One Good Thing: Special Olympian spreads message of love
(Gary Schottle via AP)Gary Schottle arrived in time to see the other kids in line hitting and jumping on his young son. Special Olympics changed everything. Special Olympics has since branched out to more than 170 countries, empowering more than 5 million athletes who had often been cast aside. In 20 years of Special Olympics competition, Tank's confidence has soared, his leadership spreading across playing fields, the Houston area and beyond. Once one of the bullied, he has become a living embodiment of the Special Olympics message.
Rafer Johnson, 1960 Olympic decathlon champion, dies at 86
Rafer Johnson, who won the decathlon at the 1960 Rome Olympics and helped subdue Robert F. Kennedy's assassin in 1968, died Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020. (AP Photo)LOS ANGELES – Rafer Johnson, who won the decathlon at the 1960 Rome Olympics and helped subdue Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin in 1968, died Wednesday. Johnson won a gold medal at the Pan American Games in 1955 while competing in just his fourth decathlon. Johnson, Yang, and Kuznetzov had their way with the record books between the 1956 and 1960 Olympics. Johnson won over the Soviet audience with his gutsy performance in front of what had been a hostile crowd.
Posthumous memoir by Sargent Shriver scheduled for January
NEW YORK The late Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps' founding director and an architect of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, left behind at least one unfinished project. RosettaBooks announced Tuesday that it had acquired Shriver's memoir We Called It a War, which he worked on in the late 1960s and was only recently rediscovered. Klebanoff is a close friend of Bill Josephson, who was the Peace Corps' founding general counsel and wrote the book's foreword. Shriver published a 1964 book, Point of the Lance, about his years with the Peace Corps, and books about him include a memoir by his son, Mark Shriver, and an acclaimed biography by Scott Stossel. We Called It a War was spotted among his personal papers at the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute.