I haven’t actually seen “Cinderella Man” yet, the movie some are calling the best of the year. This is the saga of prizefighter James Braddock and his struggle to provide for his family during the Great Depression using his fists and a courage that refused to quit. Anyone who sits through the previews several times, as I have now done, pretty much knows the story. And interestingly, it’s all history. Almost all.

Braddock was born in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. He fought his way out of poverty and and eventually challenged for the light heavyweight championship of the world, a fight he lost. Apparently an average boxer–he lost 20 times–he finally took a job on the New Jersey docks to support his wife and three children. Then he got a lucky break.

One night, on a boxing card that featured heavyweight champion Primo Carnera fighting challenger Max Baer, Braddock went against someone named Corn Griffin and knocked him out. Just a year later, after upsetting two more contenders, Braddock was fighting Max Baer, the reigning heavyweight champion of the world.

Peter Finney, New Orleans’ own champion sports columnist for nearly half a century, writes, “Here he was, a hopeless underdog who had lost 20 times on the roller-coaster journey, fighting a guy whose fists had been responsible for the death of two opponents.” Then he adds: “No Hollywood hokum. It was all true.”

“And there they were,” he continues, “on June 13, 1935, Braddock and Baer fighting for the title, as some of Braddock’s faithful, listening to the broadcast, prayed for the Irishman’s safety inside a Jersey church.”

According to the movie, the two boxers went at it tooth and nail for 15 hard rounds. Directed by Ron Howard–how far he has come from Mayberry–the men pummeled each other with so many devastating blows and knockout punches, one wonders how anyone could endure such pain and live to tell it. That’s what columnist Finney wondered. And he wondered how sportswriters of the time had covered such a monumental bout.

So, Finney did something I admire mightily. He dug up the newspapers records of the original fight to see how ringside writers described this vicious pounding that surely must have left both men as invalids.

Ah, what he found out.

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What started this was something I heard on “All Things Considered” the other evening. One of their reporters had attended the funeral of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq and buried in Colorado Springs. His was quite a story–raised by his mother along with several younger siblings, a high school dropout who went back and graduated later, a prankster who just wanted to have fun, a kid who loved hunting wild animals in the mountains. In high school, he got in trouble in shop class when a buddy went to the bathroom and he welded the door shut. And there was that time he stole a car and rode around town for a couple of hours. Just having fun. He got his act together, they said, and joined the military where he used his sharpshooting skills to become a sniper with our forces in Iraq. A roadside bomb ended his life a few days ago.

Memorial Day morning some boys were having fun in my neighborhood, and it cost them dearly. The newspaper says at 3:30 am, three sixteen-year-old friends abandoned a car they had stolen in order to take a beautiful new pickup truck from a fellow’s driveway. The owner heard a noise, looked out the window and saw the truck pulling out, and called the police. Within minutes, a cop spotted the bright red expensive pickup and a chase ensued. Up and down Causeway Boulevard they went, jumping medians and doubling back. The boys bursted through a blockade and almost hit an officer. Finally, they ended up two blocks from my house in the New Orleans suburb of River Ridge where they made the worst mistake of a morning filled with them. As a police officer approached the truck, the young driver tried to run him over. Bad decision. Later, the investigators picked up over 100 spent shells from the grass surrounding that bullet-ridden truck. The driver was dead and his two passengers were headed to the hospital and later to jail. “Self-defense,” said the sheriff, and who can argue. A three ton truck qualifies as a deadly weapon by any standard.

What is it about adolescents and their fun?

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My grandchildren still do not understand why I left their church. Since Grant is 10 and the twins, Abby and Erin, are 8, I am the only pastor they have ever known. Yet, a year ago, at the age of 64, I resigned the pastorate of the First Baptist Church of Kenner, Louisiana, to become Director of Missions for all the Southern Baptist churches of metro New Orleans. I still live in the same house and have even retained my church membership at Kenner. But these days I’m preaching all over, in all kinds of churches–big and small, formal and informal, in the city and on the bayou. And that’s what puzzles my grandchildren.

Yesterday Erin asked my wife, “If Grandpa can still preach, why did he leave our church?”

Margaret went for the simple answer: “Because God told him to.”

Erin countered, “Couldn’t he have said ‘no’?”

Good question. Could I have turned God down? Was this one of those “okay if you do, but all right if you don’t” issues?

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Thursday, May 5, the National Day of Prayer, I drove across town to attend the noon gathering near the Kenner, Louisiana, City Hall. The lovely little park sports a pavilion large enough for a hundred people and we fairly filled it up. The temperature hovered in the low 70s, the humidity was low, and a breeze stirred the lovely trees just beyond the memorial flag display. I could have stayed a week.

An interfaith women’s group has been assigned responsibility for the annual prayer observance, and they did an excellent job. Only two or three of us knew that the little white-haired lady on the second row, Josie Lanzetta, actually started these prayer observances nearly 15 years ago. She took it upon herself to call the mayor’s office and ask if we could use the park and the pavilion for the prayer service. Sometimes a dozen of us would meet, and once or twice a school-bus load of children. In time, the idea caught on and now others have taken the leadership. Miss Josie is so kind and unassuming, she simply shows up as a participant and would never in a hundred years tell that she originated these observances in Kenner.

Even though the program exceeded the noon hour, each speaker/pray-er was outstanding and brought a special contribution to the proceedings. These included the mayor, a judge, several ministers, a medical doctor, a local television personality, and a deacon from the Hispanic Apostolate Church. I wanted you to know about this last one, the deacon.

