WONDERFUL PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN
Gladys with a small friend
Gladys Aylward
...our babysitting saint when I was aged three.
Gladys rescued over 100 refugee orphan children who were under her care and helped them escape the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. She led the children over two treacherous mountain ranges in the North of China. In 1958, this adventure was turned into a movie called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness starring Ingrid Bergman.
Click Here for the full story...
Robert Wilder
Founder of the Student Volunteer Movement, world wide traveler and missionary. My grandfather. I met him only once, at age 5, in his retirement years in Norway. He was first cousin to Almanzo Wilder of "Little House on the Prairie".
Eric Liddell
I knew him in the Japanese Internment Camp. Hero of the Movie “Chariots of Fire” and of the new movie to be released in 2016, “The Last Race.” He was "Uncle Eric" to us and cared for all us kids in the camp.
Dame Cicely Saunders
Founder of the British Hospice movement. We first met at Willesleigh, Devon. She was a nurse with a vision to help the dying. She became a doctor and founded St. Christopher’s Hospice, the first hospice in the UK. She was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth for her great contributions to nursing and to the founding of the hospice movement.
Margery Drake
Aunt Margery was engaged to Lawrence of Arabia’s brother Robert. What a saint! Gracious, loving, prayerful. I was privileged to be her nephew.
Richard Jolly
Best friend, explorer, member of both Alpine expeditions, brilliant economist, deputy director of UNICEF and knighted by the Queen.
Robert Noyce
Robert was the conductor of our Palo Alto Madrigal Singers, the inventor of the integrated circuit, co-inventor of the microprocessor, and founder of Intel Semiconductor. He was a good family friend during those early Silicon Valley days.
William Hewlett
Compassionate founder of Hewlett-Packard Corp. setting the unique human touch of the company, the tone which made H-P great."Everyone matters! Everyone can make a unique contribution." We shared a love for art and how to display it.
Luci Shaw
Luci and I had both lost our spouses through cancer, and we met on a blind date in Vancouver, Canada. Her poetry is loved around the world, all ten volumes and more coming. We celebrated our twenty fifth anniversary in January 2016.
Madeleine L’Engle:
Author of “A wrinkle in Time” and many other books. I met her through Luci and we had memorable times in New York and Britain, touring and participating in C.S.Lewis conferences at Oxford and Cambridge. I was privileged to handle her wheel chair.
Princess Grace of Monaco, whom I met in 1959 in planning the Hannibal expedition.
Grace Kelly
Princess Grace was eager to help the World Refugee Year link up with our Alpine Hannibal Expedition in 1959. I visited her in Monaco as she wished to discuss her participation in the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the launching of expedition. We met at the Palace that February so I was able to tell her the complete story.
She was beautiful in the movies, but was even more gracious, kind, and beautiful, in person.
Click here for the full story of my meeting with Princess Grace