Tag Archives: heroes

An Unknown Hero Among Heroes

by Woody

Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.

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Today being the Fourth of July, it seems fitting to share a column about a hero from my Star archives from a decade ago…

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For the first five days of August, I was in the august company of heroes in our nation’s capital.

Heroes like astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, and earlier fliers like Charles Lindbergh and the Wright Brothers, all in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Also men and women heroes interred in Arlington National Cemetery, a heartbreaking landscape that is ironically beautiful.

My tour of heroes further included monuments for those who served in World Wars I and II; the Korean War Memorial; and Vietnam Memorial Wall.

In the National Archives I peered at Founding heroes like Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock’s ornate signatures on the original Declaration of Independence.

And, of course, there are the marble heroes in the National Mall: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yet the hero who arguably engraved the deepest impression upon me was one I encountered shortly after my late-night arrival when I boarded the train from the airport to my downtown D.C. hotel.

The first few minutes of the ride were quiet, sans the pleasant rhythmic sounds of the track below, when suddenly calm turned to clamor. A passenger two rows ahead of me – a tall, sinewy man in his 20s, bare arms covered with sleeve tattoos, electrocuted blond hair that made Einstein’s look tame – jumped from his seat like a jack-in-the-box and began shouting at a goateed man – about his same age, although shorter and stockier – seated across the aisle.

The goateed man apparently had said something to the mangy tattooed man’s equally unkempt dog. Quick as a hiccup, the two men were standing nose-to-nose as the tattooed man angrily cursed and challenged the goateed man’s manhood.

A young woman facing me across the aisle looked petrified. As the vile racial epithets from the crazed tattooed man intensified, I signaled with my eyes that we should slip out the door at the next stop.

Just then – THUMP! – the goateed man landed a solid punch to the jaw and – THUMP! THUMP! – a second and third blow. Frankly, Gandhi might not have blamed him at this point. Remarkably, the tattooed man’s large dog remained nonviolent.

Before another punch could be thrown, or a weapon pulled out, a bald-headed man sitting with his back to the fray bolted from his seat, spun 180 degrees into the aisle in one fluid motion, took four strides in two blinks, and seized the goateed man from behind. It was as if Batman happened to be aboard the Metro Blue Line.

Sitting beside his gray-haired wife, the bald-headed man, wearing peach slacks and a white sweater, had seemed as unimposing as Bruce Wayne. Rising into action, the human Teddy bear came into focus like a grizzly – or a former NFL linebacker or retired Marine sergeant.

“Knock it off!!! Now!!!” the bald-headed man commanded fiercely with multiple exclamation marks. “Get out of here!!! Now!!! Before you get arrested!!!”

Having stepped between the two combatants, the bald-headed man assumed the wide-footed stance of a heavyweight boxer and slowly and deliberately backed the goateed man towards the closed exit.

At the next stop, the goateed man retreated out the door with haste; the tattooed man and his dog also departed; the bald-headed man returned to his wife’s side; and the rest of us passengers finally exhaled.

When my stop came, I used the exit door further from me but nearer the bald-headed man.

“Thanks,” I said, shaking his hand. “You’re a hero.”

He smiled, humbly, but his wife’s proud smile was as oversized as John Hancock’s “John Hancock.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Two Tales of Christmas Spirit

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Two Tales of

Christmas Spirit

A song in the movie The Grinch asks, “Where are you, Christmas? Why can’t I find you?”

Sometimes it shows up where you least expect it as I witnessed just the other day. A homeless man, bearded and bedraggled and sadly appearing to be in mental disarray as well, was yelling angrily at every passerby who came with 20 yards of him near a walkway at a local park.

Naturally, people began keeping their distance. And then came an exception. A teenage boy on a bike approached the man, not too close, but near enough to get barked at fiercely before riding away.

A good while later, maybe half an hour, the teen returned. He had pedaled some four miles, roundtrip, to McDonald’s to buy a gift meal for the distressed man.

The scene, which I watched unfold from afar, brightened my day and Holiday Season as I hope it does yours. It also brought to mind another Christmastime encounter I witnessed a number of years ago that I still share whenever someone complains about today’s youth.

