Taking The Time To Talk To Strangers

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your stories. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. And now we have a story from one of our listeners, Paul Kotts, who’s from the Twin Cities where we broadcast on WCCO AM 830. Paul is a professor at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota. Here he is to share this story.

Yesterday, I went to fill up my tank at Speedway, went inside to purchase some food items, and the friendly clerk said, “Do you have your card?” I flashed my barcode on my keychain, exchanged an excited comment about getting a free donut, collected my bag of items, and exited. Back at the car, I discovered that I could not find my keys. Funny, I don’t remember being absent-minded. I checked my front pockets frantically. Maybe I left them in the car? No luck. “Life is now officially unfair,” I’m thinking to myself. I went back in to check with the clerk, and people were waiting in line. “Did anyone see some keys on the counter?” Someone remarked, “He lost his keys?” No luck again. I just had them, but I felt a heightened sense of panic, and I’m thinking, “It all is not lost.” “Where are my keys?” I went back outside, and as I checked my front pockets one more time, I tried my back pocket, and they magically appeared. “What? I never put my keys there!” Relief settled in. Soon I will be able to hide my own Easter eggs, you know, but life has so many twists and turns.

In the morning, I’ve been trying to work out at a fitness center in our area. As I’m exiting with my mask on, a woman was headed inside and proceeded to tell me that they need to stock the women’s restroom with more toilet paper. “Miss, I’m sure they can help you at the desk,” I do not… I was not able to finish my sentence, and the reprimand continued, “And the floors in there could use some cleaning too.” She seemed to be on a mission and breezed by me. Later, I told my wife Jan what happened, and she laughed, “You look like a person in charge!” That’s what happened. You know, I like people, and whether I make eye contact or not, they seem to find me.

I was within a hotel with historic charm in the heart of the old main district of Dubuque, Iowa. I entered an elevator from the basement level, and in this case, there’s nowhere to go but up. A man was occupied in some texting, and I pressed the button for my stop on the eighth floor. He states, “I guess I never pushed which floor I need to go to.” “Well, you want to go to the main level?” I suggested. He acknowledged, “Yeah, that works.” “Got my head stuck on this phone.” “Just like the kids.” “It’s easy to do,” I said, and I pressed the button.

Later that day, I spent some time at an indoor pool on a Monday and made my way to the nearby whirlpool that was right next to it. I met a little guy who emerged from the hot tub after being submerged underwater. I realized he should not be doing this, and after a brief introduction, said to the young man that he could get hurt. That I was impressed with his ability to stay under hot water for such a period of time. He told me his name was Takien. His brother Prince soon joined us, and the other older sister spent her own quiet time in the pool. The young men told me they were from Chicago, and they were moving to Houston in August. “Do you know where I’m from?” “Texas? New York? Chicago?” “No, further north,” I said. Takian asked, “Do you live in an ice state?” And then he ran back to the pool to cool off. I smiled, “Yes, for part of the year. Heaven?” asked Prince. I said to him, “You know, we’re all under heaven—you, me, and the people outside. I live in Minnesota,” I continued. “You live in an igloo?” I explained that this does happen, but not in our state very often. Alaska and the North Pole have some igloo living as far as I know. Prince said, “I’m going to Heaven.” “So is my sister.” I said, “Well, what about your brother?” Pensively, he expressed, “He’s going to Hell?” I said, “How do you know?” Before any answer was given, Takien joined us again. He proceeded to tell me that he and his brother were now working on tablets in school and hadn’t been back for days. “What is your name?” inquiring minds wanted to know. “My name is Paul.” “Some of my friends and family call me Polly.” Prince processed this and said, “You should change your name to Land In.” That was a first. I’ve been called many things, but I told Prince that I would consider this, but to legally change it would take some work. “How about Camden?” Takien suggested. “Man, these kids, the possibilities are endless!” The older sister emerged from the pool, was now checking on the two boys, and gave them some direction not to make too much commotion in the hot tub. They gave her a splash. “Don’t mess with the older sister,” I’m thinking to myself. Her look of admonishment worked. They quieted down. She said, “I ain’t playing.” “So, you are headed to Houston?” I inquired. “Yeah, with my little brothers.” “Hey, you’re a very good sister.” “You can tell they look up to you.” Takeisha rolled her eyes. “Thank you.” The three delightful young people sat, and we continued to talk about stuff and things. “Well, it’s time for me to go.” “It’s been a pleasure,” I said to the gentleman and miss. As I was drying off, the kid who purportedly was going to Hell came up and offered his hand to me and said, “I wanted to shake your hand so I won’t forget you wherever I’m headed—Heaven or Hell.” I won’t forget this young man and his family. I hope they make it to Houston in one piece.

