Lesson 11: The Big Snow

Summary A big snow is coming. Anna has Anna and Pete have to stay at work on the weekend to report on it. Have they both prepared for the blizzard? Let's find out!   Conversation Kelly: Hi, Anna. Why do you have all this weather stuff? Anna: I love weather. Kelly: Me too! Weather is so important. Anna: It is. It affects people’s lives! Kelly: Have you ever reported on a big weather event? Anna: I have. I’ve reported on a blizzard. Kelly: Do mean the one last weekend? Anna: Yes! I had been waiting for that blizzard for years. When it came, I was ready. Prof. Bot: Welcome to our most perfect lesson! Why is it perfect? Today we are reviewing the present perfect and past perfect verb tenses. These show that an action is completed. Kelly uses the present perfect when she says, Kelly: Have you ever reported on a big weather event? Anna uses the past perfect when she says, Anna: I had been waiting for that blizzard for years. Listen for "have" or "had" and the past participle to find more sentences with the perfect tense. I'll color those words to help you. Anna: I have wanted to report on a big weather event my whole life. Kelly: Who hasn’t? Did you report all weekend ... by yourself? Anna: No, no. I volunteered Pete to help me. Pete: Why am I here on a Saturday? Why are you carrying things? Why? Why? Anna: Pete, these are my supplies – food, a blanket; warm clothing. Where are your supplies? Anna: Pete, Pete, Pete. This could be the “blizzard of the century.” Pete: It’ll be fine.   Kelly: How else had you prepared? Anna: Well, I had just bought the latest weather forecasting software. So, I brought it! Kelly: Do you mean The Weather Genie Pro? Anna: You know it. Pete thought it was pretty great too. Pete: Do you have any games on that thing? Anna: Yes! I have the best weather survival game. Boom! Pete: Sounds fun. Anna: It is. But right now, Pete, this computer is a work tool. It will give us the temperature, wind speed, wind direction and amount of snowfall … in real time! Boom, boom! Pete: I can’t wait. Anna: Pete, we need a name for this blizzard. Pete: No, we don’t. Anna: All the great storms have names. Pete: No, they don’t. Anna: I know -- “The Big Snow!” Pete: I am not saying “The Big Snow.” Pete: Welcome to “The Big Snow.” Kelly: The Big Snow broke all kinds of records, didn’t it? Anna: Yes it did. And every time a record was broken, we celebrated! Anna: So far, in Washington, D.C. 29 inches of snow has fallen. That, my dear listeners, is a record! (Honks horn) Anna: We just broke the wind speed record! (Honks horn) Anna: Snow has been falling for 30 hours straight! That’s another record! (Honks horn. Pete comes into room and breaks the horn.) Kelly: By Saturday night, stores and restaurants had closed. Did you bring enough food? Anna: I thought I had brought enough food. But I ran out. Anna: Hey, Pete, where is my bag of popcorn? Pete: Maybe you ate it already.  Anna: No, I didn’t. Pete: I haven't seen it. (Pete has popcorn in his beard. Anna tries to hit him.) Anna: We had reported together for 48 hours straight! Kelly: Wow. That must have been a great team-building exercise for you and Pete. Anna: Yeah. You - you could say that. Prof. Bot:  I hope you found all the sentences with perfect tenses. Learn more on our website!   New Words affect - v. to act on (someone or something) and cause a change amount - n. a quantity of something blizzard - n. a severe snowstorm that goes on for a long time century - n. a period of 100 years event - n. something (especially something important or notable) that happens forecast - v. to predict (something, such as weather) after looking at the information that is available record - n. a performance or achievement that is the best of its kind or at an extreme when measuring data software - n. the programs that run on a computer and perform certain functions straight - adv. without interruption survival - n. the state or fact of continuing to live or exist especially in spite of difficult conditions volunteer - v. to say that someone will do something without asking if he or she wants to do it   Learning Strategy The learning strategy for this lesson Find and Apply Patterns. That means to look for patterns in what you are learning. For example, we use many patterns to communicate: groups of sounds, letters, and words get our meaning across. In this lesson, Pete sees a pattern in Anna's celebration of the weather records. Each time a weather record breaks, she honks her horn to celebrate. Pete does not like the horn, so he breaks it before Anna celebrates the next record-breaking weather fact. He is applying his understanding of a pattern to make his life quieter. How about you? How do you find and apply patterns?  Can you see patterns in the way people use English? How about in literature? There are also patterns in math, science, history, music and social studies. Can you think of a time when knowing about a pattern helped you to learn something? Write to us in the Comments section or send us an email.    Listening Quiz See how well you understand this lesson by taking a listening quiz. Play each short video, then choose the best answer. ​ Free Materials Download the VOA Learning English Word Book for a dictionary of the words we use on this website. For Teachers Send us an email if you have comments on this course or questions. Grammar focus: Present Perfect Simple/Continuous; Past Perfect Simple/Continuous Topics:  Describe actions that have occurred; Describe actions that haven't occurred yet; Discuss duration of activity Learning Strategy: Find / Apply Patterns   Comments Now it's your turn. Send us an email or write to us in the Comments section below or on our Facebook page to let us know what you think of this lesson.

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Lesson 11: This Is My Neighborhood

Summary Anna has many things to do. She needs to go to the library, post office, bank, and store. Marsha helps her find these places in their neighborhood. Speaking In this video, learn to say the new words. Learn to thank someone for giving you help. You can also download the Activity Sheet and practice talking about the places in your neighborhood. Pronunciation ​In this video, you ​learn to show strong feelings by saying words slower and louder. Conversation   Anna: Hello! DC is a city for walking. In our neighborhood, I can do all my errands. Marsha, before we get ice cream, I need to return three books to the library. Where is the library? Marsha: It is on this street on the corner. Anna: Awesome! Marsha: Let's go! Anna: Marsha, I can return the books here. Marsha: Anna, what are those in the books? Anna: Marsha, these are letters to my family and friends back home … four letters! Is there a post office near here? Marsha: Um, no. The post office is far from here. But there is a mailbox across from the store. Anna: Awesome! Let’s go! (At the mailbox) Anna: Marsha, now I need to buy stamps. Marsha: Do you have cash? Anna: No. Is there a bank near here? Marsha: There is a bank behind you. Anna: Thanks, Marsha. You know our neighborhood so well. Anna: Now I have cash. I can buy stamps. Marsha: That store sells stamps. Anna: Wait here. Anna: I have stamps. Marsha: Wow, you’re fast. Anna: Thank you, thank you letters, for sending my words… my love … to my family and friends -  Marsha: Do you have more cash? Anna: I do! Marsh and Anna: Ice cream!! Anna: I love my new neighborhood! Everything is near our apartment! Even hair salons*, and ice cream! Anna: Until next time! *salon - n. a business that gives customers beauty treatments (such as haircuts) Writing Where do you do errands in your neighborhood? Write to us to tell us about three places you go in your neighborhood. Send us an email or write about them in the Comments section. Click on the image below to download the Activity Sheet and practice with a friend.       Learning Strategy Learning Strategies are the thoughts and actions that help make learning easier or more effective. The learning strategy for this lesson is ​Ask Questions. When we are learning a language, asking questions helps us practice and get new information. Here is an example. Tatiana is visiting her friend in New York. Her friend goes to work one day and gives Tatiana a map of the city. Tatiana wants to run in Central Park. She walks out of the apartment and sees a woman with two children. Tatiana thinks, "I need help with the map. I do not know where this apartment is on the map." She asks the woman, "Excuse me. Is Central Park near here?" The woman smiles and says, "Yes, walk to the bus station and turn left. It's not far away." Tatiana asks, "Thank you. Can you show me where we are on the map?" The woman shows Tatiana her friend's street on the map. "Have a nice day!" she says as she walks away. Tatiana is happy she can ask questions in English. She soon finds the park and has a great run. How do you ask questions to practice speaking English and learn in English? Write to us in the Comments section or send us an email. Teachers, see the Lesson Plan for more details on teaching this strategy. Listening Quiz Test your understanding by taking this listening quiz. Play the video, then choose the best answer. ​______________________________________________________________ New Words   bank - n. a business where people keep their money, borrow money, etc., or the building where such a business operates buy - v. to get (something) by paying money for it cash - n. money in the form of coins and bills corner - n. the place where two streets or roads meet errand - n. a short journey that you take to do or get something fast - adj. moving or able to move quickly get - v. to obtain (something) ice cream - n. a frozen food containing sweetened and flavored cream library - n. place where books, magazines, and other materials (such as videos and musical recordings) are available for people to use or borrow mailbox - n. a public box in which letters and packages are placed to be collected and sent out post office - n. a building where the mail for a local area is sent and received return - v. to bring, give, send, or take (something) to the place that it came from or the place where it should go sell - v. to exchange (something) for money send - v. to cause (a letter, an e-mail, a package, etc.) to go or to be carried from one place or person to another stamp - n. a small piece of paper that you buy and then stick to an envelope or package to pay the cost of mailing it store - n. a building or room where things are sold ______________________________________________________________ Free Materials   Download the VOA Learning English Word Book for a dictionary of the words we use on this website. Each Let's Learn English lesson has an Activity Sheet for extra practice on your own or in the classroom. In this lesson, you can use it to practice a conversation about activities.   For Teachers See the Lesson Plan for this lesson for ideas and more teaching resources. Send us an email if you have comments on this course or questions. Grammar focus: Prepositions (across from, behind); Cardinal numbers indicating quantity; Singular/Plural introduction Topics: Describing neighborhoods; Asking for information​ Learning Strategy: Ask Questions Speaking & Pronunciation Focus: Expressing gratitude, emphasis on words expressing feelings ______________________________________________________________ Now it's your turn. Send us an email or write to us in the Comments section below or on our Facebook page to let us know what you think of this lesson.

