Page 277 – Guideposts Articles

Guideposts Classics: Karl Malden on Finding Peace

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Karl Malden

In a recent episode of The Streets of San Francisco we did some filming in a foundry where they were melting iron.

Before I knew it I was asking the men there questions like, “How’s the salt? What kind of sand do you use? What about corze?” until one of the guys stopped me, saying, “Hey, how do you know stuff like that?”

“Listen,” I said, “where I come from you had to know those things.” And for just a brief moment I thought how amazing it was that I was an actor and not a steelworker, especially since my acting career, once launched, had nearly destroyed me when I had got too caught up in it.

I grew up with no particular ambition to be anything except maybe a pro ballplayer. I was born in Chicago, but my father had gone there from Serbia and my mother from Bohemia. I spoke Serbo-Croatian—still do—until I learned English in kindergarten.

We lived in a lower middle-class neighborhood of Gary, Indiana, where most of our “culture” centered around the picnics, song groups and foreign-language theatricals of the Serbian Orthodox church.

In school I learned to be an expert cabinetmaker. Back then, becoming an actor never entered my mind.

In my senior year at Emerson High I won an athletic scholarship to Arkansas State Teachers College, but I quit during freshman year when I got clobbered in football and ran out of money at the same time.

After that, I went where my friends went—into the steel mills. For two years I sweated it out as a cinder snapper on U.S. Steel’s No. 2 open hearth, the roughest job on the floor, cracking the brick to let the liquid iron flow through. I hated it.

It wasn’t until I happened onto the job of carpenter and man-of-all-backstage work at the Goodman Theatre school in Chicago that I began to enjoy working again. At that moment everything in my life changed. I got ambition. Too much ambition.

I was cast in one of the Goodman’s plays and from that time on I was hooked. Acting, an unlikely profession for me, brought out strong, challenging insights and feelings that I never knew I had.

Suddenly that’s all I wanted to be, an actor, yet I was scared to death that the odds were against me, that I had too far to climb.

So I pushed. I pushed hard. To help pay the tuition at Goodman I took on outside jobs. I met my wife, Mona, at Goodman and we were married in 1938 before setting out for Broadway.

I had some luck on the New York stage, but I always seemed to want more until, suddenly, in a hospital bed in Denver, Colorado, everything came to a sharp halt.

By then I was also a corporal in the Army Air Corps and as an actor I was a member of the cast of Winged Victory, the huge soldier-show that traveled across the nation raising money for World War II relief. While playing in Denver, I got sick and the company left without me.

For six months I languished in Denver’s Fitzsimmons General Hospital while the doctors there tried to figure out why my health had taken a nosedive. At first they suspected TB, but that diagnosis proved false, and so while they made their tests, I grumbled and cursed my luck.

The only bright spot in those hospital days was Mona. More than anyone, she understood my drive to get ahead. She herself had wanted to be an actress, but after our marriage she gave that up. “One actor in the family is enough,” she said, and from then on all her energies went into helping me.

So there she was, stuck in Denver, wrapping packages in a department store so she could be near me.

One day when I was feeling especially depressed, I told Mona that I felt like an express train that had been derailed.

“Maybe we’re not derailed at all,” she said, throwing in her lot with mine as usual. “Maybe we’ve just made an unscheduled stop in a very pleasant place that we would never have seen if we’d been barreling through.

“Okay, so we’re here. Why don’t we get off the train for a while, stretch our legs a bit and see what this town has to offer us?”

Later I lay awake, thinking. Was it possible to look at my derailment in any other kind of light but bad? Could I have been rushing too fast, pushing too hard?

On Mona’s next visit, we talked in a new and different vein for us. I recalled the ultimatum I’d given myself in New York—to make it big in five years or go back to Gary. “Suppose I don’t make a big splash?” I said to Mona. “Suppose I just get enough theater work to keep food on the table?”

“That’s fine by me,” Mona said, “so long as you stay in the theater the way we planned. If you don’t become a star, so what? We’ll still be together, you’ll be doing what you enjoy doing—or should be enjoying, if you ever learn to relax and savor it.”

So I began to take it easier and that really was the turning point in my life. Once my mind stopped fighting the frustration, once I said to myself that if honest effort wasn’t enough then to heck with it, everything changed.

It may have been mere coincidence that as my tenseness began to go, the abcess on my lung was discovered, or that the abcess came to a head and broke only days before a scheduled operation.

It may have been coincidence that within the month after I was processed out of the army, I got a solid part on Broadway, and then another good part after that in a career that went steadily up.

But I didn’t think so, and I remember going around with the jubilant feeling that I had discovered some sort of natural law about pushing too hard.

When I finally got back to New York with its busy, often frantic, life, I hated the pace and the push and the noise just as much as I had before. This time, though, I did something about it. Whenever I started to get tense or angry or troubled, I’d carve out some time in the day to be alone.

Gradually I took up the habit of slipping down to 26th Street, to the familiarity of the Serbian Orthodox cathedral. There, in the confusion of the garment district, I found that just 15 minutes of sitting in silence could restore equanimity and a sense of balance.

Even small problems seemed more manageable after a period of calm withdrawal, and I soon realized that the problems didn’t change while I was there—I did. And that’s what had happened, on a larger scale, in Denver.

When in time we moved to Los Angeles and while my two daughters were growing up, I’d drive them to school and on the way home I often dropped into whatever house of worship caught my attention.

Today, now that I spend a big part of each year filming our show all over the streets of San Francisco, I often find myself going into churches I’ve never seen before.

I’m aware that one can find quiet in the most unlikely places. Yet to me the quiet of a church is special. I may sit there for 15 or 20 minutes and not even pray—I’m not sure what I do. But while I sit musing about the colors of the stained glass, waiting for the inner silence to come, my awe is real.

I don’t have to reach out to touch the infinite; I am part of it. I may think I am alone, but of course I’m not. There, in God’s house, when I am still, I know that He is there, to refresh and recharge me.

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Guideposts Classics: John Havlicek on the Importance of Teamwork

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by John Havlicek

At Bridgeport High School in Ohio I was quarterback, the leading offensive player, on the football team. In baseball I was the leading hitter. In basketball, the leading scorer. To say that I didn’t glory in the spotlight, appreciate the acclaim and savor the headlines would be false. We all like to take bows.

But when I went to Ohio State on a basketball scholarship, I discovered that everyone on the squad had been a standout in his part of the country. I clearly remember one day early in the season, when I was still feeling my way around, the coach gathered us around him during a break.

“Which player makes the most points, grabs the most rebounds or shoots the best percentage, matters little compared to which team scores the most points,” he told us. “Poor teams often have one or two players who stand out; good teams have five who work together. It is amazing what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit.”

Suddenly, sitting there in that circle of perspiring athletes, I came to a startling realization. To win a starting job on the team, I had figured I would have to impress with my shooting ability, but the team was already loaded with shooters. What it needed was someone to concentrate on defense. I decided then and there to take that role, and the decision was to make all the difference from then on.

Last basketball season, 16 years later, I saw the same principle work to perfection once again in the seventh and deciding game of the National Basketball Association playoffs between the Milwaukee Bucks and my team, the Boston Celtics.

Before the game, coach Tom Heinsohn called us together in the locker room. There was some nervous conversation, the shuffle of sneakers, the squeak of a wooden bench, then quiet except for the sound of Tom’s chalk on the blackboard. He was diagraming a new strategy he wanted us to use against the Bucks. Although I had led the scoring for Boston in the first six games, which we had split 3-3, our coaches had noticed that Milwaukee was concentrating more and more on me.

“What I want you to do is play decoy, John,” the coach said. Instead of playing a strong scoring role, I was being asked to draw the defense to me, away from the basket, freeing someone else to score. It sounded like a good idea—and it was. By half time we had built a 13-point lead—the score was 53-40. My teammates Jo Jo White, Don Chaney, Paul Silas and Dave Cowens were more than carrying our scoring load.

But Milwaukee made some adjustments, and in the second half they came back with a rush. Soon our lead was down to five points and I began to wonder if it was time for me to begin shooting.

