The Thrifty Retiree, 7211 Jewel Lake Road, Anchorage, AK (2026)

10/28/2026

For a year and a half, the fastest way to send a letter across America was on the back of a galloping horse.

In 1860, California was booming. The Gold Rush had brought hundreds of thousands of people west. Families had settled in Utah and Oregon. But the mail was painfully slow. A letter from the East could take weeks or even months to reach the Pacific Coast.

Three businessmen, William Russell, Alexander Majors and William Waddell, had a bold idea. What if they set up a chain of stations across the frontier, from Missouri to California, and passed the mail from rider to rider, horse to horse, day and night, without stopping?

They called it the Pony Express.

In March 1860, an ad ran in a Sacramento newspaper looking for "ten or a dozen men, familiar with the management of horses." The pay was $50 a month, with meals and lodging included. That was good money at the time.

On April 3, 1860, the first riders set off. One rode west from St. Joseph, Missouri. Another rode east from Sacramento, California.

The route was more than 1,800 miles long. It crossed open prairie, deserts, rivers and the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains. Riders galloped from one station to the next, jumped onto a fresh horse and kept going, then handed the mail bag to the next rider. They rode through heat, snow, storms and darkness.

A letter that used to take weeks could now make the journey in about 10 days. It felt like a miracle.

But even as the riders were racing across the West, another invention was catching up with them. In June 1860, only about ten weeks after the Pony Express began, Congress approved money to build a telegraph line all the way across the country.

Workers strung wire from pole to pole, moving closer every month. Messages could fly through that wire in minutes.

On October 26, 1861, the telegraph finally connected San Francisco with New York City. That same day, the Pony Express officially came to an end. The last letters finished their journey in November.

It had lasted only about 18 months.

Today, most of the original trail has disappeared. Only a few short stretches survive in Utah and California, along with ruins of some of the old stations.

But the Pony Express never really left the American imagination. For more than 160 years, the image of a lone rider galloping across the plains with a mail bag has stood for courage, speed and the spirit of the Old West.

It was over almost as soon as it began. But some legends only need a year and a half.

10/28/2026

Everybody knows the four faces on the mountain. Very few people know about the men who dangled from steel cables to carve them.

High in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum had a gigantic dream: to carve the faces of four American presidents into a granite mountain. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Each face would be about 60 feet tall, as tall as a six-story building.

Work began in 1927. Two years later, the Great Depression hit. Across America, millions of people lost their jobs. But in the hills around Mount Rushmore, men lined up to work on the mountain. For many local miners and ranch hands, it was the only work they could find, and they were grateful for every paycheck.

Over the years, about 400 men worked on the mountain. Very few of them were trained sculptors. Most were miners, farmers and local workers who learned on the job.

The work was dangerous. Every morning, the men climbed hundreds of stairs to the top of the mountain. Then they were strapped into little leather seats called bosun's chairs and lowered over the edge of a 500-foot cliff on steel cables. Up at the top, winch operators turned the cables by hand to raise and lower them. Young "call boys" sat at the edge of the cliff, shouting instructions back and forth so the workers didn't get dropped too far.

Most of the mountain wasn't carved with chisels. It was blasted. About 90 percent of the rock was removed with dynamite. Specially trained powdermen learned exactly how much explosive to use to remove just the right amount of stone, sometimes within a few inches of where a nose or an eye would be.

When they got close to the final surface, the men switched to jackhammers. They drilled rows of holes close together, a method called honeycombing, and broke away the last few inches of granite. Then they smoothed the faces by hand.

They worked through blazing summer heat and bitter winter wind. They carved Washington's eyes, Jefferson's hair, Roosevelt's glasses and Lincoln's beard, one small piece at a time.

And through 14 years of dynamite, cables and cliffs, not a single worker died.

Gutzon Borglum didn't live to see his mountain finished. He died in March 1941. His son, Lincoln Borglum, took over and completed the work later that year.

Today, millions of people visit Mount Rushmore every year. They look up at the presidents.

But the next time you see those famous faces, remember the miners and ranch hands who hung from that cliff during the hardest years in American history, and made it happen with their own hands.

10/28/2026

During the hardest years of the Great Depression, a little girl with 56 curls made America smile. What most people forget is what she did after she grew up.

Shirley Temple was born on April 23, 1928, in Santa Monica, California. Her mother signed her up for dance lessons when she was just three years old. Before long, she was in the movies.

In 1934, Fox made a film just for her called Bright Eyes. In it, she sang "On the Good Ship Lollipop," and audiences went wild. Some people even said that little girl saved the struggling movie studio from going broke.

America was in the middle of the Great Depression. Families had lost jobs, farms and savings. But for a few cents, they could sit in a dark movie theater and watch a smiling little girl sing and dance and forget their troubles for an hour.

In 1935, when she was just six years old, she received a special Academy Award for her contribution to movies the year before. From 1935 through 1938, Shirley Temple was the number one box office star in Hollywood. Not the number one child star. The number one star, period.

