June 30 — If the British were to organize a baseball team and defeat the New York Yankees, it wouldn’t cause much more surprise than the United States 1-0 upset of England in the world soccer championships here yesterday.

The favored British team and the spectators were stunned by the result. The lone tally was scored by Ed Souza of Fall River, Mass. at 39 minutes of the first half.

...

Brazilian fans swarmed onto the field after the United States victory and took the North Americans on their shoulders while the victors were given an ovation.

Yep, the Americans won. However, quick correction, 76 years later: It was Gaetjens, the Haitian-born dishwasher, who scored the lone goal for the United States, not Souza.

How unexpected was the U.S. victory? In London, several newspaper editors received the wire report and printed the score as England 10, United States 1, assuming it was a misprint.

As for the American players — well, they came home and returned to their day jobs. There’s also a note of tragedy we have to add here, which is that Gaetjens returned to Haiti in 1954, married, had three children — and ten years later was killed by the secret police of dictator François Duvalier.

It was another 40 years before the United States even qualified for the World Cup again; then four years later in 1994, the U.S. hosted the tournament for the first time, setting attendance records that still stand — but will likely be broken this summer.

Major League Soccer followed, and a generation of American kids grew up playing the sport.

Still, the 1950 team is arguably the high-water mark of American men’s soccer, given that it was a group of mailmen and schoolteachers and dishwashers who beat the country that had invented the game, and had essentially no tradition of American soccer success to build on.

Fun trivia about U.S. and England soccer: England has never beaten the United States in any game that mattered in any tournament — despite soccer being England’s number 1 sport. Three meetings — 1950, 2010, and 2022 — one American win, two draws.

As this newsletter goes out, both teams are still in the 2026 World Cup, both playing their Round of 32 matches on Wednesday — the US against Bosnia and Herzegovina in Santa Clara, England against the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Atlanta.

They’re on opposite sides of the bracket. The only way they meet again is in the final, on July 19 in New York.

If it happens, say a little prayer for Joe Gaetjens and his teammates. Then tell other people who he was.

All writing is autobiographical ... so by the time you read this I’ll be on my way to my second World Cup game of this tournament. I was at France’s victory over Iraq last week in Philadelphia, and today my wife and I will watch Germany take on Paraguay near Boston.

Still rooting for the U.S.A. and Canada (and psyched after Canada’s win yesterday over South Africa). It’s a beautiful game!

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7 other moments to know from history this week

• June 28: “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” — Janis Joplin, from the a cappella song she recorded three days before her death in October 1970, which became one of the most recognizable car references in the history of popular music. Her reference was possible only because on this day in 1926, two rival German automakers formally merged to create Daimler-Benz AG.

• June 29: “The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his memoir At Ease, explaining the two experiences that shaped the most consequential domestic legislation of his presidency: his experience in 1919 crossing the country in a military convoy, and watching Allied forces move rapidly across Germany on the Autobahn in 1945. On this day in 1956, he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act authorizing $25 billion to build 41,000 miles of interstate highway, the largest public works project in American history to that point.

• June 30: “Our wounds are too fresh and too painful still for us to drive them from our memory.” — Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the independent Republic of the Congo, in an unscheduled speech he delivered at the independence ceremony on this day in 1960, directly in front of King Baudouin of Belgium. Lumumba was assassinated six months later; he was 35 years old.

• July 1: “We are a great country, and shall become one of the greatest in the universe if we preserve it; we shall sink into insignificance and adversity if we suffer it to be broken.” — John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, sworn in on this day in 1867. Macdonald had wanted the new country to be called the Kingdom of Canada; the British government talked him out of it.

• July 2: “It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” — John Adams, writing to his wife Abigail 250 years ago, predicting to her that July 2, 1776, the day on which the Continental Congress voted to declare independence from Great Britain, would be celebrated as America’s birthday.

• July 3: “I have not had one unpleasant moment.” — Spencer Gore, the 27-year-old rackets player who won the first Wimbledon championship on this day in 1877, defeating William Marshall 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 in a final that lasted 48 minutes.

• July 4: “Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” — Lou Gehrig, speaking at Yankee Stadium on this day in 1939, two weeks after the New York Yankees first baseman had retired at 36 after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

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This is the story of a 19th century chemistry discovery that affects our lives in many ways today, and that most people are completely unaware of.

Let’s change that, starting our narrative in 1852, when a boy named Henri Moissan was born in Paris.

The son of a railway employee and a seamstress, Moissan became an apprentice clockmaker, but then wound up in the army during the Franco-Prussian War (1870; saved you a Google). Afterward, he switched careers, so to speak, and became a trainee chemist in a pharmacy.

He apparently received some renown after saving a patient who had been poisoned with arsenic, and had the chance to go back to school — earning a doctoral level degree at age 28, in 1880.

This background placed Moissan perfectly to take up a quest that had flummoxed European chemists for more than 70 years at the time — the attempt to isolate an element that they were convinced existed, but that had never been directly observed.

This was fluorine — the last halogen anyone hadn’t managed to isolate, and the one that kept killing the people who tried.

I don’t think it’s too much to say some parts of the chemistry world at the time were obsessed with this question, to the point that several scientists chased after it to the point of serious injury or death:

• A Belgian chemist named Paulin Louyet tried to isolate it and died of poisoning.

• A Frenchman named Jérôme Nicklès tried next, knowing exactly what had happened to Louyet, and died the same way.

• Two Irish brothers, Thomas and George Knox, both attempted it in the 1830s; Thomas nearly died, and George was disabled for three years afterward.

Chemists started calling the dead and injured the “fluorine martyrs.”

None of them knew exactly what they were dying for; they just knew something was in that rock, and it was killing the people who went looking for it.

Fluorine, once freed from its compounds, is the most reactive element on the periodic table. It corrodes glass. It ignites substances that don’t normally burn. Every 19th-century chemist who went after it was handling something that wanted to combine violently with whatever it touched, including human tissue.

Using a borrowed laboratory, Moissan took up the quest.

Moissan built a custom electrolysis apparatus out of platinum and iridium, the only materials that could resist what he was trying to produce, sealed with stoppers carved from fluorite itself. He cooled the whole system to -50°C to slow the reaction down enough to survive it.

He poisoned himself with his own apparatus more than once.

Then, on June 26, 1886, he ran an electric current through a solution of potassium fluoride dissolved in hydrofluoric acid, inside his platinum apparatus, at fifty degrees below freezing. A pale yellow-green gas collected at one electrode.

Fluorine. Isolated, alone, for the first time in human history, after roughly seventy years of failed attempts and at least four deaths along the way.

The French Academy of Sciences sent three of its most distinguished members to confirm it. It held.

Moissan spent the following years studying the element’s properties and building an electric furnace capable of reaching temperatures over 3,000°C — itself a major advance, used to produce industrial compounds that had been impossible to create at lower heat.

In 1906 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The committee’s citation called fluorine “that savage beast among the elements” and praised the skill with which Moissan had tamed it.

He died the following February, at 54, officially of appendicitis, though some historians have wondered whether decades of fluorine and carbon monoxide exposure played a role.

None of the dead and disabled men of the 19th century actually knew what fluorine would be used for, of course. So here’s a list of some of the things their work led to:

• Roughly a fifth of modern pharmaceutical drugs — including widely prescribed antidepressants and cholesterol medications — contain fluorine atoms, added because they make the drugs more stable and effective in the body.

• Hydrofluoric acid, a fluorine compound, etches the silicon wafers inside every computer chip and smartphone on Earth.

• Teflon — chemically inert, heat-resistant, used in everything from frying pans to surgical implants to spacecraft components — exists because fluorine chemistry exists.

• Fluoride compounds in toothpaste and drinking water prevent tooth decay for billions of people.

• Uranium hexafluoride, the only stable, gaseous uranium compound, is what makes uranium enrichment for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons possible at industrial scale.

Granted, early refrigerants made from fluorine compounds were celebrated for being inert and non-toxic—but they turned out to be destroying the ozone layer. So, they were phased out worldwide starting in the late 1980s.

Very few people knew what was going on in Moissan’s borrowed lab 140 years ago this week. Heck, very few people know today! But now you’re an exception.

Thanks for reading.

Now that I’ve finished writing this newsletter on a chip-infused computer and you’re done reading it on your chip-infused smartphone, I’m off to make scrambled eggs in a nonstick pan and then brush my teeth.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• June 21: “I was singing to God and I was saying that God was the Tambourine Man and I was saying to him, ‘Hey, God, take me for a trip and I’ll follow you.’ It was a prayer of submission.” — Roger McGuinn, lead singer of the Byrds, describing the spiritual undertone behind the band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the opening track of their debut album of the same name, released on this day in 1965.

• June 22: “One more of the emotionally charged and at times dramatic pages in Berlin’s post-war history has been turned.” — Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, speaking at the ceremony in Berlin on this day in 1990, when a crane lifted the guardhouse at Checkpoint Charlie off its foundation and carried it away.

• June 23: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” — The full text of Title IX, signed into law on this day in 1972. The law is best known today for transforming women’s college athletics.

• June 24: “It came spasmodically from a chain of nine circular-type aircraft way up from the vicinity of Mount Rainier... [like] “a saucer if you skip it across water.” — Kenneth Arnold, an Idaho pilot and search-and-rescue volunteer, describing what he saw on this day in 1947. Newspapers garbled his description into “flying saucers,” a phrase that didn’t exist the day before and has never left it since.

• June 25: “How proud Anne would have been if she had lived to see this.” — Otto Frank, the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, on the publication of his daughter’s diary in the Netherlands on this day in 1947, under the title Het Achterhuis — “The Secret Annex.”

• June 26: “History will honor you for it.” — President Harry Truman, addressing the delegates of 50 nations who had just signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco on this day in 1945, seven weeks before the war in the Pacific finally ended.

• June 27: “Captain, our adventures have been a little different.” — Theodore Roosevelt, greeting Joshua Slocum, the first person in history to sail solo around the world, who had completed his voyage on this day in 1898 after more than three years and 46,000 miles alone aboard a 37-foot rebuilt oyster boat. Slocum’s reply: “That is true, Mr. President, but I see you got here first.”

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This week’s essay opens in one of the most horrible places in the history of the world, and with a short story that two groups of people experienced very differently at the time.

The first group is very hard to have any empathy for: a group of SS guards at the main gate at Auschwitz on June 20, 1942.

Whoever they were, they were nervous and afraid: One of them looked up to see the car belonging to camp commandant Rudolf Höss idling in front of him, waiting for them to open the barrier.

An officer inside — an Untersturmführer according to his rank insignia, roughly equivalent to a lieutenant — leaned out the window and screamed at them: “Wake up, you buggers! Open up or I’ll open you up!”

The guards, rattled, scrambled to raise the barrier. The car drove through.

The second group of people? The men inside the car.

They were not in fact Nazi officers; they were four Auschwitz prisoners in the midst of one of the most daring escapes you’ll ever learn about. Their names:

• Kazik Piechowski, 22, who had been an Eagle Scout imprisoned at Auschwitz for two years. (Boy Scouts were targeted early on; apparently the Nazis feared them as young men with strong feelings of patriotism).

• a Polish priest named Józef Lempart.

• a young resistance courier named Stanisław Jaster.

• Eugeniusz Bendera, a mechanic who worked in the camp’s motor pool repairing SS vehicles, who had been placed on a list for execution — spurring the escape plan to begin with.

They had stolen the car, the uniforms, and Nazi guns and hand grenades, but they had pledged that they would not kill any Germans on the way out—out of hard-earned confidence that no matter what they might do to hurt the Nazis, the Nazis would enact far greater vengeance on their fellow prisoners.

It was Piechowski who spoke German, and who wore the lieutenant’s uniform, and who yelled at the gate guards. Had they not complied, all four men had decided to shoot each other rather than risk recapture and retribution.

Exactly 2 years

Auschwitz was the largest Nazi killing center. Of roughly 1.3 million people sent there, an estimated 1.1 million died — most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war.

Piechowski had arrived two years before, to the day, in the second transport ever sent to the camp, when it was still being built by the people imprisoned in it, after being caught trying to escape to Hungary.

He later described the first months as a kind of total shock — the starvation, the violence, prisoners forced to eat from the same bowl they used at night if they lost their spoon.

Their escape plan took almost absurd levels of nerve.

They disguised themselves as a work detail moving a cart, which gave them relative uninspected mobility in the camp. Then, they managed to sneak into a storeroom via a coal chute Piechowski had rigged so that it didn’t latch properly, and stole the Nazi uniforms, weapons — and Höss’s Steyr 220.

Besides simply escaping, they carried an intelligence report written by Witold Pilecki — a Polish army officer who had deliberately gotten himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz to organize resistance and smuggle information to the Polish underground.

Not over for a long time afterward

The barrier went up. They drove out of Auschwitz in the commandant’s car, in German uniforms, carrying German weapons, and nobody stopped them.

Forty miles away, they abandoned the car and split up. All four men survived the escape itself, although the German reprisals were in fact brutal.

Both Piechowski’s parents and Jaster’s were arrested by the Germans afterward and died at Auschwitz.

According to multiple accounts, the camp’s policy of tattooing prisoners with identification numbers — the practice most associated with Auschwitz today — was introduced partly in response to this escape, after a furious Höss demanded to know how four prisoners could vanish in his own car, wearing his own men’s uniforms, carrying his own ammunition.

Piechowski made his way toward Ukraine, couldn’t find safe refuge there, returned to Poland under a false name, and joined the Home Army — the main Polish underground resistance — fighting the Germans until the war ended in 1945.

