John Rutherford
NBC News Producer, Washington
By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
Mary Hoffman, 101, still remembers coming to America from Russia in 1912, arriving on a ship the same week the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic.
She's one of three centenarians featured by Willard Scott on NBC's "Today" show who talked about immigrating to this country many years ago.
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| Family photo |
| Mary Hoffman arrives in America, 1912 |
"I was 5 years old," Mary said in a recent interview. "They knew I could sing good, and at 5 o'clock in the morning they would go through the boat with lunches and stuff like that, and they would throw me a bun or something to eat, you know, something good."
In return, Mary and her grandfather sang religious songs.
"I know I sang a lot, because whenever they wanted us to sing for 'em, we would sing," she said. "At that time, you was glad when you had something to eat, and we were awful poor, and if somebody fed you something, you appreciated it."
Mary, her parents and her grandfather settled in Michigan, but the rest of her family never made it out of Russia.
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By John Rutherford, NBC News Producer
WASHINGTON – Marine Sgt. Michael Strank received his citizenship papers Tuesday, 63 years after he helped raise the American flag over Mount Suribachi and was later killed in the battle of Iwo Jima.
His certificate of citizenship was presented to his sister at a brief ceremony in the shadows of the Iwo Jima Memorial overlooking the nation's capital.
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| USCIS |
| Sgt. Michael Strank, USMC. |
"I am just so honored and proud to be here today to accept this citizenship in honor of my brother," Mary Pero, 75, of Pittsburgh, said.
Strank, four other Marines and a Navy corpsman are depicted on the huge bronze memorial hoisting the flag over the volcanic island on Feb. 23, 1945.
"He wouldn't have wanted the fame," Pero said after the ceremony. "He was there, and he did his job."
Michael Strank's journey to Iwo Jima began in 1919 in Jarabenia, Czechoslovakia, where he was born. He came to America at the age of 3 and grew up playing baseball and the French horn in western Pennsylvania.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
WASHINGTON – Ruth Huzzard, 104, likes to tell the story of how she came to the rescue of a familiar face while going to the store in Princeton, N.J., in the late 1940s.
"As I came along, I said, 'Boy, there's a man down in a manhole,' and I went closer and I discovered it was [Albert] Einstein," she said in a recent interview. "He was walking along the street, and he stepped into this manhole. I helped him out, brushed him off, and took him back to his home."
Huzzard, who had never met the famous scientist before, said Einstein was shaken but not hurt in the mishap.
"No wonder he fell in the hole," she quipped. "He always had his head in the clouds."
Huzzard is one of several centenarians featured by Willard Scott on NBC's "Today" show who've had encounters with famous people over the past century.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News
Baseball's All-Star Game was played Tuesday night at New York's Yankee Stadium, "The House that Ruth Built," but the last living teammate of the legendary Babe Ruth wasn't watching the game on television, not on your life.
"No, I haven't seen a ball game in four or five years," 100-year-old Bill Werber, the oldest living former major league baseball player, said in an interview. "I don't like the appearance of a lot of the players. The hair's too long. Their beards are too evident. They're a grubby-looking bunch of caterwaulers."
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| AP |
| Bill Werber smiles as he talks about his days in Major League Baseball at his retirement home in Charlotte, N.C., June 6, 2008. |
Werber played baseball in a bygone era when games were half as long and twice as fun. In his first game as a Yankee, on June 25, 1930, Werber walked and Ruth swatted one of his 714 home runs.
"I said to myself, 'Well, I'll show these Yankees how I can run,'" Werber said. "So I ran around second base at high speed – I knew it was a home run – and I ran around third base, and when Babe came in, he patted me on the head and he said, 'You don't need to run fast like that when The Babe hits one.'"
When Ruth wasn't playing baseball, he was playing .. bridge.
"When the train began to roll out of Chicago for St. Louis," Werber said, "Babe would holler, 'Cut the cards,' and we'd play cards on the Green Diamond Express until Babe would give Lou [Gehrig] false bids, and Gehrig was no dummy, he'd recognize what was going on, and he'd throw the cards in the middle of the table and say, 'Add it up, let us know what we owe ya,' and they'd owe us $3, $3.50, not much."
Werber liked Ruth a lot and Gehrig not so much.
"Ruth was convivial, friendly, and Gehrig was aloof and unfriendly," Werber said. "Ruth would stop at the gates and sign autographs for an hour. Gehrig would scatter kids everywhere and get in his car and drive off."
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News
Gail "Hal" Halvorsen was among a special group of Americans who changed the course of history 60 years ago this summer.
Halvorsen was a U.S. Air Force pilot who flew food and supplies into Berlin in 1948 and helped break the Soviet blockade of the beleaguered German capital.
"If the airlift had failed, those people would have been speaking Russian in West Berlin, and West Germany was next," the 87-year-old Halvorsen said in a recent interview.
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| AFP/Getty Images |
Gail "Hal" Halvorsen gives a thumbs at the U.S. military airbase in Frankfurt, Germany, in October 2005.