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College Admissions: Teaching Parents How to Help

  For most people around the world, applying for admission to a college or university is a major event in their lives. Many young people see it as one of their first steps toward becoming adults. It is also a lot of work. The competition and risk of rejection can create a lot of stress, and not just for the applicants. Parents of high school students are often very involved in the college search process. Sometimes they are even more invested in the application results than the students themselves. Ffiona Rees is a senior associate director of international admissions office at the University of California in Los Angeles. She says most students in the United States would list their parents as the main influence on their college application decisions. “Even when the students are appearing like they don’t want to listen to their parents, they clearly are,” Rees told VOA. “And so, it’s important for the parents to be supportive of the students. Students look to their parents for all kinds of advice, she says, including where to go and what to study. But Rees argues there is also some important advice parents need to hear if they want to be as helpful as possible to their children. First, parents must accept that there are limits to what they know about the application process, she says. She says even parents who attended university in the U.S. themselves, must understand that a lot has changed in just the last 20 years. It is important for parents to join their children in researching the most current college and university requirements. Working together is important for success, Rees says. And, it can be an important time for parents and students to strengthen their relationships with each other. Rees says parents need to fully devote themselves to the process if they get involved. She describes one college admissions informational meeting in which she witnessed a parent repeatedly leave the room for phone calls. Rees says the parent may have missed important information. But, as important, is the impression such behavior creates. The parent seemed to not care about the student’s interest in attending the school. “It’s really important that the parents take the time to tell their child how proud they are of them … and to … tell them that you love them no matter what,” Rees said. “Because the students need to hear that. We forget that, while they’re young adults, they’re still only usually 17, 18 years old and they need to hear that from their parents.” Rees says parents also need to be honest. They may want to protect their children and provide them with everything they want. But students need to know if there are limits to their college search. For example, will finances restrict their choices? Rees says parents must tell their children exactly how much money they will provide for college. What about distance? Reese says she once got a phone call from unhappy parents demanding to know why the school had accepted their child whose home was far away. They wanted their child to study closer to home. But they had never discussed that with the student, thinking the application would not be successful. Rees says it is important for parents to express such concerns before the student applies to any school. It is a thin line to walk, Rees suggests. Parents should talk to their future college students, of course. But she says parents also must listen to them. In the end, Rees notes, it is the child who will be attending the college, not the parents. Young people may not be clear on what their educational interests or desires are. Parents may not care for some of their child’s choices. But, Rees says, making such decisions is an important part of becoming an adult. Such independence is important when it comes to completing college applications as well. Parents may feel the urge to help their children write an essay or fill out a form. Rees advises parents to fight that urge. Young people must learn to meet deadlines and take responsibility, she says. Valuable lessons can be learned in the application process. And, schools demand the applicant be the author of his or her application. Finally, Rees says, most students will likely be rejected by at least one college or university. Parents, she says, can greatly help their children move beyond such rejection in a healthy way. “It’s much like when you have a toddler and they fall down,” she said. “If you rush to them and say, ‘Oh, you must be hurt. Are you okay?’ the child is going to react accordingly. If … you say, ‘You’re fine! Get up, off we go,’ then your child is also going to react accordingly. … They will get some letters of denial. They are not personal rejections, and it is important that you help to remind your child that they are still a good person.” I’m Jill Robbins. And I’m Pete Musto.   Pete Musto reported this for VOA Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor. We want to hear from you. How involved in the college application process are parents in your country? What other advice do you think parents should listen to when helping their children apply to college? Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   apply(ing) – v. to ask formally for something, such as a job, admission to a school, or a loan, usually in writing stress – n. a state of mental tension and worry caused by problems in your life or work proud – adj. very happy and pleased because of something you have done, something you own, or someone you know or are related to finances – n. money available to a government, business, or person essay – n. a short piece of writing that tells a person's thoughts or opinions about a subject deadline(s) – n. a date or time when something must be finished toddler – n. a young child who is just learning to walk rush – v. to move or do something very quickly or in a way that shows you are in a hurry accordingly – adv. in a way that fits the facts, needs, or requirements of a situation remind – v. to cause someone to remember something

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What Does It Mean to Go 'Haywire?'

  Welcome to Words and Their Stories, from VOA Learning English! Today, we are going on a make-believe trip to the countryside to learn about a word that comes from something used on a farm – haywire. Like it sounds, haywire is a strong, thin wire. Farm workers often use it to tie up hay grown in the fields. They roll up the long, cut grass and store it in large bundles. Later, when farm animals need to be fed, the wire is cut. You need to use a hatchet or something else with a very sharp edge to cut the wire. Haywire does not break easily. But it can get easily twisted together by accident. So, that is the farm material called haywire. But what does it mean to go haywire? The expression “to go haywire” has several meanings. “To go haywire” can mean to turn crazy, unreasonable or wild, as in this example: “If I don’t take a break from work soon, I am going to go haywire!” Here, the expressions flip out or freak out have a similar meaning. These are all informal or for everyday use. If you want to be more formal, you could use the word berserk. “To go haywire” also means to start malfunctioning or failing to operate normally. We often use this expression for machines that don’t work as they should. For example, let’s say we are visiting a peanut butter factory. A machine used to pump peanut butter into jars suddenly goes haywire. It squirts peanut butter everywhere – on the floor, on walls and on factory workers. Soon the whole area is covered with the tasty, but sticky food! So, the machine is not only broken, it made a huge mess. “Haywire” can also mean to become out of control. When a process fails to work as planned, you can also say it ran amok. This expression is more formal. Here is an example of this meaning of “haywire.” “Urgh. Plans for my outdoor party just went haywire! The supermarket can’t bring the birthday cake. The musicians refuse to play. There’s no place to leave a car because of unannounced street repairs in front of my house. Oh … great. And it’s going to rain. It’s going to rain hard!” But how did this simple farm word come to mean “go wild”? Language experts say there are two stories that help explain where this meaning came from. As we said earlier, Americans use haywire to describe a state of disorder, extreme messiness – in other words, a situation where everything seems to be going wrong. Years ago, farmers used haywire to temporarily fix a damaged fence, gate or barrier. But the wire was never a good choice for permanent repairs because it breaks down easily. The metal iron turns reddish brown and wears down when attacked by oxygen in the air or water. It other words, it rusts! This fact, however, did not stop people from using it for repairs. As a result, many fences and buildings where lots of wire were used for repairs look messy. They have gone haywire.   Another story about “haywire” comes from the material itself. When you cut tightly wound wire, you should do so carefully. It can suddenly spring back at you like a snake. It can circle your body and then stab you with its sharp ends. This can happen quickly, often catching a person off guard. Word experts may not agree on the origin. But they can agree that anything that has “gone haywire,” has gone crazy or is a big, hot mess! And that’s the end of this Words and Their Stories. I’m Anna Matteo.   I pushed the fool button My night went haywire I pushed the fool button Set my brain on fire   Anna Matteo wrote this story with additional reporting from Jessica Berman. George Grow was the editor. The song at the end is “Fools Button” by Jimmy Buffet. ________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   hay – n. grass that has been cut and dried to be used as food for animals   bundle – n. a group of things that are fastened, tied, or wrapped together   berserk – adj. to become very angry, crazy, and violent : to become very excited jar – n. a widemouthed container made typically of earthenware or glass squirt – v. to come forth in a sudden rapid stream from a narrow opening mess – n. a very dirty or untidy state or condition — usually singular amok – adv. in a wild or uncontrolled manner — used in the phrase run amok off guard – verbal phrase in an unprepared state : not ready hot mess – n. informal : something or someone that is emphatically a mess: such as something in a state of extreme disorder or disarray  

