Growing up in Westport, Conn., with two PhD chemist parents, Roberts decided on a different direction: “I wanted something new, not old like chemistry,” he said. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his degrees — bachelor’s (1959), Master’s (1960), and Ph.D. (1963) — all in electrical engineering. During school he … Read more
From This is True for 30 December 2018
Growing up in a family of traditional healers in Musamo Village, Ruhango District, Rwanda, Karuhimbi saw the ethnic violence escalating in 1959 between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi, perhaps better known in the west as the Watusi. The revolution, which continued until 1962, replaced the Tutsi monarchy with a new Hutu-led government. In 1959, … Read more
From This is True for 23 December 2018
Born in Texas and raised in Alberta, Canada, Wareham was one of six children, and they all went into some aspect of medicine: three brothers became dentists, two sisters became nurses. And himself? “You know how people will say they had ‘their call’ to something? I felt that I was actually called to be a … Read more
From This is True for 16 December 2018
Born in the Bronx, at just 15 years old Berezin was ready for college. She wanted to study physics after reading her older brother’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine, but the colleges that taught physics in New York City were men-only, so in 1941 she reluctantly studied economics at the women’s college, Hunter. When the U.S. was pulled … Read more
From This is True for 9 December 2018
A writer with a Masters degree in film from UCLA, Katz mostly collaborated with Willard Huyck — her husband. The two wrote a forgettable movie together: Messiah of Evil (1973), re-released later as Dead People. Nevertheless, another up-and-coming filmmaker, who had met Huyck in film school, asked the two to write a script for him … Read more
From This is True for 2 December 2018
Born in Tulsa, Okla., Hooker remembered the Tulsa Race Riots in 1921. “I was six years old when the riot came, but I had been in school for two years (at a little private school down the street) and so I could read, and I thought that everything in the Constitution pertained to me,” she … Read more
From This is True for 25 November 2018
Andrew Fitzgerald. When he told his story, Fitzgerald would start, “It was a dark and stormy night…”. And it was. Fitzgerald was a 20-year-old Engineman Third Class on U.S. Coast Guard Motor Lifeboat 36500, stationed in Chatham, on Cape Cod, Mass. On February 18, 1952, the boat was called out for a rescue — in … Read more
From This is True for 18 November 2018
As a child, Bragg had no idea he was deaf. He was born to deaf parents, his deaf aunt and uncle lived in the same building in New York City, and sign language was just the way people spoke. Until he was sent to the store with a note to buy cigarettes for his mother. … Read more
From This is True for 4 November 2018
An electrical engineer, Bakken’s interest in things electrical started when he saw the movie Frankenstein (the 1931 classic starring Boris Karloff) when he was 8 years old. “What intrigued me the most, as I sat through the movie again and again, was not the monster’s rampages,” he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, “but the creative spark of … Read more
From This is True for 28 October 2018
Bol was the creator of the Little Free Library movement.
From This is True for 21 October 2018