But we stuck to our pregame plan. I contributed a few points, but mainly I continued to play the decoy role. Then, near the end of the game, in a desperate attempt to close the gap, Milwaukee turned its attention away from me and gave me a wide-open opportunity. Driving up the middle of the court, I scored a basket and got a foul shot to boot. It was a key three-point play because it put the game safely out of Milwaukee’s reach and minutes later the championship was ours.

I hear a great deal today about people doing their own thing and I believe in that. Individuality is great. But sometimes we all need to subordinate ourselves for the good of the group.

Teamwork was taken for granted by the townspeople of the small eastern Ohio village of Lansing where I grew up. Just across the river from Wheeling, West Virginia, Lansing is in steel and coal-mining country, where people work hard to make a living. But hard work has its rewards and this rugged existence seemed to bind the people together. They cared about one another and were always ready to help. Teamwork was part of survival. No one asked for any credit for what he or she did; they just did it.

If the mines and mills closed and men were out of work, people like my mother and dad did their part.

Together they ran Havlicek’s General Store for many years, dispensing everything from groceries to animal feed, ladders, boots and fertilizer. When customers lost their jobs or couldn’t work, my folks extended credit to them, sometimes way beyond the point of business prudence. And if those families got too far behind, where it might be impossible for them to catch up, dad and mom would devise ways to help them out of the hole.

They would allow the customer to do odd jobs—such as filling stock, sweeping floors, loading trucks and delivering groceries—to relieve the pains of a growing grocery bill.

For the most part, I suppose we were looked upon as people of some means in our community; but the money must have all been on the store’s books, because my brother, sister and I weren’t ever spoiled with luxuries. We had plenty to eat, but no frills. Though no one drew us any pictures, everyone seemed to know that life was a game which required plenty of cooperation and teamwork.

Someone once suggested that I must have been born with a basketball in my hand, but I didn’t own a basketball until I was 14 and I never had my own bike. Being bikeless, however, may have had its rewards. I ran everywhere, which built up my legs. That helped in sports, which I was involved in year-round.

So much has happened to me since those days. Basketball at Ohio State is among the highlights. When I was a sophomore we won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship, and we went to the finals the following two years as well. When it came time for the pros to make their picks, coach Red Auerbach of the Boston Celtics drafted me in the first round because he thought I could play a supportive role for his already talent–laden team.

When I became a starter, I was called upon to le ad more and to score more, which I have been able to do. Many people who had watched me in college were surprised to see me average over 20 points per game as a pro. They were so accustomed to seeing me play defense that they couldn’t believe I could also put the ball in the basket.

Lately, knowing that retirement is not more than a couple of years away, people have been asking me about my future. During the off season I have been working as a manufacturer’s representative in Worthington, Ohio, and I expect to join the firm full time after retiring from basketball. I may also assist my friend, Ohio State basketball coach Fred Taylor.

My confidence for this transition is bolstered by a habit I began as a teen–ager. Each day I read a devotional with a Bible verse and prayer. From that practice, from my association with many fine people, from the influence of my wonderful parents and the support of a great wife, I have developed a faith and an attitude about life. It is simply that each of us has a role to play and whatever it is, we should do it with our whole body, mind and soul. That isn’t always easy, but I know from experience that the greatest rewards go to the people who give their all and don’t worry about who gets the credit.

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Guideposts Classics: Joel McCrea on God’s Guidance

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Joel McCrea

If my experience in motion pictures has taught me anything, it is this: No mere man is clever enough to control all the forces which must work together for all-around success in life. I do not believe in luck, nor can I take personal credit for the piloting of my own career.

While attending Hollywood High School, my fellow students said I lacked “get-up-and-go.” Though ambitious, I seemed to lack drive. But my dreams were of the wide spaces, open sky and a cattle ranch.

Hollywood was a smaller town then, and my newspaper route was star-studded. As a boy, I tossed the Los Angeles Times on the doorstep of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. I was on friendly terms with others of my customers: Gloria Swanson, Wallace Reid, Cecil B. de Mille and William S. Hart.

Hart was a famous silent-screen cowboy actor. Each time I threw a paper on his porch, I imagined that my delivery bike was a horse and for a moment the paved street was a cactus-studded range.

During the summers, I worked for the King Cattle Company in the Tehachapi Mountains, where I was taught to ride the range and to farm.

To achieve my goal of a ranch, I needed capital. Acting would be a fine way to acquire this capital, I decided. It might even be fun. And the jump from a delivery bike to the silver screen isn’t at all fantastic in a place like Hollywood.

My mother had some advice to offer. She had always relied on a line from the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done.” With her, it was not a term of martyred resignation. On the contrary, it was a joyous note of confidence in a Divine harmonious plan which included all men.

If I listened for His voice, followed His guidance and wisdom instead of my own, she advised, He would lead me to my proper place. And what could I want, she asked, more than my proper place?

My father had given me 12 months in which to prove myself in pictures. Should I fail, I was to “go out and get a job.” For 11 months I failed miserably, averaging 3 days a month as an extra at $7.50 a day.

One morning I awoke with a great sense of harmony, of peace, of my right relationship to the world and everyone in it. Even the rain outside, which would make moist hunting of my daily studio rounds, seemed a blessing. I could wear my new trench coat, a prized possession.

I was standing outside the door of the RKO casting office when a producer went by. A mighty man with parts to give, he looked me over carefully. My heart rose. He passed into his office without a word. My heart sank. But in a minute he was back, “You,” he called. “Come in here.”

I stood in his office, a little damp, but feeling again that sense of rightness. “This,” thought I, “is it.”

“What do you do around here?” he asked.

“I’m an actor,” I said, stretching the truth a bit.

“Where did you get that trench coat?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Place up in Hollywood,” I faltered.

“How much?”

“Eighteen dollars.”

“I like it,” he said. “Could you get me one?” I watched him peel off a twenty and then I was out in the rain again, trudging three miles because I didn’t want to waste carfare. And he didn’t even tip me.

Next morning our phone rang. It was the producer. “Are you the trench coat fellow?” he demanded. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “Didn’t you say you were an actor? We just bought a story, and the guy in it…Well, you are the guy. Built the same. Look the same. You better come back here.”

There it was. The open door. Luck? Maybe. Maybe once…or twice. But when you find you can apply a certain principle to every phase of life, at any given moment, It can’t be just luck. Through the years I have followed the principle of “asking my way of Him,” and then confidently taking the next step which seems right.

Several years ago, for example, a major studio had a call on me for one picture a year. That is a commitment and, in the last analysis, I could be forced to do that picture whether I liked the part or not.

One day I was mailed a script which had me playing the lead opposite one of our foremost glamour girls. My agent was delighted. “She’s never made a picture that’s lost money. She’s great box office.”

But I didn’t like the story, nor my part. It was a distasteful, degrading one, I thought. Nor did I personally care for the torrid story any more than I could see myself as the lover.

Starting with the producer, I carefully explained why I did not want to make the picture. He referred me to the executive producer, who passed me on to the executive, executive producer. Each time I repeated my explanation until my own monologue was beginning to bore me. And all it got me was a date to explain my feelings to the big boss.

I valued my reputation for cooperation. Never had I been forced to be “difficult,” to refuse a part. I didn’t want to now. And a contract is a contract. Nevertheless, I felt strongly I shouldn’t do this picture. It was, you might say, a dilemma. And as I faced the chief executive, a man reputed to be ruthless and deaf to any pleas, I knew that beyond this office I had no further recourse.

He looked at me with cold eyes and said abruptly, “I don’t want a long story. I want just one good reason wily you don’t want to play this part.”

In a moment of silence, I reached mentally for help. Then I said slowly, “I would be embarrassed to have my sons see me in this picture.”

For a second he just stared. Then he stood up, clapped me on the shoulder and said, “I see you have given this honest thought… Maybe you’d like to do a Western we’re working on?”

Was that a “lucky” line? I don’t think so. Was I clever? I know I wasn’t. It was truth speaking in me, recognized by the producer, and harmony between us was the inevitable result.

I don’t claim I haven’t made mistakes. I have. But most of my mistakes were due to trusting “luck,” or my own judgment instead of His.

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Guideposts Classics: Joe E. Brown on the Power of Laughter

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Joe E. Brown

Laughter in my business. Everyone pretty much knows that laughter is good medicine. It is a recognized therapy—a definite Rx, a real specific for disease. Experts state that the first test of sanity is whether the patient has humor and can laugh at himself.