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Actor Benedict Cumberbatch Plays Thomas Edison in 'The Current War'

  The Weinstein Company planned to release its new film The Current War in the United States this week. But the opening has been delayed until next year.   Disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein heads the company, and he is accused of sexually harassing and assaulting several women in Hollywood. The film stars Oscar nominee Benedict Cumberbatch. He plays light bulb inventor Thomas Edison who clashes with industrialist George Westinghouse in the early 20th century. Edison prefers direct electrical current while Westinghouse, played by Michael Shannon, wants to use the more dangerous alternating current. Originally, the two men wanted to work together, but Edison received a lot of investment money from the world’s richest man, J.P. Morgan, and decided to work alone. Westinghouse and Edison became enemies, fighting over the future of electricity. Benedict Cumberbatch says that he played the role of Edison because it was a great challenge. “That’s kind of an exciting chapter of history no matter who you’re playing in it and I just thought it’s a challenge to play such a titanic figure in American culture and I like a challenge.”  Michael Shannon says he tried to play Westinghouse as a complex character and not let him become a great egoist. “For every success they had, they had a failure and it wasn’t always easy.”  In addition to Edison and Westinghouse, the film features the life of Nicola Tesla, a former assistant to Edison who goes on to work for Westinghouse. Actor Nicolas Hoult plays Tesla. Hoult says that Tesla believed that everyone had a right to use electrical power and it would change the world dramatically. As a character, he adds, Tesla is interesting to play because he was often poor, but was always well dressed. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon has received some criticism for his use of special effects and odd camera angles. He says he wanted the audience to understand the importance of electricity and the way it would change the world. He explains he had to tell a long story in a short time and he hopes it “captures the feeling of the time.” I'm Susan Shand.   David Byrd reported this story for VOANews.com. Susan Shand adapted his report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. _______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   disgrace - v. to cause (someone or something) to lose or become unworthy of respect or approval alternate - adj. occurring in or forming a repeated series challenge - v. to be difficult enough to be interesting to someone titanic - adj. very great in size, force, or power egoist - n. a person who believes he is better or more important than other people odd - adj. strange or unusual; different from what is normal or expected    

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Newly Found Painting Shows George Washington's Army Tent

  One late night in May, Philip Mead was looking for historical objects from the American Revolution. He noticed a painting being offered for sale on the internet. Suddenly, he felt his heartbeat speeding up. Mead is the chief historian at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The painting is an unsigned watercolor from 1782. It shows the army tent that George Washington had used as his command center during the Revolutionary War. And, to Mead, this seemed to be the only known artwork from that period to show this tent. The painting is the top exhibit at the museum, which opened in April 2017. And, thanks to Mead, the museum now owns the painting, which will be the centerpiece of a show next year. Mead said the discovery seemed almost “too good to be true.” “I’ve had this level of excitement only a handful of times in my 30 years of looking for this stuff,” he said. When Mead saw the tent painting, he immediately emailed the image to Scott Stephenson. Stephenson serves as the museum’s vice president of collections, exhibitions and programming. He said his heart jumped when he realized what the painting was. The next step was to quickly find people willing to donate money to buy the painting, which was up for auction. It was to be sold just days after Mead’s discovery. He and Stephenson were concerned that they might not be the only people to have seen the rare work. And they were not sure the painting was exactly what they'd hoped. But they still followed their plan. The painting got only one other bidder. And so, the Museum of the American Revolution easily bought the painting for $12,000. Then, museum workers studied the picture and confirmed that it shows the Continental Army’s fall encampment at Verplanck’s Point, New York. The painter was a French-born engineer, Pierre L’Enfant. He served in the Continental Army. L’Enfant was wounded at the Siege of Savannah and taken prisoner at the surrender of Charleston, South Carolina. When released, he went back to serve with Washington for the rest of the war. Years later, he worked on planning the design for Washington, D.C. The painting shows hundreds of military tents across the hills of New York's Hudson Valley. On the left side is Washington’s field command center, including the tent. Most artwork about the war was created after it, historians say. So the images didn’t necessarily show real events. Mead said having a painting by L'Enfant is "like having a Google Street View look at a Revolutionary War encampment." Although L'Enfant did not sign the painting, it is similar to one he made in 1782 of troops at West Point, New York. The family who cared for L’Enfant at the end of his life gave it to the United States Library of Congress. The appearance, the dates of both paintings, and handwriting helped to confirm L'Enfant as the painter. Sometime in the past, the original tent painting was cut into six pieces of paper and placed into a folder. An expert is working to clean the painting and put the pieces back together so it can be shown as it was meant to. It will be the central piece of an exhibit called “Among His Troops: Washington’s War Tent in a Newly Discovered Watercolor.” The exhibition will open on January 13, 2018. To offer visitors a more complete show, the museum is also borrowing the West Point painting from the Library of Congress. I'm Alice Bryant.   Kristen de Groot reported this story for the Associated Press. Alice Bryant adapted her report for VOA Learning Learning English. George Grow was the editor. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   tent – n. a portable shelter that is used outdoors, is made of cloth and is held up with poles and ropes exhibit – n. a presentation or showing handful – n. an amount that you can hold in your hand auction – n. a public sale at which things are sold to the people who offer to pay the most bid – v. to offer to pay a specific amount of money for something that is being sold original – n. that from which a copy or reproduction is made folder – n. a folded cover or large envelope for holding documents

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US Businesses Making Farming Technologies for Cities

  How do you get the freshest, locally grown fruits and vegetables in a big city? For an increasing number of Americans, the answer is to grow the fruits and vegetables themselves. Businessman Cam MacKugler can help. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Seedsheet. MacKugler was at the Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, New York, earlier this month. He was showing off Seedsheet products, which are for people who live in high-rise buildings or other homes with little space for growing plants. Seedsheet products come with fabric sheets and small pods, each filled with a mix of seeds and soil. The fabric is placed on top of dirt in a home planter or in the ground. When watered, the pods soften and eventually break up as the plants start to grow. The seed groupings on any given Seedsheet provide vegetables or herbs for salads and other meals. Pricing starts at $15 for the factory-made sheets. But you can spend up to $100 for a larger, made-to-order outdoor covering measuring 1.2 by 2.4 meters. Efforts like Seedsheet come as Americans increasingly want to know where their food comes from. Many are looking for socially and environmentally responsible growing methods. MacKugler told VOA that most of the company’s sales come from young people living in cities. American consumers are not giving up on the low cost and ease of packaged and prepared foods. But new products and technologies are playing a part in helping Americans understand where their food comes from. “Consumer education is really progressing,” said Nicole Baum of Gotham Greens, a grower of hydroponically grown produce. Baum said consumers were less familiar with the term “hydroponics” -- growing plants in water instead of soil -- when Gotham Greens first started in 2011. But more and more Americans have since heard about this form of agriculture. Baum said she has also seen an increase in competing companies. “We’re definitely seeing a lot more people within the space from when we first started, which is awesome,” she said. “I think it’s really great that other people are coming into the space and looking for ways to use technology to have more productive, efficient growth.” Gotham Greens provides leafy greens and herbs grown on buildings to supermarkets and top-rated New York restaurants like Gramercy Tavern. Companies like Smallhold also advertised their services at the Food Loves Tech event. Smallhold manufactures mini-farms – small, self-contained structures -- for growing mushrooms. The mushroom mini-farms are meant to be used in restaurants, not homes. Smallhold sets up the devices and services them at restaurants, with restaurant workers harvesting mushrooms when they are ready. Hannah Shufro, operations lead at Smallhold, said the mini-farms help cut down on pollution that comes with transporting and shipping produce. Shufro also noted that produce begins to lose its nutritional value right from the time it is harvested. "When you’re harvesting food right out of a system that’s growing onsite, it does not get fresher than that, she said.” I’m Susan Shand   Tina Trinh reported this story for VOANews.com. George Grow adapted her report for Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   fabric – n. a material like cloth; the main structure of something pod – n. a protective container package – n. a box or container; something that comes in a box awesome – adj. extremely good; causing feelings of wonder  

