|
|||
|
Five good things · Three minutes
|
|||
| |||
|
KINDNESS • Good News Network
Eddie turned down half a billion. He gave the company away.Half a billion dollars was on the table. He said no.
Eddie Smith Jr. turned down offers of around half a billion dollars for the boat company he spent 58 years building. He gave it away instead. Smith signed controlling shares in Grady-White Boats to a perpetual purpose trust that can never sell the business, with the remaining shares going to a social welfare organization that donates its profits to charity. Smith took over the near-bankrupt builder in the 1960s and worked 80 to 100 hour weeks to turn it into a company averaging over $100 million a year in revenue. He gave up golf for more than 30 years to do it. He told Fortune that the friends he watched sell their companies had "lost their way" and "lost their culture that they had built, and I just couldn't bear the thought of that happening." Smith grew up near the poverty line, eating SPAM three times a week, and was the first in his family to finish college.
| |||
| |||
|
KINDNESS • Upworthy
A town of 8,000 took in 7,000 stranded strangersThousands of strangers landed with nowhere to go. A town of 8,000 answered.
When the FAA shut down American airspace on the morning of September 11, 2001, some 7,000 passengers from 38 planes landed in Gander, Newfoundland, a fishing town of about 8,000 people. As the aircraft touched down, Mayor Claude Elliott went door to door asking neighbors for spare blankets, pillows and cots, warning them they might never get the items back. Nobody minded. Sue Riccardelli, flying from Paris to Newark with her wife, Maureen Murray, slept on a classroom floor at the College of the North Atlantic. Pharmacies filled prescriptions for free, and residents drove strangers to Walmart for clean underwear. "We ate better than we ate in Paris," Riccardelli said. American airspace reopened on September 13, and the planes left. The passengers did not forget. A scholarship fund they started with $15,000 has since raised more than $1 million for Gander's students. Every September, Riccardelli flies a Canadian American flag outside her home.
| |||
| |||
|
DELIGHT • NPR Stories
The museum turned a bad review into best-selling merchThe visitor wanted fish. The museum sold him instead.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts received a one-star review last month from a visitor who called it the "worst Aquarium Ever." The museum is not an aquarium. It has no live fish, a fact its staff knows well, given that it is a museum about whaling. Rather than argue, the museum leaned in. It printed the phrase on T-shirts, mugs and tote bags, then posted about the whole thing online. The internet responded the way the internet does when an institution refuses to take itself too seriously. The merchandise sold, the post spread, and the museum picked up a fresh round of visitors who now know exactly what they are and are not walking into. The review remains posted. The museum kept the receipt.
| |||
| |||
|
NATURE • GreaterGood
A senior black dog found his sanctuary of dog bedsOld, big, and black-coated. Three strikes at a shelter.
Vader, a large senior black dog, was surrendered by owners who could no longer care for him, landing him in the demographic that waits longest in shelters. Older, big, and dark-coated, his adoption odds were slim. He now lives at Horse and Hound Rescue Foundation, a 50-acre horse rehab and senior dog sanctuary where the elderly dogs run the place. He arrived on May 4, which earned him the name Darth Vader. His caretakers are quick to clarify the misnomer. "You won't find him trying to take over the galaxy, unless the galaxy is made of comfy dog beds and snacks," they said. "He's a calm, kind soul who enjoys spending his days with his senior friends and soaking up all the love he can get." Donated food keeps his bowl full. He has no dark side. The force, staff report, is strong only when it comes to dinner.
| |||
| |||
|
DELIGHT • The Marginalian
He couldn't hear a note. The crowd erupted anyway.He couldn't hear a note. He conducted it anyway.
Beethoven premiered his Ninth Symphony in a Viennese court theater on the early evening of May 7, 1824, and could not hear a single note of it. He was almost entirely deaf, wearing an old green frock coat because a friend reasoned the hall would be too dim for anyone to notice. He had fought for this. The finale set Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy," a poem he had loved since he was a teenager auditing Kant's lectures at Bonn. No composer before him had woven words into a symphony. His soloists called the parts impossible to sing. Karoline Unger, the nineteen-year-old contralto, told him in his conversation books that he had "too little self-confidence," then wrote "O Obstinacy!" The royal box sat empty when he raised his arms. He was playing for the people. After the last chord, the silence broke into applause, and Beethoven kept conducting, still facing the orchestra.
| |||
|
|||
|
Someone forward you this? Get it every morning →
|
|||
|
With love, The Editor
|
|||
|
honeyletter
|