Then, under the new Communist government that took power in Poland after the war, he was arrested again. Membership in the Home Army — the same resistance movement that had fought the Nazis — was now treated as evidence of disloyalty to the new regime. Piechowski was sentenced to ten years in prison.

He served seven.

Witold Pilecki

Honestly, Witold Pilecki deserves his own newsletter and then some; in short, he escaped Auschwitz himself in 1943, fought in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Germans, and then — like Piechowski — returned to Poland afterward.

He was arrested by the Communist secret police in 1947, accused of espionage, and executed in May 1948.

As for Piechowski, he lived to be 98. After Poland’s transition away from communism, he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the country’s highest civilian honor. For most of his life before that, almost nobody outside Poland had heard his story.

The optimism in this story isn’t that they escaped — most people who tried didn’t, and the four of them knew the odds better than anyone. It’s that faced with those odds, knowing exactly what failure would cost, they decided to try anyway. Sometimes fortune favors the bold.

Sometimes the boldness is the whole point, regardless of what fortune does.

Katy Carr

In 2009, a British singer-songwriter named Katy Carr — who has Polish roots on her mother’s side — learned about Piechowski’s escape and was struck by the details of the last 80 meters or so, the moment at the gate, the few seconds when the entire plan came down to whether four starving men in stolen uniforms could bluff their way past a single guard.

She wrote a song about it, called “Kommander’s Car,” and then traveled to Gdansk to meet Piechowski in person and play it for him. He had never had anyone do anything like that before, and Carr later made a documentary about the meeting and spent years afterward touring with the song and working to keep the story alive.

I met Katy Carr briefly years ago, when I was a reporter at Stars and Stripes, which is how I first heard about Piechowski’s story.

It wasn’t really a Stripes story, and I couldn’t write about it then. But I’m sure glad I knew it to share now.

I’ll admit I went back and forth on whether to write about something as terrible and sacred as Auschwitz in a newsletter that’s supposed to be about optimism. I’m not sure any of us is fully worthy of telling these stories.

But I think they’re worth knowing, and worth retelling, and so here we are.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• June 14: “We’ve had a terrible voyage. The wonder is we are here at all.” — Captain John Alcock,upon landing in a bog outside Clifden, Ireland, on June 15, 1919, after departing Newfoundland the previous afternoon with navigator Arthur Whitten Brown — completing the first nonstop transatlantic flight in history.

• June 15: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed... except by the lawful judgment of his peers.” — From the Magna Carta, sealed by King John at Runnymede on this day in 1215, under pressure from rebel barons who had seized London.

• June 16: “Hey sky, take off your hat, I’m on my way!” — Valentina Tereshkova, a 26-year-old former textile factory worker, as she launched aboard Vostok 6 on this day in 1963, becoming the first woman in space. She orbited the Earth 48 times over nearly three days.

• June 17: “I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.” — Amelia Earhart, describing her role as a passenger and logkeeper, aboard the Fokker trimotor Friendship, which on this day in 1928 became the first aircraft to carry a woman across the Atlantic. Earhart was embarrassed, since the flight made her famous, but she’d done none of the flying herself. Four years later, in 1932, she went back and did it solo.

• June 18: “I knew that women belonged there.” — Sally Ride, who on this day in 1983 became the first American woman in space, launching aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger as a mission specialist.

• June 19: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” — General Order No. 3, read aloud by Union Major General Gordon Granger and his troops on this day in 1865 — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and more than two months after the Confederacy’s surrender.

• June 20: "This age of fast-moving events requires quick, dependable communications for use in time of emergency." — President John F. Kennedy, on this day in 1963, the day American and Soviet negotiators signed the agreement creating the Washington-Moscow hotline. The first message was a typing test: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back 1234567890.

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Little diddy ‘bout Richard and Mildred …

With apologies to John Mellencamp, it’s time we talked about Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Delores Jeter if you don’t know who they are—and why we should know them.

Richard Perry Loving was born on October 29, 1933, in Central Point, Virginia, a small farming community in Caroline County. His family was of English and Irish descent. He was a bricklayer and construction worker, quiet and taciturn, with a platinum blonde crew cut.

A man of few words.

Mildred Delores Jeter was born on June 22, 1939, in the same community. Her ancestry was African American and Native American — she identified primarily as Rappahannock — and she was shy, soft-spoken, and possessed of what people who knew her described as a quiet dignity.

She and Richard grew up as neighbors. He first came to her family’s house as a teenager to hear her siblings play music.

Central Point was, at that time — and despite Virginia’s segregation laws — a surprisingly integrated community in practice — mixed-race families had lived there for generations, and the formal rules of Jim Crow sat uneasily alongside the actual texture of daily life.

Richard and Mildred knew each other for years before they began dating, and — we’re all adults here — when they got pregnant, they decided to get married.

Only problem: mixed race marriages weren’t allowed in Virginia, so they drove to Washington D.C. — where it was legal — on June 2, 1958.

Then, they came home to Virginia and moved in with Mildred’s family. Five weeks later, 2 a.m. on July 14, 1958, Sheriff Garnett Brooks and two deputies burst into their bedroom.

The charge was violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage a felony. On the wall above the bed was their marriage certificate from Washington D.C.; Sheriff Brooks told Richard it was no good in Virginia.

They pleaded guilty. Judge Leon Bazile sentenced them to one year in prison, then suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. His Honor wrote:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents.

The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

The Lovings moved to Washington D.C. They hated it. Their whole world was in Caroline County — their families, their friends, the land Richard knew.

Mildred later said that Washington felt like a foreign country. So, they’d sneak back to Virginia, taking risks whenever they could, for family events, for the births of their children — Richard’s mother was a midwife and delivered the babies at home.

Police kept finding them and expelling them again. Caroline County is about 70 miles from Washington — just across a border they couldn’t cross.

In 1963, Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, asking for help. Kennedy referred her to the ACLU.

Two lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschbaum, took the case for free. It wound its way through the Virginia courts, and eventually to the Supreme Court.

Neither Richard nor Mildred attended the oral arguments. Richard sent a message to his lawyers:

“Tell the Court I love my wife and it is just not fair that I cannot live with her in Virginia.”

On June 12, 1967 — 58 years ago this week — the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in their favor.

Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion:

“The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act was struck down, and laws banning interracial marriage in 15 other states fell with it.

The Lovings moved back home to Caroline County, where Richard built them a small concrete block house. They lived quietly, mostly out of the public eye, the way they had always wanted.

Richard was killed by a drunk driver in 1975; Mildred lost her right eye in the same accident. In a rare interview in 2007, she said:

“I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life.”

Mildred never remarried, and she stayed in the house Richard built until she died of pneumonia the following year.

There was a film about the Lovings released in 2016 — simply called Loving, starring Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton — that told the story well if you want more.

Honestly, could you pick a better name? Loving v. Virginia.

Quick personal note: In 1998, I spoke briefly with Mildred Loving.

I’d been thinking about writing a book about the real people behind landmark Supreme Court cases — a way to reiterate that our common law system is built on real human beings with real lives that are sometimes turned upside down in the process of making history.

I remember her as a quiet, dignified, composed woman who was a bit skeptical but very comfortable with her story and her place in history.

I set the book project aside; life intervened.

But I’m glad I get to tell the story now.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• June 7: “Only by playing with something can you find out what it is and what it can do.” — Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, managing director of the Lego Group, who on this day in 1968 opened the first Legoland park in Billund, Denmark. The park was built to accommodate the crowds of people who kept showing up at the factory wanting to see Lego models.

• June 8: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” — George Orwell, whose final novel, 1984, was published on this day in 1949.

• June 9: “Actually, I wanted to be a doctor; but instead I became the biggest quack in the world.” — Clarence “Ducky” Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, recalling his unlikely career — which began on this day in 1934 when the animated short The Wise Little Hen introduced Donald to the world.

• June 10: “He was the first living human with whom I had ever talked who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language.” — Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, describing his first conversation with Dr. Bob Smith, who on this day in 1935 took his last drink..

• June 11: “There will come a day in your life when you must act for others — your family, perhaps your community — and you must be ready.” — Vivian Malone Jones, speaking at the University of Alabama’s commencement ceremony in 2000, 37 years after she and James Hood became the first Black students to enroll there on this day in 1963.

• June 12: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” — Ronald Reagan, standing 100 yards from the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on this day in 1987.

• June 13: “Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed.” — Chief Justice Earl Warren, from the majority opinion in Miranda v. Arizona, decided on this day in 1966.

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Ever played Tetris?

• Maybe it was on a Game Boy in the back seat of a car.

• Maybe it was on a desktop computer when you were supposed to be working.

• Maybe it was on your phone last week.

It’s one of those games that requires no instruction, crosses every language barrier, and produces in almost every person who touches it the same response: one more game.

Tetris has been downloaded on mobile devices alone more than 500 million times. It has been played in more than 200 countries on more than 50 platforms. Neuroscientists have studied it and found it can reduce symptoms of PTSD and improve brain efficiency.

It is almost certainly the most widely played game in human history — certainly the most-played video game.

So it might be surprising, if you don’t know, to learn that it was created by a 29-year-old Soviet programmer in his spare time at the height of the Cold War, on a computer with no ability to create graphics, all as a way to test his machine.

His name is Alexey Pajitnov, and honestly the only less probable thing than for him to have invented an incredibly viral game long before anyone talked that way was all that had to happen in order for him to make any profit from the venture whatsoever.

If you’ve seen the 2023 Apple TV+ film about how Tetris escaped the Soviet Union and reached the world, spawning a high-stakes international licensing battle, you know that part.

But I think Pajitnov, the inventor, might be the more interesting person in the story.

Pajitnov was born on April 16, 1955, in Moscow, the son of a film critic and a woman who worked in publishing. He was a quiet, puzzle-obsessed child — the kind who could spend hours with a pentomino set, fitting differently shaped pieces into a box, turning the problem over and over until it resolved.

He studied applied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Aviation, then joined the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he worked on speech recognition and artificial intelligence — yes, all the way back then.

It was serious and kind of unglamorous work at the time, but he was good at it.

In the summer of 1984 — remember this was around the time of the Los Angeles Olympics, which the Soviets boycotted, in case you want a chronological marker — the Computing Centre received a new machine: the Electronika 60, which was basically a Soviet rip-off of a DEC minicomputer.

Pajitnov’s job was to test its capabilities, so he thought back to those pentomino puzzles from his childhood, simplified the pieces from five squares to four, and added the mechanic that made everything work: the pieces falling from the top of the screen.

The player had to arrange them into complete lines before the screen filled up. It was he who came up with the name “Tetris,” combining tetra, the Greek prefix for four, and tennis, his favorite sport.

The Electronika 60 had no graphics card, so the first version of Tetris was built entirely from keyboard characters — letters and symbols arranged to suggest blocks falling down a screen. It took up 2.7 KB of storage; by way of comparison in 2026, I’m guessing this email newsletter alone will run between 40 KB and 100 KB.

Still, back then it was impressive. Pajitnov showed it to his colleagues, and within days, productivity at the Computing Centre had collapsed, as all around him comrades played Tetris instead of working.

He sometimes had to pretend to be busy when he was actually playing himself. “Magic is in it,” he said.

From there:

• A 16-year-old intern named Vadim Gerasimov built the first proper IBM-compatible version with actual graphics.

• It went viral the quasi-old-fashioned way, spreading via copies on floppy disk, hand to hand from office to office across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and eventually into the West.

• In 1988 it reached a Las Vegas game trade show, where a Dutch-American designer named Henk Rogers first saw it and understood immediately that it was unlike anything else.

Now we get into what you might have seen in the recent film — one of the stranger legal battles in the history of entertainment.

Three people flew to Moscow simultaneously in February 1989 without knowing about each other — Rogers, a British software broker named Robert Stein of Andromeda Software, and Kevin Maxwell, son of media tycoon Robert Maxwell — all trying to negotiate rights with ELORG, the Soviet state organization that controlled software exports.

ELORG discovered that console versions of Tetris were being sold across Japan and the West without their knowledge or payment, and they were displeased. But Rogers won the handheld rights by offering ELORG a royalty per cartridge rather than the flat fee his rivals were proposing — more valuable to the Soviets in the long run, although more costly to Rogers himself.

He then convinced Nintendo to bundle Tetris with its new Game Boy rather than Mario or Donkey Kong. The Game Boy launched in 1989 and sold a million units in the United States in its first few weeks, and my little brother was playing with his in the back seat of a station wagon a few weeks later.

Throughout all of this, Pajitnov received nothing.

Because: communism.

He worked for a Soviet state institution, so the government owned what he created, and while Tetris made fortunes for publishers, console makers, and licensing bodies around the world, Pajitnov got nothing.

But then: Glasnost, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Pajitnov emigrated to the United States in 1991, and he got a job at Microsoft — and then in 1996, the ten-year license on Tetris expired.

Pajitnov teamed up with Rogers, and they founded The Tetris Company together. For the first time, Pajitnov began receiving royalties from his own game — twelve years after he built it on a machine that couldn’t display proper graphics.

Just past his 71st birthday, Pajitnov talks about all of this without apparent bitterness. Creating the game itself was its own reward, he says — although I assume he also doesn’t mind being financially rewarded.

Because: capitalism.

He’s still working in game design, although talk about a heck of a first entry into the industry.

“I never could have imagined,” he said, “anything like the history it actually had.”

