It wasn’t all bad
Bill Collins, who recently retired from the Des Moines Fire Department after a decades-long career, collects T-shirts from local stations when he takes trips with his family. Recognizing that he might not make it to all 50 states, Collins’ daughter, Allison Marois, put out a call for firefighters to submit shirts to be included in a quilt she’s making to celebrate her dad’s birthday. She received more than 100, from as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan. “I got very emotional,” Marois said. “[People are] helping someone they don’t even know.”
A British teenager recently unearthed a safe stuffed with cash while using a magnet to trawl the floor of a Lincolnshire river with his father. But instead of keeping the $2,500 in Australian dollars—about $1,800 U.S.—he found inside, George Tindale used expired bank cards to track down the safe’s original owner. Tindale learned that the safe had been stolen from a man named Rob Everett 22 years before. “I was just amazed that they’d been able to track me down,” Everett said. “There are some really nice and good people in this world.” Everett gave Tindale a small reward for his troubles and offered him a job at his wealth management company once Tindale gets a little older.
In 1984, Tracey Meares was set to become the first Black valedictorian of her Illinois high school. But days before graduation, she learned that the school was demoting her to “top student,” a title she was forced to share with a white peer. Thirty-eight years later, Meares—now a legal scholar at Yale University—was finally honored for her achievement during the screening of a documentary chronicling the controversy. “A lot of the emotions I have about this whole incident are emotions I had when I was 17,” Meares said. “It’s incredibly gratifying, but it’s also a lot to process.”