And a little slice of Paul Kotts’s life from the Twin Cities WCCO AM 830. Paul’s stories of camaraderie and fellowship with fellow citizens in this country, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.

This is Our American Stories, and we tell all kinds of stories here on this show. As you know, Jerry Bergman has taught science for forty-five years at a university in subjects like biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology. He has nine degrees in the field of science, including seven graduate and postgraduate degrees. Dr. Bergman’s here to tell us the story of a teenage boy who became interested in snow. On January 15th, 1885, at twenty years of age, he became the first person in the world to photograph a snowflake. Here’s Dr. Bergman with the story.

Well, his background is he’s in Vermont, and a lot of snow there, and he became interested in science, and his parents were very supportive. Even though they really couldn’t afford it, they bought him things like a microscope and a camera so he could take pictures. And among his many interests was the weather. He actually charted the weather and tried to correlate the weather with other events. But he became especially interested in snowflakes, and with a small magnifying glass, he could see they look different, and so he tried to figure out what—why are they different? What’s going on here? And of course, the problem is a microscope requires light, and light produces heat, and the heat then melted the snowflakes. So he had to come up with a way of getting it cold enough to get the snowflakes and examine them. Work quickly so he could get pictures without the snowflakes melting, and he was finally able to do that. In fact, he was the first person ever to get a photograph of a snowflake, and so that was quite an invention for a young boy. He was homeschooled, by the way; he didn’t go to public schools. And his parents… His mother was a teacher, so she was very supportive of his work, so he was somewhat independent, I guess, his whole life. His full name was Wilson, or Willie. They called him by his childhood name, Bentley, and his name often is called Snowflake Bentley because he did so much work in this area, and he wanted to explore the world of science firsthand. And he saw God not only in the Scriptures, but he saw God in the natural world. And as a result of his studying the natural world, he just realized he could learn a great deal about God through studying God’s creation. And once he noticed they were different, he wanted to photograph them because he felt that the glory of God can be revealed through snowflakes. And of course, people thought that was silly, because, “Come on, the glory of God can be revealed through snowflakes!” “This is silly,” but he saw snowflakes as miracles of beauty, and it seemed to him the beauty of this should not be hidden; it should be seen and appreciated by others. So how can you do that? You can do that basically by getting pictures, and when he photographed them, he realized that the key is the conditions. Can’t be too cold because then the snowflakes are brittle. It can’t be too warm because then the snowflakes melt. And so, therefore, he really was a good experimentalist. I mean, he must have spent hours and hours and hours of failures, and he realized that, “Well, this has to be done,” and he had things all set up to get pictures, and something would happen. He didn’t get a picture. He wasn’t fast enough, and so he had to work out his system so that he was able to accurately get snowflakes. And once he did so, he was able to photograph a few—ten, fifteen, twenty—and then after a while, he ended up with about 5,000 snowflake images for the forty-six years that he worked on this. And so he had a lot of pictures.

One interesting thing is that even though he wasn’t a scientist, never went to school, he was home-educated, he ended up publishing in some of the leading science magazines in the world. He wrote the article on snow for the Encyclopedia Britannica, and that was quite a privilege in his day, and well, today as well. And then he eventually published a coffee-sized table book of 6,000 photographs titled Snow Crystals, and the book was published by the leading publisher McGraw-Hill, and so this was quite a coup for a young man who was home-schooled. He also published articles on snowflakes in Popular Mechanics magazine, in the world’s leading scientific magazine called Nature, and of course, in the more common, widely circulated magazines like National Geographic in 1923. Unfortunately, I have most of these magazines, so I was able to look them up. And from our standards today, they were good and beautiful, but not to the quality that we can get today. The techniques are such that we end up with incredibly gorgeous pictures of snowflakes. And I have four or five books which illustrate this, and you can see the beauty is there quite vividly, and you can appreciate it more than in his day. But on the other hand, in his day, you know, seeing a picture of a snowflake just astounded people, and that’s why his work became so popular.