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Germany after World War II was divided between the Allied Forces – the United States, Great Britain and France - in the West, and the Soviet Union in the East. Berlin, located in the eastern, Soviet half of the country, was divided into four sectors, with West Berlin occupied by the Allied forces and East Berlin occupied by the Soviets.
In one of the first major international crises of the Cold War, on June 24, 1948, Soviet forces began blocking highway and railroad access to the Western sectors of Berlin.
The Soviets hoped to force the Western powers out of Berlin and seize control of the city for themselves.
The Allies responded by launching the Airlift.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
WASHINGTON – Desmond Doss seems like an unlikely person to have a building named after him on a military post.
A Seventh-Day Adventist, Doss was a conscientious objector during World War II who refused to train on Saturdays or carry a rifle.
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| Courtesy Doss family |
| Desmond Doss is awarded the Medal of Honor by President Harry Truman on Oct. 12, 1945. |
"He always put God first in his life," his 86-year-old widow, Frances, said in an interview.
But the gentle, lanky Doss was also a war hero, and for his heroics on the island of Okinawa in 1945 the guest house at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was renamed Doss Memorial Hall Wednesday morning.
"Doss was a uniquely American soldier and a uniquely American story, and yet unique in all of American history," Col. Gordon Roberts, a friend, said at the dedication ceremony.
Doss grew up in Lynchburg, Va., and enlisted as a conscientious objector in 1942. He served as a combat medic on Guam, the Philippines and Okinawa.
On May 5, 1945, under heavy Japanese fire, he saved the lives of 75 sick and wounded soldiers by lowering them, one by one, down a 400-foot cliff on Okinawa. For this and other acts of courage, Doss was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Harry S Truman.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Dawid Pietrek emigrated from Poland to the United States three years ago with dreams of a college education and a career as a police officer.
He arrived with a green card and worked as a caregiver for several elderly families in the Chicago area.
"Dawid was the best," one of his employers told the Daily Herald newspaper. "He was smart and kind and worked so hard."
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| Daily Herald |
| U.S. Marine Dawid Pietrek was killed in Afghanistan on June 14, 2008. |
Pietrek, 24, joined the Marines last year in hopes of becoming one of 40,000 foreign nationals since 9/11 to expedite their U.S. citizenship by serving in the armed forces. He was among 69,000 active duty service members born outside the United States, about 5 percent of our total military force.
Pietrek deployed to Afghanistan two months ago with the 1st Marine Division and was initially assigned to Kandahar.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A few days after the New York Times published a story detailing network reporters’ concerns about war coverage, three soldiers wounded in Iraq expressed a dim view of how they see the war depicted on television.
"You always hear about the explosions or people being killed, but you never really hear about how the people are being helped, or how much they appreciate it," Spc. Hein Tran, 28, of Milpitas, Calif., said after receiving a Purple Heart today at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for wounds suffered May 10 in an explosion northeast of Baghdad.
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| John R. Chew/ Walter Reed |
| Spc. Hein Tran, center, at the Purple Heart ceremony at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Friday. |
Pfc. Alex Knapp, 22, of Shelby Township, Mich., who lost both legs in a roadside bombing on March 14, agreed with Tran.
"It's a little on the negative side because all we really hear about are deaths and injuries," Knapp said.
Sgt. Francis Collins III, 24, of Laurel, Md., also wounded by a roadside bomb, said some things are accurately depicted on television, other things aren't.
"Sometimes it's dramatized, sometimes it's not enough, as far as what they show on TV," Collins said after being awarded his Purple Heart.
Some journalists would agree. Earlier this month, the New York Observer published an article in which many journalists who cover the war expressed frustrations about the difficulties of getting their stories on air or in print. "There’s a marked drop-off in the appetite for stories from Iraq," ABC News correspondent Terry McCarthy told the Observer.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Leon Abbott made a startling discovery while rummaging through his late mother Sarah's personal effects last December.
"She was instrumental in launching the POW/MIA movement, and it turns out the bracelet she wore was John McCain's," Abbott said in an interview. "Pure coincidence."
Sarah Abbott and millions of other Americans began wearing the copper bracelets in 1970 to draw attention to the plight of U.S. service members missing or taken prisoner in Vietnam. She wore hers until McCain and his fellow POWs were released by North Vietnam in 1973.
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By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News, Washington
WASHINGTON - Thomas and Romayne McGinnis were physically and emotionally exhausted after three days of ceremonies surrounding the posthumous awarding of the Medal of Honor to their son Ross.
Army Pfc. Ross McGinnis, 19, died Dec. 6, 2006, when he fell on a grenade in Adhamiyah, Iraq, saving the lives of four of his comrades. For his heroics, President Bush presented the military's highest honor to his parents at a White House ceremony on Monday.
Since the beginning of World War II, only 850 Medals of Honor have been awarded and according to the medalofhonor.com, there are only 123 living recipients.
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| AFP |
| President Bush looks on after presenting the Medal of Honor to Thomas and Romayne McGinnis, the parents of Army Pfc. Ross McGinnis, of Knox, Pa.on June 2. |
"It's been a rough week," his father said today, shortly before flying home to Knox, Pa.
"It's been very good, though," his mother said. "The Army has taken care of us, tremendously."
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