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 31: “It is working better than expected.” — Werner von Siemens, writing to his brother Carl two weeks after demonstrating the world’s first electric locomotive on this day in 1879 at the Berlin Trade Exhibition. Every subway, tram, and electric train in the world descends from what debuted that day in Berlin.

• June 1: “A decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.” — Critic Kenneth Tynan of The Times of London, on the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on this day in 1967.

• June 2: “Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.” — Queen Elizabeth II, in her broadcast to the nation on the evening of her coronation on this day in 1953 — the first coronation in history to be televised.

• June 3: “At 10:00 p.m. … a switch was thrown … and electricity traveled 14 miles.” — From the Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation’s account of the first long-distance transmission of electricity in the United States, on this day in 1889. Before this moment, electricity could only be generated and used in the same location.

• June 4: “I came up with the idea while waiting in a long line at a Dallas bank.” — Don Wetzel, describing the moment of inspiration that led to the invention of the ATM, which he patented in the U.S. on this day in 1973 along with engineers Tom Barnes and George Chastain.

• June 5: “The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand.” — Harriet Beecher Stowe, describing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first installment of which appeared in the National Era on this day in 1851. Published as a book in 1852, it sold 1.5 million copies worldwide.

• June 6: “We’ll start the war from right here.” — Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the 26th president, on this day in 1944 at Utah Beach, Normandy, after discovering that strong tidal currents had carried his landing craft more than a mile south of the intended target. He was 56 years old, walked with a cane due to arthritis and World War I injuries, had petitioned three times for permission to lead the first wave of the assault, died of a heart attack five weeks later and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

• June 7: “I began to think of my duty. It would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation.” — Mohandas Gandhi, writing in his autobiography about this day in 1893, when the then-24-year-old Indian lawyer was thrown off a train in South Africa for refusing to move from his first-class compartment — for which he held a valid ticket — to a third-class car. The movement for Indian independence from Britain began on a train platform.

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Growing up in Rhode Island as I did, and thus learning Rhode Island history in school, you hear a lot about two things:

• First, lots of comparisons about how small the smallest U.S. state actually is — like the size of the micro-country of Luxembourg, or smaller than Long Island (which is actually an island), or how Texas is 221 times bigger.

• Second, Roger Williams, the 17th century minister who basically founded the colony that would go on to become the smallest state in the United States after he was kicked out of Massachusetts.

Williams was a progressive in many ways, a solid 200 years before the word was even coined. He was a fierce advocate for religious liberty and the separation of church and state, and a strong advocate for the idea that Crown edicts allocating land in North America were suspect, because they didn’t acknowledge that Native Americans had been living here long before the first Europeans landed.

In fact, that’s a big part of what got him kicked out of Massachusetts to begin with.

The Narragansetts took him in, and Williams later wrote that he had never experienced such kindness. He spent the rest of his life learning their language, trading with them, and defending their land rights in English courts.

I could write an entire newsletter about Williams; probably should at some point if I haven’t already. (After seven years of this (!), I lose count and constantly have to look things up.)

But today, I want to talk about one of the forgotten optimistic-in-retrospect anniversaries in United States history, which intimately involves the history of the place where I grew up. And we need to cover a bit more of Roger Williams in the process.

Williams started the colony of Rhode Island on land he bought from the Narragansetts. In 1663, King Charles II granted Rhode Island a charter guaranteeing freedom of conscience, elected self-governance, and no religious test for citizenship.

This was probably the most liberal political document in the colonial world to that date, and while moral failures abound — the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675, in which English forces attacked a Narragansett winter encampment and killed hundreds of women, children, and elderly, stands as one of the darkest chapters — that independent spirit inspired later events.

Case in point: Rhode Island was the first state to declare independence from England, two full months before the Declaration.

Which brings us to 1787, when the Constitutional Convention began in Philadelphia, and Rhode Island flat-out refused to send delegates.

Like everything in history, the reasons were complicated, but two stand out today:

• A powerful central government with the ability to tax was not an abstraction to Rhode Islanders — it was exactly what they had just fought a war to escape.

• More important for today, the original Constitution contained almost none of the things we like to think of as the cornerstone of American democracy: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable government searches and seizures, the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Thing I like to point out to people whose financial fortunes take a turn and have to consider bankruptcy: the Founding Fathers included bankruptcy in the original Constitution, but didn’t get around to freedom of speech until later, in case you ever wondered about their priorities.

Rhode Island held fast, even as other states ratified. The legislature rejected calls for a ratifying convention seven times. The state held a popular referendum in 1788 and voted the Constitution down, 2,708 to 237.

George Washington made a celebrated tour of New England in 1789, and he pointedly skipped Rhode Island in response. The state’s Federalist merchants wrote to ask whether they could secede from Rhode Island and join the Union separately.

By early 1790, Rhode Island stood entirely alone — the last state outside the Union. Congress threatened tariffs, back payment of war debts, treatment as a foreign country.

A ratifying convention finally met in March 1790 with an Anti-Federalist majority, debated for a week, then adjourned to Newport in late May. On May 29, 1790 — 236 years ago this week — the delegates voted: 34 in favor, 32 opposed.

Rhode Island became the 13th state, which completed the “United” in “United States of America.”

At the same time, the smallest state attached 18 declarations of human rights and 21 proposed amendments to its ratification — a ban on poll taxes, a ban on the draft, a ban on the importation of slaves.

Many were ignored, but when the Bill of Rights was ratified eighteen months later, much of what was included were things Rhode Island had obstinately insisted on.

There were other factors. Virginia, a much more powerful state back then, gets credit for pushing just as hard, but the fact remains that Rhode Island signed last.

This year, we celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, and July 4, 1776 is rightfully a watershed date in history.

I’m also quite glad that our national birthday is early in the summer — can you imagine trying to hold parades and host barbecues in January in Boston or New York City?

Still, I like that annoying, ornery, contrary little Rhode Island — a place founded by exiles and troublemakers, a place that had been demanding a Bill of Rights for three years while everyone else told it to sit down and sign — played a key role in shaping much of what we celebrate about America today.

Small state, big role. At least those of us who grew up there like to think so.

I hope you have a good Memorial Day, and better weather than is forecast in Rhode Island (and New Jersey). And as every year on this date, I like to mention three U.S. veterans in particular who gave their lives for our country: Lieutenant Todd Bryant (Iraq, 2003), Captain Tim Moshier (Iraq, 2006), and Specialist Jacob Andrews (Afghanistan, 2012).

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 24: “It will be the work of our lives to repay him for what he has done.” — Emily Warren Roebling, speaking of her husband Washington Roebling, who directed construction of the Brooklyn Bridge from a sickbed for 11 years after being struck by caisson disease while supervising work on the underwater foundations. The bridge opened on this day in 1883. Within 24 hours, 250,000 people had walked across. The Brooklyn Eagle called it “the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

• May 25: “You can’t even believe it in a way that you’re standing up there. You’re with your team, and yeah, there might be a few tears. You hold your flag and you get your photos — but then you have to turn around and get down. You gotta get down alive.” — Erik Weihenmayer, recalling the moment on this day in 2001 when he reached the summit of Mount Everest, becoming the first blind person in history to do so.

• May 26: “It was absolutely terrifying. I thought they were going to mow me down every minute.” — Frank Clement, the Bentley driver who, during the first 24 Hours of Le Mans on this day in 1923, improvised a fuel tank repair after a stone punctured his car, then cycled back to the stricken vehicle against traffic while carrying two gas cans around his neck.

• May 27: “I’m not going to limit what I can say. I have to be true to the song.” — Bob Dylan, then 21, who on this day in 1963 released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album and first as a fully formed songwriter. The record opened with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which would be performed at the March on Washington three months later, hours before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

• May 28: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” — Alan Turing, the British mathematician who on this day in 1936 submitted to the London Mathematical Society a paper titled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” which described, entirely in the abstract, the logical architecture of a programmable computer.

• May 29: “And ain’t I a woman? I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!” — Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved woman who on this day in 1851 rose to speak at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in a speech that witnesses described as turning the entire mood of the gathering.

• May 30: “Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms.” — General John A. Logan, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, from General Order No. 11 designating May 30, 1868 as a national day of remembrance, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.

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Jacob Davis was born Jacob Youphes in Riga, Latvia, in 1831. He emigrated to the United States, bounced between cities and trades, failed at a brewery in Reno, Nevada, and eventually opened a small tailor shop on Virginia Street. He made tents, horse blankets, and wagon covers for railroad workers. He bought his fabric from a dry goods merchant in San Francisco named Levi Strauss.

In 1870, a woman came into his shop. Her husband — a woodcutter known around Reno as Alkali Ike — kept destroying his pants, and she wanted a pair that would hold together. Davis had copper rivets on his workbench, left over from a horse blanket he’d been repairing. He put them at the stress points — the corners of the pockets, the base of the button fly. The pants held.

Word got around and Davis started getting more orders than he could handle. He knew he had something, and he knew he couldn’t afford the $68 patent filing fee. So in 1872, he wrote a letter to his fabric supplier in San Francisco — in the best English he could manage, which was not quite standard:

”The secrett of them Pants is the Rivits that I put in those Pockots and I found the demand so large that I cannot make them fast enough.

My nabors are getting yealouse of these success and unless I secure it by Patent Papers it will soon become to be a general thing everybody will make them up and thare will be no money in it.”

He proposed splitting the patent fee and sharing the rights. Levi Strauss wrote back immediately: Yes.

Let’s talk about Strauss. He’d been born Loeb Strauss in Buttenheim, Bavaria, in 1829. He came to New York at 18 after his father died, and in 1853 made his way to San Francisco — not to mine, but to sell to the people who were mining. By the time Davis’s letter arrived, he was prosperous, well-established, and a man who recognized a good idea when he saw one.

On May 20, 1873, 153 years ago this week, the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent No. 139,121 — officially for “an Improvement in Fastening Pocket Openings” — to Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss and Company. Davis moved to San Francisco to run the factory. He designed the double-arch stitching on the back pockets that became a registered trademark — the oldest apparel trademark still in use today. They called the pants “waist overalls.” Nobody called them jeans yet.

For the next 60 years, that’s essentially what they remained — workwear. Miners, cowboys, and railroad crews wore them. During the 1930s, jeans moved from the Sears catalogue onto the pages of Vogue. During World War II, soldiers wore them off-duty. A pair of Levi’s became one of the most coveted items American GIs could trade in occupied Europe.

Then Marlon Brando wore them in The Wild One in 1953. James Dean wore them in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. Overnight, jeans became the unofficial uniform of juvenile delinquency — and high schools across America banned them. The ban made them irresistible. By 1958 a newspaper report estimated that 90 percent of American teenagers wore jeans everywhere except bed and church.

The civil rights movement claimed them too — not the hippies, though they came later, but the Black college students who rode south to organize protests, deliberately wearing denim as a symbol of solidarity with the Southern Black working class. By 1969, a trade publication noted: “What has happened to denim in the last decade is really a capsule of what happened to America. It has climbed the ladder of taste.”

Behind the Iron Curtain, they were contraband — a symbol of everything the Soviet state was not. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the young people dismantling the first bricks were photographed in blue jeans. When Russian citizens could finally buy Levi’s legally, one customer wrote to the company: “A man hasn’t very many happy minutes in his life, but every happy moment remains in his memory for a long time. The buying of Levi’s 501 jeans is one of such moments in my life.”

In 1995, Levi’s ran a television commercial set in Prague — black and white, no dialogue, a young man navigating city streets in a Trabant he’s clearly still getting used to, near-misses and all.

At the end he pulls up to a group of friends, gets out — he’s in his boxer shorts — and they all pile in and drive away. The announcer delivers the tagline: “Reason Number 007: In Prague, you can trade them for a car.”

It was a joke. Mostly.

(As a card-carrying member of Generation X, I remembered this commercial instantly when I realized the Levi’s anniversary this week.)

Jacob Davis worked at the factory until his death in 1908, his name largely forgotten for most of the following century.

Then in 1974 an archivist at the National Archives came across a transcript from a 100-year-old court case in which Davis testified to how it all happened. In 2006, a historical marker was placed at the site of his tailor shop on Virginia Street in Reno. Strauss, as far as anyone can tell, never set foot in the city.

Two immigrants. Between them they invented the most democratic garment in human history. The company does $6 billion in annual revenue, sells in more than 110 countries, and its name is on the stadium where the San Francisco 49ers play.

Not bad for a letter written in broken English by a tailor who couldn’t afford a filing fee.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 17: “If the red and green images had been as fully photographed as the blue, it would have been a truly-coloured image of the ribbon.” — James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist, commenting on the imperfect but world-changing result of the first color photograph, demonstrated on this day in 1861 at the Royal Institution in London.

• May 18: “I’d get two chances — just two — to set my record because that’s all the fuel the plane could carry.” — Jacqueline Cochran, from her autobiography, recalling the morning of this day in 1953 when she climbed into a borrowed Canadian Air Force F-86 Sabre jet at Rogers Dry Lake, California, and became the first woman to break the sound barrier.

• May 19: “It has swept away forever the age-old barriers of time and distance.” — Juan Trippe, founder of Pan American World Airways, describing what transatlantic air service meant to the world — service he launched on this day in 1939 when the Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper departed Port Washington, New York, under Captain Arthur LaPorte on the first scheduled transatlantic airmail flight in history.

• May 20: “To afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” — Abraham Lincoln, from his message to Congress on July 4, 1861 — words he made concrete on this day in 1862 when he signed the Homestead Act, opening 160 acres of public land to any American citizen willing to farm it for five years and pay an $18 filing fee.

