Classic Chronicles

"Nobody could have predicted that a borrowed quarter for french fries at a snack counter would eventually become one of the sweetest origin stories in Hollywood, but that is exactly how Howie Mandel and Terry Mandel found each other. It was at a local YMCA in Toronto, Canada, and both of them were around twelve years old when a young, broke, slightly awkward boy turned to the girl standing next to him in line and asked if she could lend him a little money because he was short for his order. Terry handed over the change without a second thought, and that small, unremarkable act of kindness quietly set the rest of their lives in motion. Howie has retold this story for decades with the same signature smile, always joking that he borrowed that money and has been paying her back ever since. Years later, when they were teenagers at William Lyon Mackenzie Collegiate Institute in Toronto, that childhood friendship finally blossomed into something deeper. Their very first date was nearly their last, because Howie drove Terry to the movies in his mother's Cutlass Supreme, and the car hit an ice patch and teetered on its side before landing back on four wheels. Terry, who already knew Howie was a habitual prankster, assumed he had done it on purpose. She laughed. He panicked. They went to the movie. And then they never really stopped seeing each other after that. They married in the spring of 1980, raised three children together, became grandparents together, and have now shared more than four decades of life, laughter, challenges and unconditional love. All of it traces back to a snack line, a missing quarter, and a girl with a generous heart who had no idea she was handing change to the person she would spend her entire life with. Some love stories begin dramatically. This one began with french fries, and somehow that makes it even more perfect."

"Most people know that Barack Obama became the first African American president of the United States in January of 2009, but fewer people know about the other time he made history first, nearly two decades earlier, in a quieter room with no cameras and no crowd. In the early months of 1990, Obama, then twenty-eight years old and a second-year student at Harvard Law School, was elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review in its then one-hundred-and-two-year history. The Law Review is considered the most prestigious student position at the entire institution, and before Obama, every single face in the row of formal portraits hanging on the wall of its offices was white. Obama himself stood and looked at those photographs in silence the day after his election, taking in what that wall represented and what it now meant that his face would eventually join it. The news traveled fast, and a New York Times reporter reached him for a quote. His answer was vintage Obama, even at twenty-eight: he said that the fact of his election showed real progress, but warned that stories like his should never be used to suggest that everything was already fine, because for every one of him, there were hundreds of equally talented young Black students who never got the chance. He then turned down every prestigious law firm that came calling, every Supreme Court clerkship offer that was essentially handed to him, and went back to Chicago to work as a community organizer and civil rights attorney. Every door in the world opened for him after Harvard, and he walked back through the one that led to the people he started with. That quiet decision, made when he was still young and unknown, tells you everything about who he was long before the world was watching."