Persevere

In 1957 Theodor Seuss Geisel took 225 new reader vocabulary words, rhymed them, and turned out Cat in the Hat. Ella Goodman says this little volume of absurdity "worked like a karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane, and Spot." Not only that, Dr. Seuss was suddenly famous. He didn't have an easy time getting there. His first book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was submitted to 27 different publishers before it was printed. (Maybe if he had shortened the title....)

Our newspaper just finished running a book about Orville and Wilbur Wright who tried and failed many times before they got it right. Thomas Edison delivered light to a dark, soot-covered society when he tried a thousand times and finally succeeded with the electric light.

What would we do without men and women who took risks and persevered despite all obstacles?

We must tell our children and grandchildren the stories about these and other people like Wilma Rudolph who won 3 gold medals in the Olympics after having polio. Our children and grandchildren face a world plagued with war, the AIDs epidemic, rampant hunger and homelessness. May they take the risks we failed to take and persevere more fervantly than we have.

"Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see." John W. Whitehead