J.C. Ponder was a lieutenant junior grade paymaster.

Known as the Bloody Z, it was a cargo ship that delivered equipment and other goods to the war zone and was capable of producing 80,000 gallons of fresh water. Perhaps more importantly, the ship carried men to repair ships damaged in the South Pacific during World War II.

McClure and Ponder were onboard the Zaniah in October 1944 for the invasion of Letye in the Philippines, which was led by General Douglas MacArthur.  The ship then sailed for Okinawa. What would become the bloodiest battle of the war began on April 1, 1945 – Easter Sunday and April Fools Day. It lasted 82 days.

It was the battle of more – more ships, more bombs, more troops, more guns, more deaths. In all, 38,000 Americans died, 107,000 Japanese and Okinawans, 100,000 Okinawan civilians.

Shortly after the campaign ended, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

The war ended.

McClure and Ponder ultimately returned home, to different lives.

McClure came to Greenville and founded Morningside Baptist Church on Pelham Road.

Ponder went to work for R.J. Reynolds and then Burlington Industries.

McClure and his wife Frances had five children. He retired from the pastorate after 17 years to establish Christian radio stations all over the country.

Ponder didn’t marry for many years. Then he met and married Elizabeth Fisher, an elementary school teacher. They never had children.

McClure and Ponder had no contact with each other in all those years.

Then 1985, in Hickory, N.C., at a reunion for sailors who served on the Bloody Z, they met again.

They realized they lived a few miles apart, McClure in Simpsonville; Ponder in Greer. McClure had lived in the Greenville area since the 1940s, Ponder moved here in 1979.

They kept in touch after that, trading war stories and memories.

Then about six months ago, McClure and his daughter Carolyn Robinson were at a funeral. McClure pulled her over and said, “This is my buddy. We served on the same ship.”

Robinson was astonished. The coincidence of these two men, now in their 80s, living all these years in the same town without knowing it was amazing to her. Another astonishing fact was Ponder was married to Robinson’s third grade teacher.

Robinson asked Ponder if he had his war medals.

“No, ma’am, I don’t,” he said.

She had gotten her father’s as a father’s day present some years before so she was familiar with the government red tape and paperwork and helped Ponder apply to the Department of Defense.

She also got him a seat on the same Honor Flight her father was to go on. Honor Flights take WWII veterans to Washington, D.C., for a day to see the WWII Memorial, an honor many would not have otherwise.

It is a race against time. The youngest veteran of the war would be 80 now and the Veteran’s Administration says about 740 WWII veterans die every day. Of 16 million who served, about 1.7 million are still living.

The two took the flight on Sept. 20.

They saw the Memorial. They posed for pictures in front of the statue of Iwo Jima.

“It was the best day of my life,” Ponder said.

When McClure, 85, and Ponder, 88, came off the plane at Greenville Spartanburg International Airport that night, Robinson was waiting.

And so were Ponder’s service medals. Robinson had received them, gotten them framed in a shadow box and presented them to him at the airport.

The next day he called and asked how much he owed her for the framing.

She said, “Nothing, you’ve already paid me.”

She runs track, volunteers at Meals on Wheels and has a smile so big it makes you think there can be nothing wrong in the world.

This past week, that smile was the most obvious thing about her.

That’s because Natalie was voted by her peers to this year’s homecoming court, an honor bestowed to five seniors, and three in each of the younger grades.

It’s commonplace in most schools for the homecoming court and especially the queen to be the most popular, prettiest girls.

And that’s what the senior class at Riverside saw in Natalie, who has Down syndrome.

“She’s small, cute and bubbly,” said her teacher Karen Carnes, who nominated Natalie for homecoming court.

“We talked about it for several years, but decided to wait until she was a senior,” said Carnes. “We didn’t do any politicking.”

Natalie’s mother, Gail, said she thinks the vote for Natalie is a testament to the character of the students at Riverside and their upbringing.

