Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year, and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th.
If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage. It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. Hello. This is Hey Dude Shoes. This is an ad. But not for your ears, for your feet.
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And Em. From In Our Own World Podcast. My Cutura Podcast Network and Coca-Cola celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with incredible content creators like Patty Rodriguez. I was born in East L.A., and I remember growing up, there was a small little shack in the apartment we lived at, and I would make that shack into a television studio. And there I would play pretend. I would pretend that I was a news reporter.
And that's how I would spend most of my afternoons. Pretending and imagining that one day I would be able to tell our own stories. Listen to Out of the Shadows, hosted by Patty Rodriguez and Eric Galindo on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Coca-Cola, proud sponsor of the My Cutura Podcast Network.
Hispanic heritage is magic. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. And our favorite stories are our listeners stories. They're your stories. Our next story comes to us from Paul in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Paul moved our listeners with his story Wilbur and the Empty Nester and a baby boomers battle with insanity and fitness.
We asked him if he had any more. Here he is with a story simply titled Moose Prayer. Have you ever seen a moose? I have.
They're big, strong, powerful and athletic. Have you ever wanted to be a moose? I did. I lived with a moose all throughout my childhood growing up in Bloomington, Minnesota, the middle child of a cluster of eight devout Catholic kids. I have three older brothers, one older sister, two younger brothers and one younger sister. I grew up idolizing my older siblings, what I wouldn't have given to be as cool as them. Such was the thought of this impressionable little brother.
It was Tom, the firstborn, five years my senior, that I most wanted to emulate. His nickname? Moose. A three sports star at Kennedy High School, larger than life in my 10 year old eyes. To a fifth grader, a 15 year old moose may as well have been Paul Bunyan.
He could do it all. What does this have to do with the moose prayer? Let me start by asking, have you ever wondered whether God is listening to your prayers?
I have wondered the same. As a high school sophomore, I remember praying that the cute, energetic cheerleader would fall head over heels for me. I was a shy, bashful, awkward teenager. It didn't happen. God didn't answer my prayer. Or did he?
It turned out the cheerleader and I had very little in common. I also remember another selfish prayer, a petition I made before my varsity hockey games. Please God, help us to win and help me to score a goal. A victory and a goal did not always happen. God didn't grant that prayer request either. Or did he?
Perhaps I scored more goals than I deserved. Or what about my prayer asking that God would give me over my fear of public speaking? He certainly didn't answer that one the way I had hoped.
After 58 years, I still shiver at the thought and stutter when attempting to speak in public settings. Or was it answered indeed? This leads me to the prayer that God answered for me without a doubt. My Moose Prayer.
Let's go back to the 10 year old 5th grader and his 15 year old oldest brother. One evening, Moose and I were in our basement in the middle of an all-star wrestling match and it happened. Bam! I could not believe my eyes. Moose, while performing a wrestling move, banged his head and the duck worked above us. While he was busy shaking off the cobwebs, I was standing there in awe.
How could he hit his head on something that high? My brother, Moose, was indeed larger than Paul Bunyan. He was a giant after all, confirmed in my mind right then and there. Thus, my Moose Prayer was born. From that night forward, I ended my bedtime prayers with, Please Lord, help me to grow to be as big as Moose. Prayer after prayer, night after night, year after year, I was relentless. I wanted more than anything to be as big as my big brother. I kept up this prayer for a good 5 or 6 years, never letting up. While we don't have a lot of tall jeans in our family, My dad pushing 6 feet, My mama petite 5 feet 5 inches, My non-Moose brothers at 5'11", although most of them are still claiming to be 6 feet, But Moose topped out at 6 feet 2 inches.
Big, strong, powerful and athletic indeed. As for me, somehow I grew to be 6 feet 6 inches. How did that happen? I don't know for sure. Was it the peanut butter, my favorite food? I doubt it. Coincidence? Maybe.
In answer to my Moose Prayer, I think quite possibly, yes. For God tells us, Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, Knock and it will be opened unto you. I certainly ask to be tall, with passion, over and over again. For me, I believe God chose to answer my prayer and then some. His way of telling me, Do not doubt, have faith. I hear you and will answer your prayers. This knowledge He has given me, this faith, has served me well over the years. On days when my faith is tested and doubt creeps into my mind as to whether God cares and is listening, I need to look no further than my 6 foot 6 inch frame as a reminder that yes, God does listen and He does care and He does want me to talk to Him. My prayers have changed since I was a teenager.