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English in a Minute: Tacky

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Zimbabwe’s New President Promises Reform, Urges Forgiveness

Zimbabwe has its first new leader in nearly 40 years. Emmerson Mnangagwa was sworn-in as the country's president on Friday, ending 37 years of rule by Robert Mugabe. Mugabe resigned on Tuesday after intense pressure from the military and the ruling party. The new president spoke to a crowd at the 60,000-seat National Sports Stadium in Harare. He praised the former president, and promised to hold democratic elections next year. Mnangagwa called Mugabe the "father of our nation," but also said he made some mistakes while serving as president. He added that Zimbabweans should “never remain hostages” of their past, and urged them to begin rebuilding “our great country.” Changes to government policy Mnangagwa says he wants to compensate farmers who lost their land under Mugabe's rule. Mugabe critics say Zimbabwe’s land reform program has caused hunger in a country once considered the most fertile in southern Africa. Under the program, the government forced most experienced white commercial farmers off their land. The president said he would try to pay the country’s international debts, ease restrictions on imports, and make it easier for Zimbabweans to get hard currency. Currently, nine forms of currency are accepted, yet the country has a shortage of ready money or cash. Mnangagwa’s presidential inauguration was a surprise for many people, both in Africa and around the world. Earlier this month, on November 5, he was ousted from his position as vice president as part of a power struggle with Mugabe's wife, Grace. Two weeks later, the 75-year-old politician became the leader of the southern African nation.   Known as the Crocodile, Mnangagwa has a strong relationship with Zimbabwe's army. Among the many tests he faces will be rebuilding the country's economy, which suffered during Mugabe’s rule. Previous government officials  The former president and his wife have been given immunity from legal action. The military took control of the government after Mugabe dismissed Mnangagwa, and suggested he would appoint his 52-year-old wife as vice president. Human rights groups have accused Mugabe of unfairly influencing elections and permitting corruption. They also say he was responsible for the torture and killing of thousands of political opponents during his long rule. American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has urged Zimbabwe's new leadership to hold free and fair elections. "The people of Zimbabwe must choose their own leaders," he said. I'm Jill Robbins. Anita Powell reported this story for VOANews.com. Susan Shand adapted her report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor. What do you think of the changes in Zimbabwe's government? Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story currency – n. the money that country uses; something being used as money commercial – adj. of or related to the buying and selling of goods or services compensate - v. to give money or something else of value to (someone) in return for something (such as work) or as payment for something lost or damaged  crocodile – n. a large reptile that has a long body, thick skin, and a long, thin mouth with sharp teeth and that lives in the water in regions with hot weather immunity – n. special protection from what is required for most people by law 

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What It Takes - Andrew Young

