I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.
— Pablo Casals
The “Your Heroic Heart” series is inspired Succeed and Soar’s August 21, 2021 post.
There, Eleanor Roosevelt said,
“We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time.”
After the Carnegie family left Scotland in 1848, they settled in Allegheny, now part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, Andrew and his father worked in a cotton factory. The teenager would have worked 12 to 16 hours a day. and earned—at most—$1.50 a week.
In time, the bobbin boy became one of the world’s wealthiest men. He invested much effort and resources into ending West Indies and Asian colonization. When the United States bought the Philippines from Spain for $20 million [over $757 million in 2024 dollars], Carnegie offered to purchase the islands for the same amount to assure those people’s freedom and democracy. Six years later, Carnegie dedicated a fortune to honor, “deeds of heroism where men or women are injured or lose their lives in attempting to preserve or rescue their fellows.”
For their actions following a 1954 sewer excavation cave-in, three men were honored by the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. In trying to rescue Richard Fisher, who’d been buried to his neck. 20-year-old construction worker Nicholas A. Bruno, was the first to swing over the edge, followed by Arlin Vance and John Weaver. Within 30 seconds, a second, massive section of earth shoved shoring and timbers forward. Bruno, seven feet below ground, was pinned between the shoring and sustained severe internal injuries.
27-year-old John Weaver was caught at the hips and legs. A worker atop the wall freed him. Weaver suffered a fractured pelvis, torn muscles and bruises. He was disabled nine weeks. A timber pinned Arlin G. Vance’s legs, but he freed himself. With others, Vance raised some shoring and sawed away other portions. Vance’s chest and shoulder were wrenched. After two hours , Bruno was freed. Fisher had died of suffocation. Bruno was rushed to a hospital but died of his injuries the following day.
Six months later, and two days before Thanksgiving, 27-year-old Alden Hartz rescued a woman who fell into a hole 70 feet deep. Catherine Murphy had been crossing a field that collapsed into an abandoned coal mine. Because the hole’s sides were unstable, others wouldn’t enter the cave-in. The 72-year-old woman had been half buried, and died two days later. Hartz was shaken but recovered.
Nominate a Hero.
Imagine a world where everyone goes to bed a hero.
Wouldn’t more monuments honoring these kinds of heroes be great?
Succeed and Soar!
Sandra Gould Ford
Presenting arts experiences to encourage, refresh, enrich creative thinking and inspire.
As a young mother, I worked at Jones and Laughlin Steel’s Pittsburgh Works during its heyday when over 10,000 people struggled and snoozed, played and died in that fire and brimstone world. I saw the last steel poured inside those bleak walls. I watched those miles of cinder and char change as new life evolved from the mill’s ashes.
Steel Genesis presents images and experiences of making steel, the metal and human mettle.
- High quality, soft laminate cover. 50 Pages. 8×10, $69. Preview.
- Hard Back, printed on Premium Lustre Paper. 8×10, $125. Previews.
