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Saving the world's most treasured artifacts

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Rembrandt. Vermeer. daVinci. Raphael. Some of the most famous works of art by the most renowned European artists and architects would not be here today without the efforts of the Monuments Men during WWII. In anticipation of the release of Sony Picture's The Monuments Men, starring George Clooney, Matt Damon and Cate Blanchett on February 7, 2014, join Museum Trustee and author Robert Edsel as he discusses his book-turned-major motion picture. Explore how a small group of forgotten men and women rescued some of the most important art, artifacts and monuments from Nazi looting and ultimate destruction as they embarked on "the greatest treasure hunt of all time." Edsel will impart the importance of the Monuments Men mission and work, both during the war and today.

Looking for Spanish captions? Check out the Museum's distance learning YouTube playlist and toggle on Spanish captions. Spanish captions are made possible through generous support from Pan-American Life Insurance Group.

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The Monuments Men: Saving Europe's Cultural Treasures | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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Rembrandt. Vermeer. daVinci. Raphael. Some of the most famous works of art by the most renowned European artists and architects would not be here today without the efforts of the Monuments Men during WWII.

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Word count: 1.015 words

A STRANGE LOVE AFFAIR

Ah! -- the 1960s! The hairstyles, the politics, the fashion! I could never get enough of it. I used to think if I'd been old enough then, I would even have done more drugs. Shameful, I know. But that wasn't meant to be, and I have to say I'm not exactly regretful about that. But the '60s -- what an age!

Oddly, I grew up then -- but I wasn't even yet a teenager for most of it. So I kind of missed out on the outrageousness of it all -- that is, until my 20s.

My name's Ruthie. Think I was delusional? I wasn't. I knew "flair" when I saw it, thought I knew clothes, and I respected the idea of peace. I got to know the '60s, when I grew up. And as I walk down this street, headed home, I'm just thinking about that. How a decade influenced me and made me want to be "cool." Cooler than Clint Eastwood, cooler than James Bond.

This obsession has lasted me through two marriages, two divorces, three kids -- and very good ones, I might add -- and many dates with older and younger men. As well as countless jobs working for the left, politically. I never forgot my ideals. And I never forgot my roots -- the '60s. All through college, all through the angst of being young, even into later middle age. I thought the '60s were it.

So in the 1980s, when I was 26, I had my hair cut in a flip, wore miniskirts and plastic earrings, and talked endlessly at parties about the senselessness of Vietnam. Well, who today would disagree with that? Even by the early '70s everyone had jumped on board about how bad that war was. I thought I was so hip that even Mick Jagger might have dated me.

But one guy at a party took a look at me and said, "Who do you think you are -- Julie Christie?" He was mean.

Another guy said I spouted off too much about politics and I was boring. He hurt my feelings terribly. Who could not care about war?

And a young woman who obviously hadn't grown up in the 1960s said my eyeliner looked "tawdry." Tawdry! I was actually trying to copy Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn. But I guess it didn't work.

When I moved to London for a year as a student, the first thing I did was to look up the location of Carnaby Street -- home of '60s English fashion. I actually bought a white lace-trimmed caftan there -- my tribute to 1960s taste! And I checked out the Marquee Club, where the Rolling Stones got their start. By then it was full of punks, with safety pins attached to their ears. I was a little disappointed.

Then -- in the 2000-oughts -- I had a revelation. What if I just decided to act like a Millennial? Not caring too much about politics, being carefree, letting my hair grow long and grungy, and acting like current teenagers. After all, I'd always tried to be with-it, even though I was stuck in the '60s -- so why not update my look and attitude?

Thing was, I was getting older -- and my new idea didn't work out so well, either. I felt sad about it. A woman at a nightclub called me a "wannabe." Rude, don't you think, when I was trying so hard? Like she was all that? And like, as an older woman, I didn't deserve some respect? Guess not.

And now I'm in my early 60s and I just don't give a damn anymore. My hair is short and grey, and I have daughters and nephews who are older than I was in my prime. I wear utilitarian clothes and no one notices me when I walk down the street, like I am right now.

So what was it all about? -- the 1960s? I guess it was about being fashionable, and being anti-war, and the appeal of Motown and the dawning of hard-core rock & roll, and the idea of "free love conquers everything," along with peace and justice for all.

It just seems like now, with some of the reaction to Black Lives Matter, and COVID, and the conflict over immigration, a few of us have forgotten all that good stuff. So I think I'll go into my bathroom when I get home and put on some black eyeliner and false eyelashes. I'll take looking like Julie Christie and Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn any day, over being an uncaring, forgetful-of-history, naive newcomer to the current century, who calls old ladies like me "dated," as if all we want to do is live in the past. Forgive me. I fell in love with a different era. And I never even used LSD! But the 1960s have my heart forever.

I guess I'm disillusioned now. Nothing will ever match that generation's fervor. Or do you think it will? Maybe, just maybe...

...It's true, young people today do think about climate change and the effects of police brutality. They're getting on board. Thank goodness they've got some soul. It's not all bad now, and kids have woken up again. So as I walk down this street towards my apartment, I'll dwell on that. Life is good, even though the '60s are long gone. But -- hmm. The modern age. What does it have over flower power?

...As I said, my name's Ruthie. I like to think of myself as resembling the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- dead at 87 -- only I never was a Supreme Court Justice. But just look at her life, going all the way back! Totally in support of women's rights, from her very beginnings. I'm humbled. And I'm sighing to myself, walking down this street, just because the '60s, with all that style and music and flower power and youthful rebellion, were so damned great and -- dare I even use the word? -- groovy! Guess, like the band Steppenwolf sang, I was "born to be wild." But, like Bob Dylan also wrote, "The times, they are a-changing."

###

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A STRANGE LOVE AFFAIR - A Funny Short Story by Martha Patterson - Reedsy Prompts

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Word count: 1.015 words A STRANGE LOVE AFFAIR Ah! -- the 1960s! The hairstyles, the politics, the fashion! I could never get enough of it. I used to think if I'd been old enough then, I would even have done more drugs. Shameful, I know.

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I live in Oxford, Mississippi, which lies along the ruby-throated hummingbird's migratory path. Did you know ruby-throats migrate? They do, spectacularly. Come late summer, ruby-throats drift from their breeding grounds in North America to points south. When they reach the states that border the gulf, they linger, juicing blossoms, storing up energy before their journey to their wintering grounds. They gorge until they've doubled their weight, to almost that of a nickel. A few take the longer land route along the Yucatan, but most fly over the Gulf of Mexico without stopping, a trip of five hundred miles, to winter in southern Mexico and Central America.