Instead of a laundry list of things to ask God for, I try to spend more time talking with God and listening to Him. Quiet time together, one on one, conversing. As a father myself, I learned how precious time is with your sons and daughters. What father would not want to have a conversation with his child? After my kids moved out of our house and I became an empty nester, the days I would get a phone call from one of them became my best days.
It made no difference to me the reason they called. Sometimes it was just to say hi and to tell me they loved me. Sometimes it was to discuss an issue they were having or to ask for some fatherly advice.
Sometimes they even called and questioned something I was doing. I cherished each and every one of these conversations. The precious time together is priceless. Fathers, I have learned, of course want what is best for their children and we do want them to ask. And I can surely imagine how the same goes with our Heavenly Father.
I also learned much of this from my own father. He asked me once, during one of our weekly Sunday night sessions, to define prayer. I struggled with an answer.
I thought I knew what it was, but I couldn't articulate it. He sent me to go look it up. I don't remember where I found the answer he was looking for, but when I came back and I said prayer is talking to God with love, he said, that's correct.
I'll never forget it. But more than a definition, I learned from my dad how to pray. From the formal prayers and the rosary, I also learned to be unselfish in prayers, praying for others rather than myself, just as he did.
Our family has been blessed over and over, thanks in a large part, I'm sure, to his unending prayers. I'm pretty sure my dad's moose prayer had nothing to do with himself, but more to do with talking to God with love about helping others. So this all begs the question, who is your moose?
Who do you want to emulate? What is your moose prayer? Talk to God about it with love. I'm convinced he's looking forward very much to talking with you, and he will listen to you, and he will answer your prayers. And a great job as always by Greg, and a special thanks to Paul in Minneapolis, Minnesota, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's OurAmericanStories.com. Hey, you guys. This is Tori and Jennie with the 902.1 OMG podcast. We have such a special episode brought to you by NerdTech ODT. We recorded it at iHeartRadio's 10th poll event, Wango Tango. Did you know that NerdTech ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams can help migraine sufferers still attend such an exciting event like Wango Tango?
It's true. I had one that night and I took my NerdTech ODT and I was present and had an amazing time. Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with some of our closest friends. This episode was brought to you by NerdTech ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams. Life with migraine attacks can mean missing out on big moments with friends and family.
But thankfully, NerdTech ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams is the only medication that is proven to treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines in adults. So, lively events like Wango Tango don't have to be missed. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year. And UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.
It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit UHCmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop. But for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot.
And I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. And we continue with our American stories. And this next story, well, it's a great social entrepreneurship story.
And we often delineate between the two. Some people go into business to make money. But so much of the great work in this country is philanthropic work for the community and for the betterment of people's lives, filling the gaps. Well, that's what social entrepreneurship does.
And this next story is brought to us by our own Joey Cortez. Every kid is born curious. And we do a damn good job saying, don't climb on that, don't put that in your mouth.
Of course, we have to put those guardrails up. But if you think about how we raise our kids, don't do this, don't do that, don't see this, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. And what do kids want to do? Explore.
They want to taste it, they want to touch it, they want to try it. And we do a good job for little kids, like, trying to kill their curiosity, right? You're listening to Nicole Small, an extraordinary Dallas woman who orchestrated the massive merger between Dallas' three then-existing science, natural history, and children museums and became the head of the new Perot Museum. She must have caught some kind of science bug when working at Perot because she now runs the If-Then Initiative, encouraging young girls to pursue careers in STEM, careers in science, technology, engineering, and math by highlighting stories of inspiring women in STEM. But in truth, she didn't catch any science bug at all.
She's had it since she was a little girl. I grew up in Dallas. My father was at the medical school here, so I had this upbringing where I was exposed to a ton of science.
What I didn't know then was that that would have a deep influence on my life. I think sports, for me, was a huge thing growing up. And sports is just an incredible way that I think parents enable their kids to go out there. My parents always taught me it's how you win and how you lose. That's integrity and character, right? And competition is really important because that's how you learn to fail sometimes.