Deacon Luis Campuzano is perhaps sixty years old. He said, “I am from Honduras. Had you told me 20 years ago I would someday be addressing this group of community leaders, I would not have believed it.” Then he told us about his mother.

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Funny how those little decisions you make with hardly a thought have a way of redirecting the rest of your life.

Best friend J. L. Rice and I were coming up on our junior year at Winston County High School in Double Springs, Alabama, and thought of something that might be fun. We had come through the science fair together and loved to kid around, imitating Don Knotts on the old Steve Allen program (with a wide-eyed, “Nooo!”–okay, you had to have been there), when one of us had a bright idea. We would take short-hand the following year.

Gregg Shorthand was taught in almost every high school in the land back then, always by the “business” teacher, the lady who instructed in typing and office skills. Shorthand class was intended to prepare future secretaries to earn a living, and thus no one but girls enrolled. J. L. and I became the only boys in the school’s history–before or since–to sign up. We took the class for two solid years, made excellent grades, and loved every day of it.

Had you asked, we would have told you we were preparing for college. Neither of us knew anything about college, but we had always imagined there would be lots of lectures which necessitated note-taking. J. L. went to work up north after high school and never used his shorthand, whereas I found out pretty quickly that you don’t need shorthand for college classes.

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Jonas Salk was in the news a few weeks ago, fifty years to the day after announcing his vaccine which halted the epidemic of polio in its tracks. How well I can recall the dreadful plague known officially as infantile paralysis. Every time you turned around, you heard of another precious child being afflicted. “Don’t swim in that pond,” we would hear. Our parents were certain that the disease was caught or spread through infected swimming pools. As a child in the 1940s, I joined with others from our school as we filled the little March of Dimes cards with coins to help fight polio. And we breathed a great sigh of relief when Salk’s announcement was made.

Now it comes to light that Dr. Salk was only the point man of a vast team of researchers and scientists. While that is not particularly surprising, what is unusual is that none of them got any credit for their part in the discovery and perfecting of this vaccine. A half century later, those researchers and their families are still hurting over the slight. Dr. Salk is long dead, but his son now apologizes for the glaring oversight.

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On the plane returning to New Orleans from Atlanta, I found myself seated beside a Catholic priest making an overnight trip to my city to speak at a local church. We fell into a conversation about our respective ministries in a brief attempt to understand each other better. At one point the priest said, “What’s it like being a Baptist in New Orleans?”

While I was formulating an answer, the lady in front of us–we had no idea she was listening–turned around and said loudly, “I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like being a Catholic in Atlanta!” A dozen passengers around us, also tuning in, erupted in laughter.

Outnumbered is the point. Maybe overwhelmed sometimes. And, if we’re not careful, overlooked.

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Five years into our marriage, Margaret and I had a honeymoon. That’s what happens when you are a) poor and b) in seminary all the time, trying to earn your credentials as a pastor.

Anyway, I was just graduating from seminary and pastoring a little church on a bayou some 25 miles west of New Orleans and we decided the time had come for a real vacation. We did something that was so unlike us that it seems a little foolhardy now and I wonder that we did it at all. We hired a lady to come in and stay with our two small boys for the week. (Okay, it wasn’t quite that scary. Leola was a lovely Black lady who helped Margaret with the housekeeping one day a week and our boys adored her.)

We were driving a 1964 red Ford Falcon with no air conditioning, but hey, it was 1967 and that’s how most people lived. And so we went to Texas.

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Have you ever fainted? I did once, in a cafeteria. I had taken my sons and daughter-in-law to dinner while my wife was out of town. Standing in the line, I began to feel queasy. By the time we started selecting dishes, all I could think of eating–and holding down–was jello. At the table, I asked the waitress if they had a couch where I could lie down. They didn’t. The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back under the table being attended to by two physicians who had been dining at the next table. Later, my son Marty teased, “Dad, if we had gone to Taco Bell, there wouldn’t have been no doctors at the next table!”

I was doing a wedding once where the bride fainted. At first, I thought she was just swooning against her beloved father, but then she dissolved into a pile at the groom’s feet. The best man carried her to the church parlor and laid her out on the carpet and someone broke a capsule of smelling salts. She opened her eyes and said, “Oh, mother, I’ve embarrassed you in front of all your friends.” Mom said, “Hush.” I asked if she wanted to cut short any of the wedding material. She said, “No, not after all the planning we’ve done. But talk fast.”

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Among the people in my past I give thanks for most is the small parade of friends who loved me enough to confront me about some area that needed my serious attention.

As a freshman at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, two-thirds of a lifetime ago, I was approached by classmate Bob Cornell who asked if I would like to help him a couple of afternoons washing windows at the president’s home. I casually answered, “Sure,” and walked with him the next afternoon across the highway to the president’s mansion where we cleaned windows in preparation for an open house the school’s first lady had scheduled. Now, I grew up on the farm and certainly knew what hard work was, but washing windows was not the way I wanted to spend my autumn afternoons. So, the next day, I just simply did not show up, and thought nothing about it.

“Mrs. Bertrand wants to see you,” Bob said to me that evening in the cafeteria. “Me? Why?” I said, without a clue. “She says you had made a commitment to help me wash windows and you let us down.” I laughed and shrugged it off. To my way of thinking, I had agreed to help my friend wash windows that one afternoon, but I did not sign on for anything more, and I surely made no commitment to the president’s wife. I put it out of my mind.

A couple of days later, the hall phone in our dormitory rang and someone yelled my name. It was Mrs. Bertrand. “Are you busy?” she asked. “I’ll be by in five minutes. Meet me in front of your dorm.”

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