Because they loiter here, fattening up, I get to see them more frequently than most people, and as a result, I've become a little hummingbird-obsessed. I always have fresh nectar in my feeders. My binoculars are close at hand when I sit on the porch. I'm an active member of the "Hummingbird Hobnob" listserv (and maybe the youngest member by a good thirty years). A few years ago, I even went on a trip to Belize to band hummingbirds. All this time, I knew hummingbirds gave me a lot of pleasure. I didn't know they'd give me a model for a literary form.

What happened was this. My husband and I wrote a collaborative novel. Called The Tilted World (HarperCollins, 2013), it was set in the flood of the Mississippi River in 1927, and it ended up being a big project. Although we'd each published four books, we'd never written one together. In addition to teaching ourselves how to collaborate, we had to do a lot of research. And it was high stakes: we spent four years writing the novel. Imagine, if it failed, how costly that would have been for our marriage.

Luckily, it didn't fail. After we returned from book tour, tuckered, I wasn't sure what I wanted to write next. There followed a long, frustrating fallow period, in which I wasn't writing. I mean, sure, I was scribbling little thoughts and ideas in my notebook, but nothing was adding up to anything. Many of my scribbles were just sentences, or a paragraph; the longest, just a few pages. I kept complaining to my patient husband that I was "not writing." Eventually, however, it occurred to me that I was enjoying this scribbling in my notebook. After the high-stakes, research-heavy, character-imbedded thinking of the novel, my own life seemed like rich material again. The little memories or quirky thoughts or miniature scenes I was creating seemed refreshing. So, strangely, I identified the feeling of writing before I identified the activity. I thought, What if this "not writing" I'm doing actually is writing, and I just don't recognize it because it doesn't look like other writing I've done? What if I need to stop waiting for these things to add up to something, and realize maybe they already are somethings, just small? What if I'm writing hummingbirds?

It's precisely because hummingbirds are so small that they can do things larger birds can't. Some people find hummingbirds cute, but in reality, hummingbirds are badasses. They're fast: they have the most rapid wingbeat of all birds, averaging fifty-three beats per second and reportedly up to two hundred beats per second. Their flight muscles make up 30 percent of their weight. They can fly sixty miles per hour during courtship dives. They're smart: they have the largest brain-to-body ratio of all birds-4.2 percent of their body weight. They're hugely kinetic: they have the greatest relative energy output and greatest heart-to-body ratio of any warm-blooded animal. They're dexterous: they alone can rotate their wings in a circle, so they alone can fly forward, backward, up, down, and sideways, as well as hover, and even, for short distances, fly upside down. (The logo of the American Helicopter Society is the hummingbird.) Finally, they're efficient: although their metabolism is one hundred times that of an elephant, they're among the few birds that can enter a trancelike state of torpor. Come evening, a hummer can perch on a branch, fluff its feathers, slow its heart and breath, and lower its temperature-all to conserve energy for the next morning's aeronautics.

I began to think: if there are things a hummingbird can do precisely because it's small, what about a piece of writing? What topics, styles, and tones does a micro-memoir-that's the term I started playing with-invite? How could it, too, be fast, smart, kinetic, dexterous, and efficient?

Get in and get out as quickly as possible: that's the first rule I made for myself. Create the world in a bright flash. Easy on the exposition. Also, I didn't want the pieces to have to accumulate to make sense, didn't want them dependent on each other. Although some of my favorite writers-such as Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, and Claudia Rankine-are doing interesting work with the fragment, I didn't want my micro-memoirs to be read as fragments. I wanted them to stand alone, each a small thing but a complete thing. They should not need elaboration or expansion. After all, you don't look at a hummingbird and think, "Wow, if only I had one hundred of them, I'd have a crow." I figured the small size would allow a great variation in tone from piece to piece, so the experience of reading the book would be one of movement, zipping from mood to mood, music to music, as some pieces would be wry, some wistful, some acerbic.

The ruby-throated hummingbird weighs so little you could mail nine of them in an envelope for the price of a first-class stamp. My new book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, is also tiny. But size isn't always commensurate with ambition. If I had a nickel for each time I've admired a hummingbird-or felt gratitude for the literary model it provided me-I'd have a lot of nickels. And each one would weigh more than a ruby-throat.
* Illustration by Anna Hall

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Making a Hummingbird of Words - Creative Nonfiction

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I live in Oxford, Mississippi, which lies along the ruby-throated hummingbird's migratory path. Did you know ruby-throats migrate? They do, spectacularly. Come late summer, ruby-throats drift from their breeding grounds in North America to points south. When they reach the states that border the gulf, they linger, juicing blossoms, storing up energy before their journey to their wintering grounds.

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As far as scientists know, there is only one animal on Earth that has achieved what some (secretly, all?) humans dream about: immortality. Unfortunately, it's probably not the kind of animal you want to be-just a soft-bodied, neuronally challenged, jellyfish-like creature called "Turritopsis nutricula." Aside from swimming in the sea, targeting microscopic plankton, a Turritopsis doesn't do much. It does have sex, but it's the disembodied, spawning kind. Males release sperm near a female, and the sperm join up with eggs inside her stomach. The fertilized eggs hatch into larvae, called planulae, which settle on hard surfaces-most often rocks-on the sea floor. There, they grow into branching, colonial creatures with budlike polyps that form new, individual jellyfish-beginning the cycle again.

In other related species, adult jellyfish die immediately after reaching sexual maturity and releasing their eggs and sperm. Not so the Turritopsis. It happily reverts to its youthful polyp stage. It does this via a neat trick called transdifferentiation, during which it converts the cells of its umbrella and tentacles into a twiggy colony ready to produce baby jellies once more. Think about it: One moment, you're a sexually spent adult; the next, you're a budding youth about to enjoy life all over again.

Bacteria and some social insects, too, can keep on going, perhaps indefinitely. But these aren't individuals like Turritopsis nutriculae. Rather, theirs is an immortality on a colony-wide scale. It could be, some scientists think, that certain army ant colonies may have persisted for tens of thousands of years or more. The individual ants, workers and queens have changed over time, but their clones live on-with each colony living, hunting, reproducing and then dividing, amoeba- like, into a twin ...endlessly.

Plants also have death-defying tricks, turning bits and pieces of themselves into fresh, young copies. Or they act like Methuselah and simply live so long-4,000 years for a bristlecone pine-that from a human's perspective, they might as well be immortal. Near my home in Oregon, there's a white pine that sprouted just about the time George Washington set about liberating us from the British. The tree is nearly 300 feet tall, 28 feet in circumference, and shows no sign of dying.