“There are lots and lots of pretty girls there,” she said. “They picked a young lady for her inner beauty and spirit. It exemplifies the heart of the school.”

Natalie has been at Riverside since the new school opened in 2005. As a special needs student, she was able to stay in public school until she is 21. She’s 20 now.

Carnes said everyone at school knows Natalie. They know Natalie’s loving heart.

“She doesn’t know how to hate,” her mother said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be like that?”

Riverside students are accepting and open minded about differences, Carnes said.

“Students here are just great kids. I’ve never had an issue with any of these kids being hateful toward mine,” she said.

Carnes has taught special education at Riverside since 1992 and for seven years before that in Anderson. She spent 16 summers as a teen and young adult working with kids at Camp Spearhead, a camp for kids older than eight with special needs.

Studies show special education teachers burn out within five years.

What keeps Carnes there is the unconditional love she gets from students like Natalie. Half of her class of 10 has Down syndrome, which is caused at conception by the development of an extra chromosome. People with the syndrome typically have a similar look and the symptoms can range from mild to severe. Some people will never be able to care for themselves; others can live independently.

Natalie falls in the medium range.

Her mother said when Carnes called her Monday morning to say Natalie had been chosen, she was astounded. Never would she imagine her daughter would have such an honor.

“I wasn’t picked for homecoming,” she said, and laughed. “I called my husband and I could barely get the words out.”

That afternoon when Natalie’s brother Andrew, who is 18 and also a senior at Riverside, brought her home, Mrs. Carnes met them at the car.

“She looked at me through the car window and her smile was from ear to ear,” she said. “She got out and gave me a huge bear hug.”

Natalie’s family will be well represented the night of Oct. 14 when she walks out onto the field at Riverside’s stadium: her parents, her brothers, grandparents, who are moving here this weekend from the Chicago area, and her aunt and uncle from Charlotte.

She wants to wear a pink dress and maybe even pink shoes. She wants both her brothers, Andrew and Ethan, 17, to escort her.

She’ll go to the homecoming dance with them.

“I’m a princess queen,” she said.

No matter who is crowned homecoming queen that night, Natalie has already won.

“It’s a big deal, and she’s part of it,” her mother said. “She will never, ever forget this.”

Junk food. Vending machine food. Hospital food.

M&Ms.

It was a steady diet of bad food and worry.

Aden was three when doctors discovered he had cancer, Wilms disease, which began either in utero or in the months after birth as a tumor in a kidney and spread to his lungs. Stage 4.

Harrington said she and her husband, Scott, decided Aden should take part in a study that looked at the results of light chemotherapy and no radiation for the disease, which is one of the more curable cancers.

It worked for nine months.

But then in May of last year, the cancer returned and the whole weight of modern American medicine was applied to Aden’s case.

Almost a week of hospitalization for chemotherapy every three weeks.

“You lose sleep and eat and this becomes the normal routine,” she said.

But she learned from a nutritionist who was treating her mother that there could be more to the protocol than medicine. He encouraged certain healthier foods and nutritional supplements.

They decided to give it a try.

Aden never developed the sores common with chemotherapy, Mrs. Harrington said. She doesn’t know for sure it was the supplements but the other children did develop sores.

“This whole time we were trying to get Aden healthy, and I realized I needed to get healthy, too,” she said.

The woman who describes herself as a meat and potatoes girl became a vegetarian. She read books on the subject and ate tofu and actually started cooking for the family, which she said, she didn’t do before.

“Meal by meal, day by day,” she said.

And she started running. She had never been a runner before. She owns a highly sedentary business, a web development and marketing firm. She grew up in Simpsonville, where her father, Ray Guenthner, served on City Council. He runs the acoustic cafe Coffee Underground.

Harrington, 37, met her husband after she graduated from University of South Carolina and he from Winthrop. Scott Harrington, 41, works as a server at Rick Erwin’s.