00:00:02     OPRAH WINFREY: "Hattie Mae, this child is gifted," and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.   00:00:08     ROGER BANNISTER: If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity, and you don't take it, you may never have another chance.   00:00:14     LAURYN HILL: It all was so clear. It was just, like, the picture started to form itself.   00:00:19     DESMOND TUTU: There was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth, darkness over light, death over life.   00:00:27     CAROL BURNETT (quoting CARRIE HAMILTON): “Every day I wake up and decide, today I'm going to love my life. Decide.”   00:00:34     JOHNNY CASH: My advice is, if they're going to break your leg once when you go in that place, stay out of there.   00:00:40     JAMES MICHENER: And then along come these differential experiences that you don't look for, you don't plan for, but boy, you’d better not miss them.   00:00:52     ALICE WINKLER: This is What It Takes, a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy of Achievement. I’m Alice Winkler. I pulled an interview today from the Academy’s vault that has so many memorable stories it’s hard to know where to start, but honestly, I think this time it makes sense to begin in the middle. It’s 1957, and Andrew Young, recently out of seminary, is pastor at a little country church in South Georgia.   00:01:24     He’s involved at a very local level in the fight for civil rights. One day he gets an invitation from the Alpha Phi Alphas, a prominent African American fraternity. They want him to speak at Talladega College in Alabama. Also invited is a man he’s never met before, Martin Luther King Jr.   00:01:46     ANDREW YOUNG: And I always said they invited him and they didn't think he would come, so they invited me as a backup, and it turned out we both showed up.   00:01:53     ALICE WINKLER: King had risen to prominence two years earlier as leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, and Andrew Young knew all about him.   00:02:01     ANDREW YOUNG: And that's when we met, in 1957, and my wife was with me, and he started talking to her and realized that she and Coretta had known each other in high school. So we stopped off and had dinner with them, and I knew who he was, and I kept trying to talk civil rights or theology or trying to, you know — I don't know what I was trying to do, but he wouldn't talk about anything but his baby.   00:02:32     And he was crazy about this little girl, and of course, I had a three-month-old daughter, too. So we met as fathers who married women from the same little country town.   00:02:45     ALICE WINKLER: Andrew Young became a member of Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle. He was chief strategist and negotiator. If you glance through photos of the Civil Rights Movement, you will find Young at King’s side in Birmingham, in Selma, in Atlanta, in St. Augustine, and in the White House. He was there again at his side when King was assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis.   00:03:12     A number of years later, Young would become one of the first African Americans elected to Congress from the Deep South since Reconstruction, and ambassador to the UN under Jimmy Carter, and the mayor of Atlanta, twice. But his path to the center of the Civil Rights Movement, and to a remarkable life of public service more generally, is the subject of the stories in this interview. It was recorded by the Academy of Achievement in 2013.   00:03:50     Andrew Young, like Martin Luther King Jr., was a minister, and by the time he met King on that day he just described, in 1957, the two men were pretty much in lockstep on the issue of nonviolence, but it wasn’t always the case for Young. Two years earlier, he had been organizing a local voter registration drive, and he remembers the turning point for him.   00:04:14     ANDREW YOUNG: We had been shopping in Albany, Georgia, and we were driving back, Jean and me, with a three-month-old baby in a bassinet in the back seat of this little Nash Rambler, and we go around the curve in this little town called Doerun, Georgia, and I was going pretty fast, and there were people all over the streets, you know.   00:04:36     And I slowed down quickly, and there must have been a hundred people in sheets with their pointed hats. They didn't have their face masks on, but I turned the corner, and I was in the middle of a Klan rally. And I realized that they were coming to Thomasville because I had put up signs about a voter registration drive, and I was prepared for it, you know. And so I said to Jean, I said, "Look — " She's a country girl.   00:05:07     One of the things we used to do on dates is go out in the backyard and shoot tin cans.   00:05:12     So she was a good shot. I said, "Look, I'm going to try to reason with these people if they come to visit us, and I want you to sit in the window and just point our rifle at the guy I'm talking to." And, see, I'd been to theology school, and I was — I grew up in the Second World War, where Reinhold Niebuhr and others criticized the church for being pacifist.   00:05:37     So I said, "You point the gun at him, and then I can reason with him as a brother, because if he takes me out, you take him out," and she said, "I'm not going to do that." I said, "What do you mean? What's — what are you going to do?" She said, "I'm not going to point a gun at a human being." I said, "That's not a human being. That's the Ku Klux Klan."   00:05:55     She said, "Look, don't you forget it. Under that sheet is the heart of a child of God." And my idea was, "Damn, woman."   00:06:10     You know, what kind of woman did I marry? And she said, "No. We're not going to point guns at — we're not — " she said, "If you don't believe in what you preach, we need to quit now."   00:06:23     ALICE WINKLER: Andrew Young took in her words and took a different tact. He got out of the way of the Klan, got home, and found a local business leader willing to accompany him to visit the mayor, who also happened to run the town’s hardware store. The mayor then called the head of the two biggest employers in town, and together they made an agreement that the Klan could convene on the courthouse steps but would not enter the black community or disrupt their registration drive.   00:06:54     ANDREW YOUNG: That was my first test of nonviolence. What it taught me was that the best way to avoid violence is to head it off, not wait for a confrontation where violence is almost inevitable, but that you've got to be more aggressive pursuing what Gandhi called organized, aggressive, disciplined goodwill.   00:07:22     ALICE WINKLER: And what gave Andrew Young the idea that he could possibly broker a deal with the Klan? Well, as I said earlier, I’ve started his story in the middle, but now I’ll go back to Andrew Young’s beginnings because, as he tells it, he started learning his ambassadorial skills at his father’s knee.   00:07:41     ANDREW YOUNG: Because I grew up in New Orleans and there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner, and the Nazi Party headquarters was on the third corner. My aunt lived right behind the Nazi Party, and the — there was no air conditioning, so the windows were open, and my father had to explain to me why these people were “heiling” Hitler.   00:08:07     And he did a very interesting thing. He took me to the movies to see the 1936 Olympics and Jesse Owens, and when Jesse Owens won his first race, Hitler got up and walked out. He said, "You see, racism is a sickness," my father said. And he said, "Jesse didn't get mad. He just went on and won three more gold medals." And he said, "The thing you need to remember is that you don't get mad with sick people. You help them, and you can't help them unless you try to understand them."   00:08:39     So, even as a four- or five-year-old, he was trying to make me responsible for understanding racism. He didn't expect it to change, but he wanted me to be able to survive and thrive, and he used to say all the time, "You're in a struggle, but if you get in a fight and lose your temper, you lose the fight, so don't get mad, get smart."   00:09:06     ALICE WINKLER: Young’s dad did also get him boxing lessons, however, on the theory that if you know how to fight, you don’t have to fight. Young says everything his father taught him helped him to survive in his mixed neighborhood.   00:09:20     ANDREW YOUNG: And then, because it was segregated, I had to go out of that neighborhood to another neighborhood, where I was the little rich kid whose parents had been to college. And so I had to deal with poverty and how to accept privilege as a responsibility and not as a burden.    00:09:40     ALICE WINKLER: Andrew Young’s father had also grown up privileged. His father — in other words, Andrew Young’s grandfather — had been a very successful businessman in Franklin, Louisiana.   00:09:51     ANDREW YOUNG: He had four million dollars in a bank account, about 1916. He managed the money for burial societies, Masonic organizations, and because he was trustworthy, almost everybody in Louisiana — every organization in Louisiana — banked in Franklin, Louisiana.   00:10:14     ALICE WINKLER: Andrew Young’s grandmother, meanwhile, taught him to appreciate that he’d been dealt a pretty good hand.   00:10:20     ANDREW YOUNG: She'd always say, you know, "To them to whom much has been given, of them will much be required," and so it was just expected that God does not waste blessings and, “If you got all these blessings, you better do something with them, boy.” But she also gave me a faith in life that made me not fear death. When she lost her sight, she was about 80, and she died at about 87, 88.   00:10:54     And so for those — that was between, like, 6 and 14. My job every day was to read the newspaper and the Bible, and I say that's where I got my education.              00:11:05     ALICE WINKLER: Young’s mother was the only child in her family who got to go to college, because her mother and siblings sacrificed to get her there. She became a teacher. Young’s father was a dentist.   00:11:17     ANDREW YOUNG: Louis Armstrong was one of his patients, and a lot of the old blues singers and a lot of the prizefighters in New Orleans. I met all kinds of people. He was active in the NAACP, so I met people like Paul Robeson and Walter White. I don't remember meeting W.E.B. Du Bois, but Langston Hughes, Marian Anderson, all of the great black people of the time came through New Orleans.   00:11:46     ALICE WINKLER: For many years, though, his father traveled outside of New Orleans to take care of patients in rural communities, and he often took his son along.   00:11:56     ANDREW YOUNG: During the Depression, all the doctors and dentists were broke, and Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana, came up with the idea of — it was really one of the first public health projects. And so he bought trailers that were mobile dental offices, and my father's job for most of my young life was to drive from parish to parish in Louisiana, and he'd plug in at the parish courthouse.   00:12:27     And the parish nurse would line up all of the black children, and in the summertime we'd travel with him, and because we couldn't stay in hotels, we always stayed in people's homes.   