You cry and then you look around and you're like, hmm, no one else is crying. I better get up and keep going. And I got hurt playing high school soccer, made it to college, played two years in college, and I was a soccer player. That's who I was and what I did, and my injury got a lot worse. An orthopedic surgeon said to me, do you want to hike, bike, and ski the rest of your life or do you want to play another year or two of soccer? What's your trajectory? And I was like, well, but I'm a soccer player.
That's what I do. And he said, well, you better figure out how to do something else then because you're not going to be able to do all these things the rest of your life. And that was a pretty painful moment when everything you've worked for just kind of gets taken away. I think my parents felt sorry for me for about five minutes and said, okay, sorry, you've had a great run, that's awesome, but like what are you going to do about it now? And not in an unkind way by any means. You cannot change the past, you cannot change the situation, what are you going to do about it?
You make the best out of your situation, and so you move on with life and like I said, it doesn't always go the way you plan it and sometimes awesome things happen that are unplanned. So I graduated from college and I had an opportunity to go work for McKinsey & Company, which is a consulting firm, and got the greatest business education ever. Worked really hard but in a good way.
Everybody should understand what it means to work hard too, right? I had just the incredible good fortune to work for great people and great clients and one of my projects was working for a natural history museum. I was the low man on the totem pole and McKinsey had offered to do some pro bono work for a local natural history museum in Dallas, so they offered me up and my job was to go look at museums and figure out what made a great science museum. We had in Dallas built a natural history museum at the Texas State Centennial in 1936 and we still had the exact same museum. Dallas had 250,000 people when that museum was built. Now we've got six or seven million in our metroplex area.
The city had outgrown the museum, kind of what they'd say, Stones and Bones Museum. We've got kids in the 21st century that learn everything on their phones, so you've got to think about how to stay competitive, right? It's like any other business. We like to say that nonprofit is a tax status, not a business plan. So for everybody who tries to run their business as a charity, it turns out you actually have to make money.
No margin, no mission, right? So we had to figure out how to build an institution. They wanted to build an institution that actually could make money, could serve people, could make sure that they were meeting their mission, right? So of inspiring the next generation. And like a typical consultant, I finished the deck, handed it to my partner, we presented it to the board at the museum and said, good luck.
We hope you guys can go build a new museum one day. And I thought that was the end of it. But yet that was just the beginning.
I didn't know that. Nicole went on to Northwestern's business school, where she started and sold her own company with classmates. She then made her way back to Dallas for love and for marriage, and unexpectedly made her way back to the Museum of Natural History. They said, do you want to come help us build that museum you talked about? And I said, I don't know anything about museums, but I know how to start things.
I can write business plans and I'll help consult for a while. And a while turned into a while. 13 years, to be exact. This project was no small feat, and it metamorphosized into something far greater. I was a young woman taking over an old natural history museum, and there were challenges for sure. And I came in from a startup, from the for-profit world, and it took me some time to culturally adjust. It probably took people some time.
They would tell you to culturally adjust me. Business plans in hand and expectations to work long hours, Nicole came in like a bull in a china shop. But it turns out that with her background, she would be the perfect person to face the challenges ahead. We had three museums in Dallas. There was a science center, a natural history museum and a children's museum who all had their own brands, had their own constituents. All of them wanted to go from good to great. And what we recognized was that our constituents would be better off if we had one great museum versus a few good ones.
Some would tell you it took 10 years to get the merger done. And we spent a lot of time working to try to figure out how to encourage the teams of three different museums that it would be better off for our community, that it was actually better for the mission that the business was a single entity over time. That while we were all three nonprofits, you know, no margin, no mission.
You can't survive as a business. You can't get your mission out the door. And if there was a way to combine the three together, we could have a stronger margin and then we could have a stronger mission. And we really wanted to aspire to build a from scratch brand new museum. And the only way that was going to get done was if we did it together.
We were better together. So we spent hours and hours and hours and it was painful along the way. Someone at the time said this was as easy as merging Exxon and Microsoft, right? And there were three little tiny nonprofits, but it's hard because people are really passionate. But we got this merger done and we had already bought some new lands and we began to envision, gosh, if you could build a museum from scratch to meet sort of the 21st century needs of how you inspire the next generation workforce and get kids in the community passionate about science and you make it fun and you make it engaging and you make it smart, what would that look like? We were able to construct an exhibition design team, an architecture team, a construction team that we put together, frankly, right before the 08 crash. And so imagine deciding you're going to raise $200 million buying an expensive piece of land on the edge of downtown Dallas, being well into that project, being into design documents with the Pritzker prize-winning architect who was incredible, Tom Main, to work with, with three exhibition design firms and then the market, the bottom completely falls out of the market in the middle of it. We're dead in the water. There's no way. We're never going to raise $200 million.