• May 21: “You must never think of anything except the need, and how to meet it.” — Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, which held its first official meeting on this day in 1881 at her apartment in Washington, D.C.

• May 22: “If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats, we will never achieve any progress.” — Richard Nixon, to Leonid Brezhnev at the opening of summit talks in Moscow on this day in 1972 — to which Brezhnev replied, with a laugh: “They would simply bury us in paper.” Nixon, who had built his career as America’s most fervent anti-communist, spent eight days negotiating with the Soviets and came home with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the first Strategic Arms Limitations agreement.

• May 23: “By this means, as I wear my spectacles constantly, I have only to move my eyes up or down, as I want to see distinctly far or near, the proper glasses being always ready.” — Benjamin Franklin, writing to his friend George Whatley on this day in 1785, describing what he called his “double spectacles,” or what we now think of as bifocals.

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Lothar Hermann was born in 1901 in Quirnbach, a small town in the Westerwald region of Germany. He grew up, trained as a merchant, worked in finance, and in the 1930s began quietly smuggling currency across the border into France to support Jews trying to reach Palestine.

In 1935 the Gestapo caught him. They sent him to Dachau, where the beatings were severe enough that he lost the sight in one eye, and eventually the other.

When he was released, he emigrated to Argentina with his wife and his daughter Sylvia.

Years later, when Sylvia was a teenager when she met a German boy at a club in Buenos Aires named Klaus. They began seeing each other. One evening Klaus came to dinner and said, in front of Lothar, that it would have been better if the Germans had finished the job of extermination.

Lothar said nothing, but he remembered the name. Klaus Eichmann.

In 1957, when Sylvia was reading the newspaper aloud to her father — he was by then entirely blind — and came across a detailed account of Nazi war crimes trials in Germany.

The story described in detail the role of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Final Solution, last seen alive after the war, believed to be in hiding somewhere in South America.

Lothar did not think it was a coincidence. He wrote letters — too the Jewish community in Buenos Aires — no response.

To a prominent Nazi hunter — no meaningful follow-up.

To Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor-general of the German state of Hesse, a Jewish man himself who had survived the Nazi years and who did not trust his own colleagues not to tip Eichmann off if official channels were used.

Bauer took the letter seriously and passed it on to Israeli intelligence.

Mossad sent an operative to look at the house where Klaus and his father lived, but he came back skeptical. The house was too modest, too wretched — a small structure without running water or electricity on the outskirts of San Fernando, a working-class suburb north of Buenos Aires.

A man like Eichmann, who had organized the deportation of millions with the administrative power of the entire Nazi state behind him, wouldn’t be living like this. The case was effectively closed.

Bauer pushed again; Mossad sent an operative back — this time to meet Lothar and Sylvia in person. He believed them—but without proof, nothing happened.

Mossad asked the Hermanns to investigate further themselves, without support, without protection.

So Lothar and Sylvia boarded a train to Buenos Aires and started asking around for Klaus Eichmann’s address. Sylvia went to the door alone. Eichmann answered, saying he was Klaus’s uncle. Then Klaus came home and called him father.

Sylvia returned and told her father what she had seen. They were certain. But Mossad was still not convinced.

Then a second independent tip arrived — a German geologist named Gerhard Klammer, who had worked with Eichmann at a construction company, provided a photograph and an address, corroborating everything the Hermanns had said.

By early 1960, Mossad director Isser Harel had seen enough. He flew to Buenos Aires himself to oversee the operation.

The man living on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando had spent fifteen years becoming invisible. He was working on the assembly line at a Mercedes-Benz factory. He called himself Ricardo Klement.

He rode the same bus home every evening at roughly the same time. For weeks, Mossad agents watched him — noting his schedule, renting safe houses, building a cell in one of them where he would be held.

They photographed him from a distance with a camera hidden in a briefcase, and compared the shape of his ears to photographs in his SS file.

It was a match.

On the evening of May 11, 1960, seven agents waited for two hours near the bus stop on Garibaldi Street. When Eichmann finally stepped off the bus and began walking toward his house, agent Peter Malkin stepped forward.

“Momentito, señor.”

Eichmann panicked; Malkin grabbed him and forced him into the car. An agent told Eichmann: “If you move, you will be shot in the head.”

They held him in the safe house for nine days, and he offered aliases twice before admitting who he was. They flew him to Israel on an El Al plane, drugged, dressed in an El Al crew uniform, and boarded as a sick flight attendant.

The code word sent to Israel confirming the capture was: “The typewriter is okay.”

On May 23, 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stood before the Knesset and announced that Adolf Eichmann was in custody and would stand trial.

It was the first trial in history to be televised. More than 100 witnesses testified — Holocaust survivors, most of whom had never spoken publicly about what they had experienced.

Eichmann sat behind bulletproof glass and did not deny his role. He said he had been following orders.

He was found guilty on all 15 counts. On June 1, 1962, he was hanged — the only time Israel has ever carried out a death sentence. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, so there would be no grave, no marker, no place for anyone to come.

Lothar Hermann, the blind man whose letter started all of it, died in 1974, largely unrecognized.

(The video above is from a somewhat fictionalized account of the capture: Operation Finale. But it’s worth a watch.)

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 10: “Done.” — The single word tapped in Morse code by the Western Union telegrapher at Promontory Summit, Utah, at 12:47 p.m. on this day in 1869, announcing to the nation that the Golden Spike had been driven and the first transcontinental railroad was complete.

• May 11: “The great thing about Python was that it was somewhere we could use all the material that everybody else had said was too silly.” — Terry Jones, recalling the evening of this day in 1969 when all six members of Monty Python met for the first time together at a Kashmir tandoori restaurant in Hampstead, London.

• May 12: “Strategically unimportant.” — The German government’s official verdict on the world’s first programmable, fully automatic digital computer, presented by engineer Konrad Zuse to a small audience of scientists at the German Laboratory for Aviation in Berlin on this day in 1941. The original Z3 was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943. Zuse rebuilt it from memory.

• May 13: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” — Winston Churchill, from his first speech as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, delivered in the House of Commons on this day in 1940, three days after he had been called to replace Neville Chamberlain.

• May 14: “I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inoculation.” — Edward Jenner, from his own account of the experiment he conducted on this day in 1796 in Berkeley, England — scraping cowpox matter from the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and introducing it into two small cuts on the arm of his gardener’s eight-year-old son, James Phipps. The experiment launched the science of vaccination.

• May 15: “The effect was electric.” — A contemporary account of the moment nylon stockings went on sale for the first time across the United States on this day in 1940; stores in New York sold out within hours.

• May 16: “I will never forget that moment. I had never heard anything like it.” — Jack Mullin, recalling when he first encountered a German Magnetophon — a broadcast-quality tape recorder in the waning days of World War II. Mullin, an Army Signal Corps engineer, dismantled two machines, shipped them home, and demonstrated them on this day in 1946 at an Institute of Radio Engineers show in San Francisco. Bing Crosby, who hated performing live, wrote a check for $50,000 on the spot.

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Today’s story began on the seventh floor of a bombed-out department store in Tokyo, 80 years ago this week: May 7, 1946.

This was less than a year after the unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied forces. The country’s economy was in ruins. An engineer named Masaru Ibuka borrowed about $500 to start a radio repair shop.

Seeking to branch out, his tiny company tried to manufacture and sell electric rice cookers to a starving nation.

The rice cookers didn’t work. Next up: tape recorders — enormous, rudimentary things. Ibuka and his small team eventually showed courts how the machines could replace stenographers, and showed schools what they could do for language learning. Slowly, they found customers.

The real turning point, in retrospect, may have been a short article in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper about the venture — because another engineer who had known Ibuka during the war read it and reached out.

They teamed up. What followed was success that most people can only dream of. But first, the two men:

• Masaru Ibuka: Born 1908 in Nikko, Japan. Lost his father at two, raised by his grandfather, became a solitary tinkering child who by 17 was operating a shortwave radio station connecting with strangers across oceans. Spent World War II as a defense contractor for the Imperial Navy, and when it ended found himself 37 years old in a ruined country with nothing but his tools and his ingenuity.

• Akio Morita: Born 1921 near Nagoya, the firstborn son of a sake-brewing dynasty that traced its lineage to 1665. His father began grooming him to be the fifteenth-generation heir before he could understand what that meant — but his mother owned one of Japan’s first RCA Victrola record players, and Morita spent his childhood taking it apart instead. He walked away from three centuries of family obligation to study physics, graduating in 1944 directly into the Imperial Navy.

They’d met on a wartime research committee. Ibuka was the civilian technical expert, 13 years older. Morita was a 23-year-old ensign who had walked away from 300 years of inheritance to study physics.

They were temperamentally opposite — Ibuka shy and introspective, Morita outgoing and restless — and became close friends almost immediately.

The war ended in August 1945. Ibuka set up his radio repair shop. He called it Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute.

On October 6, 1945, the newspaper article ran. Morita, preparing to join the faculty of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, read it. He went to Tokyo to find his old wartime colleague.

Their partnership flourished — but it was in 1952, when Ibuka visited the United States and learned that Bell Laboratories had licensed transistor technology, that things really changed. Ibuka saw a pocket-sized radio. He saw what consumer electronics could become.

Morita flew to New York the following year and completed the licensing deal.

In 1958, preparing to sell to the world, they renamed the company — combining the Latin word sonus with sonny, American slang for a bright young person. Sony. Four letters. Recognizable everywhere.

In 1961, Sony became the first Japanese company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1979 it gave the world the Walkman. In 1982, the compact disc. More cameras than we know what to do with.

The PlayStation followed.

Ibuka died in 1997. Morita died in 1999. In 1992, when both men suffered serious health crises at nearly the same time, they were placed in adjoining hospital rooms.

Ibuka’s son told reporters that the bond between them had been “more like love than friendship.”

They had met in a wartime committee room, building weapons for a losing war.

One of them was supposed to be a sake brewer. The other had lost his father at two years old.

Between them, starting from a city in ruins, they built a company that changed how the world listened to music, watched television, and came to see Japan in an entirely different way.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 3: “It seemed unthinkable. We were flying at nearly 500 miles an hour, at 35,000 feet, and the ride was as smooth and quiet as sitting in a drawing room.” — A passenger aboard the de Havilland Comet, as reported in contemporary press accounts of the world’s first scheduled jet passenger service, arriving in Johannesburg this day in 1952.

• May 4: “This is the most important decision in my life — to give up all if necessary for the Freedom Ride, that justice and freedom might come to the Deep South.” — John Lewis, 21 years old, one of 13 black and white activists who boarded buses in Washington D.C. on this day in 1961 and headed south to challenge segregation. In Alabama, one bus was firebombed and passengers were beaten with pipes and bats. The rides continued for six months and led directly to the federal desegregation of interstate travel facilities.

• May 5: “A new and useful improvement in weaving straw with silk or thread.” — The official description of the patent issued on this day in 1809 to Mary Kies of Killingly, Connecticut — the first patent granted to a woman in American history. Women could legally apply for patents under the Patent Act of 1790, but almost none did, because in most states they could not legally own property independent of their husbands. Kies died penniless in 1837, her patent file destroyed in a fire, fashion having moved on.

• May 6: “I felt suddenly and gloriously free from the burden of athletic ambition that I had been carrying for years.” — Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old medical student who on this day in 1954 ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds at Oxford’s Iffley Road track, becoming the first person in history to break the four-minute mile — a barrier that experts had long declared the absolute limit of human capability.

• May 7: “Let the good times roll.” — The unofficial motto of New Orleans, the city founded on this day in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, a French-Canadian naval officer who had entered the French navy at age 12. He chose a crescent-shaped bend in the Mississippi River 100 miles from its mouth, believing it would be safe from hurricanes and tidal surges. He was not entirely right about that.

• May 8: “The world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox.” — The official declaration of the 33rd World Health Assembly, issued on this day in 1980 — the only time in human history that a disease has been completely eradicated. Smallpox had killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, and had plagued humanity for at least 3,000 years.

• May 9: “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.” — Anna Jarvis, the West Virginia woman who spent years campaigning for a national Mother’s Day holiday, which President Woodrow Wilson officially proclaimed on this day in 1914, and then spent the rest of her life trying to undo it because she objected to the commercialism.

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You probably already know the name Tim Berners-Lee. If not: he’s the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. That’s what he’s famous for.

But I think he did something more important and laudable — he gave it away.

Berners-Lee was born in London on June 8, 1955. His parents were both mathematicians who had worked together on the Ferranti Mark 1, one of the first commercially sold computers in the world.

He studied physics at Oxford, graduated in 1976, and spent the next few years doing what a lot of technically gifted young people did in that era — bouncing between jobs, writing software, figuring out what to build.

In 1980 he took a six-month contract at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose name derives from its original French acronym, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

It sits outside Geneva, straddling the French-Swiss border, and it is one of the strangest and most remarkable places on earth: a campus of particle accelerators and underground tunnels where thousands of physicists from dozens of countries come to smash subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light, trying to understand what everything is made of.

They produce staggering amounts of data. In 1980, sharing that data between researchers was a genuine problem — different computers, different operating systems, different institutions, none of them talking to each other easily.

Information got lost, and when people left they basically took their knowledge with them. The institutional memory of one of the world’s great scientific organizations lived largely inside individual human heads.