Another contribution he made, which turned out to be very important, was that every snowflake, as far as he could tell, was different, and he wondered, “Why are they different?” And so he studied the process of the manufacture—the production of snowflakes—and realized they fall in certain conditions. They move upward because of weather conditions, so they move up and down the clouds, and after a while, they end up being exposed in different amounts of heat and cold, in different conditions, and that produces the variety that we see in snowflakes. But he discovered they all have either six sides or three sides. And now we understand part of the reason for the difference is because water molecules are not all the same. We have a water molecule called deuterium, which is called heavy water, which is a little bit different than most common water molecules. And this is a rare molecule. It’s not found very commonly. But each snowflake is made out of several hundred trillion water molecules, and so even if we only have a few of these molecules that are deuterium, we therefore end up with differences because of these few molecules. Because when you’re talking about a thousand million billion water molecules, even if you have a million billion of these rogue molecules such as deuterium, they produce differences. And so he really did a lot of work in chemistry and physics, in science, and in understanding specifically why there are so many snowflake differences, and so, therefore, it helps us appreciate the variety in nature. And one thing you learn about nature when you study nature is there is an enormous amount of variety everywhere—in animals, in beetles. One scientist said, “God has an inordinate fondness of beetles because he made so many kinds.” And I guess there are six or seven thousand different kinds of beetles. And so, therefore, one thing we know when we look at the natural world is enormous variety everywhere, even in snowflakes. And his inspiration again was to understand God’s creation. You learn about God by studying His creation, which is true because you learn about an artist by studying his artwork. You learn about a musician by studying his musical compositions. You learn about God by studying His creation. And of course, His creation would be the natural world. And so, of course, my background is science, so I agree that that’s true, and many scientists that I know, their motivation is to understand and learn about God. And certainly we can see that was true in Snowflake Bentley. That’s why I became fascinated with him, because he’s different. He’s not the usual person who goes to colleges and gets his Ph.D. in physics and goes on and studies nature. He’s totally home-grown, and therefore, he was original and wasn’t constrained by the belief back then that you’ll never photograph snowflakes because it just can’t be done because of the heat of the microscope. You’ve got to get light in there to see it, and that light is heat, and therefore, that’s going to melt the snowflakes. He can’t do it, and he had a hard time at first. He failed. I think for two or three years, and he wasn’t able to get one single photograph, but eventually he got thousands. As Edison once said, “The key to invention is not creativity, but simply perseverance—keep trying, keep working.” At the local elementary school, I was asked to come in and do a presentation on Snowflake Bentley because they studied him in this school, and so his ideas and his example still inspire young people today, and there are a lot of children’s books about him. And so, therefore, it’s a good example—a good example for all of us.

Great work as always by Greg Hengler for digging up this story and for producing the piece. And his special thanks also to Jerry Bergman for sharing the story of Wilson ‘Willie’ Bentley—a beauty here on Our American Stories. This is Our American Stories, and now it’s time for our Rule of Law series, where we tell stories about what happens when the rule of law is present or absent in our lives. Our own Alex Cortez brings us this next story. This is the story of three residents of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

“My name’s Craig Richardson. I’m an economics professor at Winston-Salem State University. I’m Matthew Bryant, and I’ve practiced law in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. My name is Paula Smith. I sell helpful benefit plans, so FSAs, HSAs, HRAs. I have a wealth of knowledge of HSAs and FSAs, so if anyone needs to ask me questions, I can answer those questions.”

“I was driving on my way to work and I heard a story on my local NPR station about a couple named James and Phyllis Nelson, who bought this little dream home outside of Winston-Salem, surrounded by hardwoods. Looking out their bedroom window, they could see Pilot Mountain. And what they started to relay was something which was shocking to me: the fact that one day when they woke up in 1996—this was about seventeen years earlier—they woke up to see government workers driving stakes in their lawn. And they came out to ask what was going on, and they said, ‘Well, this is where a road’s coming through—the highway, a future highway—and it’s the centerline of the road, and it’s going to go two hundred feet on each side of these stakes.’” It turns out that that road goes right through their kitchen, right through the middle of their home. This whopping surprise arrived for Paula Smith, too. “We bought the house that we’ve lived in for twenty-nine years in Winston-Salem. So at that time, we didn’t know anything about a highway coming through our neighborhood. There were a lot of years there that we were living, not knowing what was about to happen to us. That’s for sure.”

Now, when we hear a story like that, you know, I think we know that sometimes this happens. We have eminent domain, which means the government has the right to have public projects, and they buy out homes. But what gave the twist to the story was that the Department of Transportation was using a law passed by our General Assembly in the late ’80s that allowed the department to make road plans that would restrict the development and use of property indefinitely until the department got around to acquiring and getting ready to construct the roadways. It turns out that there’s something called the Transportation Corridor Map Act. What gave this a very unusual twist was that in North Carolina, unlike any other state—and there are other states that have map acts—but unlike any other state in the United States, there was no time limit on when these roads could be built. In other words, the DOT, the Department of Transportation, could plan a road, could say it would happen sometime in the future, and essentially have carte blanche to…