It's impossible. And what we saw at that bottom was incredible hope, this incredible realization that if ever we needed to invest in our kids, if ever we needed to think about how the U.S. was going to remain competitive, we needed to make sure that this project kept going. I think you asked me earlier if I ever cried. I cried when I fell off the beam when I was 8 and I think I cried when the market crashed and I just thought, gosh, they're in our dream. It's over.
There's no way this will ever happen. But people really rallied, and I had the good fortune of witnessing that, you know, sometimes when you're challenged, that resilience thing, it's kind of real. That resilience thing, it's kind of real. Nicole Smalls, who we're listening to, the co-founder of If Then Initiative and the former CEO of Perot Museum, more of this remarkable story, her story here on Our American Stories. Can help migraine sufferers still attend such an exciting event like Wango Tango?
It's true. I had one that night and I took my NURTEC ODT and I was present and had an amazing time. Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with some of our closest friends. This episode was brought to you by NURTEC ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams. Life with migraine attacks can mean missing out on big moments with friends and family.
But thankfully, NURTEC ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams is the only medication that is proven to treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines in adults. So lively events like Wango Tango don't have to be missed. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year, and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare annual enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.
It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit UHCMedicareHealthPlans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot, and I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. And we continue with our American stories and Nicole Small's story. We left off with the stock market crashing, casting doubts on this bold endeavor to merge Dallas' three main museums. While their team weathered the storm, Nicole was about to enter darker territory. Got diagnosed with breast cancer about a year before we opened the museum.
Definitely a shocker. And had an incredible team of doctors who were able to put me through a year of treatment, radiation, all of the above, and saved my life. Made me ever more passionate about science and investing in science, and also, you know, put your priorities in order. Silver lining and all that, right, is you also see the great good in people when you go through tough things. That makes me want to cry more than being told I'm sick, is how grateful I was.
I had friends flying in from my two business partners who I had started a company with, showed up many times, sat through chemo with me, college friends, high school friends, my kids' friends' moms who jumped in to help make sure my kids were fed or got where they needed to go. People were incredible, truly, truly incredible. Random acts of kindness were just, you know, and I feel very indebted, right, to who much is given, much is expected, and that can be used in a lot of ways. And for me, in that circumstance, I was unfortunately the recipient of a yuck diagnosis, right, that I was a recipient of such incredible kindness that I will forever hope and aspire to be as good of a person as those people were to me and to my family. It really restores your faith in humanity if you ever think about losing it. To go through difficult things sometimes brings out the best in people, and so that was a pretty incredible thing. And I got to keep working, some days better than others, and God, that museum kept me going, my kids kept me going, my husband kept me going, and so, you know, knock on wood.
If you could see me, I'm knocking on wood, you can hear that. I really don't want to do that again. While I was at the museum, we had to buy land, and we were incredibly fortunate to be introduced to Lida Hill. She was associated with a company that made the first gift to buy the land for the Perot Museum and was just really inspired by her passion and commitment to making the world a better place, to science, and I was just really taken with her spirit. And along the way, she was really, really involved in our committee to build the museum, so we worked together for about ten years. And through the process of building museums, she became a member of the Giving Pledge, which the Warren Buffett Bill Gates pledged to commit to give away a majority of your wealth to make the world a better place, and she was like, yeah, not only am I going to take the pledge, I'm going to give it all away.
Oh, and by the way, I'm going to do it all while I'm alive, because it's not fun to do it after you're dead, so I might as well do it now. So she just got this incredible kind of character and spirit and integrity. She's also a breast cancer survivor and was incredibly supportive when I was ill. And when she'd first taken the Giving Pledge, I said, gosh, I love, I'm in my dream job. I didn't know it was my dream job, but it was my dream job to run this museum. What an incredible privilege. And I said, but boy, helping you give your money away, that's a fun job for someone, too.
Not knowing that I would have that opportunity one day. So we visited, and I had an opportunity to join her team and do a lot of the work that I'd been doing at the museum, focusing on how to inspire the world in science. But to do it maybe with her and in support of her on even a larger scale, as she wants to give all her capital away and her tagline with science is the answer, which is kind of awesome, right? So the privilege to come support her in helping do the philanthropy to make the world a better place was an incredible personal opportunity. And, by the way, I'd been at the museum 13 years.