So laughter is healing.

And laughter is holy.

I could not be interested in any man’s religion if his knowledge of God did not bring some more joy, did not brighten his life and did not make him want to carry his joy into every dark corner of the world. I have no understanding of a long-faced Christian. If God is anything, He must be joy. And a clean heart must be a happy heart.

I am not a religious man in the sense that most people speak of religion. I believe in God because everything around us proclaims Him. I respect His Universal Laws which are wondrous indeed. I live the Golden Rule to my fullest capabilities. As the years have passed, I have worked out a philosophy for myself which convinces me that God is universal and that I may incorporate into my daily life and thoughts as much of Him as I wish.

Because of the love I have for my own kids, to whom I’ve always been heart-close, I arranged during the past war, to go to the combat areas and entertain the boys. No sooner had I done so when I was stricken with renewal of my old sciatica which withered my leg and shortened it.

Now I’m no stranger to pain. My arm was once chewed by a circus lion. My back has been broken twice. And my sciatica had kept me in agony for nearly 4 years. So I wasn’t going to let it stop me on that Armed Forces trip. They assigned 2 men to watch over me when they realized I wouldn’t cancel, and the Army and Navy supplied special planes and rendered every service possible.

The first plane out from the west coast ran into trouble and had to return to San Francisco. The cold was acute and greatly aggravated the sciatica, but we started out again as soon as it was possible.

The first 3 weeks of my journey I had to be carried in an ambulance. And I almost thought of quitting rather than be so much trouble to people.

But one of the boys came up to me as I was almost ready to leave an encampment and said: “Joe—I’m praying for you. A lot of the fellows are.”

I couldn’t answer him—except to pat his back. But I began to think. If the men were praying for me in the midst of their own dangers, I’d better get busy and pitch in and pray too.

Well you never saw a churchgoing man to equal Joe E. Brown after that. And somewhere in one of the numerous churches I visited in the next few weeks, I was healed!

I know I was healed by prayer. I have over a thousand letters from boys in the South Seas who tell me they were praying for my recovery. No wonder I completely recovered.

Then one night, I found myself without thinking, going into a dance! And when I got off the stage, I said excitedly: “I can’t dance! I couldn’t have been dancing! I haven’t been able to dance with this leg for years.”

But I had danced. And I’ve danced ever since.

So if I went out to bring laughter to boys at war, I came back healed—and renewed in my faith. And that’s the way with God—the more you give and do, the more you have and are. It’s the universal and blessed law.

Plutarch said: “The measure of a man’s life is the well spending of it and not the length.” That is a comfort in thinking of my son who was killed in war. I am able to believe he lived a complete life even though he was only 25, and I believe too, that his influence will continue to uplift many, because his faith and the sincerity of his religion were imparted to all who came in contact with him.

He is an inspiration to me in courage, and in standing for what he believed was right. In my way, I, too, have tried to do this.

My weapon is laughter, and it’s a powerful one. I beseech you to use its secret power in your life—to cultivate it and pass it on.

As long as men like each other and can laugh together, life flows along like a song, with no thought of his or mine. But the moment they begin to think of each other’s possessions, they begin to compare and one wants for himself what the other fellow has. Then the laughter stops and the fighting begins. It is so even among children.

Who would dare to say that greed, covetousness, and avarice does not creep in when laughter dies out, when people and nations cease to rejoice in the good fortunes of another?

It is easy to sympathize with people in pain or trouble. But it is holy and divine to rejoice with another in good luck and rich blessings—to celebrate—to take pleasure in another’s advancement and successes…

That’s unselfish—selfless and holy.

And the sound of laughter and merriment is God’s most precious music.

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Guideposts Classics: Joan Fontaine on Finding a Church Home

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Joan Fontaine

Most of us move through life looking for something. For years my search was for a sense of belonging, truly belonging somewhere. I spent half a lifetime looking for a place where I could feel deeply at ease, accepted, part of a family, surrounded by people who cared.

I had begun to believe that no such place existed. Then I found one.

I’m sure the origins of my search go back to my childhood when ill health and the isolation that it brings played such a large role in my life. My mother told me that I spent the first two-and-a-half years of my life wrapped from head to toe in cotton bandages due to the eczema that covered me.

My father, Walter de Havilland, was a professor teaching at the Imperial University in Tokyo, where I was born. Mother always believed that the goats’ milk that is given to babies in Japan started me on my endless succession of ailments.

My parents’ marriage was not a happy one. When I was two-and-a-half, Mother, my sister and I left Japan and settled in Saratoga, California, where doctors assured Mother that the climate would be healthier.

It was true that my eczema got better, but just about every other conceivable illness followed.

My earliest memories are of tastes–castor oil and Scott’s Emulsion and the hatefulness of unsweetened licorice cough syrup–and of white-uniformed strangers bending over me with long, hurting needles.

I suppose it was no wonder that with such handicaps I found it hard to relate to other children. And indeed the life we led was different from other children’s carefree existences.

By now my mother had remarried. My stepfather was an investment counselor, but I’m sure he should have been a general.

The bedroom my sister and I shared, when I wasn’t quarantined with some infection, was modeled after a barracks: khaki spreads on iron bedsteads, khaki-painted furniture against dun-colored walls, military-style inspections morning and night.

At his insistence, each Sunday we wrote out the schedule for the week ahead in precise segments:

7:00-7:15 bathe and dress
7:15-7:45 breakfast
7:45-8:15 make beds; tidy room
8:15-8:30 walk to school

and so on through the long regimented day. My stepfather was a well-intentioned man, and I respected him, but he was unable to give the warmth, the open affection, the understanding touch that I yearned for.

And yet all the illness and isolation and regimentation had their compensations, for instead of real companions, I found my friends in books and in the dramatic sketches Mother taught my sister and me to act in when friends came to visit.

On days when I was unable to sit up in bed, I would weave long thrilling dramas in my head. Little did I think, at such lonely moments, that I was going through the perfect apprenticeship for an acting career.

But apparently it showed to those around me. One day a friend of Mother’s who had seen our little living-room dramas received a call from the actress May Robson. May was looking for a young girl to play the role of the ingenue in her next play.

“Joan de Havilland,” said Mother’s friend without hesitation. And so I found myself in the wonderful make-believe world of theater.

By now my sister was an established actress, so in order not to trade on her name I took our stepfather’s name, Fontaine. Acting was a strenuous career for a girl as sickly as I was, but I soon came to know why Dame Sybil Thorndike called it “Doctor Theater.”

No matter how I felt or how high my temperature, when the curtains parted, a burst of energy always flooded into me, and I went on, oblivious to everything but the part I was playing.

An increasingly successful movie career had many rewards, but it did not bring me the warmth and close relationships that I kept seeking, sometimes desperately.

Perhaps it was the lack of a warm father figure in my childhood that made my expectations of marriage so ridiculously high. My husband was to be everything I had longed for as a girl. All-loving, all-strong, all-wise, he would be the answer to every need.

And each time he fell short of those expectations the disillusionment was keener, the depression that followed more serious. Each time I felt as if I were a wanderer with no place to go, no place to belong.

It was during one of those bleak times in 1972 that I finally realized what I had been doing. I had been idolizing human beings, trying to make of them what flesh and blood can never be. Even if a man could be the father I dreamed of, the brother I never had, he could never be God.

Of course I wanted a center to my life, of course I wanted perfect faithfulness, perfect love—only I had been looking for those things in the wrong places.

I remember so well the day, sitting alone in my New York apartment, when that realization came to me. I remember because with it, quietly and clearly, came the answer I had been seeking for so long.

Not far away was a tranquil place of worship called the Church of the Heavenly Rest. I began to attend services there. A few months later I consulted the rector, Burton Thomas, and told him I needed to be baptized.

With just a few friends to stand with me, and Dr. Thomas’s wife, Hazel, as my godmother, I was baptized, and I knew that I had found the place where I belonged at last.

Baptism is an inrush of grace—and grace changes people. Have I been changed? I believe so. Where I was judgmental and sometimes too demanding, I now feel more sympathy for other people, more tolerance, more understanding.

My friends, who seem closer and dearer, tell me that I seem closer and dearer to them. I feel stronger in myself; I’m not looking so desperately for some other human being to lean on. I belong to a church and a church belongs to me, and I feel surrounded by love and joy.

