It wasn’t all bad
■■Three-year-oldThomas Boffey saved his unconscious mother by dialing police—a skill the British boy learned from aYouTube cartoon. After his mom, 33-year-old Kayleigh Boffey, fell down the stairs and hit her head,Thomas remembered what he’d learned from Robocar Poli, a kids’ show featuring a police car, an ambulance, and a fire engine: In an emergency, call 999, the U.K. equivalent of 911. Kayleigh suffered knee, ankle, shoulder, and hip injuries but is now home recovering withThomas. “He’s like a mini superhero,” she said.
■■Megan Ragucci, 10, started losing her hair to alopecia universalis, an autoimmune condition with no known cure, when she was in first grade. People often stared; many assumed she had cancer. “I’m bald, not sick, so it really bothers me when people treat me like there is something wrong with me,” said Megan, a fifth-grader. Megan and her parents regularly visited Sam Aggarwal’s bagel shop in Wyckoff, N.J., and Aggarwal could tell she needed a pickme-up. So, to lift Megan’s spirits, he decided to shave his head to resemble Megan’s—and invited her along to watch. “I couldn’t stop looking at Megan’s smile,” Aggarwal said. “I had never seen her so happy.”
■■In the 17th century, British authorities barred colonists from minting money, but New Englanders defied the bans to strike a small number of coins. One was recently uncovered by Wentworth Beaumont, a descendant of 17th-century New England settler William Wentworth. Beaumont said he found the coin, a very simple design with an “NE” for “New England,” in a candy tin at the family’s English estate. Wentworth took the coin to a specialist, who was stunned by the New England shilling, one of only 40 examples of the coins minted by Massachusetts’ treasurer John
Hull in 1652. Last week, the lucky find sold at auction for $351,912.