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I know a
guy named Albert Lexie, and for my money Albert is the
heart and soul of America. He dropped out of school
when he was fifteen and took up shoeshining for a
living. That was his calling. Albert's a
little different than the rest of us. He actually
listens when he asks how you're doing. You give him
an answer. He listens. So, right there, he's
different.
One
Sunday afternoon, Albert was at home watching a telethon
on Pittsburgh television, to benefit the children's
hospital there. And, watching, he fell in love with
a little girl he saw on the telethon and with the thought
of how he might help her, on Monday morning he went to his
bank and withdrew every penny he had in savings.
Eight hundred bucks, give or take a couple pennies.
Albert Lexie took that money and went down to the hospital
and gave them every last cent. Hospital
administrators found out about this, and a little bit
about Albert Lexie, and they reached out to him and asked
him to come shine shoes at their hospital. To which
Albert responded, "Look, I'm pretty busy. I can
give you two days a week." Which is just what
he's done--for the last twenty years. He hops a bus
for the half-hour trip to the hospital, straps on his tool
box, which weighs about thirty pounds.
He's got
all his stuff in there. His brushes, his polish, and
his special "magic" sauce that gives his
customers that extra shine. He goes from doctor's
office to doctor's office, nurse's station to nurse's
station.
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Spend any kind of time in that hospital on
Tuesdays and Thursdays when Albert's working and you'll
see doctors and nurses traipsing around without their
shoes on. He's become a fixture--an oasis for folks
desperate to talk, to get their minds off whatever else it
is that brought them to the hospital in the first place.
He
charges three bucks for a pair of shoes, and he
slips that money into his right-hand pocket because
that's what he lives on, but he takes his tip money
and slips that into his left-hand pocket, because
that's what he means to donate back to the
hospital. Over the years, he's collected more
than $100,000 in tip money, and he's used that money
to help parents cover their bills and other
attendant costs associated with their children's
long-term care. He was voted Pittsburgh's
"Philanthropist of the Year" in 2000, and
it was about time. And, it was about
leadership.
Guys
like Albert Lexie are the heart and soul of this
nation. They move America every bit as
meaningfully as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald
Reagan. And it doesn't end there. In our
communities--big and small, rich and poor--we
struggle with education. The knee-jerk
response is that we're not giving our public school
children what it takes to meet the challenges of
today, and in many schools that's unfortunately the
case. Not so at the Frederick Douglass
Academy, a small public school in Harlem. The
school was shut down in the late 1980's due to
excessive violence, but it has reopened in the
middle 1990's with renewed promise. It was
still located across the street from a burned-out
crack house, but it was now being run by folks with
the vision to look past their surroundings.
Now, the kids don't go to school in their Britney
Spears t-shirts, or in baggy pants
"sacked" halfway down to their
knees. There's a dress code, and there's no
wising off to the teacher. Students say,
"Yes, ma'am" and "No,
sir." There are no study halls or free
periods or gut classes that encourage students to
skate by on little effort. If you do well on
trigonometry, you get kicked up to advanced
trigonometry. They've got rules, and
expectations, and if you mean to stay there you've
got to meet them all.
And
guess what? The students are thriving.
They've gone from wondering where they're going to
get their next meal to wondering where they're going
to go to college. The first graduating class
in 2001, there were 105 graduates. Out of that
group, 104 went on to college. The one student
who didn't go to college became a Navy SEAL.
In 2002, there were 120 graduates and each and every
one of them went to college. And in 2003, they
were 115 for 115--netting over $5 million in
scholarships. Not bad for a bunch of
administrators and teachers dedicated to
old-fashioned values like hard work and teamwork and
discipline. Once again, for good measure,
that's leadership.
Okay,
so what does all this have to do with the rest of
us? We're not Jesse Owens or Davis Love
III. We're not Albert Lexie or the
administrators at the Frederick Douglass
Academy. So what about us? Where is our
shared ability to recognize and harness this type of
leadership in our own communities, in
ourselves? Where is our responsibility to
stand tall in the face of these low
expectations? For me, the answer comes in a
book written almost two thousand years ago:
St. Augustine's Confessions. It's a
tough little book, written in the fifth century, but
I take it with me wherever I go. It's got a
powerful message that I believe resonates
here. St. Augustine maintains that each and
every one of us has a special gift, and that it
falls to each and every one of us to unwrap those
gifts and share them with the rest of the
world. I like that image a whole lot, because
I look at gifts the like I look at stars. have
you ever seen an ugly star? I never
have. They're all just magnificent. You
look through the telescope and see that some of them
flame brightly in the night sky and some are so far
off as to be nearly unrecognizable. And every
last one seems just about as special and magnificent
as a thing can be, but none of them are quite the
same. That, to me, is a true gift. We
find them in the heavens, and we find them here on
earth. We find them in our friends and family,
and we find them in ourselves. And,
significantly, we find them in our leaders.
Now,
here's what I know, as sure as I set my pen to
paper: Discover your own gifts and you will
give your life new meaning. Find the courage
to share those gifts with the rest of us and you
will give all our lives new meaning. I can't
tell you what your gifts are, just as you can't
pinpoint mine, but I can tell you they lie in
wait. Oh, they're out there, waiting for you
to come upon them and put them to good use, and it
is in the putting to good use of our unique gifts
that we will rediscover our health and strength as a
nation. After all, we are all stars, in our
own way. We all shine uniquely. We all
share the power to grow and change and re-imagine
the world around. Find your gift and you will
find your way. Join a team. Become a
part of something bigger than yourself. Throw
in with all of the other stars in your community and
help to form a giant constellation, built together
on the back of courage and faith and
determination. And, above all,
leadership. Take charge. If you see
something happening that sets you off, rise up and
do something about it.
Stand
for something.
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