Johnny, a 19 year old college boy returned from a walk one day with an abandoned baby raccoon. He didn’t want to turn it back out to die, so they took it to a vet to have it checked out, and they found why his mother abandoned it. The baby raccoon was blind.
Johnny named the raccoon Kitty, and it became part of the family. But this story isn’t about Kitty, it’s about the father Malcolm, Malcolm Stamper. Malcolm retired from the aerospace industry, where he worked for Boeing and was the overseer of 50,000 employees working in the biggest factory in the world.
But now Malcolm had another idea. He wanted to start a book publishing company, publishing children’s books. He called his company, “Story Tellers Ink.” He had one employee and that was his daughter, Mary Lou. His idea was not only to teach children to read but teach them kindness at the same time. He would publish books like Black Beauty, and You he Lost and Found Puppy. Lessons learned from Kitty the raccoon, and Charlie The crow.
Tallking with law officers, Malcolm found that a high percentage of criminals got their start by being cruel to animals. He would publish books about being kind to animals. He was able to solicit backing from General Motors, Walmart, and other big businesses and made a successful company.
Malcolm had headed the project of building the Boeing 747. From start to finish it took 28 months. During that time Malcolm never missed a day of work. After 3 years he finally took Christmas off which seems strange because he had six children. There was no factory big enough, so they built their own factory with a building covering 44 acres or 74 football fields, north of Seattle, Washington.
The first plane rolled off of the assembly line September 30, 1968. It was ground tested for 3 months and the first flight was February 9th, 1969. The plane was used until 2023, and has now been taken over by the Airbus which is made in Europe. The 747 could carry 660 passengers. One of the interesting facts is they used Boeing employees to test evacuation procedures. They could evacuate the plane in two and a half minutes but they always had injuries to some of the passengers.
The FAA requires that all planes must be able to evacuate in 90 seconds. They finally achieved this but it was difficult because the upper story, of the plane stood so high. Back to the books. It is said that a high percentage of the population cannot read at a 6th grade level. Dolly Parton started a program which is still going. She will send a book every month, to a child from birth to age 5. This has been an excellent program and all you have to do is sign up for it.
Years ago we had a beautiful cat, and it simply disappeared. There was a boy the age of our kids, that lived a mile out of Grabill. One of our boys friends said he had seen the boy take our cat. I hustled out to his house and he showed me where he buried the cat. The boy has been in trouble all of his life and I’m not sure what happened to him.
PS… I wrote this recently and had never heard of Dolly Parton’s charity. Good to know there is a program in Allen County Indiana, library.
—James Neuhouser