And then there's the death-be-damned plant in my front bay window: a tangled, snaky epiphyllum-or more simply, an orchid cactus. In the wild, these plants grow in the crowns of tall rainforest trees. But in my home, it's a reluctant captive, its long, fleshy, swordlike leaves splaying up and out in all directions. "If you get too close," the waving green blades seem to say, "I'll poke you right in the eye."

My husband hates this plant. He has cursed it and wishes it would die. It won't-not even when I'm away and he forgets to water it. Then, it merely becomes quiescent: The blades droop a bit; the edges curl back and shrivel. But they all spring heartily back to attention with the first splash of water. And even if what's in the pot in my window did die, the plant would still live: The blades regularly break or drop off and start sprouting roots, searching for a new home. The trick works: I always give in and gather up the young plant like an injured thing, then give it some soil, some water, my care.

They are clones, of course, youthful versions of their older self, and they stand green and juicy in jars and bottles on my windowsills. Sometimes, I hand them off like prizes to my friends. Why would they want them? Because they've seen the flowers, each one a huge, voluptuous, pink concoction with long, fringed petals opening wide around a tubular, rosy throat. So gorgeous, so mesmerizing is each bloom that even my husband's heart softens at the sight. "Incredible," I once heard him murmur as he reached out to touch a silky petal.

The orchid cactus has lived with us for almost 30 years now. But it was already 80 years old or older when it entered our lives shortly after our wedding. My father, a man who loved plants, brought it to us one day. "Here," he said, handing me a single blade wrapped in newspaper. "My mother grew this plant, and she gave me a cutting a long time ago. This one comes from that same plant."

The flat, wizened blade was a family heirloom!-one that if treated kindly, would endure for our lifetimes and beyond. In fact, imagining handing off blades of our own to future descendants, I told my husband this orchid cactus had the possibility of living forever ... or at least for a very long time. "Ah, our own Immortal," he teased.

But all this raises the question: Why them and not us? What twist of fate conferred immortality on a jellyfish, of all things, or edged the bristlecone pine into the longevity record book? Or gave the orchid cactus and many other plants (including a 9,550-year-old spruce in Sweden) the ability to reproduce and defy death by cloning itself? And really, those long, endless lives seem so wasted: The organisms aren't even conscious. They have no awareness of being dead or alive.

One can pout or curse the gods-or turn to Charles Darwin. Darwin did not know about the Turritopsis since its longevity wasn't discovered until the 20th century. But like any good gardener, he would have known how to take cuttings from plants to make clones. And so he knew that life could be extended in peculiar ways. He also knew that life is not fair: Disease carried away a beloved daughter when she was only 7. Her death left him bitter, doubting that any god who would sanction such a thing could exist. Yet he didn't fret about his own aging, even as he chronicled his ailments and changed from a young man able to climb the Andes to one bent and white with age.

Darwin didn't address the issue of immortality, didn't write about the possibility of life after death or speculate about how his theory of evolution would affect the many religions that are based on this hope. Some writers have argued that he must have known what his theory meant to such beliefs: In a world driven by evolution, immortality is impossible. Many have cursed Darwin for, as one writer put it, "celebrating death over life." They are wrong.

What Darwin loved most was life itself, in all its shapes and glories. He wondered how so many beetles, birds and bats had come to grace our planet, and he found the answer, and it had nothing to do with fates or gods. The Earth was not a static place, he realized, and as it changed, as ice ages came and went, and seas rose and fell, plants and animals faced new challenges. Those that adapted left descendants. Those that did not vanished forever. Immortality was not the goal, the reason for being.
How could it be? What purpose would it serve? Where would the many fabulous species that filled the forests, seas and skies be?

If Darwin had met a Turritopsis, I think he would have marveled at its extraordinary life and lifespan. A great observer, he would have described its every detail. Surely, he would have devised some experiment for it, searching, perhaps, for the clues to transdifferentiation as other scientists are doing today. But his true quest was seeking an explanation for what generated new life, for the forces that produce Earth's "endless forms, most beautiful." In that long, as yet unending, parade of life's many species-whether extinct, alive or yet-to-come-there is a continuity and grandeur at least as great as any vision of immortality.

As for the Turritopsis, you can see the jellyfish on YouTube these days. It even has a Facebook page and a Wikipedia entry, and it seems well on the way to achieving yet another kind of immortality that is also beyond the reach of most of us: stardom.
* Illustration by Anna Hall
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As far as scientists know, there is only one animal on Earth that has achieved what some (secretly, all?) humans dream about: immortality. Unfortunately, it's probably not the kind of animal you want to be-just a soft-bodied, neuronally challenged, jellyfish-like creature called "Turritopsis nutricula."

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We don't know much about Mr. Otomatsu Wada of Unit B in Barrack 14 in Block 63 of the Gila River Relocation Center in southern Arizona beyond the fact that on May 1, 1943, eight months to the day after he arrived at the concentration camp for Japanese Americans, he went missing.

Census records and ship manifests do little more than sketch a picture of a typical member of the generation of Japanese that came to the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. We know that he was born in Japan in 1873, that he had a high school education, and that he arrived in the United States for the first time in 1901, when he was about twenty-eight and a bachelor. He never learned to speak much English. He worked as a laborer in Santa Ana, California, until early 1906, when he went back to Japan for a short time. He must have gone to get married, because by the fall of that same year he was back in the United States in the company of a wife seven years his junior. We know that upon returning as a married man, Otomatsu went into farming, as so many Japanese immigrants of his generation did. And we know that tragedy struck less than a year later, when the young Mrs. Wada passed away.

We know that by 1914, when Otomatsu Wada was around forty, he had remarried, this time to a twenty-six-year-old Japanese woman named Toshi. She quickly bore three sons: George in 1916, Gabriel in 1917, and Paul in 1919. And then tragedy struck again. Toshi Wada passed away in February of 1920, just thirty-one years old, leaving Otomatsu a widower for a second time.

We know that on December 7, 1941, Otomatsu and his two younger sons were working on a farm they had leased in Compton, California, just north of Long Beach. His oldest son had joined the U.S. Army a few months earlier and was away.

We know that the government did not arrest Otomatsu in the weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. The government did do this to hundreds of other Japanese men on a list of supposedly dangerous aliens that intelligence agencies had compiled in the years before the war. Making this list wasn't hard; all a person had to do was hold some sort of leadership role in the Japanese community, whether as an officer of a business association or as a Buddhist priest or as a Japanese language teacher or judo instructor. Later in the war, the attorney general would repudiate the list as unreliable. But however little evidence of subversiveness it took to make the list, Otomatsu Wada didn't have it; the government didn't see him as a dangerous man.