Great institutions need leadership change, too, right? It's like, you don't want to be the quarterback that stays a little too long, that overstays their welcome. And so I left to join our team in 2014 and been there five years.
And it's been an incredible ride. So I worked for a museum for so long and talked to kids and watched how they interacted. And when we were building the prayer, we thought a lot about this idea of giving kids visibility into career opportunities.
Because, again, if you can't see it, you can't be it. It's not new news that we have a leaky pipeline for women in STEM. And so we began to really think about, are we tackling this women in science challenge in the right way? And, again, you can look at the pipeline from little girls all the way up to Nobel laureates.
It leaks the whole way. If you leave half of the brains on the table, are we solving the problems we need? Are we giving everyone the best opportunity?
I mean, we're not, right? It's just inherent in problem solving that you want as many great minds trying to solve problems. And, by the way, it's proven over and over that bringing a diverse set of skills and brains to the table gives you different perspectives. Imagine a little girl like me who always wanted to be a soccer player, but I was never going to be a pro athlete, right? But if I knew I could work for the U.S. women's soccer team and be an orthopedic surgeon or a data scientist and combine my love of science with my love of soccer, how cool is that?
I didn't know that was an option when I was growing up, right? What if you're into fashion and you found out that we just interviewed the head of persons who was explaining to us that if you don't know the golden rule and the Fibonacci sequence, how can you design things, right? You have to know math to design. So if you're interested in fashion, by the way, you should probably study math.
How do you measure to cut fabric? How do you think about material science? So if you want to cure cancer one day, did you know that there's lots of jobs, right? You could be a research scientist, you could be a clinician, you could work for a pharma company. How many jobs are out there to cure cancer one day?
We have met so many cool, amazing, inspirational women. Some are 22, some are 82, some are biochemists, some are marine biologists, some work for garden companies, for Google, all sorts of things, right? But we realized that if we could just show more little girls what their opportunities were, then we might be able to begin to widen the pipeline. So one of the things we noticed was, gosh, was there an opportunity to work with lots of different sectors to show little girls that STEM was everywhere, to both amplify the girls who were already interested in science to make sure they had visibility into what their options were, to girls who thought they weren't interested in science because they didn't know really what that meant. They were told they weren't good at math when they were little.
They thought it wasn't for them. They thought being a scientist was only one thing, right? A lot of kids have a vision of a scientist and they draw Albert Einstein or they draw someone in a lab, which is incredible work, right?
That's how we're carrying cancer. But if you're a kid who likes to be outdoors all the time or likes to be in the ocean all the time, maybe we should show them they can be a marine biologist one day. So we recognized that there was an opportunity to bring together thought leaders across sectors to create what we're calling the If-Then Initiative. If we support a woman in STEM, then she can change the world. This initiative is about inspiring young girls and connecting them to amazing role models, funding women in science, funding women scientists, and then helping them tell their stories. We're going to have some badass women, too, that people are just like, I mean, not only do I want to be here when I grow up, I just want to be friends with her because she's so fascinating and cool and interesting and real, right? The other thing about these women is they're real, so a lot of them have families, a lot of them are adventure scientists, a lot of them work in labs, a lot of them, some of them won a Nobel Prize, some are going to be 22-year-old post-docs that an 18-year-old could look at and say, oh, okay, I can see myself in her shoes because that's not that far away. So they're real, and we're going to tell their real stories. Real stories, and we do that here every day, and we know that the power of stories is the imitative power. We can see ourselves in the characters, and the more diverse those characters, the more people in America actually see themselves.
If you can't see it, you can't be it, we heard Nicole Small say earlier. And so her life's mission is to bring more women to the sciences, to technology, engineering, and math, known as STEM. And you can see all the great work of the If Then Initiative at ifthenshecan.org. That's ifthenshecan.org. They have great stories of women in STEM.