Berners-Lee decided to do something about it. He wrote a small program for keeping track of the connections between people, projects, and documents — a personal tool, essentially, built on the concept of hypertext, which allowed documents to link to one another.

He called it ENQUIRE, after a Victorian household encyclopedia called *Enquire Within Upon Everything* that he remembered from childhood.

Then his contract ended and he left, and ENQUIRE stayed behind on a CERN computer for four years.

In 1984, Berners-Lee came back in a permanent role, and he found that the data problem was even worse — CERN was bigger, the data was more complex, the researchers were more dispersed.

He spent several years thinking about it, and in March 1989 he wrote a formal proposal: a system of linked documents that could live on multiple computers simultaneously, that anyone with the right software could navigate, that would be built on top of the internet infrastructure that already existed.

He called it a “mesh.” Later he called it the World Wide Web. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, read the idea and wrote four words in the margin: *”Vague, but exciting.”*

That was enough. By the end of 1990 he had built a working version — a web server, a browser, and the first website, all running on a NeXT computer on his desk at CERN.

Someone taped a note to the computer in red ink: *”This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN.”*

For the next two years it grew quietly. Other physicists started using it, and other institutions picked it up. The first web server outside Europe came online at Stanford in December 1991. By 1993 there were perhaps 50 websites in the entire world.

The internet existed, and had existed for decades — but it was complicated, technical, and forbidding to anyone without serious training. What Berners-Lee had built was a layer on top of it that made it navigable by ordinary people.

That meant he now had a decision to make.

Berners-Lee had built something that any reasonable person could see was going to be enormous, with staggering commercial possibilities.

A system that could eventually connect every computer on earth, carrying information, commerce, communication — and he held the patents! Or at least, he could have, structuring it so that every website, every browser, every web server owed him something.

On April 30, 1993, 33 years ago this week, CERN instead released the World Wide Web software into the public domain — no patents, no royalties, no licensing fees.

Free, forever, for every person and institution on earth to use, build on, and improve.

The decision to release it like this was Berners-Lee’s, and he’s been undramatic about it in the years since, framing it less as generosity than as logic.

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control,” he said, “it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

Maybe. But plenty of people have looked at something universal and tried to own it anyway.

Within two years of that April day there were 10,000 websites. Within five years, millions. Within a decade, it had become the largest communications system in human history — carrying more information, connecting more people, and generating more economic activity than anything ever built. There is almost no corner of modern life it has not touched.

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004. He is 70 years old and still working — currently focused on giving people back control over their own data, which he considers the web’s unfinished business. He has received every honor his field can offer.

But he has never collected a royalty.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• April 26: “Well, the people, I would say.” — Jonas Salk, when asked by journalist Edward R. Murrow who owned the patent on the polio vaccine, which began its first mass trial on this day in 1954 — with nearly two million American children, known as the Polio Pioneers, receiving shots.

• April 27: “Once more, we affirmed a truism of human history: that the people are their own liberators.” — Nelson Mandela, who on this day in 1994 voted in South Africa’s first fully democratic election, held over three days, which drew 22 million voters of all races. Mandela, then 75, was elected president.

• April 28: “The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyor and not an isolator.” — Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who on this day in 1947 set sail from Callao, Peru, on a hand-built balsa wood raft with five companions and a parrot named Lorita, attempting to prove that ancient South Americans could have reached Polynesia by drifting with the wind and current.

• April 29: “The first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent.” — Horace Mann Bond, class of 1923 and Lincoln University’s first Black president, describing the school he attended, which received its charter from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on this day in 1854 — making it the first degree-granting HBCU in the United States.

• April 30: “I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” — George Washington, from his first inaugural address, delivered on this day in 1789. A witness noted that even Washington trembled as he spoke. He had not wanted the job, but he had been recruited and elected unanimously.

• May 1: “It will never be finished.” — William Lamb, chief architect of the Empire State Building, which opened on this day in 1931, only 410 days after construction began. It was the tallest building in the world for 40 years. Lamb reportedly said that every time he looked at the building, he saw something he wished he’d done differently.

• May 2: “We are the ship. All else the sea.” — Andrew “Rube” Foster, the son of a Texas sharecropper who became one of the greatest pitchers of his era, and who on this day in 1920 launched the Negro National League’s first game — the first successful professional baseball league for Black Americans. Foster borrowed the motto from Frederick Douglass.

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William Dean Robertson was born on January 7, 1924, in Los Angeles, California. He was 21 years old and a second lieutenant in the United States Army on April 25, 1945.

Alexander Silvashko was born in 1923 or 1924 in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine. He was a lieutenant in the Soviet Red Army, fighting westward across the Eastern Front.

Neither man knew the other existed, but 81 years ago this week, they were joined forever in one of history’s most celebrated images, as the Allied armies linked up — one coming from the West, the other from the East — shortly before the surrender of Nazi Germany.

We have something unusual this week: Robertson’s account of what happened that day in his own words. In 1989, someone thought to interview him by telephone and record it. The audio is below, followed by part of the transcript:

There were hordes — hundreds and hundreds of refugees of all description. Released prisoners, escaped prisoners of war, German refugees, slave laborers — with their freedom, coming into the American lines.

I was an intelligence officer for our battalion, and it was my job to make plans for accommodating these refugees. … I went out one day to get a rough idea of how many hundreds were coming into our camp. I took a Jeep with three men and went up and down several roads outside of our town, counting refugees, counting surrendering German troops.

There were two Americans — one was an ensign from the Navy named Peck, and a sergeant. They had been in the OSS and had parachuted behind German lines and been captured. They joined our patrol. So now there were six of us.

We took a bedsheet and fashioned the United States flag. The Russians fired several times, then quit, then fired again. They didn’t believe the flag.

We finally encountered a Russian prisoner of war [and] we instructed him to tell his Russian colleagues on the other side of the Elbe that we were Americans and not Germans. He shouted across. The firing ceased.

I crawled across the girders of the bridge. I met — I think his name was Andreev, a sergeant in Silvashko’s rifle platoon — up on the girders of the bridge.

And then I crawled across to the east bank.

Within a few minutes there were probably 100 or 150 Russians there. We exchanged cap ornaments and wristwatches and mementos. We slapped each other on the back, shook hands. They produced some schnapps and we toasted each other and all our leaders.

And then someone in the Russian lines clearly spoke English, and we made arrangements for our leaders to meet the following day.

I remember it very well.

The following night, the U.S. Army distributed an official photograph of Robertson and Silvashko, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning.

Robertson came home, went to medical school, completed his residency in neurosurgery at UCLA, raised four sons, and practiced medicine in Los Angeles until his death in 1999.

Silvashko returned to Ukraine to find his family and his village wiped out. He settled in a village in Belarus called Morach, became a schoolteacher and then a school principal.

The two men reunited in Moscow in 1975, then again in what was then East Germany for the 40th anniversary in 1985 — though the Cold War cast a shadow over the celebrations, and official relations between the two countries frequently made the reunions complicated.

Then Silvashko was largely forgotten until 2005, when U.S. Ambassador to Belarus George Krol read a small item in a local newspaper noting that the Soviet soldier in the famous photograph was still alive, and drove hours down dirt roads to find him.

They were not the only ones there that day.

First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue reached the Soviet lines hours earlier, crossing the Elbe in a rowboat near Strehla and meeting a Soviet soldier on horseback — but there were no photographers.

And there was Joseph Polowsky, a Chicago taxi driver and rifleman on Kotzebue’s patrol, who was so moved by the experience that he spent the rest of his life campaigning for peace.

But Robertson and Silvashko became the symbols — two young men from opposite ends of the world, meeting in the rubble of a defeated country, with nothing in common except the fact that they had both survived long enough to be there.

“Governments can talk,” Robertson said, years later. “But people can do better.”

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• April 19: “This will probably be my last long race. Look at my feet — do you blame me for wanting to stop?” — John J. McDermott, a New York club runner who on this day in 1897 won the first Boston Marathon, covering 25 miles from Ashland to Boston in 2 hours, 55 minutes and 10 seconds.

• April 20: “We must not forget that when radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science — and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become a benefit for humanity.” — Marie Curie, who on this day in 1902 completed the isolation of one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride from one full ton of pitchblende, after nearly four years of work.

• April 21: “All history proves the great path of the world’s commerce to be from East to West.” — Davenport Mayor James Grant, speaking at the grand opening celebration on this day in 1856 of the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River.

• April 22: “It was truly an astonishing grassroots explosion. The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy.” — Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the founder of Earth Day, which was first observed on this day in 1970 by an estimated 20 million Americans on 2,000 college campuses and in hundreds of communities.

• April 23: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” — King Edward III of England, which translates as “Shame on him who thinks evil of it” — words the king reportedly spoke on this day in 1348 after picking up a garter that had slipped from a noblewoman’s leg at a court ball, and tying it to his own leg to spare her embarrassment. The phrase became the motto of the Order of the Garter.

• April 24: “I cannot live without books.” — Thomas Jefferson, writing to John Adams in 1815 after selling his personal library of 6,487 volumes to Congress to rebuild the collection the British had burned the year before.

• April 25: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." — James Watson and Francis Crick, from their 900-word paper published in the journal Nature on this day in 1953, announcing the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

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If you’ve ever been in a concert hall, a church, or honestly just a shopping mall in December, you’ve probably heard it — that surge of voices and brass, everyone suddenly standing. The Hallelujah chorus.

I suspect most people couldn’t tell you who wrote it, or why, or what the rest of the piece sounds like. They just know that when it hits, something happens.

I wonder if they’d be interested to know that the man who wrote it was 56 years old at the time, had recently recovered from a stroke that had partially paralyzed his right hand, and was seriously concerned that he might end up in debtors’ prison.

George Frideric Handel had been one of the most celebrated composers in Europe. He’d moved to London in 1712 and conquered it — writing and staging more than 40 Italian operas, accumulating royal pensions and aristocratic patrons, becoming so famous that a statue was erected in his honor in Vauxhall Gardens while he was still alive.

Then London’s taste changed, Italian opera fell out of fashion, his productions failed, and his finances collapsed.

Think of it like being a writer in 2026 who finds he’s suddenly being replaced by AI.

Things got worse: In April 1737 Handel suffered a stroke. He recovered, but the humiliation didn’t — his last opera, staged in early 1741, ran for three performances before closing. He gave what he believed was his final concert that April and essentially prepared to retire in defeat.

Then, Deus ex Machina:

First, a poet named Charles Jennens handed him a libretto — passages stitched together from the Bible, tracing the life of Jesus from prophecy to resurrection.

Then, a group of Dublin charities — the Irish had always been warmer to him than London — invited him to Ireland for a season of benefit concerts, offering him a commission to write something new.

On August 22, 1741, Handel locked himself in his London home and started composing, working in a state that people around him described as almost frightening — barely eating, barely sleeping, moving from one section to the next without stopping.

In 23 days he produced a 260-page oratorio, weeping — by some accounts — as he wrote the Hallelujah chorus. Whether or not that’s true, when he finished he reportedly said he felt he had seen God.

He traveled to Dublin that November, where he found enthusiastic audiences, no jadedness, no rival factions. The premiere was set for April 13, 1742, at the Great Music Hall on Fishamble Street — a venue built, almost poetically, to raise money for the release of imprisoned debtors.

More than 700 people crowded into a hall designed for 600. The management had taken out newspaper advertisements beforehand asking ladies not to wear hooped skirts, and gentlemen to leave their swords at home, so that more people could fit.

He owned the room, as we’d say today. The Dublin Journal, reviewing the premiere, wrote that words were insufficient to describe the delight it had given the audience — that the sublime, the grand, and the tender had combined to transport and charm every heart in the room.

When Handel was asked where the proceeds from the night should go, he replied: “I have myself been a very sick man, and am now cured. I was a prisoner and have been set free.”

The money raised that night freed 142 men from debtors’ prison.

I like this story because who doesn’t like Handel’s Messiah? Especially the Hallelujah chorus?

But also because when I heard this story I filed it immediately with other writers and creators who had to work fast to produce groundbreaking work — because their families would be in dire financial straits if they didn’t pull it off.

A hundred and forty years later, former President Ulysses Grant, diagnosed with terminal throat cancer in 1884 and nearly broke after a fraudulent investment scheme wiped him out, spent his final months writing his memoirs through excruciating pain — sometimes unable to speak, reduced to scribbling notes when his voice gave out entirely. He finished the manuscript days before he died. Mark Twain published it. The book is considered one of the finest military memoirs ever written, and it made his family the equivalent of roughly $15 million in today’s money.

Dostoevsky did something similar, under circumstances almost too strange to believe.

By 1866 he had gambled away nearly everything he had, and in desperation signed a contract with a predatory publisher: deliver a complete novel within 26 days, or forfeit the rights to every book he had ever written — and every book he would ever write — for the next nine years.

He hired a 20-year-old stenographer named Anna, dictated the entire novel to her, and submitted the manuscript two hours before the deadline. The novel was about a compulsive gambler, and he later married Anna; without her, by most accounts, we would never have gotten The Brothers Karamazov.

But back to Handel. His piece is 283 years old, and it has been performed every year since its premiere — through wars, revolutions, and the rise and fall of every musical fashion imaginable. Mozart reorchestrated it and said of Handel, “He knows better than any of us what will make an effect.”

Beethoven called Handel the greatest composer who ever lived. When the Hallelujah chorus was first performed in London, King George II stood up — nobody knows exactly why — and the tradition of standing has continued ever since.