It was past 1 o’clock in the morning when I stopped at a 24-hour Ventura doughnut shop on my way home from a Lakers game. The parking lot was a ghost town except for four shadowy figures loitering on the sidewalk near the shop’s entrance.

As I approached I could see there were three boys and girl, all teens, all with numerous tattoos and piercings. I stereotypically judged these books by their covers, especially as they stood hauntingly in a semicircle around an elderly man, cold and coatless and barefoot, and seated on the sidewalk.

I went inside to get a blueberry muffin, all the while keeping a worried eye on the group outside. Nothing seemed to be happening until…

… I walked back outside. Then, as ominously as pirates ordering a prisoner to walk the plank at gunpoint, I heard the troublesome-looking teens tell the old man to stand up and walk.

“Uh-oh!” I thought.

My next thought was that I had misjudged these four buccaneers, and greatly so.

“How do those feel?” one of the boys asked. “Do they fit?”

The homeless man took a few measured steps, stopped, looked at his feet, made an about-face and returned to the quartet.

“These ones fit real good,” the cold man answered, flashing a smile that warmed the winter night.

The teens, in unison, smiled back.

“Keep them. They’re yours,” the same boy as before replied. “I want you to have them.”

Glancing down I saw the speaking teen was now barefoot. He had given the man in need his expensive skateboarding sneakers and socks as well.

The other two boys sat on their skateboards, retying their shoes. It seems that they, too, had let the man try on their sneakers to find which pair best fit him. The girl, meanwhile, gave her hooded sweatshirt to the cold man.

Halfway to my car I made a U-turn and went back inside the shop and picked out an assortment of a dozen doughnuts while sharing what I had just witnessed outside. Time and again, the Christmas spirit is more contagious than coronavirus and this was such a time. The woman worker not only wouldn’t let me pay for the doughnuts, she added a free jumbo coffee for the cold man.

“These are from the lady inside,” I said, delivering the treats. “Have a nice night.”

The man with new shoes and a sweatshirt grinned appreciatively.

“You have a nice night, too,” one of the teens replied.

I already had.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

 

Sweet Thank You For Heroes

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Sweet Thank You

For Frontline Heroes

A cupcake is a small thing.

One thousand cupcakes is quite another.

Stephanie Nelson had the very big idea of honoring frontline heroes at Ventura County Medical Center with gourmet cupcakes. She selected National Nurses Day on May 6 for the confectionary celebration.

Because National Doctors Day passed two months earlier without any festivities due to the urgency of COVID-19 preparations, docs were also mixed into the new cupcake batter. In fact, because every worker in the medical profession is indispensible, it was decided that each and every member of the VCMC staff would be thanked with a fancy cupcake.

This was no small undertaking for Nelson, Director of Volunteer Services at the hospital, and her helpers. To deliver successfully required the harmony of an ICU team during a Code Blue situation. Call this a Code Red Velvet.

The baking angels were called upon at “Heavenly Cakes & More” in Oxnard to create a variety of gorgeous offerings in chocolate, vanilla, lemon and, of course, red velvet. The frosted artworks featured swirls, sprinkles and powdered dustings.

On the morning of Nurses Day, Nelson and two fellow cupcake crusaders – Mary McCarthy, a member of the VCMC Auxiliary; and Patient Advocate Marie Castaneda – picked up the baked bounty.

In a bakery’s version of Tetris, they puzzle-pieced 84 pink and white cardboard boxes, each holding a dozen delicacies, into their three cars and rushed them – “Stat!” – to VCMC.

“It took quite a while to load the cars and then unload them,” McCarthy shared in apparent understatement, for the boxes naturally had to be handled and stacked with care.

After the cupcakes were set out in various break rooms throughout the hospital, Nelson sent out word about the goodies to department managers. During brief reprieves from caring for patients, their work seemingly more nonstop than ever during this coronavirus era, staff members snuck away to savor a little taste of Heavenly.

Despite a sweet discount by Heavenly Cakes and a kind Samaritan stepping forward to pick up the tab for 100 of the cupcakes, dough was still needed to pay the balance. In stepped the Auxiliary with funds it raises from sales in the hospital gift shop.