It will be a tremendous resource for you, your children, and your community. This is Lee Habib, Nicole Small's story, here on Our American Stories. Hey you guys, this is Tori and Jenny with the 90210MG podcast. We have such a special episode brought to you by NERTEC ODT. We recorded it at iHeartRadio's 10th poll event, Wango Tango. Did you know that NERTEC ODT Remedipant, 75 mg, can help migraine sufferers still attend such an exciting event like Wango Tango? It's true! I had one that night, and I took my NERTEC ODT, and I was present and had an amazing time. Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with some of our closest friends. This episode was brought to you by NERTEC ODT Remedipant, 75 mg. Life with migraine attacks can mean missing out on big moments with friends and family.
But thankfully, NERTEC ODT Remedipant, 75 mg, is the only medication that is proven to treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines in adults. So, lively events like Wango Tango don't have to be missed. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year. And UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.
It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot, and I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. And we're back with our American stories. And now, we bring you one of our favorite contributors and producers, John Elfner, to tell us the story of the iconic book collection known as the Harvard Classics, created by a president of Harvard from the 1800s because of his unusual philosophy on education. In the early 1900s, a man named Charles Eliot made this bold claim. One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long. That claim might strike some as surprising, but what is even more surprising is that this man, Charles Eliot, was president of Harvard University, a position he held for nearly 40 years.
It seems odd that the president of America's most prestigious university would say you don't need a school to become educated. But if you know a little more about Charles Eliot and the United States at the turn of the century, this statement makes more sense. During the early 1900s, the United States was experiencing rapid transformation. The American Industrial Revolution created loads of factory jobs, which were luring farmers from rural America and immigrants from across the ocean to American cities. The population of cities was skyrocketing during this period.
That's Dr. Robert Johnston. He's a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he's an expert on this period. The social changes of the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States were among the most momentous in our nation's history. People came from all over the globe so that they could have better lives for themselves and for their children.
Of course they were drawn to America to improve their economic circumstances, but for many there was more to it than that. We might call these people strivers, people who really sought to improve themselves in what we think of as a classic American way. The desire of these strivers to improve themselves was recognized by members of America's established elite class, and none was more elite than Dr. Charles Eliot, the longest-serving president of Harvard University. You heard Eliot's claim at the beginning of the story about the possibility of an education minus a university, and that was no hollow claim from Eliot. He had spent his last four decades as Harvard's president, transforming the institution from its original mission as a minister's training school to become a leading liberal arts college. As Eliot was nearing retirement, he began to consider how his transformation of Harvard could be shared more broadly with those who couldn't attend a university. Of course the problem was that still very few people could go to college, not just Harvard, but any college, and so what would you do if you wanted to create an opportunity for everyone?
Eliot saw the nation's emerging striver class and began speaking to them on their terms. What if, he imagined, the classics taught at Harvard could be made more widely available, especially to those who couldn't afford to take four years off of work to attend a university? Central to that vision was his belief in the power of the written word to educate anyone. I'm telling you, this guy loved books, and he believed books, not teachers, were the surest path to becoming educated. Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.
They are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. He even began to share in public addresses his belief that a university may not be necessary to become what he called a cultivated man. A three foot shelf would hold books enough to afford a good substitute for a liberal education to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading. Fifteen minutes a day, that's all it would take, and Dr. Eliot's bookshelf was the right idea at the right time. There was a public appetite for something like this.
Here again is Dr. Robert Johnston. Part of thinking of a better life, of capturing the American dream, was not just about making money and buying a better house, but in fact becoming cultured. And to do that, people realized that they wanted to be educated in a very broad and liberal way. Eliot later amended his estimation of the size of the bookshelf to five feet, and his frequent references to this idea earned it the name Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Bookshelf. But it's not clear that this idea was anything Eliot ever intended to actually create. Sure, it was consistent with his ideas about the value of liberal arts education. But for Eliot, this five foot bookshelf idea seems to have been more of a rhetorical flourish than an actual intention.
And it was an easy claim to make, since he likely assumed he'd never have to test the ability of his bookshelf to educate. That was until Peter Collier, one of the nation's biggest publishers, heard Eliot make this claim in his speech and said to Eliot, oh yeah, prove it. Peter Collier was the publisher of Collier's magazine. Collier's billed itself as a weekly collection of fact, fiction, sensation, wit, humor, and news.
The magazine featured prominent writers including Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And the public ate it up. Collier's was first published in 1888, and by 1892 it was going to a quarter of a million homes in America.