We know that in the spring of 1942, as the government uprooted every man, woman, and child of Japanese descent along the West Coast, Otomatsu and his youngest son were shipped some two hundred miles north to the Tulare Assembly Center, a temporary gathering facility not far from Sequoia National Park. They moved into makeshift barracks that ran almost the entire half-mile length and quarter-mile width of the Tulare Fairgrounds, including across the infield of a big racing oval.

We know that from there, late in August of 1942, Otomatsu and Paul were removed by train to what the government officially called the Rivers Relocation Center. Nobody actually used that name; people called the camp "Gila River" because the government had built it on reservation land owned by the Gila River Indian Community, even though the tribe didn't want it there.

The camp was south of Phoenix. It was searingly hot there. On September 1, the day Otomatsu arrived with his son, the high temperature was 103 degrees Fahrenheit.

We don't know exactly how he spent his time at Gila River, but we can make some educated guesses. Camp jobs paid between $12 and $19 a month, depending on the skill level of the work, but it's hard to imagine that an almost seventy-year-old widower who knew only farming would have jumped at the chance to work in the scorching sun, particularly when he didn't have to earn money to pay for his room and board, such as they were. Most of the elderly inmates at Gila River and the other War Relocation Authority camps really did very little with their empty days. A lifetime of hard work lay behind them, and now they had nothing to show for it, so lots of the older folks just tried to ease into this first real moment of idleness they had ever known, hunting for whatever shade they could find to sit and gossip and play cards or checkers. There were lots of elderly bachelors in camp-men who had come to the United States to work and had never married. They tended to be more solitary than their married counterparts. Maybe, as a widower, Otomatsu whiled away his time with some of them, brewing homemade sake, musing about the war, and playing the ancient game of Go with black and white stones on boards they made from leftover plywood.

We know that in the spring of 1943, life got lonelier for him. Paul Wada had the opportunity to get out of camp on what they called "seasonal leave," to pull and top sugar beets in the fields of Montana. Even though it meant leaving his father behind in camp to fend for himself, the young man headed north in early April.

Perhaps, though it seems unlikely, Otomatsu caught the Eleanor Roosevelt fever that gripped Gila River later that month when the First Lady paid a surprise visit to the camp as part of a public relations effort. Her tour was an attempt to refute charges, swirling in the national press, that the government was coddling Japanese Americans in the camps. She wowed inmates with an energetic itinerary of appearances around camp, moving unannounced from schools to recreation halls to mess halls to the camp hospital to the factory where inmates made camouflage netting for the war effort. The camp's newspaper reported that "curious and thrilled evacuee eyes followed her everywhere, and autograph hunters had a field day," but Otomatsu was preoccupied by other things. He kept telling people that he was going to leave camp to be with his son on the beet farm in Montana. But the beet fields were at least a thousand miles away, and he didn't have permission to leave or any way to get there. Nobody took him seriously.

We know that by 2:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, May 1, a week after the First Lady's visit, Otomatsu had been reported missing from his barrack. The temperature that day was 84 degrees.

We know that over the next several days, as temperatures climbed as high as 97, camp officials launched a massive manhunt for him. Upwards of a thousand prisoners searched inside the perimeter fence on Sunday. On Monday, several hundred of them were given special permission to search outside the fence, within a concentric circle with a five-mile radius, while two private airplanes buzzed the skies above. On Tuesday-a day when the camp newspaper warned camp residents about scorpion stings and rattlesnake bites and announced the distribution of salt tablets due to the heat-administrators devoted even more manpower to the search, throwing twenty-five to thirty volunteers from each of the residential blocks into the effort, so many that the camp had to shut down all but the most essential operations. Word went out to law enforcement officials across Arizona and southern California to be on the lookout for a five-foot-seven, 140-pound, white-haired and clean-shaven seventy-two-year-old man in blue jeans, work shoes, a white dress shirt with brown spots, and a gray gabardine slouch hat.

The search turned up nothing-not a clue. At that point, Otomatsu was officially listed as missing. Four months later, the camp newspaper described his disappearance as one of Gila River's "unsolved mysteries."

~

We don't know whether, in the heat of the search, any of Gila River's prisoners saw foreshadowing in a poem, by Gila River high school student Tokiko Inouye, that appeared in the camp newspaper. She titled the poem "The Desert Is My Home," and it went like this:

The desert is my home, I love its suns and sands,
I love its vastness, centuries' sleep; it challenges, commands.
At night the cold stars crystallize, opalescent, clear and free-
I exult in their ageless eyes, their silence envelopes me.

And this is now my home; this, the open plains
And endless sage beneath hot sun, the sky and sudden rain
From golden dawn to red sunset, the desert beckons, calls-

I love its freedom, wilderness, unlimited by walls.
And this will be my home, The desert paths I'll trod,
For out beneath its skies and stars, I can be alone with God.

~

We really don't know much about Otomatsu Wada.

But we do know that almost two years after his disappearance, in March of 1945, a cowboy on horseback in the desert about ten miles southwest of the camp happened across a bleached and partly clothed skeleton. It was of a small man in shredded blue jeans and the tatters of a white shirt.

In camp, where people did know Otomatsu Wada, the newspaper reported that "Gila's two-year-old mystery" had come "to an abrupt end under a lonely mesquite tree."

The war was nearing an end, and with it their desert exile. Their pre-war lives were gone, their futures nothing but uncertainty.

At least this was one mystery solved.

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We don't know much about Mr. Otomatsu Wada of Unit B in Barrack 14 in Block 63 of the Gila River Relocation Center in southern Arizona beyond the fact that on May 1, 1943, eight months to the day after he arrived at the concentration camp for Japanese Americans, he went missing.

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Neil Gaiman reads inspirational 'Make Good Art' speech at Art Matters Live

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Elie Wiesel talks about Holocaust Experience

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Elie Wiesel talks about Holocaust Experience

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Oprah and Elie Wiesel Interview at Auschwitz

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I Wrote a Book.  I WROTE A BOOK.  How did I do that?

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I Wrote a Book.  I WROTE A BOOK.  How did I do that?

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I Wrote a Book. I WROTE A BOOK. How did I do that?

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YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly users visiting the video-sharing platform for their favorite vlogs, music videos, sports highlights, and more.