Sometimes when a bird sings in Central Park and no one else stops to listen, I feel myself overwhelmed with wonder and gratitude to the Giver of such gifts.

And sometimes I wonder why it took me so long. Then I think of that marvelous parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), and remember that in God’s sight there is no soon or late.

In that story each worker received the same reward no matter when he came. For me that reward was the gift of knowing I belong.

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Guideposts Classics: Jane Wyman on the Ten Commandments

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Jane Wyman

How annoyed I get today when I hear someone teased for being shy! “Come on!” they shout, dragging him into a crowded room. “Don’t be shy!” As though not being shy were a matter of will power. Or, “You’re just shy!” as though that were the most minor of problems.

Shyness is not a small problem: it can cripple the whole personality. It crippled mine, for many years.

As a child my only solution to the problem of shyness was to hide, to make myself as small and insignificant as possible. All through grade school I was a well-mannered little shadow who never spoke above a whisper. In ballet class I haunted the corners of the room, hoping the dancing master would not see me.

The very thought of performing in front of someone made me wilt with fear, quite literally.

The saddest part of it was that I idolized Dad Prinz, the dancing master. He was the most understanding man I had ever met and I longed to tell him so. I never did.

Then my parents left St. Joseph, Missouri, and moved to Los Angeles. And now a new and more threatening dimension had been added to life outside the big city high school walls. Dating. It seemed to me that on some prearranged signal, every boy and girl in school paired off.

Every girl, that is, except me. I don’t know whether I could have had dates or not; it simply never occurred to me to try. Hadn’t I been told many times that I was not pretty? I lugged home piles of books every night and disappeared into them.

And then the Depression came. In California it seemed to hit older people like my father especially hard. Overnight I was thrust from my safe little book-world into the world of job hunting.

In all that vast, bewildering city, I knew only one person who might give me a job: LeRoy Prinz, the famous Hollywood dance coach, Dad Prinz’ son. He gave me a tryout and discovered I had a sense of rhythm. “As long as you’ve got that,” he said, “I can teach you the rest.”

Under LeRoy Prinz’ coaching I began to get chorus parts in the movies, those lavish, glittery, extravagant movies we loved in the hungry ‘30s.

It was work when the family badly needed the money, but for a girl who had grown up in terror of being looked at, it was also agony.

Then I made a discovery: a good shield for shyness is a bold exterior. Did my heart turn over when the man with the megaphone bellowed out my name? Were all the other dancers prettier?

Never mind. I covered up by becoming the cockiest of all, by talking the loudest, laughing the longest, and wearing the curliest, most blatantly false eyelashes in Hollywood.

And then one day a fellow chorus girl gave me a piece of advice:

“Jane, you’d improve your looks about a thousand percent if you’d peel off those trimmings and wash your face.”

I was crushed. I wept. I hated her. But the next day, feeling completely bald, I showed up on the set without my disguise. We hadn’t been rehearsing half an hour before a comparative stranger stopped and stared at me.

“Gee, Jane,” he said. “You look great.”

For me it was the heavens parting. Could he have meant that I looked great? It was the first hint I had that I could be myself without the sky falling in.

But the insight went only skin deep. I shed the eyelashes, but I wasn’t about ready to shed the tough, smart little shell.

I had begun to get a few minor acting parts and they were just the kind you would expect. I was the brash blonde girl reporter rushing into the newspaper office to shout “Stop the presses!”

Then one day on the set someone else said something that shone another bit of light through the defense I’d set up.

“When I first came out to Hollywood,” he said, “I discovered there are two kinds of people here. There are the ‘closed people,’ the careful ones who don’t take risks and don’t get hurt. And there are the ‘open people,’ the ones who give life all they’ve got.

“They make mistakes, they get hurt, but they also get back a lot of joy.”

I recognized myself right there as one of the closed people and my bright personality as the shell for a clam. I began to want very much to open the shell. I began to loathe the brassy blonde I played in the movies. Suddenly I longed to play real people, to move the hearts of real people.

Today I would call this quality of deep yearning, “prayer,” and what happened next, a small miracle. Then, I only knew that no sooner had I set my heart on changing than I was offered two roles about unmistakably real people: first in Lost Weekend and then in The Yearling.

I worked on those parts as I’d never worked before, sat up nights with my lines, studied them for hidden meanings over my meals. When those films were finished, the studio decided I was ready for the role of the deaf-mute in Johnny Belinda.

With that part came the Academy Award, and surely, I thought, surely now I will stop hiding. Surely I will feel some kind of self-esteem and confidence.

But the months passed, my Oscar collected dust on a shelf, and I made a dismal discovery. External achievements change nothing: inside I was the same tormentingly stay person I always had been.

My real self still was hiding in the shadows, sending someone else out front to greet the world. It was an exhausting way to live.

Then, 10 years ago, I went to England to do a picture for the Royal Academy. It was a lonely time: I knew no one outside the cast and I did a lot of walking, and thinking.

During my solitary rambles I found myself wandering into Westminster Abbey, first as a sightseer—then over and over again to try to grasp something I felt there. Something that felt like approval. Like acceptance. Like love.

I tried to dismiss the experience. It was, I rationalized, only the reaction of a homesick woman in a foreign land. I almost had convinced myself when I met the man who at last threw a searchlight on the girl in the shadows.

I was back in Hollywood and tie was a kindly old priest with a manner so gentle, so uncritical, that suddenly I found myself talking to him about things I’d never told anyone.

I found myself telling him about the little girl who was too shy to speak above a whisper, about my lifelong struggle with the same feelings. “I thought if I only could succeed at something, then I wouldn’t be shy. But I have had success, of a kind, and I feel just the same.”

“Of course you do.” The priest smiled at me. “Shyness isn’t a matter of doing well, or not doing well. It isn’t a matter of whether you’re handsome or plain.”

Over his cluttered desk, tie looked at me. “Shyness, Miss Wyman, is a little matter of self-centeredness.”

I blinked. The words were harsh but he said them so mildly, that I resisted a familiar impulse to flee into a protective shell.

“That’s all,” he continued cheerfully. “Just a little tendency to think of the whole world as terribly interested in oneself. You know, the feeling that every eye in the room is focused on one—whereas actually most of the other people there are pretty much involved with their own problems.

“Now fortunately,” he went on as he rummaged for something in the maelstrom on his desk, “the Bible gives us some very specific instructions for dealing with selfcenteredness.” He located his Bible, found the passage he wanted, and handed it to me.

I looked at the Bible passage. It was the Ten Commandments.

“The first four,” he said, “deal with our relationship to God. They get our attention out where it belongs: on Him and His majesty. And the last six tell us how we ought to conduct ourselves toward other people. They keep our attention out there, away from ourselves and onto our neighbors.”

I looked down at the Commandments again. I had read them a hundred times, of course, but something in the old priest’s voice filled them with an unspeakable promise.

It was the first of many interviews with this priest who became my spiritual mentor. And I have never forgotten what he told me the first time we met, about the cause of shyness, and its cure.

Not that I have succeeded in following all the Commandments in all their fullness, but the act of trying to has worked a big change in my life.

For when I looked away from myself I discovered a whole world full of other people. Fascinating people, people with woes and joys I had never imagined. I didn’t have much time left to worry about the impression I was making, once I really began seeing them.

But best of all, out there, I am finding God. Not much of Him, yet. At first it was just a shadow, a glimmering. But getting to know Him better, listening for Him, contemplating Him, loving Him, is a 24-hour-a-day assignment. Shy? I just haven’t got time.

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Guideposts Classics: James Stewart on ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by James Stewart

A friend told me recently that seeing a movie I made more than 40 years ago is a holiday tradition in his family. That movie is It’s a Wonderful Life, and out of all the 80 films I’ve made, it’s my favorite. But it has an odd history.

When the war was over in 1945, I came back home to California from three years service in the Air Force. I had been away from the film business, my MGM contract had run out and, frankly, not knowing how to get started again, I was just a little bit scared.

Hank Fonda was in the same boat, and we sort of wandered around together, talking, flying kites and stuff. But nothing much was happening.

Then one day Frank Capra phoned me. The great director had also been away in service, making the Why We Fight documentary series for the military, and he admitted to being a little frightened too. But he had a movie in mind. We met in his office to talk about it.