Mothers curled their daughters' hair to look like hers. Shirley Temple dolls sold everywhere.

But children grow up, and Hollywood wasn't sure what to do with a teenage Shirley. Her last movie came out in 1949. She was 21. In 1950, she married a businessman named Charles Black, and she stepped away from acting for good.

Most child stars fade away after that. Shirley Temple Black did something completely different.

She became interested in public service. In 1969, she became a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. In 1974, she was named U.S. Ambassador to Ghana, in West Africa. Two years later, she became the White House Chief of Protocol for President Gerald Ford, in charge of welcoming foreign leaders to the United States.

In 1972, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. At a time when many people wouldn't even say the word out loud, she spoke about it publicly. She was one of the first famous women in America to do so, and her honesty encouraged countless other women to get checked.

Then, in 1989, she was named U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. She arrived just as the country was going through enormous change, and she was there to witness history as it unfolded. She served until 1992.

Shirley Temple Black died on February 10, 2014, at her home in Woodside, California. She was 85.

She lifted the spirits of a struggling nation as a little girl. Then she spent her grown-up years serving that same nation around the world.

Some people peak early. She just kept going.

10/28/2026

She beat him in a shooting match. He married her anyway, and spent the rest of his life cheering for her from the side of the stage.

Born Phoebe Ann Moses in Darke County, Ohio, she learned to shoot as a young girl to help feed her family, and her skill paid off the mortgage on her mother's house.

10/27/2026

Most people think it's too late to start something new at 65. Laura Ingalls Wilder had only just begun.

She was born on February 7, 1867, in a log cabin near Pepin, Wisconsin, in an area called the Big Woods. Her family was always on the move. Her father, Charles, loaded the family into a covered wagon again and again, chasing a better life in Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa and finally the Dakota Territory, where they settled in the little town of De Smet in 1879.

Laura grew up fast. She was only 15 when she took her first job as a schoolteacher, two months before her 16th birthday.

On August 25, 1885, she married a young farmer named Almanzo Wilder. Their daughter, Rose, was born the next year.

The years that followed were hard. Almanzo became very sick with diphtheria and was left partly paralyzed. A fire burned down their home. Their baby son lived only 12 days. Drought ruined their crops year after year, and the couple fell deep into debt.

In 1894, they packed up and moved to Mansfield, Missouri, and started over on a rocky piece of land they called Rocky Ridge Farm. Slowly, through hard work, they built it into a working farm with chickens, cows and fruit trees.

In 1911, Laura was asked to write an article for a farm newspaper called the Missouri Ruralist. She ended up writing a regular column for years.

Then, when she was in her early 60s, she sat down and wrote the story of her own childhood: the covered wagons, the prairie, the blizzards, her Pa's fiddle. She called it Pioneer Girl. Publishers turned it down.

She didn't give up. With help from her daughter Rose, who had become a writer herself, Laura reworked her memories into stories for children.

In 1932, when she was about 65 years old, her first book was published. It was called Little House in the Big Woods.

Children loved it. So she kept writing. Over the next 11 years, she published eight books about her life, including Little House on the Prairie and On the Banks of Plum Creek. Five of them were runners-up for the Newbery Medal, one of the highest honors in children's books.

Almanzo died in 1949. Laura lived on at Rocky Ridge Farm for eight more years. She died at home on February 10, 1957, three days after her 90th birthday, and was laid to rest beside him.

Seventeen years later, in 1974, her stories came to television as Little House on the Prairie, and a whole new generation fell in love with the Ingalls family.

She lived through hardship, loss and poverty. And at 65, she turned it all into something beautiful.

It's never too late to tell your story.

10/27/2026

When the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York, she had nowhere to stand. The money for her base simply wasn't there. So ordinary Americans, kids included, dug into their pockets.

The statue was a gift from the people of France. The deal was simple. France would build the giant copper lady, and America would build the stone pedestal she would stand on.

France kept its side of the bargain. In June 1885, the statue arrived in New York Harbor, packed in pieces inside crates.

But America was behind. The pedestal wasn't finished, and the committee in charge still needed somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000, an enormous amount of money at the time. Congress couldn't agree on paying for it. The governor of New York, Grover Cleveland, said the city's money couldn't be used either.

For a while, it looked like Lady Liberty might sit in her boxes for years.

That's when a newspaper publisher named Joseph Pulitzer stepped in. Pulitzer was an immigrant himself. He had come to America from Hungary as a young man with almost nothing, and now he owned a newspaper called the New York World.

On March 16, 1885, he made an appeal to his readers. He didn't want the money to come from a handful of rich men. He believed the statue belonged to the people, and the people should pay for it. "We must raise the money!" he wrote.

And he made them a promise of sorts. Anyone who gave, no matter how little, could see their name printed in his newspaper.

