Word: va
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Once it took off, the seven-and-a-half-hour plane ride did go smoothly. There was even some comedy aboard. "When the flight attendant said to turn off electronic devices, people were laughing hysterically because nobody had anything," said Nancy Bort of Arlington, Va. Bort seemed unfazed, despite having been on a flight dubbed "red" by the Department of Homeland Security. "After seeing what's going on in the world in general, I don't know how you can worry about this," she said later in a phone interview. "I still think I have a greater chance of being...
DIED. Carl Brashear, 75, first black master deep-sea diver for the U.S. Navy, whose triumph over Kentucky poverty, racism and leg amputation inspired the 2000 movie Men of Honor, starring Cuba Gooding Jr.; in Portsmouth, Va. Brashear, a sharecropper's son who finished only the seventh grade, joined the Navy in 1950 and, after four years of pleas, was admitted to diving school--unofficially, it was for whites only--where classmates taunted him with racial slurs and death threats. In 1966, while Brashear was serving on the U.S.S. Hoist, a loose steel pipe careered across the deck and crushed...
DIED. Frederick Mosteller, 89, pre-eminent statistician and founding chairman of Harvard University's statistics department who popularized the application of statistical data to fields from politics to sports; in Falls Church, Va. Mosteller first showed his knack for laws of probability as a teenager, while working on a road crew that played poker during rain delays. In 1952, after mulling over the St. Louis Cardinals' 1946 World Series win over the Boston Red Sox, he published the first known academic paper on baseball statistics. A stronger team on paper would often lose to a weaker team, he proved, simply...
...spite of keeping house, home schooling and a new daughter, Andrea never missed a day of visitation when her father lay dying in the spring of 2001. She took all the children with her to the local VA hospital. She cared for him after doctors sent him home. The man who once taught her to sail was now confined to a wheelchair and could only gargle the water Andrea gave him. The night he died, Andrea insisted on driving to her parents' house. But the sight of her father's corpse devastated her. Rusty still wonders how guilty Andrea felt...
Chambers is a finalist. Among the others are Martha Rollins, 63, of Richmond, Va., who runs a furniture store and café staffed by ex-convicts; June Simmons, 64, of San Fernando, Calif., whose nonprofit trains social workers to cut down on life-threatening errors in their care of the elderly; and Charles Dey, 75, of Lyme, Conn., who places high school students who have disabilities in paid internships that provide a workplace mentor. Chambers hopes to use any prize money to expand his New England auto-loan operation across the U.S. If more folks can afford to get to work...