Most people who stand have no idea they’re honoring a 56-year-old man who wrote the whole thing in 23 days, convinced his career was over, in a last desperate act of creation that turned out to be the most performed choral work in history.

Hallelujah.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• April 12: “I could have gone on flying through space forever.” — Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, who on this day in 1961 became the first human being to leave Earth, orbiting the planet aboard Vostok 1 in 108 minutes. He was 27 years old.

• April 13: “Today, in the midst of a great war for freedom, we dedicate a shrine to freedom.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicating the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., on this day in 1943 — Jefferson’s 200th birthday.

• April 14: “It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” — Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, announcing on this day in 2003 the completion of the full sequencing of human DNA — a 13-year effort involving more than 1,000 scientists across six countries, finished two years ahead of schedule.

• April 15: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” — Jackie Robinson, who on this day in 1947 took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era.

• April 16: “I was annoyed from the start by the attitude of doubt on the part of the spectators that I would never really make the flight. This attitude made me more determined than ever to succeed.” — Harriet Quimby, American aviator and journalist, who on this day in 1912 became the first woman to fly solo across the English Channel, navigating by hand compass through heavy fog in an unfamiliar plane. Her achievement went almost entirely unnoticed — the Titanic had sunk the same night.

• April 17: “We don’t claim the Mustang can be all things to all people. But we do believe it will be more things to more people than any other automobile on the road.” — Lee Iacocca, Ford Division vice president, at the public debut of the Ford Mustang on this day in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair. Ford sold 22,000 Mustangs that opening weekend and more than 400,000 in the first year.

• April 18: “The regulars are coming out!” — Paul Revere, Boston silversmith and Son of Liberty, who on the night of this day in 1775 rode from Boston through the Massachusetts countryside to warn colonial militias that British troops were marching toward Lexington and Concord. The battles fought the next morning became the opening shots of the American Revolution.

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When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, millions of tragedies resulted. Today we’re focusing on one person’s story.

Her name was Manya, and she was Jewish, age 13, living with her mother and father and siblings in a small city that the Germans turned into a ghetto. Her family took in other families for the first few years of the brutal occupation.

Eventually, the Nazis arrested her father, and then sent Manya, her mother, and her younger sister and brother to a labor camp called Strzelnica.

Obviously, this was a grim, terrifying experience. However, there was a small ray of light, in that in the midst of this, Manya met a boy named Moshe, and the two teens developed crushes on each other. As someone later said: They were kids, and they still found small ways to flirt and joke in the midst of horrible surroundings.

Over time, the Nazis began sending Jews from Strzelnica to even harsher concentration camps. Manya’s brother was sent away; they had no idea where. Then, Moshe disappeared as well. Then, in July 1944, Manya, her mother, and her sister were crowded into a filthy boxcar and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Manya’s mother is one of the real heroes in this story; with death and destruction all around, she somehow kept what remained of the family together. After six or seven months at Auschwitz, the three were sent to Bergen-Belsen, which is the camp in which Anne Frank and her sister Margot perished.

In telling this story, I worry that I might somehow underemphasize the unfathomable death, destruction and pain. So, let me quote two of the first British soldiers who liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, on what they saw immediately afterward:

• “You just couldn’t believe the numbers involved. ... The whole camp was so quiet and yet there were so many people there. ... Everything was just ghost-like and it was just unbelievable that there were literally people living still there. ... So much death ...”

• “We’d been trained for war wounded, we were used to terrible wounds ... [W]e hadn’t been trained for this ... It was so terrible and so different from anything we’d seen ... We’d seen distressed people about, people walking from town to town, but nothing like this.”

Miraculously, Manya, her mother, and her sister survived, and they lived for a while in a displaced persons camp nearby. Manya’s father had died, but she learned that her brother was alive in a hospital in Munich.

Then, another miracle: Moshe showed up.

He’d been through hell, left for dead, lost his own parents and most of his relatives. But, when he’d seen a list of survivors in another D.P. camp in Munich that included Manya’s name, he walked and hitchhiked more than 300 miles over three weeks to Bergen-Belsen to find her.

Mayna and Moishe were married while still in camp at Belsen, and they moved the next year to Canada, where Moshe’s sister had emigrated before the war.

Over the next year or so, they were able to sponsor Manya’s mother, brother, and sister (and her sister’s new husband, too).

Manya and Moshe anglicized their names to Morris and Mary when they reached Toronto. There, they had three children, including Geddy Lee, the lead singer of the rock group Rush.

Morris (Moshe) died in 1965. Manya took over the family store, and raised her kids. She also told them all about her experiences -- every detail she could remember. It seems she had two missions if I’m reading this right: Never forget, and keep her family together.

Maybe a third: Embrace the life she was blessed enough to survive to live.

As an example, Rush wasn’t exactly Mayna’s kind of music to begin with, and she wasn’t thrilled with her son’s long 1970s rock star hair. But she embraced it all and became the band’s biggest fan.

Geddy has a great story about walking onto the stage in one auditorium in the 1970s, and seeing his sister in the front row -- along with his middle-aged, suburban, Yiddish-speaking mother. She politely declined a marijuana joint from another audience member, but passed it to his sister.

Then, on April 15, 1995, Geddy took his mother and siblings back to Germany, for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

“When I stood there, my proudest moment was that I’m here, with my three children, and Hitler didn’t get all of us,” Mayna told an interviewer from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The proudest moment in my life.”

If you’re interested, you can find Mayna’s entire testimony here.

Some of it is very hard to hear given the details and the subject, but the “Part 3” recording talks about life after the war.

Amusingly, even after Mayna mentions “my son the rock star” several times, the interviewer never thinks to ask if he was in a band he might have heard of.

I’m also going to add one more anecdote, which isn’t really chronological, but it’s such a great story. It has to do with Mayna’s son Geddy’s name.

In short, he was originally named “Gary” (middle name, “Lee”). But with her accent, some of his friends thought her “R’s” sounded like “D’s.” So, “Gary” became “Geddy,” which became his nickname. Ultimately “Gary” took it a step further and officially changed it.

Honestly, that’s why I started on this whole story: Is there a better way to say “I love you” to your mom than to legally change your name to the way she mispronounces it, so nobody can ever again say she says it wrong?

There are a lot of fantastic quotes from Geddy Lee about music and artistry and passion. Here’s one to tuck away:

“There will always be pressure on you to compromise, pressure to sell your dreams short, and there will always be people who want you to be something that you’re not. But none of those things can happen without your permission.”

But given the theme today, and the fact that this story is more about Mayna (who died in 2021 at age 95) than Geddy himself, let’s go with something a little more topical:

“I feel that we’re living in an era that seems to have forgotten what can and will happen when fascism rears its head. I think we all need reminding of it in the face of those who either deny the past or never knew about it in the first place.”

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday March 29: “It seemed unthinkable for me to leave the world forever before I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce.” — Ludwig van Beethoven, who on this day in 1795 walked onto a Vienna stage at age 24 and made his debut as a concert pianist.

• Monday March 30: “Henceforth we live in a new world, breathe a new atmosphere, have a new earth beneath and a new sky above us.” — Frederick Douglass, born into slavery, responding on this day in 1870 to the adoption of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

• Tuesday March 31: “I ought to be jealous of the tower. It is more famous than I am.” — Gustave Eiffel, whose iron tower opened on this day in 1889 as the tallest structure on earth.

• Wednesday April 1: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs, who on this day in 1976 co-founded Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, with $1,300 in capital and no real idea what they were building toward.

• Thursday April 2: “I don’t see why [women] couldn’t play ball. I know I always wanted to.” — Jackie Mitchell, Chattanooga Lookouts pitcher, who at age 17 on this day in 1931 retired Babe Ruth on three pitches, and then struck out Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. Baseball voided her contract shortly after, on the grounds that the professional game would be “too strenuous” for women.

• Friday April 3: “The most quickly adopted consumer technology in the history of the world.” — Martin Cooper, the Motorola engineer who on this day in 1973 stood on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk and made the first call ever placed from a handheld cellular phone.

• Saturday April 4: “We are not a war-making alliance. We are a peace-making alliance.” — NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, on the alliance founded on this day in 1949, when twelve nations signed a treaty committing to collective defense.

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Roger Bushell spent most of his adult life doing three things: practicing law, skiing as fast as possible, and trying to escape from the Germans.

Born in South Africa in 1910, Bushell was sent to school in England at 13, went on to Cambridge, and by his late 20s was a London barrister who spoke nine languages and defended people who couldn’t afford to defend themselves.

He’d joined the RAF Auxiliary along the way, in 1932 — the kind of outfit where wealthy young men paid their way to fly on weekends. Assigned to defend RAF personnel in courts-martial, he was eventually banned from the job for winning too many cases.

Then war came, and Bushell was given command of a fighter squadron. They went into combat for the first time on May 23, 1940, flying Spitfires over the French coast to cover the retreat toward Dunkirk. Bushell damaged two Messerschmitts before being shot down and captured by a German motorcycle patrol.

He would spend the next four years behind wire. He didn’t take it quietly.

His first escape got him to within a few hundred yards of the Swiss border before a border guard caught him. His second was more audacious — he and a Czech officer jumped from a moving train, linked up with the Czech underground in Prague, and stayed hidden for eight months before a Nazi manhunt flushed them out. The Gestapo warned him a third attempt would mean execution, and transferred him to Stalag Luft III: their supposedly inescapable new camp deep in a German pine forest.

Bushell arrived at the camp more determined than ever to wage war from within. He took over the job of running the camp’s clandestine escape committee, with the codename Big X.

“Everyone here is living on borrowed time,” he told his fellow prisoners. “By rights we should all be dead. The only reason God allowed us this extra ration of life is so we can make life hell for the Hun.”

His plan: Build “three bloody deep, bloody long tunnels” out of the camp, on the theory that even if the German guards found one, at least one would eventually be complete.

Six hundred prisoners worked under Bushell’s direction, day and night for more than a year, digging three massive tunnels right under the guards’ noses. Starting from nothing, they scrounged and improvised — repurposing over 4,000 bed boards, hundreds of blankets, and 1,400 powdered milk tins into ventilation shafts and dirt containers. They built an underground railway, forged passports, fabricated civilian clothes and fake German uniforms, all hidden in plain sight beneath their captors’ feet.

Oh, and one detail worth noting: Bushell was claustrophobic. He did it anyway.

On the night of March 24, 1944 — 81 years ago this week — 76 allied prisoners of war crawled out through tunnel Harry and slipped into the darkness.

Only three made it to freedom. The rest were recaptured, and Hitler ordered 50 of them executed as a warning to every prisoner of war in Germany.

Roger Bushell was among those murdered. After the war, the RAF launched a criminal investigation — the only major war crime ever investigated by a single branch of any nation’s military, and in 1947, a tribunal found 18 Nazis guilty. Thirteen were executed.

Clearly there is tragedy here. But the men still in camp later said that the entire effort buoyed their spirits, and that even after learning of their fellow prisoners’ deaths, the act of forcing Germany to divert thousands of soldiers into a massive manhunt felt like a victory — a terrible, costly victory, but a victory nonetheless.

They had struck back, and that mattered, because people need more than survival. We need purpose — things to build, to work toward, and a sense that our efforts add up to something larger than ourselves.

For the ones who didn’t make it — including Bushell himself — there is something to be said for having spent those years not in resignation but in an audacious act of defiance.

Nobody lives forever, but knowing that you lived long enough to give other people hope and purpose can be enough.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, March 22: “I think this would be a good time for a beer.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, upon signing the Cullen-Harrison Act on this day in 1933, which legalized the sale of beer with up to 3.2% alcohol content, marking the beginning of the end of Prohibition.

• Monday, March 23: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” — Patrick Henry, Virginia delegate who on this day in 1775 delivered his legendary speech to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond.

• Tuesday, March 24: “If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings … I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside.” — Robert Koch, German scientist who on this day in 1882 announced the discovery of tuberculosis bacillus, the bacterium responsible for TB, which at the time killed one in seven people.

• Wednesday, March 25: “A common market is far more than an economic union. It is the practical manifestation of a common will to build a joint civilization.” — Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Prime Minister on the Treaty of Rome signed on this day in 1957.

• Thursday, March 26: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” — Jonas Salk, American virologist who on this day in 1953 announced that he had successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis, responding to journalist Edward R. Murrow’s question about who owned the patent, choosing to maximize the vaccine’s global distribution rather than seek profit.

• Friday, March 27: “This definitive treaty of peace put an end to the war.” — Opening language from the Treaty of Amiens, signed on this day in 1802 achieving peace in Europe for 14 months during the Napoleonic Wars. This represented the only period between 1793 and 1814 when Britain and France were not at war.

• Saturday, March 28: “Such a power if developed would operate railroads, factories, mines, irrigation pumps, furnish heat and light in such measure that all in all it would be the most unique, the most interesting, and the most remarkable development of both irrigation and power in this age of industrial and scientific miracles.” — Rufus Woods, newspaper publisher who promoted the Grand Coulee Dam, on this day in 1941 when the dam began producing electricity, eventually becoming the largest capacity hydropower station in the United States.

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Hugh Thompson Sr. was a World War II Navy veteran who worked as an electrician in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He raised his two sons—Hugh Jr. and Tommie—with strict discipline. If the boys did something wrong, their mother Wessie would punish them. Then Hugh Sr. would come home from work and punish them again.

Hugh Sr. and Wessie were working-class Episcopalians in 1950s Georgia who actively denounced racism and helped minority families in their community. They taught their boys three simple rules: don’t be a bully, help the underdog, and follow the golden rule.

