Madelyn Murriea
I found the Todays Hero Blog about school bus driver Harold Girard very interesting because I had a very similar experience that helped shape my life. Only my hero and role model was my grade school librarian, Madelyn Murriea.
I, too, was the smallest boy at my school, and the target of all of the playground bullies. Being the product of a mixed race family did not help either. For me, my first five years of school were terrible. It didn’t help that my parents were never all that interested in my well being, so if I came home with a bloody nose or a fat lip from some schoolyard encounter, they never even noticed.
In the fifth grade, I discovered the school library, and it became my refuge. I wasn’t all that interested in books, to be honest, but I much preferred to be in the library than getting roughed up on the playground, where the other kids called me Oreo for being half white and half black.
One day a couple of bullies grabbed my lunch box from me in the hallway and were tossing it back and forth, taunting me with a game of keep away. Mrs. Murriea, a very large and formidable woman, looked out the library door and saw what was happening, and she came out, grabbed each of them under the arm, and marched them right to the principal’s office.
A few minutes later she returned to the library, where I had taken to eating my lunch (against school rules) because it was better than the cafeteria. I thanked Mrs. Murriea for rescuing me, and then said something to the effect of “I just wish I didn’t always need rescuing!”
“Don’t worry, Robert,” she assured me, “someday you will be much better than those boys can ever hope to be.”
“How?” I asked her. “I’m just a runt. Even my Daddy says so. And runts never grow up.”
“Sure they do,” she told me. “And not only do they grow up, sometimes they become very important.” Then she walked away and came back with a book and handed it to me.
“Read this,” she told me. “It’s the story of a boy named Teddy Roosevelt, who was a sickly child and probably the “runt” in his family too. But because he could not compete with other boys physically, he trained his mind. He read and studied everything from geography to natural history, he became a cavalry officer and led a famous charge up a place called San Juan Hill , and he even became the President of the United States! That’s pretty good for a “runt,” isn’t it?”
I started reading that book, and took it home with me and finished it by the next day. I was fascinated. If Teddy Roosevelt could grow out of his childhood illnesses and become a big game hunter, and even President, I knew there was hope for me too!
When I returned the book to the library the next day, Mrs. Murriea gave me another book, this one about a man named Frank Buck, who became famous capturing wild animals for zoos around the world. After that, she introduced me to John F. Kennedy, who became a war hero and later another President of the United States. After President Kennedy, she gave me a book about Helen Keller, a blind and deaf girl who went on to earn world acclaim. Reading these stories of men and women who overcame the odds to achieve greatness made the schoolyard bullies seem pretty insignificant to me.
I never grew up to be President, and I’m still a runt physically, compared to most men, but I did learn a lot from reading the biographies of famous men and women. More importantly, I developed a love of books and learning, which led to my present station in life, as a research editor for a major New York publishing house. And I owe it all to a wonderful school librarian who turned an Oreo into one smart cookie!
Submitted by Robert Garver
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