It's been 15 years since YouTube's website launched to the public in May 2005.

YouTube was founded earlier that year by three early PayPal employees. Since then, it's become the most popular free video-sharing platform in the world.

Take a look at the history of YouTube, from its start as a failed video-dating website to a powerhouse platform that's launched a new generation of money-making YouTubers and influencers.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In its 15-year history, YouTube has become the undisputed king of online video.

It has over 2 billion monthly users who watch hundreds of hundreds of millions of hours of content every single day. But many people don't know how YouTube got its start.

The company rose like a rocket ship after its founding in 2005, and was bought by Google 18 months later. Under Google, YouTube went from being a repository of amateur video to a powerhouse of original content, not to mention a launching pad for its own new brand of superstar, like PewDiePie and the Smosh Brothers.

Here is how YouTube got its explosive start, and maintained that momentum to become the biggest force in online video.

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YouTube is 15 years old. Here's a timeline of how YouTube was founded, its rise to video behemoth, and its biggest controversies along way

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YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly users visiting the video-sharing platform for their favorite vlogs, music videos, sports highlights, and more. It's been 15 years since YouTube's website launched to the public in May 2005. YouTube was founded earlier that year by three early PayPal employees.

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A brief history of video games (Part I) - Safwat Saleem

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Growing Up in the First Great Depression

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Stephen King - How to write a short story

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Stephen King - How to write a short story

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Stephen King on the Craft of Short Story Writing

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History of YouTube: This is how it all began...

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How a Dog Became Mayor of a California Town

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How a Dog Became Mayor of a California Town

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Newsela | How a dog became mayor of a California town

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Performance Capture Technology - "Call of Duty"

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Performance Capture Technology - "Call of Duty"

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Official Call of Duty®: Advanced Warfare - "Animation & Art Direction" Behind the Scenes Video

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George Takei - Living in a Japanese Internment Camp

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George Takei - Living in a Japanese Internment Camp

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George Takei Disses William Shatner & Leonard Nimoy

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American Internment & Relocation Centres

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George Takei on the Japanese internment camps during WWII - EMMYTVLEGENDS.ORG

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George R.R. Martin - Writing complex characters

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George R.R. Martin - Writing complex characters

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George RR Martin on Writing Complex Characters

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Minecraft is a sandbox construction video game developed by Mojang Studios where players interact with a fully modifiable three-dimensional environment made of blocks and entities. Its diverse gameplay lets players choose the way they play, allowing for countless possibilities.
There are three actively maintained editions of Minecraft: Java Edition, Bedrock Edition, and Education Edition.

Minecraft Dungeons is an action-adventure role-playing video game where up to four players can travel through procedurally generated levels, fight monsters, and face off against the main antagonist of the story, the Arch-Illager.

Minecraft Dungeons Arcade is arcade variant of Minecraft Dungeons, which requires four players to play through levels and defeat large groups of mobs. Players can get equipment, skins, and pets by scanning collectible cards.

Minecraft: Story Mode was an episodic point-and-click narrative-driven graphic adventure video game based on Minecraft, made by Telltale Games where players had to complete chapters in order to progress, and their choices and actions had effects on the story.

Minecraft: Story Mode - Season Two was the sequel to Minecraft: Story Mode and had a new story continuing the adventures of the original game, with elements from newer versions of Minecraft.

Minecraft Earth was a free-to-play augmented reality spin-off mobile game where players travel to real-life locations to build structures and collect resources. It featured many unique gameplay aspects and interactions similar to the main game. The game became discontinued on June 30, 2021.

Minecraft

Achievements/Advancements

Various challenges and goals that the player can complete.

Blocks

Detailed information on the various blocks that make up the world.

Items

Detailed information on the various items that the player can collect and use.

Biomes

Different regions in a world with varying geographical features.

Enchanting

Tools and weapons can be enchanted to improve the item's abilities.

Effects

Information about various effects that can be applied to mobs.

Mobs

Information about the various friendly and non-friendly creatures found in-game.

Resource packs

A user-created system that alters the look and feel of the game.

Add-ons

Various user-created modifications that can alter gameplay.

Tutorials

Different user-created guides on various aspects of gameplay.
Minecraft Dungeons

Achievements

Various challenges and goals that the player can complete.

Items

Detailed information on the various items that the player can collect and use.

Locations

Information about locations in general.

Enchanting

Tools and weapons can be enchanted to improve the item's abilities

Status effects

Information about various effects that can be applied to mobs.

Mobs

Information about the various friendly and non-friendly creatures found in-game.

Tutorials

Different user-created guides on various aspects of gameplay.

Latest news

December 7, 2021

Minecraft: The Haven Trials released.

October 16, 2021

Mojang Studios announces seasonal adventures for Minecraft Dungeons, slated to begin in late 2021.

October 16, 2021

Mojang Studios announces that the Java and Bedrock editions of Minecraft will be on Xbox Game Pass for PC, beginning November 2nd.

October 16, 2021

Minecraft Live 2021 takes place.

September 28, 2021

Minecraft: Mob Squad released.

September 22, 2021

Minecraft Dungeons released on Steam for Windows.

Recent updates

January 12, 2022

Minecraft Dungeons 1.12.2.0 released for consoles.

December 17, 2021

Minecraft Dungeons 1.12.1.0 released for PC.

December 14, 2021

Minecraft Dungeons 1.12.0.0 released.

December 10, 2021

Java Edition 1.18.1 released.

December 9, 2021

Bedrock Edition 1.18.2 released.

December 2-6, 2021

Bedrock Edition 1.18.1 released for all devices except Nintendo Switch.

Servers

Documentation on starting and maintaining a server in Java Edition.

Bedrock Dedicated Servers

Documentation on starting and maintaining a server in Bedrock Edition.

Featured servers

Documentation and information about Bedrock Edition featured servers, along with a list of them.

Minecraft Realms

Information about paid Mojang Studios-hosted servers in Java Edition, known as Realms.

Minecraft Realms Plus

Information about paid Mojang Studios-hosted servers in Bedrock Edition, known as Realms Plus.

Official issue tracker

Submit and track bug reports and fixes to Minecraft.

Official feedback website

Submit feedback or suggest changes to Minecraft.

Development resources

Documentation and information to develop applications to work with Minecraft.

Programs and editors

A list containing several third-party programs that are designed to work with Minecraft.

Changes for the main page can be proposed here.

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Minecraft is a sandbox construction video game developed by Mojang Studios where players interact with a fully modifiable three-dimensional environment made of blocks and entities. Its diverse gameplay lets players choose the way they play, allowing for countless possibilities.There are three actively maintained editions of Minecraft: Java Edition , Bedrock Edition , and Education Edition .