00:12:44     ALICE WINKLER: They couldn’t stay in hotels, of course, because of segregation. Barbara Harrison, the Washington journalist who conducted this interview, asked Young whether he noticed, as a kid, that he and his dad were treated worse when they got out in the country, away from the unusually diverse city of New Orleans. The answer? Yeah.   00:13:04     ANDREW YOUNG: But, you know, I really never paid any attention to it because see, for me, since four years old, racism was a sickness. And I knew how to steer clear of sick people, and I could sense when people were uncomfortable, and I went out of my way to make them comfortable, and that wasn't —   00:13:22     You know, when I got in the Civil Rights Movement, I was so comfortable and gracious with white people that some of the guys called me an Uncle Tom.   00:13:34     And Dr. King always sent me to do the negotiations. I never got upset. I never argued back. My father kind of had me as a junior analyst by the time I was six.   00:13:51     But you can read people. You can see when they're threatened. I tell the story about, you know, nobody liked school lunch, and I always had a little extra money because I had a newspaper route or sold magazines. And to keep the bullies from taking my money, I realized I had to get it organized, and so I used to get everybody — I said, "Look, let's see how much money we got."   00:14:20     I always had the most, but everybody had a few pennies, and we'd put it all together, and then to avoid eating in the lunchroom, we'd go across the street to the grocery store, and we could buy a nickel's worth of bologna and a nickel's worth of cheese. You could get a loaf of bread for 10, 11 cents, and you could get a big RC Cola, and if we had enough, you could get a big chocolate marshmallow moon pie.   00:14:46     And then everybody would have lunch together. Now I — for me, that's a metaphor for all over the world. You’ve got to feed the hungry, and people resent you when you have too much to eat and they have nothing, and it's easier to share. It's the only way to keep peace.   00:15:04     BARBARA HARRISON:   When did you feel God's presence in your life?   00:15:09     ANDREW YOUNG: I was constantly reminded of it, but it didn't really become — I didn't take it seriously until I finished college. Well, there were two things that happened to me toward the end of my college career. One, I was goofing off.   00:15:28     And I was almost not graduating, and I was lifeguard at a swimming pool, and a kid came in and almost drowned. He was an older fellow. When we pulled him up, he reminded me that he and I had gotten put out of school together in third grade. I said, "Well, where have you been?” And he said, "I've been in and out of every jail in Louisiana, including, you know, Angola Penitentiary."   00:15:55     And it was obvious to me that he was tough, and smarter than I was, and when he said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "Well, I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to quit school and go to the Army, or — I know I don't want to be a dentist, but I don't know what I want to do with my life."   00:16:13     And he just cussed me out and said, "Look, if I'd had the opportunities you have — " And he didn't have to tell me, but I realized that, “There but for the grace of God go I.” And I went back to school, and I managed to suck it up and graduate, but then on the way back from Howard University, in the days of segregation, we couldn't live in hotels and motels, so we stopped at Kings Mountain, North Carolina, where there was a church conference going on.   00:16:45     And my parents were members of the church, and I wasn't interested in the church, but I was — I'd been on the track team and swimming team, and I thought I was an athlete, so while they went to the meetings, I went out running. And I literally ran to the top of this mountain and pushed myself to total exhaustion, and I could hardly breathe, and when I looked up and — I mean I took off my shirt and, you know, put it on a rock because I was ringing wet.   00:17:24     And I looked out at the horizon, and it just hit me that everything out here has a purpose. Everything is there for a reason. God could not have created all of this and not be a reason for me. And I came down that mountain with just a sense of peace that there must be some purpose for my life, and I don't know what it is, but I'm going to find it, and I'm going to follow it one day at a time, and that's what I've been doing for the last 60 years.   00:18:10     ALICE WINKLER: When Andrew Young came down from that mountain, destiny, perhaps, led him to volunteer with a national youth program at a place called Camp Mack in Indiana. It was run by the Church of the Brethren.    00:18:25    ANDREW YOUNG: The Church of the Brethren is one of the historic peace churches, along with the Mennonites and Quakers, and the first day I was there, a young man by the name of Tom Bowman asked me had I ever read anything about Gandhi. And I said, no, I hadn't, and he gave me a little book, Nehru on Gandhi. The only other black person at that conference was Eduardo Mondlane from Mozambique, who ended up going back to Mozambique, starting the liberation struggle there, FRELIMO.   00:18:59     But when we talked about Gandhi's nonviolence there, his view was, this will certainly work for us in Mozambique, and I was very skeptical. I said, "I don't know that this will work in the American South." Well, it was just the opposite. When he started his demonstrations, the Portuguese machine-gunned them, and that pushed them into violence.   00:19:30     We were able to gradually evolve into a fairly independent, aggressive, nonviolent movement, and we were able to bring the communities along with us. So the amazing thing about our civil rights movement was not that people got killed but that so few of us got killed.   00:19:55     ALICE WINKLER: Camp Mack was one of the turning points in Young’s life. When it ended, they sent him to work in Connecticut, and they offered him housing at the Hartford Seminary. When the dean tempted him to stay with the offer of a scholarship, Andrew Young agreed.                00:20:11     ANDREW YOUNG: Well, my father and I had a real — only time he ever got angry with me was when I told him I was not going to be a dentist, and even though he was very religious, and a very big member of the church and tither, he said he would not support me. He said, "All of the preachers I know are either poor or crooked, and I'll have nothing to do with that. You know, if you want to do this, you’ve got to do it on your own."   00:20:37     ALICE WINKLER: Young made it through seminary on his own and had no intention of returning to the South. He wanted to settle in New York, and he still harbored dreams of running in the Olympics, but then he got a call, asking if he’d take a position at a church in the little town of Marion, Alabama, and this was another turning point in the life of Andrew Young.   00:20:58     I had never heard of Marion, Alabama, and I didn't want any parts of Alabama. My life was planned, but the thing that I always said was that, if God had something for me to do, it would be something that nobody else would do. And everybody wanted to go to the Olympics, everybody wanted to be in New York, but nobody would go to Marion, Alabama but me.   00:21:26     And so I figured I was going to Marion, Alabama. Now when I got there, as soon as I walked in the first home, I realized that God sent me there to have a wife, because there was a Bible on the table that had been underlined, and there was a senior lifesaving certificate on the wall, and there were not many black women who were good swimmers.   00:21:51     ALICE WINKLER: And there were other signs of an interesting, pretty, athletic young woman in the house, but the woman, Jean, was not there, only her mother. Jean, it turned out, was at a Church of the Brethren college. The Church of the Brethren, remember, was where Andrew Young had first encountered Gandhi’s teachings.              00:22:10     ANDREW YOUNG: I always say that coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous, and I figure that God had put me in this trick because I was supposed to marry this woman. And I believe it to this day, because I decided, even before I met her and before I saw her, that this was going to be my wife. Now the irony of it is that another little girl that went to high school with her was Coretta Scott.   00:22:39     And a little further down in the county, in Uniontown, was another little girl who was Juanita Jones, who became Juanita Abernathy. So all three of us, who did not know each other, ended up marrying women from this same little county, and it was this same little county that brought us back to Selma and led to the march from Selma to Montgomery when Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed there.   00:23:06     And when we were going to Marion, Alabama with Martin Luther King years later, there was a normal road to go, and we had heard from the Justice Department that they were planning to ambush Dr. King and kill him on that road to Selma. And he was going to go anyway, and because I had been there as the pastor and had married a wife from there, and he had, too, we knew the back roads.   00:23:34     And we went the back roads and went to my mother-in-law's house, and she fixed lunch for us. And so all of my life has seemed to be like a jigsaw puzzle that, if I look carefully at the pieces, I'll see how they fit. I don't know that it's preordained, but if I make the right choices, the right things happen.   00:23:58     ALICE WINKLER: There’s no doubt Andrew Young made the right choice marrying Jean. It was 1954, the year she got her teaching certificate, and the year the Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus Board of Education. For a while, they moved to New York, but it was Jean who pulled them back to the South, Young says, and toward the Civil Rights Movement.   00:24:18     ANDREW YOUNG: I say that if Martin and I had not married the little country girls we married from Alabama, you never would have heard our names.   00:24:34     ALICE WINKLER: When the Montgomery bus boycott began in 1955, remember, Andrew and Jean Young had not yet met the Kings, but Andrew Young later heard the stories from them, and to this day he takes great pleasure in keeping those stories alive. Martin Luther King and Coretta, he told interviewer Barbara Harrison, were fairly new to Montgomery at the time. King took a job as a pastor there while he was still working on his Ph.D., not really ever intending to get involved politically outside of his church.   00:25:05     ANDREW YOUNG: Two weeks after he finished his dissertation and mailed it back to Boston University, Rosa Parks sat down in a bus. He didn't know anything about it. He didn't plan it, but there was a group of women who were teachers at Tuskegee Institute and Alabama State University in Montgomery, and it was kind of a progressive women's club.   00:25:34     And they had been very upset about the way people were treated on the buses, and several young black women had been jailed, beaten, brutalized on the buses, but they didn't feel as though they were — they were looking for the right person to start a protest. Well, Rosa Parks was one of the sweetest women in the world.   00:26:02     She never raised her voice. Everybody in town respected her, and when they put her off the bus and took her to jail, they had their candidate. And these women went to E.D. Nixon, who was the head of the NAACP, and they said, "Look, if you have the big Baptist minister or the big Methodist minister head this movement, we're going to have the same old rivalry we've always had. Why don't you try to convince them to let this young man" — now he was 26 then — "let this young man lead the movement." So —   00:26:44     BARBARA HARRISON: Did he shirk at that responsibility?   00:26:48     ANDREW YOUNG: Well, he didn't have a choice. I mean actually, when they were having the discussion and the vote, I understand, he was back in the back running the mimeograph machine, doing flyers for the boycott. And so when they came and got him and he came back in the meeting and they told him he had been elected the president, it was, like, 6:30, 7:00 at night, and he had one hour to prepare to get up and give a speech that had to be militant enough to galvanize people, but it had to be reasoned and passive enough to keep people's anger from boiling over into violence.   00:27:37     And Coretta had just had her baby, Yolanda, and she couldn't come, and she got the choir director from Alabama A&M to take one of these big two-reel tape recorders — because she didn't know what he was going to say, and he didn't have time, but she got — I think his name was Robert Williams, to go there and record the speech.   00:28:05     ALICE WINKLER: It is astonishing that that speech, delivered before King was a public figure, has survived on tape. The audio’s pretty rough, as you might imagine, but so worth the listen. Here's a little taste of it.   00:28:19     MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.:  We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.   