He said the idea came from a Christmas story written by Philip Van Doren Stern. Stern couldn’t sell the story anywhere, but he finally had 200 twenty-four-page pamphlets printed up at his own expense, and he sent them to his friends as a greeting card.

“Now, listen,” Frank began hesitantly. He seemed a little embarrassed. “The story starts in heaven, and it’s sort of the Lord telling somebody to go down to earth because there’s a fellow who’s in trouble, and this heavenly being goes to a small town, and…”

Frank swallowed and took a deep breath.

“Well, what it boils down to is, this fella who thinks he’s a failure in life jumps off a bridge. The Lord sends down an angel named Clarence, who hasn’t earned his wings yet, and Clarence jumps into the water to save the guy. But the angel can’t swim, so the guy has to save him, and then…”

Frank stopped and wiped his brow. “This doesn’t tell very well, does it?”

I jumped up. “Frank, if you want to do a picture about a guy who jumps off a bridge and an angel named Clarence who hasn’t won his wings yet coming down to save him, well, I’m your man!”

Production of It’s a Wonderful Life started April 15, 1946, and from the beginning there was a certain something special about the film. Even the set was special. Two months had been spent creating the town of Bedford Falls, New York.

For the winter scenes, the special-effects department invented a new kind of realistic snow instead of using the tried and true cornstarch.

As one of the longest American movie sets ever made until then, Bedford Falls had 75 stores and buildings on four acres with a three-block main street lined with 20 full-grown oak trees.

As I walked down that shady street the morning we started work, it reminded me of my hometown, Indiana, Pennsylvania. I almost expected to hear the bells of the Presbyterian church, where Mother played the organ and Dad sang in the choir.

I chuckled, remembering how the fire siren would go off, and Dad, a volunteer fireman, would slip out of the choir loft. If it was a false alarm, Dad would sneak back and sort of give a nod to everyone to assure them that none of their houses were in danger.

I remembered how, after I got started in pictures, Dad, who’d come to California for a visit, asked, “Where do you go to church around here?”

“Well,” I stammered, “I haven’t been going—there’s none around here.”

Dad disappeared and came back with four men. “You must not have looked very hard, Jim,” he said, “because there’s a Presbyterian church just three blocks from here, and these are the elders. They’re building a new building now, and I told them you were a movie star and you would help them.”

And so Brentwood Presbyterian was the first church I belonged to out here.

Later, that church was the one in which Gloria and I were married. A few years after that it was the same church I’d slip into during the day when Gloria was near death after our twin girls were born. Then after we moved, we attended Beverly Hills Presbyterian, a church we could walk to.

It wasn’t the elaborate movie set, however, that made It’s a Wonderful Life so different; it was the story. The character I played was George Bailey, an ordinary fella who thinks he’s never accomplished anything in life.

His dreams of becoming a famous architect, of living adventurously, have not been fulfilled. Instead he feels trapped in a humdrum job in a small town. And when faced with a crisis in which he feels he has failed everyone, he breaks under the strain and flees to the bridge.

That’s when his guardian angel, Clarence, comes down on Christmas Eve to show him what his community would be like without him. The angel takes him back through his life to show how our ordinary everyday efforts are really big achievements.

Clarence reveals how George Bailey’s loyalty to his job at the building-and-loan office has saved families and homes, how his little kindnesses have changed the lives of others and how the ripples of his love will spread through the world, helping make it a better place.

Good as the script was, there was still something else about the movie that made it different. It’s hard to explain. I, for one, had things happen to me during the filming that never happened in any other picture I’ve made.

In one scene, for example, George Bailey is faced with unjust criminal charges and, not knowing where to turn, ends up in a little roadside restaurant. He is unaware that most of the people in town are arduously praying for him.

In this scene, at the lowest point in George Bailey’s life, Frank Capra was shooting a long shot of me slumped in despair.

In agony I raise my eyes and, following the script, plead, “God… God…dear Father in heaven, I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there and you can hear me, show me the way. I’m at the end of my rope. Show me the way, God…”

As I said those words, I felt the loneliness, the hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn, and my eyes filled with tears. I broke down sobbing. This was not planned at all, but the power of that prayer, the realization that our Father in heaven is there to help the hopeless, had reduced me to tears.

Frank, who loved spontaneity in his films, was ecstatic. He wanted a close-up of me saying that prayer, but was sensitive enough to know that my breaking down was real and that repeating it in another take was unlikely. But Frank got his close-up.

The following week he worked long hours in the film laboratory, repeatedly enlarging the frames so that eventually it would appear as a close-up on the screen. I believe nothing like this had ever been done before. It involved thousands of enlargements with extra time and money. But he felt it was worth it.

There was a growing excitement among all of us as we strove day and night through the early summer of 1946. We threw everything we had into our work.

Finally, after three months, shooting some 68 miles of 35-millimeter film, we completed the filming and had a big wrap-up party. It was an outdoor picnic with three-legged races and burlap-bag sprints, just like the picnics back home.

Frank talked enthusiastically about the picture. He felt that the film and actors would be up for Academy Awards. Both of us wanted it to win, not only because we believed in its message, but also for the reassurance we needed in this time of starting over.

But life doesn’t always work out the way we want it to.

The movie came out in December 1946, and from the beginning we could tell it was not going to be the success we’d hoped for. The critics had mixed reactions. Some liked it; others felt it was “too sentimental…a figment of simple Pollyanna platitudes.”

As more reviews came out, our hopes sank lower and lower. During February 1947, eight other current films, including Sinbad the Sailor and Betty Grable’s The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, outranked it in box-office income.

The postwar public seemed to prefer lighthearted fare. At the end of 1947, It’s a Wonderful Life ranked twenty-seventh in earnings that season. And although it earned several Oscar nominations, despite our high hopes, it won nothing. “Best picture for 1946” went to The Best Years of Our Lives.

By the end of 1947 the film was quietly put on the shelf.

But a curious thing happened. The movie refused to stay on the shelf. Those who loved it loved it a lot, and they told others. They wouldn’t let it die any more than the angel Clarence would let George Bailey die. When it began to be shown on TV, a whole new audience fell in love with it.

Today, after some 40 years, I’ve heard the film called “an American cultural phenomenon.” Well, maybe so, but it seems to me there is nothing phenomenal about the movie itself.

It’s simply about an ordinary man who discovers that living each ordinary day honorably, with faith in God and a selfless concern for others, can make for a truly wonderful life.

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Guideposts Classics: Jackie Robinson on Facing Challenges

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Jackie Robinson

This is going to be a big year for me. After more than six years of shooting for a chance to manage a major-league baseball club, I’ve finally got one and I’m very happy about it. I’m grateful that the Cleveland Indian organization has enough confidence in me to let me lead its team on the field this year. Now it’s up to me to do the job.

That job, successful managing, is to me mostly a matter of caring about people and helping them to make the most of their own abilities. In that way, I suppose, managing baseball is not much different from any other job—or any other part of life actually—where working and living with other people is involved.

To me, no man did the job any better than Birdie Tebbetts, who was managing Cincinnati when I broke into the majors in 1956. Birdie is the best example I know of a man who cared deeply about the members of his team and wanted the best for them. And how he was loved by his players! The Bible says that love is kind and patient, full of hope and trust; if you believe that, then Birdie was a guy who really loved his players, too.

I remember my rookie year; I was 20 and scared stiff, though I tried not to show it. Birdie put me in left field for the opening game of the 1956 season against the Cardinals, and I got two hits in three at-bats. Though we lost, 4-2, on Stan Musial’s two-run homer, I came away from the game feeling good. Then I went into a tail spin, getting only two hits during my next 23 at-bats. I was really confused and beginning to doubt I was ready for the big leagues.

Before a Tuesday night game at old Crosley Field in Cincinnati, Birdie put his arm around me and said, “Frank, this guy they’re pitching tonight is one of the best, and he fools some of the veterans. I’m taking you out of the line-up tonight so you can watch him. You’ll be able to do the job against this pitcher eventually, but I don’t want you to get discouraged. I don’t want you to lose faith in yourself. You’re going to be a great player, but it takes time. I’ve seen too many players ruined by rookie slumps; I don’t want that to happen to you.”