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All-volunteer South Bend Bike Garage lets you fix, buy or earn a bike

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All-volunteer South Bend Bike Garage lets you fix, buy or earn a bike

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Newsela | All-volunteer South Bend Bike Garage lets you fix, buy or earn a bike

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Natalie Nourigat, "I moved to Los Angeles to work in animation."

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Natalie Nourigat, "I moved to Los Angeles to work in animation."

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4 Ways Animation Artists Can Mentally Prepare For The Move To Los Angeles: With Natalie Nourigat

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AKRON, Ohio (WOIO) - 19 News Anchor Neeha Curtis introduced us to a homeless high school senior trying to graduate while living in the woods.

The story shocked hundreds of people when they saw the image of Neeha standing outside of a brown tent in the woods, talking to a teenager in there trying to do her school work.

In a week, the outpouring of support flooded the newsroom.

She did not want to reveal her face and name, but she said she's just one of many homeless students without a safe place.

She said, "most of them don't end up in the camps or in the woods. They live in the parking lot in their car or couch surf from one friend's house to another. Very, very rarely do they end in my situation."

"I never thought that I would be in the predicament that I am in, I just had a graduate It was just something I do for myself," she said.

She said when she was just 3 years old she went into foster care, then was adopted at 5, given back to her biological parents at 15, and then thrown back into the system again at 15.

Through all of the turmoil, she was still trying to do her school work.

"I would take my Chromebook to the school provided up there and go on their Wi-Fi or go to the hospital in the ER room because they knew me," she explained.

She was a high schooler living in a different world than her classmates.

She described her struggles with hunger and food- trying to find what she called scraps, "basically pick the hills back in the woods for whatever pieces of bread the raccoons or cats sit and get to, and have them to water bottles and whatnot and drink those [or] just pass out from dehydration."

Feeling invisible most of the time was nothing to her, except now with hundreds of people reaching out to support her overnight.

She also said there's hope and all of it happening so quickly.

She explained that the outpouring of love helps her when she's sad realizing there are people out there who care and are trying to make a difference to help people like her.

Click on the link below to take you inside her life, and learn what happens when a child falls through the cracks.

Copyright 2020 WOIO. All rights reserved.

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Akron teen speaks out about what life is like for homeless students: Part 1

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AKRON, Ohio (WOIO) - 19 News Anchor Neeha Curtis introduced us to a homeless high school senior trying to graduate while living in the woods. The story shocked hundreds of people when they saw the image of Neeha standing outside of a brown tent in the woods, talking to a teenager in there trying to do her school work.

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J.K. Rowling's Struggle With Writer's Block

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Building the Perfect Squirrel Proof Bird Feeder

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Building the Perfect Squirrel Proof Bird Feeder

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Mark Rober Video

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Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0- Ninja Warrior Course

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Primary Sources: Benjamin Franklin lists 13 virtues, tries to live by them

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Primary Sources: Benjamin Franklin lists 13 virtues, tries to live by them

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Newsela | Primary Sources: Benjamin Franklin lists 13 virtues, tries to live by them

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Benjamin Franklin worked to live according to 13 virtues including frugality, order and humility. He wrote later that he never achieved perfection, but the effort made him a better, happier person.

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How does Disney's Pixar make human-like characters?

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How does Disney's Pixar make human-like characters?

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How Pixar Animates Human Characters | Movies Insider

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National Center on Accessible Educational Materials

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Josh Killacky, the power of Hip Hop dance

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Josh Killacky, the power of Hip Hop dance

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8x8 - Josh Killacky Interview | Season 1

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J.K. Rowling - From Poverty to Billionaire

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J.K. Rowling - From Poverty to Billionaire

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POOR TO BILLIONAIRE - JK Rowling Story | Motivational Speech

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Deeply Rooted Dance Company, the power of art and community

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Deeply Rooted Dance Company, the power of art and community

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Deeply Rooted Dance Theater Artistic Directors Interview

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A message from Deeply Rooted's Artistic Directors - Kevin Iega Jeff and Gary Abbott invite you to "join the movement!"

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Review for acceptable to use with your classes!

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Thrift Store Make-over

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The rise of Luka Doncic happened faster than anyone predicted

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The rise of Luka Doncic happened faster than anyone predicted

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7:07 AM ET

Tim MacMahonESPN Staff Writer

Close

Joined ESPNDallas.com in September 2009

Covers the Dallas Cowboys and Dallas Mavericks

Appears regularly on ESPN Dallas 103.3 FM

THE BALL BOY, too young to tie his sneakers, made quite the impression on Goran Dragic.

The kid was the son of a veteran player on Geoplin Slovan, an Adriatic League first-division club where Dragic began his professional career. The boy, 5 years old when he first met Dragic, always had a basketball in his hands and put up shots any time a basket was open. Occasionally, he entertained the crowd with halftime dribbling exhibitions at midcourt.

"It's really hard to predict how the future would go," Dragic says more than a decade-and-a-half later. "But the one thing I could say is as a young kid, he already had a passion for basketball."

Luka Doncic soon grew out of ball-boy responsibilities and halftime entertainment.

It didn't surprise Dragic when he later heard that EuroLeague powerhouse Real Madrid recruited Doncic to join its academy at the age of 13. He was dominating the junior levels and making headlines in their native Slovenia.

"Everybody started talking about him," Dragic says. "At that age, we figured out that he was probably something special."

Dragic had no doubt after sharing the backcourt with Doncic during the 2017 EuroBasket tournament, where they led Slovenia to the nation's first title. Dragic earned the tournament MVP, but he was certain that Doncic was destined for stardom after the then-18-year-old stood out against NBA players, displaying a deep skill set and an uncanny combination of competitive fire and calm under pressure.

"He's going to be the best player in Europe in a couple of years, trust me on that. In the NBA, too," Dragic declared after the championship game.

"Mark my words, he's going to be one of the best in the whole world."

Dragic has been proved right. After all, Doncic became the youngest MVP in EuroLeague history after leading Real Madrid to Liga ACB and EuroLeague titles the next season. His honors after two seasons with the Dallas Mavericks include Rookie of the Year and first-team All-NBA selections, becoming the first player to accomplish that in his second season since Hall of Fame inductee Tim Duncan. At 21, Doncic entered his third NBA season as the odds-on MVP favorite.