Nine months ago, she started her regimen.

Tuesday, she returned from a four-day trip to Alaska, where she ran a half marathon and raised $3,500 for Children’s Security Blanket, a Spartanburg organization that provides essential items to families of children with cancer.

She chose the organization because most money raised for cancer goes to research and she knows the financial burden families face. She remembers talking to a woman in the hallway at Greenville Memorial Children’s Hospital who said all her daughter wanted to eat that day – when she was undergoing chemotherapy – was Chic Fil-A. But she couldn’t afford it.

Mrs. Harrington said Aden’s hospital bills are the equivalent of two car payments. And they have good insurance.

She chose Alaska because she decided if she was going to put that much effort into health, she was going to have the reward of going someplace she’d never been. The whole family went and the weather was cold and rainy.

Except on race day.

The temperature was 59 and the sun was shining. Bold blue sky hovered overhead.

It was a family event with 2K races for children that she found heartwarming.

She ran the whole way – 13.1 miles.

“Aden’s run his race. Now I’ve run mine. Mission accomplished,” she said.

Aden turned six on Aug. 28. He is cancer free. He started first grade at First Presbyterian.

Caroline Harrington has started a non-profit organization to educate families about healthy eating and supplements during cancer treatment. For information go to www.doeverything.org.

It’s been a two-year effort – at once exhilarating and exhausting. There were moments I was not quite sure I was going to see the ceremony in Twichell Auditorium.

That’s because low-residency certainly doesn’t mean low work. It equals, at the very least, a part-time job.

It’s also not for people who think every word they write shines like expertly cut diamonds. Faculty and your friends in workshop stand by to erase that image.

And, after about three decades in the news business, I showed up to learn to write fiction. I’ve been saying to my journalism students at Furman University for a long time, “Good writing is good writing.” That is true. But writing from your imagination is a whole lot different from writing from your notebook. And, while journalism can be literary, it most often is not.

The first time I heard about the MFA program was when I interviewed Converse President Betsy Fleming about the school’s efforts to step into the world of creativity, to make its mark as a place where reaching for what seems impossible is commonplace.

I knew then I would apply once the program started. June 2009 brought the first residency, 10 days of lectures and workshops.

The 16 of us met in the lobby of a dorm on campus, and I am pleased to say, I was not the oldest one. Interestingly it was a mix of folks with established careers – some in areas very different from writing – and recent college graduates. One woman was from southern California, another Seattle. A woman whose husband is a certified rocket scientist came from Florida. Most were from the Upstate.

Phillip Belcher, the executive director of the Mary Black Foundation in Spartanburg, was a poetry student. He already had graduate degrees in law and theology. Jeffrey Schrecongost, a former Mauldin High School teacher and fiction student, had a master’s in liberal arts. Kasey Ray-Stokes, a creative non-fiction student from Savannah, had made award-winning films.

Sometime on the fourth day into the residency I realized this was nothing short of a marathon. The day started as early as eight if you had a meeting with your mentor, craft lectures, lunch, a three-hour workshop, another lecture, night readings, homework. Twelve-hour days. At least.

I don’t know of any other experience I’ve had that can compare to an MFA workshop. No editor combed through my work with such specificity. The word ransacked comes to mind. I left my first workshop feeling as if I had been flat run over by a truck. And the driver backed up. It was brutal.

But then something amazing happened. We were told to rewrite a few pages of the 20 we handed in. And when, later in the week, we reviewed that, it was called exquisite. A phrase I wrote was considered inspired. I was a student. I was learning. My teachers were published authors who could articulate the mysteries of every good novel I’d read.

I left there with a reading list of about a dozen books and five due dates for writing assignments and book critiques. That semester, the work was to be sent to my mentor by email, other semesters hard copies were required. I, for one, helped FedEx with my tendency toward working right up until the deadline.

And, yes, I’ll admit one particular semester I missed a couple.