And so I watched from the bench that night, secure in the knowledge that my manager was doing something for my own good, that he really cared about me. A few games later, Birdie put me back in the line-up, and I got a couple of hits. From then on, I started to play well. I hit .290 for the season and finished second in home runs in the National League, hitting 38. Birdie’s sensitive handling of me at a crucial time, I’m convinced, was the key. If he hadn’t really cared, and shown it, he would have let me play my way right back to the minors.

I want my players to know I care about them as people. And people who care about one another support one another; they work, hope and dream together.

Another thing about Birdie was his readiness to share his experience with the players. Always surrounded by rookies on the bench during a game, Birdie was constantly teaching.

“Now watch the runner, boys. He just got the sign to steal.”

“Let’s move our third baseman and shortstop back. This guy couldn’t drag a bunt with a thirty-foot bat.”

“Watch the pitcher. He’s telegraphing his curve ball.”

Anyone who sat beside Birdie for a whole game couldn’t help but learn something new. And that’s the way he wanted it.

George Powles, the manager of the Oakland American Legion baseball team on which I played as a teen-ager, was another manager who knew how to share himself with others. I was the youngest of ten kids in my family and fatherless after the age of eight, so I was ripe to respond to a man like George, who saw some potential in me. On weekends we would begin playing ball at nine o’clock in the morning and continue until dark. After practice, as if we hadn’t had enough baseball, George would invite us over to his house for sandwiches and baseball talk. What a student of the game he was!

One of the most memorable, and practical, things George told me came one day when I struck out on a fast ball because I wasn’t ready for that pitch, and it was by me before I could get the bat around. Afterward, George took me aside and said, “Always anticipate the fast ball. That’s the one that arrives at the plate the quickest. If the pitch isn’t a fast ball, you can adjust.” It was several years later in the major leagues before I heard that simple bit of logic repeated.

Another thing I believe is important in dealing and working with people is good communication, keeping those lines open all the time. Misunderstanding can almost always be traced to a lack of openness, directness between people.

Fred Hutchinson was one of my managers at Cincinnati early in my career, and although he knew the game as well as anyone, he was a tight-lipped leader. More than once, that lack of communication created some problems.

Once I got hit on the arm with a fast ball, and my arm swelled to twice its normal size. I had trouble swinging a bat; my arm hurt whenever I tried. Finally Fred told me he was taking me out of the lineup; he wanted to give my arm some rest.

The trainer worked on it and I did rest for a couple of games. I was improved enough to play, but because Fred didn’t engage in conversation easily, his players, especially one as young as I was, kept their distance and were often reluctant to volunteer information.

We were playing Houston and had fallen behind by two runs. In the last of the ninth, when we loaded the bases with one out, Fred needed a right-handed pinch hitter, and I figured he would ask me. Instead, he motioned to another player. That player, not a particularly good hitter, grounded into a double play and we lost the game.

Afterward, a reporter wondered why I hadn’t pinch hit. “Does your arm hurt too much?” he asked me.

“No,” I told him. “I could have batted, but I wasn’t asked.”

He wrote that in his story, and the next day Fred called me to his hotel room to tell me, very forcefully, what a mistake I’d made. The whole affair taught each of us a lesson, I think, for we seemed to get along better after that, and I came to appreciate Fred’s other qualities that made him a good manager.

Since then I have made a vow to myself to stay in touch with my players. Hearing from them is as necessary as their hearing from me—just as keeping communication lines open between parent and child, worker and employer, neighbor and neighbor, is important.

As a matter of fact, it’s really remarkable how much managing a team of ballplayers is like managing one’s own life—caring, sharing and communicating with others. And I’m sure that it’s because getting along with other people is such an important part of both. That’s why I think everyone should know something about managing.

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Guideposts Classics: Irene Dunne on Her Faith Journey

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Irene Dunne

At an evening party in my home several months ago, a fascinated group gathered around former Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, who held her audience, not by brilliant discourse on politics or the theatre, but by her eloquent statements on her personal religious convictions.

An elderly gentleman smoked his cigar and listened quietly. When the party broke up, he turned to me and, shaking his head admiringly, he said, “You see, she’s just too smart not to be on the safe side!”

I was amused, but later on, as I went about ashtrays and putting out lights, I thought again about my guest’s remark. What he doubtless meant to say was, “She’s too smart not to be on God’s side.” How hard it is for most of us to talk about our religious feelings, I mused. But to tell others about them, to share your treasure, is so important, for surely the best way to keep your religion is to give it away freely.

Now I am no theologian, no scholar, not even a writer. I ask myself, “How can I find a simple, uncomplicated, sincere way of telling others about the richness, satisfaction, and joy that my religion brings to my life, so that they, too, may desire to open the door and let God in?”

Then it occurred to me it was something like seeing your friends for the first time since your return from a wonderful trip—let’s call this a heavenly trip. You had such a glorious time, you’ve already sent post cards, saying, “Wish you were here.” If you have the gift of words, your description of the place will make them want to go.

Even if you have not the gift, they will note that your trip has refreshed and restored you; your step is buoyant, your heart is light. The place where you have been, and still reside in secret, has done so much for you that all who come in contact with you will yearn to go there too. They want their cup filled to overflowing as is yours.

And the wonderful part of this heavenly trip is that everyone can go. Of course, the trip will entail sacrifices. Pleasures nearer home may have to be foregone; perhaps what may seem like valuable time will be taken away from the office or from social engagements. And the journey may take a long time. It all depends upon the person and the way he chooses to go about it.

For my own part, I can recount for you no dramatic stories en route. I did not, like Saul of Tarsus, suddenly awaken to find myself already in the Heavenly Place. Nor did tragedy or affliction force me to be towed in, or sirened in by ambulance, as has happened to so many. Neither did I have to search long and hard for the right road as did Thomas Merton who tells about it in “The Seven Storey Mountain.”

No, I was placed on the road at an early age, and it was straight and narrow and pleasant, though I suppose I made a few detours here and there and from time to time I took more rest than was necessary.

I was born into the Catholic faith at Louisville, Kentucky, and there was schooled by the Sisters of Loretta. Early in my youth I began to study voice and piano. I can remember attending early Mass, then going to a nearby Baptist Church to sing in the choir. I took my religion entirely for granted.

On the opening night of my earliest musical show years ago, I was observed from out front, making the Sign of the Cross before my entrance. I had no recollection of this whatsoever. That’s how automatic, yet so much a part of me, my religion was.

The process by which I began to be happily aware of its enormous benefits to myself and others and to consciously try to practice it in my daily living, has come about very slowly, but I hope, just as surely.

Folks often ask me wonderingly how I have managed to keep my balance in the tinsel world in which I have lived. It is no wonder that those who are suddenly smothered in unaccustomed luxury and adulation are sometimes inclined to lose their sense of values and are tempted to play God themselves. Bishop Fulton Sheen says: “Twentieth Century man who thinks he is a God has to be psychoanalyzed to find out why he feels like the devil.”

In my own case I had the good fortune to be kept on the beam by the prayers of my saint-like mother. My father, a river steamboat man who became a United States Supervisor of Steamships, died when I was very young. Mother and I moved to Madison, Indiana, and I studied at a musical conservatory in Indianapolis.

While on my way to East Chicago to take a job as teacher of music and art in high school, I stopped to visit friends in Chicago. Just by chance I read where the Chicago Musical College was holding auditions for young singers, the winner to receive a scholarship.

I tried out, and to my astonishment—won. This encouraged me to try to become a singer in the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City, and shortly Mother and I were on our way to New York.

I never did get to the Metropolitan, but the decision started me on my career. Throughout my working years in motion pictures, Mother’s steady faith has been an unfailing source of strength to me.

Her death a number of years ago was the most shattering personal blow I have ever had to bear. My mother’s presence and her prayers for me, like my religion, were something I had possessed all my life and taken too much for granted. How alone I would have been at that time if she had not pointed the way to another Comforter who would never leave me!

It is not alone in the crises of life that God has sustained and strengthened me, but also in day-to-day living problems, the unending decisions and petty annoyances. Most of us have grave responsibilities to our marriage and our children. I, for one, wouldn’t have the nerve to attempt to bring up my daughter without God’s help. To do so would seem to be the most incredible egotism!