Dragic's expectations are far from the only ones that Doncic has wildly exceeded. Doncic somehow managed to be both the most hyped international prospect in basketball history and drastically underestimated as he arrived in the sport's premier stage.

"I thought he was going to need some more time to develop and to figure out the NBA style and NBA game," Dragic says. "I knew that in four or five years, he would be one of the best players in the league. But, yeah, he demonstrated that I was wrong about that.

"It happened a lot faster."

WHEN JOSH RICHARDSON returned to Miami after training on the West Coast, he couldn't wait to talk about one of his workout partners.

"Yo, I just met this kid," Richardson recalls telling his friends. "He's going to be the first pick in the draft."

It was the summer of 2016 and Richardson, who was entering his rookie season with the Miami Heat, was training at P3's facility in Santa Barbara, California, working out under the watchful eyes of biomechanical experts in the morning and playing in world-class pickup runs in the afternoon.

In Spain, the buzz around Doncic was similar to the hype generated by Zion Williamson at Duke, according to Salah Mejri, who played for Real Madrid then and the Mavs when Doncic arrived in the NBA.

"When he played guys his age, he was killing them!" Mejri says. "We always checked his numbers."

But Richardson had never heard of the young Slovenian who was in the same weight room one morning. Doncic was fresh off his first full season with Real Madrid's top team and his agent, Bill Duffy, who also represents Richardson, suggested that both players train at the facility.

"No way," Richardson recalls thinking when someone told him that the broad-shouldered, 6-foot-6 guy was a 16-year-old kid. After watching Doncic display a smooth shooting stroke, precise footwork and rare handle for a player his size, Richardson was impressed.

Doncic wowed Richardson during pickup ball, hitting some step-back jumpers, flicking some pretty passes and setting the pace in a game that included established pros.

"He's got it. He's got it," Richardson recalls thinking to himself.

"I still think he should have been [the first pick]," adds Richardson, who is now Doncic's backcourt partner after a trade in the offseason.

"I knew that in four or five years, he would be one of the best players in the league. But, yeah, he demonstrated that I was wrong about that. It happened a lot faster." Heat guard Goran Dragic

Doncic went third overall in the 2018 NBA draft, when the Mavs made a deal with the Atlanta Hawks to move up two spots. Dallas always considered Doncic the best prospect in the class -- "far and away," president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson says -- and the team's Europe-based scouts had been closely tracking Doncic since he joined Real Madrid's junior program.

Nelson first scouted him in person during Doncic's third professional game as a 15-year-old. He would time trips to Europe to see Real Madrid play lower-level teams, understanding that Doncic wouldn't play much against elite rivals at that age.

"Every time I would go see him, it was just another validation of how unique and special he is," says Nelson, who has long had an affinity for European prospects, dating to when he facilitated the arrival of Sarunas Marciulionis from Lithuania in 1989 to play for the Golden State Warriors team coached by his dad, Don.

Nelson was the first member of the Mavs' organization to identify a German wunderkind named Dirk Nowitzki as a lottery target and was convinced long before Doncic declared for the draft that the Slovenian teen could be a worthy successor.

"He was really hyping the kid up, which Donnie really never does," says Mike Procopio, the Mavs' former director of player development.

"Donnie Nelson was spot on this the whole time," Duffy says.

"I had this feeling and thought that [Doncic] could play point guard, that he was like a cross between Magic and Bird. That's the first thing I saw. He's a triple-double machine. I saw that, and then Donnie saw that. I just remember him saying, 'He's a point guard. He's like Magic.'

"You're damn right he is."

The NBA is back! Catch all the 2020-21 season action on ESPN, ABC and the ESPN App.

Friday, Jan. 29
* Bucks at Pelicans, 7:30 p.m. on ESPN
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Nelson unsuccessfully lobbied for Dallas to draft Greece's Giannis Antetokounmpo in 2014, but he completely sold owner Mark Cuban in 2018. Doncic was the target as the Mavs tanked during the 2017-18 season. Commissioner Adam Silver fined Cuban $600,000 for "public statements detrimental to the NBA" after the billionaire blurted out on a podcast midway through the season that he told the team's veterans that "losing is our best option."

When Dallas, which had the third-best odds to win the lottery after a 24-58 season, ended up with the No. 5 pick, Nelson was crushed. "I was honestly devastated," Nelson says.

Doncic was never considered the consensus best player in a draft that saw Deandre Ayton go No. 1 to the Phoenix Suns and Marvin Bagley III go No. 2 to the Sacramento Kings. Some questioned whether Doncic had "maxed out," as Duffy put it, wondering if a player who was so polished could improve.

"I was glad every time he lost a foot race or didn't look very athletic, to be honest with you," Nelson says, cracking up with laughter. "I was cheering for him to screw up in the European championships [days before the draft].

"I just wanted him to drop!"

PLENTY OF PEOPLE around the NBA doubted whether Doncic, who had grown to a shade taller than 6-foot-7 and more than 230 pounds, could play point guard in the NBA. One talent evaluator for a team picking a little later in that lottery compared him to Hedo Turkoglu, a skilled forward with playmaking ability -- a good player but far from a superstar.

Mavs coach Rick Carlisle admits that even he considered Doncic's NBA position to be "unclear" when he studied his European film. He knew Doncic had the savvy and vision to be a primary ball handler, but he wasn't sure a player that size could play point guard against the world's premier athletes.

"There's just a perception that players that are big and strong just aren't going to be able to do it, because how could they possibly be quick enough," Carlisle says. "But one of the things that you find out about Luka when you see him day to day is that he's not only strong, but he's quick and powerful and fast -- and deceptively so in all those areas."

It took about a day or two of watching Doncic play pickup ball at the Mavs' practice facility in the fall before his rookie season for Carlisle to be convinced.

"He was playing the point and he was seeing everything, he was making amazing passes look so simple," Carlisle says. "He was impacting every part of the game. He was getting a lot of rebounds. He was finding people on time, on target. It was clear that he could play point guard, let's put it that way."

There was one problem: That position was already manned by Dennis Smith Jr., the previous year's lottery pick and an All-Rookie selection the Mavs had proclaimed to be a foundation piece. Doncic began his NBA career officially listed as a forward and sharing facilitating duties with Smith, although Smith got a larger share of playmaking assignments because he struggled playing off the ball.

"I was glad every time he lost a foot race or didn't look very athletic, to be honest with you. I was cheering for him to screw up in the European championships. I just wanted him to drop!" Mavericks president Donnie Nelson

Doncic made his first start at point guard six weeks into the season, when Smith missed a game due to injury, and recorded 15 points and eight assists in a home win over the Boston Celtics. Doncic then averaged 19.9 points, 6.9 rebounds and 6.8 assists during an 11-game stretch in December, when an injury sidelined Smith for all but one outing.