Hugh Jr. graduated from Stone Mountain High School in 1961, served three years in the Navy with the Seabees, got his discharge, married, and became a funeral director. When his brother Tommie deployed to Vietnam with the Air Force, Hugh Jr. enlisted in the Army in 1966, learned to fly helicopters, and arrived in Vietnam in December 1967.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Hugh Jr. and his crew—Glenn Andreotta, 20, and Lawrence Colburn, 18—lifted off for an operation in Quảng Ngãi Province.

What Hugh Jr. saw from his helicopter was death. Dozens of bodies in irrigation ditches. The village burning. U.S. Army soldiers moving through the village they called My Lai, killing everyone—old men, women, children, infants. No return fire. No Viet Cong. Just slaughter.

Hugh Jr. landed near an injured woman and radioed for medical evacuation. When he circled back, she’d been shot dead. Captain Ernest Medina was standing nearby. Hugh Jr. confronted him. Medina told him to get back in his helicopter. Hugh Jr. kept reporting what he was seeing. No one stopped it.

Then Hugh Jr. spotted about a dozen civilians running toward an earthen bunker with American soldiers chasing them.

This was the moment Hugh Sr. and Wessie had been preparing their son for without knowing it. Hugh Jr. put his helicopter down between the American soldiers and the bunker and told Andreotta and Colburn to train their M60 machine guns on the Americans. If the soldiers tried to harm the civilians, his crew was to open fire.

Hugh Jr. walked to the bunker. He spoke no Vietnamese. The people inside were terrified. He used hand signals. Finally nine or ten civilians emerged. Hugh Jr. radioed friends flying gunships overhead and they evacuated the civilians to safety.

In an irrigation ditch filled with nearly a hundred bodies, Andreotta spotted movement. He waded into the corpses and pulled out a boy covered in blood, clinging to his dead mother. Hugh Jr. flew him to the hospital.

By day’s end, between 347 and 504 Vietnamese civilians had been slaughtered. Hugh Jr. had saved perhaps a dozen lives. The Army investigated, concluded about 20 civilians had been accidentally killed. The division commander congratulated Charlie Company. Hugh Jr. received a Distinguished Flying Cross. He threw it away.

The next year, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story. Hugh Jr. testified before Congress. Congressman Mendel Rivers called him a traitor. Twenty-six soldiers were charged. Most were acquitted. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted and sentenced to life. President Nixon commuted it to three years house arrest.

Hugh Jr. struggled with PTSD, alcoholism, divorce, nightmares. For nearly two decades he disappeared.

Thirty years later, the Army awarded Hugh Jr. the Soldier’s Medal. Days later, he and Colburn returned to Vietnam and met two women they’d saved. The women had families now—children and grandchildren who wouldn’t exist without that helicopter.

In 2001, they were reunited with the boy from the ditch. His name was Do Ba. He was 36, just out of prison for theft. Village officials called him “a walking casualty.” He’d been eight years old that day. He remembered everything.

Look, this might make a cleaner story if one of the women’s grandchildren grew up to discover a cure for cancer, or if Do Ba became a beloved teacher.

But you don’t save people because of what you think they’ll do for humanity. You save them because humanity is inherently worth saving.

A boy clinging to his dead mother deserved to live. The women deserved to live. The old man deserved to live.

At the reunion, a Vietnamese woman approached Hugh Jr. She wished the men who killed her neighbors could have come back too. Hugh Jr. looked confused. She finished: “So we could forgive them.”

“I’m not man enough to do that,” Hugh Jr. later told a reporter. “I’m sorry. I wish I was, but I won’t lie to anybody.”

Hugh Jr. died of cancer on January 6, 2006. He was 62. Lawrence Colburn was at his bedside.

I admit. I wondered a few times while writing this: Who would write a newsletter called Big Optimism, and feature the My Lai massacre?

I think it’s because you don’t have to save the world. You just have to save the very small part you can see.

On a terrible morning in March 1968, one man looked down at a nightmare and decided to do something about it.

Examples like that are as optimistic and inspiring as I can imagine.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday March 15: “I feel very honored to own the name.” — Aron Meystedt, current owner of the domain name symbolics.com, which on this day in 1985 was the first “.com” domain registered, by a computer company called Symbolics Inc.

• Monday March 16: "The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." — Robert H. Goddard, American physicist who on this day in 1926 launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts, a 2.5-second flight that rose 41 feet and traveled 184 feet before crash-landing in a cabbage field.

• Tuesday March 17: “By all accounts there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures now are.” — George Washington, describing the evacuating British forces after 11,000 troops and Loyalists fled Boston by ship on this day in 1776, ending an eight-year occupation after American forces fortified Dorchester Heights with cannons dragged 300 miles through winter snow from Fort Ticonderoga.

• Wednesday March 18: "I gently pulled myself out and kicked off from the vessel. An inky black, stars everywhere and the sun so bright I could barely stand it." — Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut who on this day in 1965 became the first human to walk in space

• Thursday March 19: "It will become apparent that it is one of the most important conservation measures ever enacted by the Congress of the United States." — Senator William M. Calder of New York, sponsor of the Standard Time Act signed into law on this day in 1918

• Friday March 20: "I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." — Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form on this day in 1852, selling 300,000 copies in its first year and becoming so influential that President Lincoln reportedly called her "the little lady who made this big war."

• Saturday March 21: May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth." — U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, in his Earth Day statement this day in 1971.

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Almon Brown Strowger was born in 1839 in Penfield, New York, and he had a bit of a local pedigree: grandson of the town’s second settler and first miller.

He also had a penchant for invention. As a boy, whenever his mother assigned chores, young Almon and his brothers would spend their time devising machines to do the work for them.

(This is what is known as “foreshadowing.”)

Years went by: the 1840s, the 1850s. He taught school for a while. Then came the war.

In October 1861, Strowger enlisted in Company A of the 8th New York Volunteer Cavalry as a trumpeter, riding with the Union cavalry through some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns: Bull Run. Fredericksburg. Chancellorsville. Gettysburg.

He rose through the ranks to Sergeant, then Second Lieutenant. But by September 1864, his war was over.

Strowger was wounded in action at the Third Battle of Winchester in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. While Union forces routed the Confederates that day, Strowger was discharged.

He came home to a country hurtling into the future. The war had industrialized America. Railroads crisscrossed the continent, then telegraph lines followed, and then came Bell’s telephone.

As for Strowger, he was left behind for a bit. He taught school again, but then drifted west through Kansas before settling in Missouri, where he became an undertaker—the second-oldest profession, I guess.

This is where Strowger’s life experience and the technological revolution converged.

Patent No. 447,918

Bell’s telephone had arrived in Kansas City, but it was rudimentary, and every call had to go through a human operator who manually connected the lines.

You picked up the receiver, told the operator who you wanted to reach, and she plugged you in.

And if the operator happened to be, for example, the wife of a competing funeral home in your town—and if every time someone called needing an undertaker, even if they mentioned you by name, she routed them to her husband—well, that was a problem.

Strowger might have been in the dying business, but now his business was dying and he did not appreciate the irony. Armed with a theory about the rerouted calls, he did the legwork, tracing obituaries to figure out if the families of the various deceased should have been his customers.

He was not pleased with what he found. But, Strowger didn’t just complain; he decided the problem wasn’t the operator—the problem was that there was an operator at all. Why should a telephone company employee decide who got connected to whom? Subscribers should choose for themselves.

And so, back to his childhood penchant, he started tinkering, trying to build an automatic telephone operator.

His first model was built from a collar box and straight pins. He added magnets, then electromagnets. He worked out a system of rotary stepping switches that could automatically route calls based on electrical pulses.

Finally, Eureka! On March 10, 1891, 135 years ago this week, the U.S. Patent Office issued him Patent No. 447,918 for an “Automatic Telephone Exchange.”

(Although Strowger preferred to call it the “girl-less, cuss-less” telephone system.)

Lieut. A.B. Strowger

Patent in hand, Strowger brought in his nephew William and others who understood electricity and had money. They formed a company and went looking for customers, finding one with the local phone system in La Porte, Indiana.

In November 1892, the first automatic telephone exchange opened with 75 subscribers. It worked, and Strowger kept refining the technology.

Unfortunately — and double-unfortunately, because I really do try to emphasize optimism in these features — Strowger only had a little more than a decade to enjoy his success.

His health started to fail in the mid 1890s, and he sold his patents and his share of the company for a modest sum—enough to retire comfortably—and moved to St. Petersburg, Florida with his second wife, Susan.

He died in 1902 at age 63, and his grave is marked with a simple white military headstone: “Lieut. A.B. Strowger, Co. A, 8 NY Cav.”

Like so many others, however, Strowger cashed out just a bit too soon; his patents eventually sold to Bell Systems for $2.5 million, and his stepping switch became the backbone of telephone systems worldwide, remaining in use well into the 1970s.

He was largely forgotten, although in 2003, the Verizon Foundation—the charitable arm of the ultimate corporate successor to Bell, which really ought to celebrate him a bit—made an award to restore the cemetery where he’s buried along with two nearby Civil War memorials.

Funeral directors should probably remember him. Oh, and Ray Parker Jr., who wrote and performed the theme song to the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters.

Why? “Who you gonna call?”

If it weren’t for Almon Brown Strowger, generations of people might not have been able to decide for themselves.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• March 8: “We appear before you this morning to ask ... [to] prohibit the disfranchisement of citizens of the United States on account of sex.” — Susan B. Anthony, addressing the House Judiciary Committee on this day in 1884.

• March 9: “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be.” — Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, who debuted the Barbie doll at the American International Toy Fair in New York on this day in 1959.

• March 10: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” — Ulysses S. Grant. On this day in 1864, President Lincoln signed Grant’s commission as Lieutenant General, making him commander of all Union armies.

• March 11: “Lithuania is free! Latvia will be free! Estonia will be free!” — Members of Lithuania’s Supreme Council, chanting in the chamber at 10:44 p.m. on this day in 1990 after voting 124-0 (with 6 abstentions) to declare independence from the Soviet Union.

• March 12: “I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.” — Mahatma Gandhi, near the end of the Salt March, which began on this day in 1930. Gandhi and 78 followers walked 240 miles to the Arabian Sea, where on April 6 he picked up salt from the beach, breaking British law. More than 60,000 Indians were jailed in the ensuing civil disobedience campaign.

• March 13: “Before the bishop blesses his people, I ask you to pray to the Lord that he will bless me: the prayer of the people asking the blessing for their Bishop.” — Pope Francis, from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on this day in 2013, moments after his election.

• March 14: “She was just incurable. It was like somebody today with COVID-19 who is going down the tubes.” — Historian Eric Lax, describing 33-year-old Anne Miller’s condition before she became the first American treated with penicillin on this day in 1942 at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Doctors gave her a tablespoon of the experimental drug—half the entire U.S. supply. Her fever broke within hours.

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John Lewis was 25 years old, and he thought he was going to die.

It was March 7, 1965. Lewis and 600 other marchers had walked six blocks from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, heading for the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as a protest for the right to vote.

In Dallas County, Alabama, only 2 percent of Black citizens were registered voters. When they tried to register, they were asked to count the bubbles on a bar of soap, or the jellybeans in a jar. They were turned away because they spelled out their middle name instead of using an initial, or showed up on the wrong day, or because the registrar just didn’t feel like it.

So they marched.

At the crest of the bridge, Lewis—chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—and Hosea Williams stopped. On the other side, Alabama State Troopers waited in formation. Behind them, sheriff’s deputies on horseback.

Major John Cloud called out through a bullhorn. The march was unlawful. They had two minutes to disperse.

“Major, may I have a word?” Williams asked.

“There will be no word.”

One minute and five seconds later, Cloud ordered: “Troopers, advance.”

They came with billy clubs raised, bullwhips, and tear gas. They trampled marchers with horses. Lewis was clubbed in the head. He fell. As he tried to get up, the trooper hit him again. His skull fractured. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized and 58 were treated for injuries.

TV Changes Everything

What made Bloody Sunday different? America watched it happen.

That evening, ABC interrupted its broadcast of *Judgment at Nuremberg*—a film about Nazi war crimes—to show footage of American state troopers beating peaceful protesters. Within 48 hours, demonstrations erupted in 80 American cities.

Five days later, Lewis testified before a federal judge, his skull still fractured. He described the trooper’s nightstick, the tear gas, being knocked to the ground. Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled that the demonstrators had a constitutional right to march.

”We Shall Overcome”

Eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress.

LBJ was a Texan who had spent decades in Congress weakening civil rights bills. But he’d watched the footage from Selma. And he’d decided.

“At times,” he told Congress, “history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

Then he did something unprecedented. He borrowed the language of the movement itself.

“Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

The chamber erupted. Members of Congress—except for the Southerners—stood and cheered. Martin Luther King Jr., watching on television in Selma, reportedly cried.

Johnson told Congress about his first job teaching Mexican-American students in Cotulla, Texas. Kids who came to school hungry, who knew the pain of prejudice but didn’t know why.

“I often walked home late in the afternoon, wishing there was more that I could do,” he said. “But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it.”

The Law

On March 21, under federal protection, 3,200 marchers set out from Selma. This time, they made it across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis was at the front, a few feet from Martin Luther King Jr. They walked 54 miles over five days. By the time they reached Montgomery, 25,000 people had joined them.

Congress debated the Voting Rights Act through the spring and summer. The Senate passed it 77-19. The House passed it 333-85.