00:28:36     ANDREW YOUNG: It’s miraculous, but all of the themes that later occurred in the March on Washington, his Nobel Prize speech and “Mountaintop” speech, you can see glimpses of that. You hear him talking about dreams. You hear him talking about the visions of America's future. You hear the seeds of a genius planted by God in a single, little individual who was five feet seven inches tall and weighed 160 pounds.   00:29:06     And one of the things I'm really most proud of is that now, that he's got a 30-foot statue here on the Mall.   00:29:13     Because we always wanted to be tall.   00:29:16     ALICE WINKLER: There’s just a skooch of irony in Andrew Young’s pride over the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. on the Mall in Washington, because back in 1963, Young says, he really wasn’t very excited about coming to D.C. for the March on Washington. He was too busy mobilizing and organizing for demonstrations in the South, and besides, he’d just landed in jail in Savannah while trying to get fellow activist Hosea Williams out of jail.   00:29:44     So Young’s fight was elsewhere, and he had little or nothing to do with the planning of the March on Washington.   00:29:50     ANDREW YOUNG: And I thought this was going be a nice little tea party and the real movement was in the South. I'd been to a march on Washington in 1957, where Dr. King spoke about “Give Us the Ballot,” but you know, it was a nice rally. We were trying to change the South, and we did — we were a little too arrogant to see that a Southern black movement could not change America.   00:30:21     What it took was a national movement, what Dr. King called a coalition of conscience, and he said, "We'll never be a majority. We will never be a black majority, but there is in America a majority of people of goodwill, and it doesn't matter what color they are or what their vocations are or their national origin or religion."   00:30:45     I think none of us were able to estimate how big the turnout would be, and we were all surprised because, see, the nation's capital was seeing this as a threat, and they were mobilizing the Army and the National Guard, and they were expecting trouble. And what happened was people and their families turned out.   00:31:16     And they dressed up like they were going to church, and the trainloads came from the South, and they came down from New York and Philadelphia, and there was a planeload of movie stars, which included — you know, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier organized it, but it included Charlton Heston and Marlon Brando and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and Dianne Carroll, Rita Moreno, I mean, Tony Bennett.   00:31:48     And we said, "Golly, this is something." It really universalized the movement and made it not just a black Southern movement, but it made it a national movement. It made it a multiracial movement, and it made it a movement for human rights in general, not just against segregation.   00:32:13     ALICE WINKLER: Andrew Young has a great story about the speech Martin Luther King delivered on that day. He was only allotted nine minutes for it, funny enough, despite his central role.   00:32:23     ANDREW YOUNG: There was a lot of rivalry and a little pettiness between all the organizations, and everybody wanted to speak first because in those days we figured to get on the six o’clock news you had to speak before three o’clock. So everybody wanted to speak first, and they were jockeying for position, and he was — he said, "I'll speak last." But everybody else spoke too long, and he was trying to discipline himself to stay within his nine minutes that was allotted.   00:32:54     And the speech that he wrote was exactly nine minutes, and the night before, in this Willard Hotel, he was walking around timing it, but he had made that same “I Have A Dream” speech in Detroit back in June, and Mahalia Jackson had been there. And Mahalia Jackson had just finished singing when Martin got up to speak, and as he got toward the end, Mahalia kept saying, "Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream."   00:33:27     MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.:  I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character! I have a dream today!   00:34:06     ALICE WINKLER: The speech was extemporaneous, but Andrew Young is careful to point out that that doesn’t mean it was off the cuff. Martin Luther King Jr., he says, was always steeped in the ideas and always prepared.   00:34:20     ANDREW YOUNG: And he never slept. You know, Ralph used to say, "Martin's got a war on sleep, not on poverty," because he would want to discuss things, you know, two, three o’clock in the morning, and then he'd wake up at six o’clock in the morning, raring to go again. He was always reading or talking or arguing, so his life was a life of constant preparation. He'd done a lot of — and he had a brilliant memory.   00:34:50     So he could go back and quote Shakespearean things that he had not seen since he was in college, or he could — because he was a preacher preaching every Sunday, he'd always get the right Bible verse at the right time. And it was his life.   00:35:09     Right after the March on Washington, President Kennedy introduced the Civil Rights Bill, but several weeks after that, four little girls were killed in a church in Birmingham, and the same day in Birmingham, two young boys were shot down, though their stories are much less known.   00:35:26     ANDREW YOUNG: It was a terribly depressing time for us, and then six weeks later, the president was killed, and that was a very dark, depressing time for us because he said, "You know, if they can't protect the president with 400 Secret Service, you know our days are numbered. Any day can be our last." And so — and then he'd laugh and joke about it. He said, "So you’d better be always ready," and then he had a way of disarming you when you’d get nervous and scared.   00:36:05     He'd say, "But don't worry, Andy. You'll probably take a bullet before me, but I'll preach you into heaven." And then he'd start preaching your funeral.   00:36:18     And having you laugh at all the things you wouldn't want anybody to say in church about you, he would say it like he was preaching your eulogy, and so — but we were very nervous about how this bill was going to be passed. And there'd been a civil rights movement in St. Augustine, Florida since 1960, and he sent me down to St. Augustine, early 1964, to stop the movement because we were afraid —   00:36:56     The Klan was very aggressive and violent down in Florida. It still is, kind of. And he didn't want there to be any retaliation, so he sent me to stop the movement. And when I got down there, and I told them, “Dr. King said we don't need to march anymore” — that the battle has moved to Washington — “and he's afraid that any violence will make it impossible to pass a civil rights bill,” people were what we had learned to call “freedom high.”   00:37:33     And they said, "We're not waiting on Washington. We want to be free here," and so I agreed to lead them. We went down, marched down, and I thought when they saw the Klan they'd be ready to turn around, but we stopped and prayed, and I said, "Anybody — " I said, "We really don't have to go down and face this kind of violence. We could go back to the church." And some lady started singing, "Be Not Dismayed Whate’er Betide, God Will Take Care of You."   00:38:06     And everybody said, "We want to march. We don't want the Klan to turn us around." And so I had to lead them down there, and when I got there, we were mostly women and children, and there were a couple of hundred, mostly pretty big men with chains and bricks and bottles.   00:38:25     And so to try to keep them safe, I kept them on one side of the street, and I went across the street, as was my custom, trying to reason with the Klan. And I was doing pretty well, I thought, until somebody, somebody hit me on the back of the head with a blackjack, and then somebody — I was knocked out.   00:38:51     ALICE WINKLER: But somebody picked Andrew Young up and revived him, and they just kept right on marching, with swings and blows coming at them. President Johnson and the nation followed the brutality of the segregationists in St. Augustine. They saw images of a white hotel owner pouring acid into his own whites-only pool while protestors swam. That helped secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Andrew Young had helped draft.   00:39:23     The next year, he helped draft the Voting Rights Act. Here’s an account of that momentous year in our nation's history as Young told it to journalist Barbara Harrison.   00:39:34     ANDREW YOUNG: Martin won the Nobel Prize after the '64 bill passed, and in December of 1964, we went to Norway for him to receive the Nobel Prize. And coming back, we stopped in Washington to see President Johnson. And he was saying that there was no way he could introduce another civil rights bill, and he went on for over an hour about the president not having as much power and he had pushed Congress about as far as he could push them.   00:40:14     So we left there, and I was a little disappointed, and I asked Dr. King, "Well, what did you think?" And he said, "I think we’ve got to find a way to get this president a little more power."   00:40:27     And, you know, I figured, "This guy’s crazy." But we go back home. In a few days, Mrs. Amelia Boynton from Selma, who's now 103, but who then was still in her 50s, came over and said what was going on in Selma. That her husband — they wouldn't even let her husband's funeral go into a church because they said her husband was too political and it was against the law to talk politics in the church.   00:41:06     And you couldn't walk down the street with more than two people, and Sheriff Jim Clark had created a police state, and she said that, "We can't survive this way. You've got to come to Selma to help us." And so, on the second of January, just two weeks after President Lyndon Johnson said he didn't have the power, we went to Selma.   00:41:38     And by the end of March, President Johnson was standing before a joint session of Congress and introducing voting rights legislation, which later passed, but he ended his speech with, "We shall overcome." Now that sounds easy, except that there were several deaths. Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion, Alabama, was killed by a state trooper. Jonathan Daniels, James — Reverend James Reeb, Father Morrisroe. Stokely Carmichael was shot at.   00:42:21     Viola Liuzzo was killed coming back from the march in Montgomery. So we gave the president the power, but it really cost the blood of many people that were willing to sacrifice their lives that this nation might, as Dr. King would say, live out the true meaning of its creeds.   00:42:53     BARBARA HARRISON: You were with Dr. King when he was killed in Memphis. How did that moment change your life?   00:43:00     ANDREW YOUNG: Well, in a very strange way. It liberated his spirit from his body, and at first, I was angry, not at the people for killing him, but for him leaving us, because he had a firm faith in life beyond this world, and so he was not afraid of death.   00:43:28     And we used to think sometimes that he was almost knowing it was inevitable, but he'd say, "You don't have anything — you're going to die. Everybody's going to die. You have no choice about where you die, how you die. Your only choice is what you die for."   00:43:54     ALICE WINKLER: Reverend, activist, congressman, ambassador, and mayor, Andrew Young. There is much about his life in public service that followed the death of Martin Luther King that we haven’t even touched on, so please, do yourself a favor, go to achievement.org and read more about this extraordinary man. He’s also featured, along with Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, in the Academy of Achievement e-book The Road to Civil Rights.   00:44:23     It's free at iTunes University. I’m Alice Winkler, and this is What It Takes. Our Twitter handle is @WhatItTakesNow, so take a moment and tweet out the most interesting thing you heard in this episode, and let your friends know that Lauryn Hill is next in our lineup. You heard me, Lauryn Hill. What It Takes is made possible with funding from the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation. Thanks for listening.