I wrote short stories about a hairdresser with a drug problem, a mother unable to have an adult relationship with her daughter, a man who left his wife for another only to find heartbreak himself.

During the second year, I returned to the business that took me to Converse in the first place, a novel I had dallied with for years. I worked under the expert tutelage of two-time novelist Leslie Pietrzyk. Her lessons are as integrated in my writing life as my Mac. No character is all bad or all good, nor should he be a plot device. Clip off the first word of dialogue to make it more realistic. Start on a day something is different. Voice is not a standalone item.

Night after night, I finished editing the Greenville Journal and Spartanburg Journal and turned to my fictional world of Holly Hill, South Carolina, and the people who had become very real to me. The novel is half finished, bound by the Converse MFA office in a neat navy blue.

My thesis.

The impossible doesn’t quite yet seem commonplace, but certainly achievable. Half a novel awaits.

Take the cage at Sevier Middle School, its new netting draping over it like an oak leaf canopy.

The cage was installed two seasons ago – two teams of 15 kids each – have taken practice there.

But before them, there were a hundred or more. Some are playing minor league baseball. Many played in college. All learned life lessons from the sport.

The cage was ordered online and delivered to the Hoffman home at the base of Paris Mountain 10 years ago. It cost $800.

Jeff Hoffman remembers three boxes, one of them huge (that would be for the net). This is no pretend batting case. It’s 50 feet long and 10 feet high all around.

Hoffman bought the cage for his son, Asher, who was playing on the Wade Hampton High School team.

Hoffman had been coaching Asher’s teams since T-ball, but this cage, that was something different, something more.

“We probably spent a thousand hours out there,” Hoffman said. “A true father-son bonding experience.”

On winter nights, Asher would come home after baseball practice. It was dark. So Hoffman installed lights. He bought a pitching machine.

“In the baseball world, the more practice you get, the more balls you see,” Hoffman said.

Make no mistake. This was not a father living vicariously through his son. Hoffman, who is 64, was a runner in high school and college.

It was most often Asher who was picking up the bucket of balls and asking his dad to hit a few.

Soon, teammates were showing up for some practice. He never worried about the liability if someone got hurt. In fact, he was the one who was beaned a few times with balls hit back at him while he was pitching.

Coaches from other teams would call to ask for cage time.

Hoffman accommodated.

That’s how Brad Chalk, who played at Riverside and Clemson, got there. The Padres drafted him in 2007, and this season he’s with the AA Altoona, Pa., Curve, an affiliate of the Pirates.

Hoffman estimates Major League Baseball drafted six players who used the cage. Dozens, like Asher, received college scholarships.

Asher went to Hiwasee Junior College in Tennessee then transferred to College of Charleston, where an elbow injury ended his baseball career.

So Hoffman packed up the cage. He and his wife, Lucy, wanted to do some landscaping after all those years.

Then Hoffman got a call from Foothills Little League. Would he coach a team? Eleven and 12 year olds?

“We put it in somebody else’s yard – the parent of one of the kids,” Hoffman said.

A season later, he was asked to become head coach at Sevier Middle School, home of the Falcons. The cage went with him.

Now it’s sunk permanently in the ground near the school’s new athletic fields. Hoffman, who owns a textile company in Mauldin, has used his $1,200 yearly stipend for a new pitching machine and the new net.

“I wasn’t looking to be paid,” he said. “I just have a passion for the sport.”

Baseball teaches life lessons, Hoffman said. The most important: baseball is a game of failure. You’re doing exceptionally well if you hit the ball three times for every 10 at bats.

“You learn it doesn’t matter if you strike out. Forget about that. Your next at bat is coming,” he said. “You can’t give up because you made a mistake.”

Not too long ago, Hoffman went to Sevier to work on the field. He saw a father and son – 10 years old or so – going into the cage, carrying a bucket of balls.

“I thought, boy this thing has come full circle.”