Out of my heart and my own experience, I know that God has infinite treasure to bestow. The joy and peace of mind that accompany love of God and faith in Him are beyond the power of words. Because of my religion, I know that I have lived a richer, fuller, more satisfying life than would have been possible without it.

With all its hardships, the journey is worthwhile. Faith is a wonderful resort. How I wish you were here—if you’ve missed it!

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Guideposts Classics: How Danny Thomas Kept His Promise

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Rosemarie Thomas

It happened in Detroit in 1934. I was on “The Happy Hour Club” radio show when the announcer walked me over to the new singer, and said:

“Rosemarie, I’d like you to meet another singer, Amos Jacobs.”

His grin was boyish and uncertain. I liked it. Most of all I liked his eyes. They were bright with truth.

Two years later we were married.

Somewhere along the line he decided to change his name, so he took the first names of his two brothers and called himself Danny Thomas. Danny was a singer then, who later became a comedian—by accident.

In 24 years of marriage we have shared all the ups and downs of an actor’s life, and been blest with three children. Yes, we’ve had our quarrels, too, but underneath it all there has always been the abiding promise, “Till death do us part.”

It’s pretty hard for Saturday’s quarrel to go very far when you’re kneeling next to each other at mass the following Sunday; or when you eat in our dining room. For on the wall there’s a large mural, a mahogany carving of the Last Supper.

Our dining room table is U-shaped, so no one ever has his back to the picture.

Danny’s success on television has made it possible for him to keep a promise he made a long time ago, a promise to a saint named Jude. Looking back, it seems to me that the meeting between Danny and the Saint was inevitable…

Danny was born in Deerfield, Michigan, into a home of few material possessions, but one that had a wealth of love and mercy. Come to think of it, these are the real roots of our happiness today, not anything that came later.

He got these traits from his parents who were Lebanese. Danny’s father tried to raise dray horses in Deerfield, and didn’t do so well, and then they moved to Toledo, Ohio, where he tried to peddle dry goods, and didn’t do much better.

Danny’s mother was a woman of remarkable strength, of a simple and undeviating faith. She raised her daughter and eight sons on stories about the old country.

“In the old country,” she would say, “people were measured in only one way; either they had hearts and souls or they didn’t. Their wealth or lack of it, their power or their weaknesses were never mentioned. Such things didn’t matter.”

When Danny was ten he was selling candy in a theater. There the acting bug bit him.

By 16 he was a performer, a singer; at 18 he worked as a factory hand and as a night watchman so he could buy a new suit for a job on “The Happy Hour Club” radio show in Detroit. He hitchhiked his way there.

On that show he became known as “The Tin Horn Cavalier,” partly because he used a gas pipe and a funnel for his act, “Trumpet Impressions,” and partly, I suspect, because of his nose.

One night he was so broke he had to break a date with a girl, who became so furious that she wrote a letter to the radio station, asking:

“Is that his nose, or is he eating a banana?”

Danny read it over the air that night, and suddenly found himself a comedian. That brought him a few more theater jobs than before, but he still had to struggle.

Even after we were married and had our first child, he was earning only $35 a week—when he worked. He struggled, bitterly, trying to find his level. I begged him to quit this crazy, uncertain business, and get some kind of a job, any job, with a steady check.

I used to pray at night: “Dear Lord, let Danny open a grocery store, or anything that will be steady and keep him at home. You can have Danny Thomas, just let us have Amos Jacobs.”

On one of his blackest nights, when he was working in a small club, Sam (name changed for obvious reasons), an employee he knew, burst in on him like a wild man, raving about how St. Jude had cured his wife of cancer. Danny asked him who this Jude was.

Sam explained that Jude was really Judas Thaddeus and that he was one of the apostles, but was called Jude because they didn’t want to confuse him with that other Judas.

Sam went on to say that his wife was given up at the hospital, but that he knelt down on the marble floor at midnight and stayed there until dawn, asking St. Jude to intercede with God for her.

Just when the sun came up, the doctor walked out, lifted Sam up, and said: “I don’t know whom you’re talking to, but thank him, because things are happening that I can’t understand. I’ve called all the doctors over to see it. Whatever cancer there was is no longer there.”

Before Sam left, he pressed a card into Danny’s hand. It was a prayer to St. Jude. “Ask him to help you, Danny,” Sam said. “He helps all the helpless and hopeless.”

Confused and happy for his friend, Danny put the card in his pocket.

The next night Danny was passing a church, and stopped in. When he put his hand in his pocket to get something for an offering, Danny felt the card.

He knelt and had a long, friendly chat with Jude, and asked him if he thought God wanted him to go on trying to be a comedian or to give it up and open a grocery store.

Danny then promised that if God showed him which way to take, he would build a shrine for St. Jude where the helpless and hopeless could come when they wanted to pray.

Not long after this, Danny got his first important job: one week, for $50, at a small Chicago night club. He stayed there for two years. For the first 26 weeks he got a $10 raise every two weeks. Then he was offered a half-interest in the place.

When Danny went to church to give thanks for all this, he sat down for a moment to think, and next to him on the seat was a little pamphlet. On it was a prayer to St. Jude.

Danny felt good and bad at the same time; bad, that he had forgotten all about his promise to St. Jude, and good, that Jude had reminded him so gently about it.

Danny came home and told me that being a partner in a night club was no way to build a shrine to Jude, and that he had decided that the shrine was going to be a different thing, a research hospital to find cures for children’s diseases.

I said he was a religious fanatic, and he said, “Honey, I love you, but this I must do.”

It wasn’t long after this decision that Danny found his real place in the entertainment business; first in movies, then in television. Meanwhile he never quit on his promise.

After talking to the experts, he learned that one of the most practical locations for the shrine was in Memphis, Tennessee, next to the State University, because the medical college had the largest student body in the country and one of the best faculties.

He also learned that it would cost $2,000,000 just to build the hospital, not to mention maintaining it.

It took Danny over ten years to get most of it; by his own contributions, through endless benefits he played, and by raising it among all the Arabic-speaking people in America.

These people are of all faiths—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Moslem—and they represent all walks of life, from plumbers to psychiatrists. But I believe it was the first time they had ever done something together, as an ethnic group, here in America.

On November 2, 1958, in Memphis, Tennessee, Danny dug up a spadeful of earth to break ground for the St. Jude Hospital Foundation. One friend has called it: “Danny’s house of thanks.” It will soon be open. The labs are already busy researching leukemia.

Part of that first spadeful of earth is encased in a jar in our living room. And Danny still carries in his pocket the thumb-worn card with the prayer to St. Jude on it.

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Guideposts Classics: Henry Winkler on Making the Most of God’s Gifts

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Henry Winkler

For years I played one of television’s most popular characters, The Fonz—Arthur Fonzarelli, also known as Fonzie—that supercool guy on the hit series Happy Days who came on like Marion Brando in The Wild One but was really a street-sweet guy with a heart of gold.

Fonzie rode a motorcycle, and slicking-back his hair with a flick of his comb, set teenagers in the audience shrieking. Kids all around the country greeted each other with The Fonz’s familiar, “Hey … ay … AY!”

In fact, Fonzie became such a part of American life that the black leather jacket he wore on the show is now displayed as part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Over the years Happy Days and all its characters and cast became like a real family to me. And yet, sometimes there were doubts in my mind about Fonzie.

I was trained as a classical actor at Yale Drama School, and I’d always meant to be a “serious” actor—doing drama, not comedy. And there were times when interviewers asked me if I felt I was “compromising myself” by playing a character like The Fonz.

Well, I’d answer that every acting job is important if it’s conveying a worthwhile message and you adapt the part to your own talents and tastes. That it took every bit of my training and skill to make the character of Fonzie come alive on the home screen—and that it was more demanding to play comedy and bring it off successfully.

I meant every word of what I said, but occasionally I too would wonder: Was playing the character of Fonzie doing anybody any good? I’d been raised in the Jewish faith and still felt a real peace and closeness to God when I worshiped in a synagogue. Was I doing what I was really meant to do? Was I using my God-given talents in the best possible way?

I’m chairman of an annual event called the Special Arts Festival that’s held at the Music Center in Los Angeles. It’s sort of a special olympics of the arts, where children with mental and physical handicaps come to perform in their own amateur theatrics, to show their talents, and exhibit their artwork.