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'Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen,' by O. Henry

  We present the short story "Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen," by O. Henry. The story was originally adapted and recorded by the U.S. Department of State. There is one day that is ours. There is one day when all Americans go back to the old home and eat a big dinner. Bless the day. The President gives it to us every year. Sometimes he talks about the people who had the first Thanksgiving. They were the Puritans. They were some people who landed on our Atlantic shore. We don’t really remember much about them. But those people ate a large bird called turkey on the first Thanksgiving Day. So we have turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, if we have enough money to buy turkey. That is a tradition. Yes. Thanksgiving Day is the one day of the year that is purely American. And now here is the story to prove to you that we have old traditions in this new country. They are growing older more quickly than traditions in old countries. That is because we are so young and full of life. We do everything quickly. Stuffy Pete sat down on a seat in the New York City park named Union Square. It was the third seat to the right as you enter Union Square from the east. Every Thanksgiving for nine years he had sat down there at one in the afternoon. Every time, things had happened to him. They were wonderful things. They made his heart feel full of joy—and they filled another part of him, too. They filled the part below his heart. On those other Thanksgiving Days he had been hungry. (It is a strange thing. There are rich people who wish to help the poor. But many of them seem to think that the poor are hungry only on Thanksgiving Day.) But today Pete was not hungry. He had come from a dinner so big that he had almost no power to move. His light green eyes looked out from a gray face on which there was still a little food. His breath was short. His body had suddenly become too big for his clothes; it seemed ready to break out of them. They were torn. You could see his skin through a hole in the front of his shirt. But the cold wind, with snow in it, felt pleasantly cool to him. For Stuffy Pete was overheated with the warmth of all he had had to eat. The dinner had been much too big. It seemed to him that his dinner had included all the turkey and all the other food in the whole world. So he sat, very, very full. He looked out at the world without interest, as if it could never offer him anything more. The dinner had not been expected. He had been passing a large house near the beginning of that great broad street called Fifth Avenue. It was the home of two old ladies of an old family. These two old ladies had a deep love of traditions. There were certain things they always did. On Thanksgiving Day at noon they always sent a servant to stand at the door. There he waited for the first hungry person who walked by. The servant had orders to bring that person into the house and feed him until he could eat no more. Stuffy Pete happened to pass by on his way to the park. The servant had gathered him in. Tradition had been followed. Stuffy Pete sat in the park looking straight before him for ten minutes. Then he felt a desire to look in another direction. With a very great effort, he moved his head slowly to the left. Then his eyes grew wider and his breath stopped. His feet in their torn shoes at the ends of his short legs moved about on the ground. For the Old Gentleman was coming across Fourth Avenue toward Stuffy’s seat. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years the Old Gentleman had come there to find Stuffy Pete on his seat. That was a thing that the Old Gentleman was trying to make into a tradition. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had found Stuffy there. Then he had led Stuffy to a restaurant and watched him eat a big dinner. They do these things more easily in old countries like England. They do them without thinking about them. But in this young country, we must think about them. In order to build a tradition, we must do the same thing again and again for a long time. The Old Gentleman loved his country. He believed he was helping to build a great American tradition. And he had been doing very well. Nine years is a long time here. The Old Gentleman moved, straight and proud, toward the tradition that he was building. Truly feeding Stuffy Pete once a year was not a very important tradition. There are greater and more important traditions in England. But it was a beginning. It proved that a tradition was at least possible in America. The Old Gentleman was thin and tall and sixty. He was dressed all in black. He wore eyeglasses. His hair was whiter and thinner than it had been last year. His legs did not seem as strong as they had seemed the year before. As this kind Old Gentleman came toward him, Stuffy began to shake and his breath was shorter. He wished he could fly away. But he could not move from his seat. “Good morning,” said the Old Gentleman. “I am glad to see that the troubles of another year have not hurt you. You continue to move in health about the beautiful world. For that blessing you and I can give thanks on this day of thanksgiving. If you will come with me, my man, I will give you a dinner that will surely make your body feel as thankful as your mind.” That is what the Old Gentleman said every time. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years. The words themselves were almost a tradition. Always before, they had been music in Stuffy’s ear. But now he looked up at the Old Gentleman’s face with tears of suffering in his eyes. The snow turned quickly to water when it fell upon his hot face. But the Old Gentleman was shaking with the cold. He turned away, with his back to the wind, and he did not see Stuffy’s eyes. Stuffy had always wondered why the Old Gentleman seemed sad as he spoke. He did not know that it was because the Old Gentleman was wishing that he had a son. A son would come there after he himself was gone. A son would stand proud and strong before Stuffy, and say: “In remembrance of my father.” Then it would really be a tradition. But the Old Gentleman had no family. He lived in a room in one of the old houses near the park. In the winter he grew a few flowers there. In the spring he walked on Fifth Avenue. In the summer he lived in a farmhouse in the hills outside New York, and he talked of a strange bug he hoped some day to find. In the fall season he gave Stuffy a dinner. These were the things that filled the Old Gentleman’s life. Stuffy Pete looked up at him for a half minute, helpless and very sorry for himself. The Old Gentleman’s eyes were bright with the giving pleasure. His face was getting older every year, but his clothes were very clean and fresh. And then Stuffy made a strange noise. He was trying to speak. As the Old Gentleman had heard the noise nine times before, he understood it. He knew that Stuffy was accepting. “Thank you. I’m very hungry.” Stuffy was very full, but he understood that he was part of a tradition. His desire for food on Thanksgiving Day was not his own. It belonged to this kind Old Gentleman. True, America is free. But there are some things that must be done. The Old Gentleman led Stuffy to the restaurant and to the same table where they had always gone. They were known here. “Here comes that old man,” said a waiter, “that buys that old no-good fellow a dinner every Thanksgiving.” The Old Gentleman sat at the table, watching. The waiters brought food, and more food. And Stuffy began to eat. No great and famous soldier ever battled more strongly against an enemy. The turkey and all the other food were gone almost as quickly as they appeared. Stuffy saw the look of happiness on the Old Gentleman’s face. He continued to eat in order to keep it there. In an hour the battle was finished. “Thank you,” Stuffy said. “Thank you for my Thanksgiving dinner.” Then he stood up heavily and started to go to the wrong door. A waiter turned him in the right direction. The Old Gentleman carefully counted out $1.30, and left fifteen cents more for the waiter. They said goodbye, as they did each year, at the door. The Old Gentleman went south, and Stuffy went north. Stuffy went around the first corner, and stood for one minute. Then he fell. There he was found. He was picked up and taken to a hospital. They put him on a bed, and began to try to discover what strange sickness had made him fall. And an hour later the Old Gentleman was brought to the same hospital. And they put him on another bed, and began to try to discover what his sickness could be. After a little time one of the doctors met another doctor, and they talked. “That nice old gentleman over there,” he said. “Do you know what’s wrong with him? He’s almost dead for the need of food. A very proud old man, I think. He told me he has had nothing to eat for three days.”   Download activities to help you understand this story here. Now it's your turn to use the words in this story. What is your favorite holiday? What kinds of holiday traditions do they have in your country? Let us know in the comments section or on our Facebook page. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   Puritan(s) – n. a member of a Protestant group in England and New England in the 16th and 17th centuries that opposed many customs of the Church of England tear(s) – n. a drop of liquid that comes from your eyes especially when you cry bug – n. a usually small insect cent(s) – n. a unit of money that is equal to ¹/₁₀₀ of the basic unit of money in many countries

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