On August 6, 1965—five months after Bloody Sunday—President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, banning literacy tests and poll taxes, and establishing federal oversight of elections in areas with histories of discrimination.

The results were immediate. In Alabama, Black voter registration jumped from 23 percent in 1964 to 57 percent in 1968. In Mississippi, it went from 7 percent to 59 percent. The number of elected Black officials in the South exploded.

John Lewis kept one of the pens Johnson used to sign the law. It hung, framed, in his living room for the rest of his life.

Good Trouble

Lewis served in Congress for 33 years, representing Georgia’s 5th district. He called what happened in Selma “good trouble”—the kind of trouble that changes things.

Every year, on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Lewis walked back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In 2015, President Obama walked with him. In 2020, sick with cancer but still fighting, Lewis crossed the bridge one last time. He died that July at age 80.

Within five months, America went from Bloody Sunday to the Voting Rights Act. The march worked. The testimony worked. The pressure worked. Democracy, battered and broken on a bridge in Alabama, bent toward justice.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• March 1: “[A] public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” — From the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, creating the world’s first national park this day in 1872. The act set aside 3,500 square miles of wilderness in Montana and Wyoming territories, launching the global national park movement.

• March 2: “I congratulate you, fellow-citizens.” — President Thomas Jefferson, who on this day in 1807 signe the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. The law did not abolish slavery or stop the domestic slave trade, but it ended legal importation of enslaved people from abroad.

• March 3: “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light” — Opening lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, which Congress designated as the national anthem on this day in 1931 after a contentious 15-year campaign. The debate largely broke along regional lines: Northerners favored “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates, while Southerners championed Key’s composition.

• March 4: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, delivered this day in 1933. FDR took office at the height of the Great Depression, with 25% unemployment and 11,000 banks failed. This was the last presidential inauguration held in March; the 20th Amendment moved future inaugurations to January 20.

• March 5: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” — Winston Churchill, speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman on the platform, this day in 1946. The speech marked the beginning of the Cold War. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin denounced Churchill’s remarks as “war mongering.”

• March 6: “At long last, the battle has ended! And thus Ghana, your beloved country is free forever!” — Kwame Nkrumah, declaring Ghana’s independence from Britain this day in 1957. Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from colonial rule, inspiring liberation movements across the continent. Martin Luther King Jr. attended the independence ceremony.

• March 7: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” — Alexander Graham Bell, speaking the first intelligible words over a telephone, after receiving Patent No. 174,465 for his method of “transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically...by causing electrical undulations” on this day in 1876. Bell had filed his patent application just hours before rival inventor Elisha Gray filed a similar claim.

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Jack Hughes scored in overtime to defeat Canada 2-1 in Milan, ending a drought that included two painful losses to Canada in Olympic gold-medal games—in 2002 at Salt Lake City and Sidney Crosby’s famous overtime winner in 2010 at Vancouver.

Canada had also beaten the Americans just last year in the 4 Nations Face-Off final.

Yesterday’s win was enormous. Historic. But the 2026 team was stacked with NHL superstars playing at the highest level. It could have gone either way.

The real miracle happened in 1980, when a 42-year-old coach named Herb Brooks stood before a team of college kids and told them something that seemed absurd: “You were born to be here.”

What almost nobody remembers is that Brooks himself was born to be somewhere else entirely. (Some of this story was dramatized in the 2004 film Miracle, but the core facts are exactly as remarkable in real life.)

Twenty years earlier, he’d been the last player cut from the 1960 U.S. Olympic team—the team that went on to win gold at Squaw Valley.

Here’s the irony: Olympic rosters in 1960 were capped at 17 players. Today they carry 20. If modern roster rules had been in place, Brooks almost certainly would have made the team.

And the Miracle on Ice might never have happened.

6 months of torture

The rejection haunted Brooks. When he got the coaching job for 1980, he carried the memory of being cut like a wound. Every decision he made—every brutal practice, every psychological test, every impossible demand—was filtered through the lens of that failure. He wanted to rewrite history, one skate drill at a time.

When Brooks took over Team USA in 1979, he told the selection committee: “I don’t want the best players. I want the right ones.”

He backed it up.

Brooks shocked hockey observers with his roster choices. He deliberately mixed bitter college rivals—especially players from Minnesota and Boston University—and then positioned himself as the common enemy.

What followed was six months of systematic torture.

Brooks studied Soviet training methods but went further, borrowing ideas from track and swimming coaches—concepts that were foreign to American hockey. Then came the infamous “Herbies”: full-ice sprints repeated until players vomited and collapsed.

After a lackluster exhibition tie against Norway, Brooks forced the team back onto the ice for forty-five minutes of Herbies in the dark after arena staff turned off the lights. Forward Dave Silk later called it the turning point: “That moment probably had more to do with us gelling as a team, feeling like we were a group, a family.”

Brooks believed suffering together would forge the chemistry required to beat the Soviets.

He was right.

Do you believe in miracles?

To understand why, remember one crucial detail: in 1980, NHL players were not allowed in the Olympics. The Americans were true amateurs—college kids, mostly. The Soviets, meanwhile, were “amateurs” in name only: state-sponsored professionals who trained and played together year-round.

It wasn’t just David versus Goliath. It was David versus a full-time machine.

The Soviet team hadn’t lost an Olympic game in twelve years. Just thirteen days earlier, they had crushed these same Americans 10-3 in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden.

But on February 22, 1980, the impossible happened.

The Americans fell behind. Came back. Fell behind again. Came back again. With ten minutes left, Mark Pavelich fed Mike Eruzione, who beat legendary Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak.

4-3, United States.

ABC announcer Al Michaels delivered the call that still echoes today: “Do you believe in miracles? YES!”

Brooks didn’t celebrate. He slipped away to a bathroom and cried.

He knew what it felt like to be cut. Now he had given these kids what he never got.

The 18th player

Two days later, the Americans beat Finland to secure the gold medal.

After the Olympics, captain Mike Eruzione stunned everyone by retiring at twenty-five. NHL teams wanted him. He could have played professionally. But he walked away.

“How can you top that?” he said. “The last game I played, I won.”

Herb Brooks died in a car accident in 2003 at age sixty-six. All twenty members of the 1980 team served as his pallbearers.

Yesterday in Milan, when Hughes scored in overtime to give the United States its first Olympic gold in men’s hockey since 1980, Team USA players held up a jersey honoring Johnny Gaudreau, the late NHL star who likely would have been on the roster.

It was a beautiful moment. But back in 1980, nobody expected anything. Nobody believed.

Nobody thought a team of college kids could beat the best team in the world.

Nobody except the man who’d been cut.

The 18th player. The one who shouldn’t have been there.

The miracle was that Brooks convinced them they could—because he knew exactly what it felt like to be told you weren’t good enough.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 22: “Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world.”— Premier Zhou Enlai greeting President Richard Nixon at Beijing Airport, on the eve of Nixon becoming the first U.S. president to visit the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949.

• Monday, February 23: “All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true.— Future Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini) describing Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary printed Bible, completed in Mainz, Germany around February 23, 1455.

• Tuesday, February 24: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”— Chief Justice John Marshall writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison, decided February 24, 1803. This landmark case established the principle of judicial review—the power of courts to strike down laws that violate the Constitution.

• Wednesday, February 25: “I shook up the world! I’m the greatest!”— Cassius Clay shouting to reporters after defeating heavyweight champion Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Hall on February 25, 1964. The 22-year-old Clay was an 8-to-1 underdog (43 of 46 sportswriters picked Liston to win).

• Thursday, February 26: “It is beyond comparison—beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world. Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness.”**— President Theodore Roosevelt on the Grand Canyon, which on February 26, 1919 became protected from development under U.S. law.

• Friday, February 27: “This amendment is in character and phraseology precisely similar to the Fifteenth. For each the same method of adoption was pursued. One cannot be valid and the other invalid.” — Justice Louis Brandeis writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in *Leser v. Garnett*, decided February 27, 1922, ruling that the 19th Amendment enrosing the right of women to vote did not violate the rest of the Constitution.

• Saturday, February 28: “We have found the secret of life.”— Francis Crick announcing to patrons at The Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, on February 28, 1953 that Cambridge University scientists James Watson and Crick had determined the double-helix structure of DNA.

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It was March 1964, and the two men were walking across the parade ground at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Stanley was Dean of Arts there—a military historian who’d spent his career thinking about what held countries together and what tore them apart.

His friend, John Matheson, was a Liberal member of parliament with a problem. Canada was tearing itself apart over a flag.

Prime Minister Lester Pearson wanted a new flag—something distinctly Canadian, not the Red Ensign with its Union Jack.

But veterans who had fought under that flag felt betrayed. The Royal Canadian Legion had erupted at Pearson’s speech, and Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker thundered about abandoning Canada’s British heritage.

A parliamentary committee asked for ideas, and was now drowning in submissions: thousands of flags, with beavers, multiple maple leaves, the fleur-de-lis. Nothing was working.

Matheson walked with difficulty; a veteran himself, he’d been wounded at the Moro River during the war. As they crossed the parade ground, Stanley gestured toward the Mackenzie Building, where the college flag snapped in the wind.

Red-white-red. Two red bars flanking a white square with the college crest.

“There is your flag,” Stanley said.

It was almost offhand, but as a soldier and an historian, Stanley had been thinking about symbols his whole life.

Did you get the memo?

Two weeks later, March 23, 1964, Stanley sat down and wrote a four-page memo to Matheson explaining his ideas for a new Canadian flag. (Full memo here.)

The greatest symbols were simple, he wrote, and no flag could represent everything—that was everyone’s mistake.

“If the flag is to be a unifying symbol,” he wrote, “it must avoid the use of national or racial symbols that are of a divisive nature.”

So, it had to skip the Union Jack and the fleur-de-lis. It had to be so simple a child could draw it—highly distinctive and recognizable from a distance.

The RMC flag wasn’t the answer, but it was close, he wrote. Red and white had been Canada’s colors since 1921. What if you stripped away everything else?

At the bottom of page three, he sketched his design—a doodle, really. A single maple leaf, centered on white, flanked by two red bars.

The Great Flag Debate

The memo made its way to the committee room, where Stanley’s sketch was placed among hundreds of professionally rendered designs. The committee remained deadlocked through spring, summer, and into fall.

Prime Minister Pearson favored a different design—the “Pearson Pennant” with three maple leaves and blue bars, but on October 22, the committee chose Stanley’s design.

A graphic artist named Jacques Saint-Cyr had refined the maple leaf to eleven points for better visibility. Another designer adjusted the proportions. But the concept was Stanley’s.

Then came the “Great Flag Debate.” The House of Commons still had to vote, and the fight raged for six more weeks. Diefenbaker fought until the end, urging his party to vote for the red-and-white maple leaf design on the assumption that Liberals would vote for Pearson’s preferred pennant, and continue the stalemate.

But Liberals switched their vote, and on December 15 at 2 a.m., Parliament invoked closure. The vote for the new Maple Leaf flag was 163 to 78.

Stanley had long since left the capital. The official flag-raising ceremony was set for February 15, 1965, and Stanley received death threats for having come up with design, warning he’d be shot if he showed up.

But Stanley had been shot at before. So, he wore his colorful Hudson’s Bay coat to the ceremony anyway and watched as his design rose on the flagpole on Parliament Hill at noon in front of thousands of Canadians in the cold.

The newspapers credited Pearson, or Matheson, or called it a committee effort. And over time, Stanley’s role was nearly forgotten.

Stanley went on to become Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick and received the Order of Canada. He died in 2002 at 95.

But he’s the one who came up with the Canadian answer: subtraction instead of addition. A country as divided as Canada needed a symbol so simple it couldn’t belong to any faction.

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P.S. — I thought as I was writing this: Was Stanley related to Lord Stanley, the British aristocrat who donated the Stanley Cup in 1892?

Nope. Different families, different centuries, same last name.

It’s a bit of a coincidence though that Canada’s two most famous Stanleys both gave the country its two most famous symbols.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 15: “I don’t think my name is likely to be worth much in the bear business, but you’re welcome to use it.” — President Theodore Roosevelt, reply to Morris Michtom, on this day in 1903, granting permission to name a stuffed toy “Teddy’s Bear.”

• Monday, February 16: “The first man-made organic textile fabric prepared entirely from new materials from the mineral kingdom.” — DuPont’s announcement in 1938 describing the invention of nylon, on this day in 1937.

• Tuesday, February 17: “Hello! This is New York calling.” — The opening words of Voice of America’s first Russian-language broadcast, this day in 1947. Programming included news, human-interest stories, and music—especially jazz.

• Wednesday, February 18: “Dr. Slipher, I have found your Planet X.” — Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old self-taught astronomer from Kansas, to Lowell Observatory Director V.M. Slipher, on this day in 1930, after discovering Pluto.

• Thursday, February 19: “The phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music.” — Thomas Edison, predicting the future of his invention, on this day in 1878, when he received U.S. Patent No. 200,521 for the phonograph. Edison developed the device while working on telegraph and telephone technology.

• Friday, February 20: “Godspeed, John Glenn.” — Astronaut Scott Carpenter’s farewell to John Glenn at launch, on this day in 1962, as Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth.

• Saturday, February 21: “An earthquake may shake its foundations...but the character which it commemorates and illustrates is secure.” — Robert Winthrop’s dedication speech for the Washington Monument, on this day in 1885. President Chester Arthur presided over the ceremony. The monument opened to the public in 1888 after elevators were installed.

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