The walls are filled with paintings done by the boys and girls, music rings out as they play instruments and sing songs. It’s an exciting time for everyone as the kids have a chance to display what they can do and become aware of the special contributions they can make.

Children are there from all backgrounds and all walks of life, and as I walk through the crowds, I do a lot of hugging. I hold the hand of a little girl in a wheelchair. I joke with a young boy without a leg.

Several years ago there was such a racket that it’s amazing I heard the voice at all. “Fonzie,” someone said. A small, shy voice in all the hubbub. “Fonzie!”

A little girl with large brown eyes and dark curls looked up at me. She was perhaps five years old—just staring at me. She didn’t say another word. She wouldn’t answer my questions. I just figured she was simply one of those shy ones that you see occasionally.

I told the little girl how glad I was to see her, then stood up and looked into the face of the woman who must have been her mother. But why were the woman’s eyes shiny with tears?

The crowd closed around us and l went on.

And then one day I got a letter—from the mother of the little girl. She told me all about her daughter—I’ll call her Claire. Claire was autistic. In the entire five years of her life, Claire had not spoken a single word. Until she called out… “Fonzie!” Somehow the character of Fonzie had broken through to her, enabling her in that one mysterious moment to make a connection. With life.

The next year Claire was at the festival again, and I eagerly went to see her. This time her voice was firm and clear. “Hi, Fonzie,” she said.

“Claire’s teachers say she now has a vocabulary of over 50 words,” her mother told me. “They can’t believe what’s happened.”

Just at that moment Claire tugged at my hand. “My sister,” she said, pointing out the young girl standing close to us. “Hug her, too.”

Sometimes we wonder if we’re doing our best for God. We’re not sure if we’re doing what we should with the gifts He gave us. That little girl showed me that we simply have to do whatever comes our way to the best of our abilities. And trust that God will find His way to touch someone else with them.

And what is that trust called? It’s called faith.

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Guideposts Classics: Hank Aaron on Sacrificing for Others

Posted on March 11, 2026April 10, 2026 by Hank Aaron

No matter where I go, someone is bound to ask me if I think I will break Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs. The Babe is a legend now. He created more excitement than any player who ever lived.

What I find so hard to believe is that Hank Aaron, a nobody from Mobile, Alabama, is really the first player in 40 years to challenge that home-run record. Who am I to be in this position? How did it come about?

Well, I sure didn’t make it on my own. There were a number of people who helped me at crucial times. And because of those people I’ve tried to live my life a certain way during my 21-year career in baseball.

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My parents were strict with us kids. We had rules, we did chores and we all went to the Baptist church every Sunday.

There were plenty of spankings too. When I was 15 I was once offered two dollars to play baseball on Sunday afternoon. I turned it down. I knew Mama would never allow me to play ball on a Sunday.

My father, Herbert Aaron, was a boilermaker’s helper in a ship-building company and worked long hours to feed and clothe his wife and six children. He didn’t have much time to play ball or talk to us, but when he did, it meant something.

Like the time I skipped school to listen to the Brooklyn Dodgers game at the local poolroom. For some reason he got off early that day and saw me there. He didn’t get mad; he just crooked his finger at me to walk home with him.

I thought I was in for it, but my father didn’t punish me. He just asked some questions. Like what I was doing out of school and in a poolroom.

“I was listening to the Dodger game,” I said. “I want to be a baseball player. I’ll learn more about how to play listening to the Dodgers than sitting in a classroom.”

My daddy wasn’t an educated man, but he and my mama had made up their minds that their children were going to get educated. “You don’t think those fellows playing in the big leagues are dumb, do you?” he asked me.

“No, but they didn’t learn to hit and throw in a classroom,” I answered.

“You can be a baseball player and get an education too,” he continued earnestly.

We had an old car that was parked in our yard, and we sat in that car and talked and talked. I told him I was going to drop out of school when I got a chance to play baseball. He turned around and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Son, I quit school because I had to go to work to make a living. You don’t have to. I put fifty cents on that dresser each morning for you to take to school to buy your lunch and whatever else you need. I only take twenty-five cents to work with me. It’s worth more to me that you get an education than it is for me to eat. So let’s hear no more about dropping out of school.”

You don’t forget this kind of sacrifice by your father. Herbert Aaron was always ready to deny himself something if it would help his family.

When I was 17 I was offered $200 a month to play ball for the all-black Indianapolis Clowns. I could hardly believe it. That kind of money for a game you loved! Only when I promised to continue my education later (which I did) were my parents willing to let me accept the offer.

So one day in May, 1952, my mother, two of my sisters and a brother took me to the Mobile railroad station for the trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, to join the Indianapolis team where they were having spring training. I left with two dollars, two sandwiches and two extra pairs of pants. It was while playing with the Clowns that I encountered this fellow by the name of Jenkins.

Jenkins was a pitcher and I roomed with him when we were traveling. He was tall and bony with big eyes and real short hair.

One night I was about to drink a container of milk when a bug flew into it. Disgusted, I poured it out. Jenkins was watching me.

“Aaron, do you know how many people in this world would have given anything for that milk you poured out?”

“There was a bug in it.”

“That doesn’t matter. Waste is a sin. There are too many starving people in this world for us to waste food like that.”

I would get annoyed with Jenkins and his preaching at times. We would get two dollars a day for meal money and when we stopped to eat, Jenkins would buy a few slices of bologna and a loaf of bread. He’d eat the bologna and half the bread and then sell the other half to another player.

Then one day after he received the two dollars for meal money, I saw him put one dollar in an envelope and seal it.

“What are you doing that for?”

“Mailing it to my wife,” he said. “I send her half my meal money every day.”

You know, I’ve never forgotten that tall, bony, unselfish guy. And I’ll think of him at some fancy banquet with all the food going to waste. Or when I’m telling my own kids not to be wasteful. Jenkins, like my father, had that rare quality of self-sacrifice.

I guess if I had real hero-worship for anyone, it would be for Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I was about 14 when he became the first black to play in the big leagues. I read everything I could find about him.

What fascinated me so much was that Jackie was an emotional, explosive kind of ballplayer. Yet during that crucial first year in the big leagues, he didn’t lose his temper in spite of a steady barrage of insults from fans and other players.

How did he keep control? I learned later that he prayed a lot for help. And he also had a sense of destiny about what he was doing, so much so that he felt God’s presence with him. He learned to put aside his pride and quick temper for the bigger thing he was doing.

Jackie’s example helped me when I faced a similar situation while playing with Jacksonville, Florida, in the Southern Association back in 1953. Blacks had never played in this league before. Three of us—Horace Garner, Felix Mantilla and myself—were the ones to break the color line.

I’m not the crusader-type, and there were times, frankly, when I wanted out. Like those bus trips from the ball park after each game on the road. The white players were left at the hotel while Horace, Felix and I were taken to a private home.

The best way to lick this racial thing is to play well. Play so well that the fans forget your color. And that’s what happened that year. As one sports writer put it, “Aaron led the league in everything but hotel accommodations.”

You learn a kind of acceptance in a situation like this. You set aside the thing that bugs you so that you can get on with doing what you know you’re supposed to do. I lost my temper a couple of times last spring when some fans heckled me from the stands. Then I’d remember Jackie and what he accomplished with his self-control, and the fact that there will always be people who resent you if you try to climb too high.

I’m not trying to preach a sermon with these stories, but they do add up to something basic which I think has enabled me to play baseball year after year now for 21 years. Like my parents—and Jenkins—and Jackie Robinson and others, I’m learning to do without something I want at the moment—like certain foods, drink and other temptations—to achieve the bigger thing ahead that is really right for me to want.

Certain parts of spring training in recent years have been agony and a punishment that I would have liked to skip. But at my age I have to discipline my body to keep on playing. The home runs keep coming only if my body is fit.

I also know this: I need to depend on Someone who is bigger, stronger and wiser than I am. I don’t do it on my own. God is my strength. He gave me a good body and some talent and the freedom to develop it. He helps me when things go wrong. He forgives me when I fall on my face. He lights the way.

The Lord willing, I’ll set a new home-run record. If I don’t, that’s okay too. I’ve had a wonderful time in baseball and have enough great memories to last two lifetimes. I have been blessed.

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