The Auxiliary itself is a collection of hero volunteers. It routinely buys toys, books and games for young patients in the Pediatric and NICU wards and also stages holiday parties for the kids.

“It’s tough for them to be there, especially at holiday times,” McCarthy says of the hospitalized children. She further notes that because of COVID-19, the volunteers currently cannot visit the kids but instead must drop gifts off at the nursing stations.

As grand as the cupcake party was, here is something even more beautiful than a red velvet with a swirl of white frosting: for each of the 1,000 smiles delivered to VCMC there surely has been a similar deed of coronavirus-related kindness in Ventura County these past few stay-and-shelter months.

The cupcakes, however, seem a perfect metaphor for these times – and for a hospital. Unlike a giant-sized fancy cake where the cut slices touch one another, cupcakes are individually wrapped in paper liners – like tiny Personal Protective Equipment. Boxed together, or arranged on a table, they are the equal of any whole cake.

“I know it’s a small gesture,” McCarthy shares, “but I am so grateful to all those on the frontlines. The hospital is under enormous pressure. Hopefully the cupcakes provided a bit of cheer. Never underestimate cupcake power.”

Asked if all 1,000 cupcakes made it to the staff lips, Mary offered a confession: “I had a red velvet one – heaven!”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Fire Casts a Glow on True Heroes

by Woody

1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

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Thomas Fire Casts a Glow on True Heroes

When the Thomas Fire burned my father’s home down to the ground, my boyhood bedroom went up in flames.

Lost, among more valuable things, were posters of Jerry West and Gail Goodrich, Stan Smith and Arthur Ashe, Bart Starr and Leroy Kelly, and more heroes from youth.

After the smoke cleared, this clarity: How misguided to consider someone a hero because he can hit a jump shot in the clutch, zip a backhand passing shot, throw a touchdown spiral.

Today, the poster I would want to hang up is an enlargement of a photograph I saw from the atrocious Thomas Fire. It is picture of a true hero. A firefighter.

1firemencourageStriding boldly through smoke and embers toward the camera, he is faceless, a good-guy Darth Vader behind a helmeted breathing mask. His firesuit looks like an astronaut’s lunar spacesuit, except instead of white it is soot-smudged tan with rows of neon-green-and-silver reflective stripes.

From his toolbelt hangs a flashlight. His black-gloved fists clutch a crowbar and red-headed fire axe. Deacon Jones, from another poster turned to ash, never looked more fearsome. The firefighter is ready for real battle, not the gridiron kind.

Hercules’ second labor was to defeat Hydra, a monster so devilish that every time the mythical Greek god chopped off one head, two would grow back. The Thomas Fire has seemed to multiply similarly.

Thousands of real-not-mythical heroes have been laboring to defeat this Pyra beast. Heroes from throughout California and also Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, Idaho and Washington.

Not only do firefighters, and other first responders, put their lives on the line – and frontline – helping others, but something that often goes underappreciated is they are thus absent from their own loved ones during trying times.

Another poster-worthy photograph taken during this Cal-amity features the black silhouette of a lone firefighter against an orange inferno backdrop. It is impossible to tell if the firefighter is walking forward toward the camera or away with back turned.

Actually, it seems certain the firefighter is stalking from the lens and towards the flames because that is what these brave heroes do.

If the world were fair and just, firefighters – not superstar athletes – would be on bedroom posters and have multimillion-dollar salaries. Like pro athletes, firefighters too often wind up with prematurely broken bodies, not to mention scarred lungs.

While it seems firefighters should wear capes, like Superman or Batman, one thing has proved beyond the powers of these real-life superheroes the past ten days: buying their own meals or cups of coffee. Seemingly every time they try, local restaurant owners or patrons pick up the tab and rightly so.1venturaspaULASTRONG

I did not know it at the time, but I was boyhood friends with two such heroes – rather, future heroes. And I have been manhood friends with a third firefighter for a quarter century.

Thinking of my friends Don and James and Hall, and their brave brethren, I am reminded of a parable about a man tossing starfish, one by one, back into the ocean after hundreds had been washed ashore by a violent storm.