The donations started pouring in. Not big checks from bankers, but nickels and dimes and dollar bills from working people. Pulitzer printed their names, and often the little notes they sent explaining why they gave. Schoolchildren saved their pennies. Families sent what they could spare.

By August 1885, just five months later, more than 120,000 people had given over $100,000. Most of them gave less than a dollar. It was enough to finish the pedestal.

On October 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty was finally dedicated in New York Harbor. The man who presided over the ceremony was Grover Cleveland, by then President of the United States.

For more than a hundred years since, she has welcomed millions of people arriving in America, including many immigrants who came with as little as Joseph Pulitzer once had.

She was a gift from France. But the ground she stands on was a gift from ordinary Americans.

Sometimes the biggest things in history are built one small coin at a time.

10/27/2026

He predicted his own exit, and the sky kept its appointment.

"I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it." Mark Twain

10/26/2026

They weren't scientists. They weren't engineers. They didn't have college degrees. They fixed bicycles. And they taught the world how to fly.

Wilbur and Orville Wright grew up in Dayton, Ohio. When Orville was 7 and Wilbur was 11, their father, Bishop Milton Wright, brought home a little toy helicopter made of paper, bamboo and cork, powered by a rubber band. The boys played with it until it broke, and then they built their own.

Their mother, Susan, was unusual for her time. She had gone to college, and she was good at math and science, and she encouraged her children to build things with their own hands.

As young men, the brothers started a printing business. Then, when the bicycle craze swept America, they opened a bicycle shop in Dayton. Soon they were building their own bikes.

But what they really dreamed about was flying.

By 1900, they had built and tested their first glider. To test their machines, they needed steady wind and soft sand to land on, so they picked a lonely spot on the coast of North Carolina called Kitty Hawk. For the next few years, they traveled back and forth between their bike shop in Ohio and their camp on the dunes, building, testing, crashing and trying again.

Finally, they built a flying machine with an engine and propellers. They called it the Flyer.

On the cold, windy morning of December 17, 1903, Orville climbed onto the Flyer. The engine roared, the machine rolled down a wooden rail and lifted into the air. Wilbur ran along beside it.

The flight lasted 12 seconds. Orville traveled 120 feet. It was shorter than the wingspan of many airplanes today. But for the first time in history, a human being had flown in a powered, controlled airplane.

The brothers took turns and flew three more times that day. The last flight, with Wilbur at the controls, went 859 feet and stayed in the air for 59 seconds.

Then a strong gust of wind flipped the Flyer over and wrecked it. It never flew again. The brothers sent word home to their father and made it back to Dayton in time for Christmas.

They kept working, kept improving their machines, opened a flying school and became famous around the world.

Wilbur died of typhoid fever in May 1912. He was only 45. Orville lived until 1948, long enough to see airplanes crossing oceans.

It all began with two brothers, a bicycle shop and a toy helicopter.

Never let anyone tell you that big dreams belong only to other people.

10/26/2026

It's one of the most famous stories in baseball. Over the years, Hollywood changed it and stretched it. But the heart of it really happened.

In the summer of 1926, an 11-year-old boy from Essex Fells, New Jersey, named Johnny Sylvester was badly hurt in a fall from a horse. By September, he had developed a serious infection, and his doctors were very worried about him.

Johnny loved baseball, and like almost every boy in America, he worshipped Babe Ruth.

That October, the New York Yankees were playing the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. A package arrived for Johnny from St. Louis. Inside were two baseballs, one signed by the Yankees and one signed by the Cardinals. And there was a note from the Babe himself:

"I'll knock a homer for you on Wednesday."

On Wednesday, October 6, 1926, in Game 4 of the World Series, Babe Ruth stepped up to the plate and hit a home run. Then he hit another. Then he hit a third. It was the first time anyone had ever hit three home runs in a single World Series game.

Back in New Jersey, the newspapers began reporting that Johnny was feeling better.

The Yankees ended up losing the series to the Cardinals in seven games. But the story didn't end there. The New York Times reported that Babe Ruth came to visit Johnny at his home in New Jersey. The first thing Johnny said to his hero was, "I'm sorry the Yankees lost the series."

Over the years, the story grew bigger with every telling. Movies moved it to a different year and a different city, and showed Babe Ruth making a promise at a dying boy's bedside. Some people even began to wonder whether any of it was true.

But the note was real. The baseballs were real. And the three home runs were in the record books for everyone to see.

As for Johnny Sylvester, he grew up and got well. He graduated from Princeton University in 1937, served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, and became the president of a company in New York. He lived a long, full life and died in 1990, at the age of 74.

Babe Ruth was the biggest star in America. He didn't have to answer a letter from a sick little boy in New Jersey.

He did it anyway, and then he went out and hit three.

10/26/2026

The most famous toy in the world started with a president saying no.

After the cartoon ran, Morris and Rose Michtom asked President Roosevelt for permission to use his name. He said yes, and their little stuffed bear became so popular that they started a whole toy company.