Enabling Others

These messages focus on individuals who have opened the doors for others through the lives that they led.

    • Head Start in Life

      Joan Ganz was born in Arizona in 1929. She was raised in a conventional family and was expected to be a housewife and raise a family. When she went to college, she was encouraged to study education because teaching was a proper career for a woman, according to her...

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    • John and Sylvia Webber – Southern Underground Railroad Conductors

      John Webber was born in Vermont late in the 18th Century. He was a medic in the War of 1812. After the war, he settled in Mexico, in what would later become Texas after the Texas Revolution. Sylvia was born into slavery in 1807 in what is now Louisiana. She later...

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    • Hopeful Adventures

      Barbara Hillary’s mother moved from South Carolina to New York City to give her and her sister better-educated opportunities. Her father died when she was only one year old. Her mother cleaned homes and strongly encouraged her daughters to get a good education....

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    • From Tennis to a Passion of Service

      Andrea was born in Chicago in 1965. Growing up, she was a rising star as a tennis player. In high school, she was the top-ranked player in America for those under the age of 18. At age 15, she was the youngest player ever to be qualified to compete at Wimbledon at...

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    • Alice Dunnigan: Asking Tough Questions

      Alice Dunnigan was born in Kentucky in 1906. Her father was a sharecropper and her mother took in laundry. She was raised in a strict family that valued education. She had learned to read before entering the first grade. Since the local schools only provided 10 years...

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    • Judith Cohen: Saving Apollo 13

      Apollo 13 kept the world on edge when an oxygen bank ruptured in the service module. Life support systems were disabled. The solution was to use the backup systems on the lunar module. Millions of people rejoiced when Apollo 13 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, and...

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    • Margaret McFarland: A Neighborhood Genius

      Margaret McFarland was born near Pittsburgh in 1905. Her father died when she was 5 and her mother never remarried, and she had a lifelong regret for a lack of fathering growing up. Her mother however did provide inspiration for her future interests in child...

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    • Funding the Civil Rights Movement

      Mollie Moon was born in 1912 in the state of Mississippi. She trained as a pharmacist but also studied education and social services. After a career as a pharmacist, she refocused her life’s work on to one of lifting up the status of African Americans. She worked on...

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    • The Golden Thirteen: Collective Intelligence at Work

      The U.S. Navy had a long history of limiting the roles of African Americans to positions where they would not come into contact with White sailors. When President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order prohibiting ethnic and racial discrimination in the defense...

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    • Giving One’s All

      Charles (Chuck) Feeney was born in 1931 in New Jersey. In high school, a financial contributor made the largest donation his high school had ever received. This was the crucible moment that would influence Chuck’s later life. After serving in the Air Force during the...

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