A second beachcomber walks up and says dismissively, “You’re just wasting your time. There are too far many starfish for you to make a difference.”

Like stranded starfish, there have been too many threatened homes and buildings for firefighters to possibly save them all. And yet they battle on, tirelessly as the tide.

I imagine their answer while protecting a home from flames is the same the first man on the beach gave while tossing a starfish into the ocean: “I cannot save them all, but to this one I’m making a world of difference.”

One final photo: a young girl wears a disposable respirator mask outside her Ventura home. On a wall she has written, in chalk of pink and orange and blue and yellow; in block letters and in script; and written also in love: “Dear Firefighters, Thank You for Saving our Home.”

I wish every fire station could have a poster of this picture on a wall.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Column: An Unknown Hero

by Woody

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoWOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” can be purchased here at Amazon

 

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An Unknown Hero Among Heroes

For the first five days of August, I was in the august company of heroes in our nation’s capital.

Heroes like astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong and earlier fliers like Charles Lindbergh and the Wright Brothers, all in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.1-arlington

Men and women, heroes, interred in Arlington National Cemetery, a heartbreaking landscape that is ironically beautiful.

My tour of heroes included monuments for those who served in World Wars I and II; the Korean War Memorial; and the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

In the National Archives I peered at Founding heroes like Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock’s faded “John Hancocks” on the original Declaration of Independence.

And, of course, there are the marble heroes in the National Mall: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yet the hero who arguably engraved the deepest impression on me was one I encountered shortly after my late-night arrival at Ronald Reagan National Airport when I boarded the Metro Blue Line to my downtown D.C. hotel.

The first few minutes of the ride were quiet, sans the pleasant rhythmic sounds of the train itself, when suddenly came clamor.

A passenger facing me two rows ahead in the near-empty train car – a tall, sinewy man in his 20s, his bare arms covered with long sleeves of tattoos, his electrocuted blond hair making Einstein’s look tame – jumped from his seat like a jack-in-the-box. He shouted at a goateed man, about the same age as he although shorter and stockier, sitting across the aisle.

Apparently the goateed man had “disrespected” the mangy tattooed man’s dog. In a flash the two men were nose-to-nose although only the tattooed man spoke – or rather, shouted. He cursed at the goateed man; challenged his manhood; unleashed racial taunts. Exclamation marks punctuated his torrent.

At any second I expected weapons to come out and I don’t think I was alone; a young woman facing me across the aisle looked absolutely petrified. As the vile racial epithets from the crazed tattooed man intensified, I signaled with my eyes that she – we – should sneak out the door at the next stop.1-metro

Just then, THUMP! The goateed man unloaded a punch. And another and a third. Frankly, Gandhi might not have blamed him at this point. Meanwhile, the tattooed man’s large dog remarkably remained nonviolent.

In slow motion this is what I next witnessed: a baldheaded man with his back to the fray bolted from his seat and in one fluid motion spun 180 degrees into the aisle, took three lightening-quick strides and grabbed the goateed man from behind before he could throw a fourth punch. Breaking apart two pit bulls would have required less courage.

It was as if Batman was aboard.

Sitting beside his gray-haired wife, the baldheaded man had been as unimposing as Bruce Wayne: he was wearing peach slacks and a white sweater and appeared old enough to receive Social Security.

Once he rose, however, the Teddy bear came into focus like a grizzly. If not a former NFL linebacker, my guess is he was once an Army sergeant or perhaps a retired police officer for he exuded the authority of both.

After getting between the combatants who were now both screaming bloodily at each other, the baldheaded man barked commands: “Knock it off! Now! Get out of here! Now! Before you get arrested!”

All the while the baldheaded man strode forward slowly and wide-footed, a heavyweight boxer backing up a foe, herding the goateed man towards the exit door as a German Shepherd would direct a sheep.

At the next stop the goateed man and tattooed man both got off; the baldheaded man returned to his gray-haired wife’s side; and the rest of us in the train car breathed easier.

When my stop came, I used the exit door furthest from me but nearer the baldheaded man.

“Thanks,” I said, shaking his hand. “You’re a hero.”

He smiled humbly, but appreciatively, and almost as widely as did his wife.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”