The Mavs soon came to the conclusion that they needed to move on from Smith to maximize Doncic's potential, which Nelson acknowledged he anticipated even before Doncic's arrival. Smith ended up being part of the package Dallas sent to the New York Knicks in the Kristaps Porzingis trade at the end of January 2019.

"In the first year, we were trying to figure things out," Nelson says. "How quickly do we put [Doncic] in that position? Things really opened up once we made that New York trade. ...

"He was born to be a quarterback."

DONCIC RAN AWAY with 2019 Rookie of the Year honors but made such a leap in his second season that he was a Most Improved Player finalist, averaging 28.8 points, 9.4 rebounds and 8.8 assists per game. The only players to stuff box scores with statistics that matched or exceeded Doncic's in those categories over the course of a season: Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson (four times) and Russell Westbrook during his MVP season in 2016-17.

Doncic was more productive during the playoffs (31.0 points, 9.8 rebounds, 8.7 assists), when the Mavs pushed the Clippers to six games despite losing Porzingis to a knee injury midway through the series.

"Once that ball was given to him, you could tell that it sort of shifted -- everything ran through him," says Procopio, who left the Mavs after Doncic's rookie year. "You could really tell that he could be an MVP-type player."

That is the standard now for Doncic, who turns 22 on Feb. 28. He'd be the youngest MVP winner in NBA history if he earns the honor this season.

"It's good and bad," said Doncic, whose conditioning was heavily scrutinized in the early weeks of the season after he came back from the short offseason carrying a few extra pounds. "A lot of people expect a lot from me. You have a lot of pressure, but on the other hand, people know I can do it."

Those high expectations also create a sense of urgency not typical for a team building around such a young superstar.

Dallas expedited its rebuilding process during Doncic's rookie season. The biggest step was acquiring a potential co-star in Porzingis. The Mavs also traded Harrison Barnes, the team's leading scorer the previous season, before that year's deadline in a move motivated by creating salary-cap flexibility. Dallas had planned to swing for another superstar next summer, a strategy that hit a roadblock when players scheduled to become free agents agreed to extensions with their current teams.

The Mavs have remained aggressive in pursuing complementary pieces around Doncic, such as the offseason trade of premier shooter Seth Curry for a stopper in Richardson, a move made because Dallas felt upgrading its defense was the only way to contend.

Despite the Mavs' rocky 8-10 start, the hype around Doncic has only gained momentum.

Any lingering doubts since his arrival as the most accomplished European teen in NBA history have been replaced by a sense of anticipation only a handful of players can command. And it happened much faster than many predicted.

"At any time," Carlisle says, "you can see something you've never seen before.

"I played with Bird. For three years straight, I watched, and that was the feeling when you watched him every single night. Magic Johnson was the same kind of player. Really, LeBron James is the same kind of player, too. These guys can do anything on a basketball court."

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'He was born to be a quarterback': How Luka surpassed all expectations

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7:07 AM ET Tim MacMahonESPN Staff Writer Close Joined ESPNDallas.com in September 2009 Covers the Dallas Cowboys and Dallas Mavericks Appears regularly on ESPN Dallas 103.3 FM THE BALL BOY, too young to tie his sneakers, made quite the impression on Goran Dragic.

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Sports Poetry goes hand-in-hand with sports. Read from our selection below.

Best Sports Poetry

Check out these famous sports poems. Some of these lyrics have earned their way into the hearts of many a sports' fan.

Casey at the Bat

by Ernest Lawrence Thayer
The Sporting News (January 20, 1906)

"Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and the echo answered fraud;
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.

They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again.

Oh! somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.
###

Baseball's Sad Lexicon

also known as "Tinker to Evers to Chance"

by Franklin Pierce Adam (1910)

###

Written from the point of view of a New York Giants fan seeing the talented Chicago Cubs infield of shortstop Joe Tinker,
second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance complete a double play.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

by Jack Norworth (1908)

###

Centerfield

by John Fogerty (1985)

Oh, put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Look at me, I can be Centerfield.

Oh, put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Look at me, I can be Centerfield.

Yeah! I got it, I got it!

Oh, put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Look at me, I can be Centerfield.

Oh, put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Look at me, I can be Centerfield.

Yeah!

Standing Alone

Author Unknown

Sports Poems

Here are some more classic poems about sport.

Money

by Grantland Rice

Money to the left of them and money to the right,

Money everywhere they turn from morning to the night,

Only two things count at all from mountain to the sea,

Part of it's a percentage, and the rest is a guarantee.

- See more Grantland Rice quotes.

Game Called

by Grantland Rice

###

BOXING POEM

by Muhammad Ali

I Am The Greatest

by Muhammed Ali

###

by Muhammad Ali

Clay swings with his left, Clay swings with his right,
Look at young Cassius carry the fight.
Liston keeps backing, but there's not enough room,
It's a matter of time till Clay lowers the boom.
Liston is still rising, now Clay lands with a right,
What a beautiful swing, and the punch raises the Bear clean out of the ring.
Liston is still rising and the ref wears a frown,
For he can't start counting till Sonny goes down.
Now Liston is disappearing from view,
The crowd is going frantic,
But radar stations have picked him up,
Somewhere over the Atlantic.
Who would have thought when they came to the fight?
That they'd witness the launching of a human satellite.
Yes the crowd did not dream, when they put up the money,
That they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny.

###

If you have any other suggestions for sports poems of note, please contact us. Thanks.

Extra Innings

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Instagram Captions for Baseball Football Jokes Sports Cliches The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible by John Geiger Football Books Quotes

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Sports Poetry: Best Poems from Baseball, Boxing and Football

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Sports Poetry goes hand-in-hand with sports. Read from our selection below. Check out these famous sports poems. Some of these lyrics have earned their way into the hearts of many a sports' fan. by Ernest Lawrence ThayerThe Sporting News (January 20, 1906) "Fraud!"

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Julia is killing it in the programming world. Meet its co-creator from India

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How I Became a Software Engineer Without a Computer Science Degree

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How I Became a Software Engineer Without a Computer Science Degree

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How I Became a Software Engineer Without a Computer Science Degree

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Neil deGrasse Tyson warns we should not mix political agendas and the climate crisis

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Neil deGrasse Tyson warns we should not mix political agendas and the climate crisis

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Neil deGrasse Tyson scolds cherry picking climate science