Her second. The new book follows a five-part DVD collection.

She’s done hundreds of workshops and events, reaching thousands of people.

That’s what she’s done in the past four years.

The four years since she resigned as executive director of United Ministries.

Templeton was once a high school math teacher, then went to seminary at Erskine. United Ministries hired her as a part-timer, but soon she became executive director. Twenty-four years later, she stepped down and her desire to teach, preach and write has become a United Ministries outreach program called Our Eyes Were Opened.

Where as a leader of United Ministries she worked with people who were poor, now her work centers on helping those with means help people who are poor.

It’s all about education. Setting aside judgment in favor of compassion.

Templeton has developed poverty simulation programs that, even though it is pretend, cause people to do some of the very things they had judged before – lie, steal.

The outreach includes taking people on tours of poverty-stricken areas, those places hidden by bamboo groves or railroad beds. Those places we really don’t want to think about.

She’s given workshops for businesses, organizations and even an entire community in Kansas.

In her first book “Loving Our Neighbor, A Thoughtful Approach to Helping People in Poverty,” Templeton taught us we need not feel guilty about refusing to give that dollar to a person on the street. What we do need to feel guilty about is looking past him as if he doesn’t exist.

“You don’t know if the money you give is the money that buys the hit that kills them,” she said. If the person is hungry, get food.

Her response is to say, “My name’s Beth. What’s yours?” And to encourage the person to contact an agency that can actually help – like United Ministries.

The DVD series “Servant or Sucker,” released in 2008, has a similar theme. How to help constructively, realistically, without judgment, with life-changing opportunity.

Now comes her newest book “Understanding Poverty in the Classroom.” It’s meant, obviously, for teachers and school administrators, but it is truly a book for us all. For opening our eyes.

The book is about understanding differences. Actions and reactions may be different, but one is not better than the other.

The child who is loud and interrupts could be perceived as rude, lacking respect of authority or even having ADHD. But it is more likely he lives in an overcrowded family and that is how he gets attention.

“If you have lived in poverty, every day is a struggle – a roof over your head, healthcare for kids – and what’s most important are relationships. Relationships become a bottom-line value,” she said. “For the middle class, work and achievement is the bottom-line value. We assume our way of thinking is universal and we’ll tell someone how to fix their lives.”

Earlier this year when the Japanese were reeling under earthquakes and tidal waves, Templeton was conducting a workshop. She told the middle- and upper-middle income folks gathered they would not be her choice of pals if she were in Japan.

“I want to be with the people in Place of Hope (homeless shelter),” she said. “You can appreciate their fund of knowledge then.”

People in poverty know how to live without electricity. They live without banks. And cars.

Once Templeton was working with a group of women. To be in the group they had to be homeless, pregnant, a prostitute or an addict. She asked about their hopes and dreams. Dead silence. Finally someone said she wanted a little house with a white picket fence, and she wanted to work in an office.

Templeton couldn’t understand. The entry office job was not going to get that lady the picket-fence house.

But then it became clear. An office job has set hours, a title, air conditioning and heat. You get to sit part of the day and go to the bathroom when you want. You dress nice.

“It made a whole lot of sense,” Templeton said. “I take those things for granted.”

If you get a copy of the new book, I encourage you to read the section about double standards.

My eyes were opened.

A guy handling all sorts of exotic animals like a hissing cockroach and an albino python.

Lots of kids, too, at this celebration the day before father’s day in Greenville.

Not as many dads, though.

But it’s a start, a new initiative to bring absent dads back into the lives of their children, sponsored by the Greenville Housing Authority.

About 250 people showed. It had an almost circus-like quality with bbq and kids laughing and grandma hazing the magician.

The underside was the serious business of kids without dads.

A representative of the Upstate Fathers Coalition was there to explain what the organization could do as a mediator between Family Court and a dad behind on child support payments.