By the time Charles Eliot was publicly ruminating about his five foot bookshelf, that number had grown to half a million. And why was there such a large audience for a magazine like Collier's at this time? It was because the changing nature of work was creating something new in the labor force. Leisure time. People were working shifts instead of tending to a farm, which operates essentially 24 hours a day. And because shift work was predictable, so was free time.
As much as people were working and working many hours and working very hard, they did have the means and the hours available to go out and have genuine leisure opportunities in many ways for the first time at a mass level. They were able to read. And read they did. And now, thanks to Peter Collier, they had something to read that could make them what Charles Eliot called a cultivated man, the Harvard classics. Following on the great success of these mass subscription magazines, people like Peter Collier said, why can't we do this for a book series?
It would be the same model, the same demographic, and people would love to grasp the opportunity to get a genuine liberal education. Charles Eliot accepted Collier's challenge, and upon Eliot's retirement, he along with several professors from Harvard began selecting works that were worthy of inclusion in the five foot bookshelf. They agreed that a 50-volume collection would be suitable, and in May of 1909, immediately following Eliot's retirement from Harvard, the work began. The list of works included that covered over 23,000 pages is too long to do justice to, but you can guess some of the authors. Plato, Cicero, John Milton, Saint Augustine, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and so many others. The marketing of the Harvard classics was genius, and Charles Eliot's renown was central to this marketing. He made several public statements like this one to advertise the Harvard classics.
Within the limits of 50 volumes containing about 23,000 pages, my task was to provide the means of obtaining such knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seemed essential to the 20th century idea of a cultivated man. And the visual presentation of the Harvard classics was ingenious as well. Upon its release, three distinct bindings were printed. A limited first edition run of 20,000 copies included Charles Eliot's watermarked signature on every page. The edition was known as the Deluxe Edition. Other limited editions of the Harvard classics were marketed afterwards. There was the Eliot Edition, signed by Charles Eliot and limited to 1,000 sets, and the Alumni Edition Deluxe. For the record, it isn't clear what made this edition Alumni or Deluxe, but for buyers, it surely felt like a luxury. Many editions were published in crimson colored binding, and as everyone knew, the color crimson meant Harvard. And the Harvard seal was printed on the binding, so visitors to the house of an owner of the classics could immediately identify the collection. Most importantly, there was an eager audience for this series.
City dwellers were eager to improve themselves, and the Harvard classics promised the reader entrance into the status of the cultivated man. In the first two decades of the Harvard classics publishing, over 350,000 full sets were sold, and countless more were sold as Collier's continued to publish various editions until 1970. You can still find sets in American households today. I grew up in a house with a full set on display. And where did we display it? Ironically, in a five foot bookshelf in our bathroom.
I'll let you insert your own joke there. But in the meantime, here again is Dr. Robert Johnston on the significance of the Harvard classics. There's this idea that you can't have democracy without an educated citizenry, and I think there's actually much to that.
To have a functioning, good, working, truly democratic society, you do need to have people who are well educated at a very mass level. Series like the Harvard classics were crucial to that. My family set of the Harvard classics was recently donated to a local high school, and given the clear educational goals of Dr. Elliott's five foot bookshelf, this seemed like a pretty appropriate place for the Harvard classics to be displayed.
You can still find complete sets online in pretty good condition. So if you have an empty five foot shelf and an available 15 minutes a day, maybe you want to get yourself a set of the Harvard classics. And a special thanks to John Elfner for some terrific storytelling. And if you're lucky enough to be in his school, well, John's a history teacher in a public school system in Illinois. And my goodness, if we had more history teachers like this, history would actually be interesting. And what a story to tell about Dr. Charles Elliott and the shift from colleges as theology schools and divinity schools to classic liberal arts schools.
And now, well, whatever your opinion to what they are now. And my goodness, to have read these classics and have them in one space and sell 350,000 of them complete series showed you the truth of the appetite for these strivers. It wasn't just about money and it wasn't just about a home. It was about culture, too, and this leisure time to be able to read that the 20th century brought to, well, to everybody. Farmers, well, who had the time? Work, work, work. And the idea that we had this kind of time, one of the great, great advances in world history.
The story of Dr. Charles Elliott, the story of the Harvard classics, and so much more here on Our American Stories. Use mobile app, available 24-hour roadside assistance and more, and Geico is an easy choice. Switch today and see all the ways you could save.
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Whisper: medium.en / 2023-02-16 03:22:32 / 2023-02-16 03:41:19 / 19