Also on hand at Westview Homes were folks from Job Corps, Greenville Mental Health, Kool Smiles Pediatric Dentistry, and The Greenville Workforce Investment Board / Personal Pathways To Success.

“We want to remove any barrier as to why a father is absent,” said Nyroba B. Leamon, the REACH Youth Coordinator and Case Manager for the housing authority.

Leamon used to work as a cop in Spartanburg. He worked in Greenville County’s  alternative school. He’s the founder of Today’s Antioch Fellowship in Greer.

The one constant through what he calls his journeyman career is working with kids.

And at the housing authority, he says, one of the biggest problems for kids is many – no most – don’t have their dad around.

“Mothers are doing an excellent job,” he said. “But the reality is for a young man and a young woman there are some things only a father can teach.”

And not having that influence – and feeling unloved or unwanted – manifests itself in so many ways – poor grades, low self esteem, getting in trouble.

He said he asked a 16-year-old girl who lives in one of the Housing Authority units if her dad was coming to the father’s day event. She said no. He didn’t care about her. Every time she reaches out to him, he rebuffs her.

“You could hear the pain in her voice,” Leamon said.

The girl is an OK student, but could be a great student if she didn’t have to spend time thinking her dad didn’t love her.

His role, Leamon said, is to encourage her to keep reaching out, which will allow him and a vast support system to reach the father.

Leamon grew up in a housing project, as did his wife. But they benefited from both of their parents being in the home, he said.

Leamon believes the vast majority of absentee father chose that route not because they don’t care but because of life circumstances: a dead-end job that doesn’t cover his bills, back child support he cannot pay that could bring arrest at any moment, bad parenting that causes a man think it’s not his responsibility to raise a child, drugs.

A society of greed and prosperity creates in some people the desire to make the quick buck by selling drugs instead of working a legitimate eight-hour day.

“I’m not excusing it, but drugs is a status,” he said. “There are many who have sequenced from selling drugs.”

A new and better life begins with education. And days like last Saturday, when the mid-day heat beat down on government housing in Greenville, South Carolina, and kids laughed and giggled in the arms of their daddys.

“It starts with a change of the mind,” Leamon said. “How we think about things determines how we act.”

It was a defining moment in my career.

I was not long out of college, working for the now-defunct Greenville Piedmont, the gutsy afternoon paper that competed fiercely with its sister The Greenville News.

Assigned to cover Greenville city government, I trooped across Main Street for a meeting with the mayor, Max Heller. His top-floor City Hall office overlooked a dying Main Street.

Store by store, retailers chose to flee downtown in search of the promise of the 1970s mall frenzy. Few treetops were apparent. Main Street was four lanes.

The mayor told me his story of coming to America, one step ahead of the Nazis thanks to a Greenville woman who arranged for someone to sponsor him. I don’t remember the exact amount but I know he had a few dollars in his pocket. And he had a work ethic as strong and straight as Palmetto tree.

He swept floors at Piedmont Shirt Co. He didn’t say this but it was apparent in his demeanor and language. In Austria, his family was prosperous. They owned a company. He was a member of a private gym, where he was a champion wrestler. And in America, he swept floors.

He pressed on, became general manager at Piedmont, co-founded another shirt company, sold his interest then founded his own shirt company. Max always had nice shirts.

Decades passed and he sold the company to dedicate his life to public service. Elected to City Council in 1969, he ran for mayor and began his term in 1971.

He’d been in office six years when I met him. He had a vision for downtown that made me think he was Greenville’s own Walt Disney. At that point, the vision had not taken root, but I knew it would and I was grateful to be watching. I knew it would be a fun ride.

At the end of the interview – Max actually spent more time asking about me than telling his story – he walked me to the door. The words he spoke then are what I tell my Furman students.

He said, “I want you to know, everything I tell you will be true, but everything that is true I won’t tell you.”

I responded, “And, Mayor, it’s that last part I’m going to be trying to find out.”

He said, “Fair enough.”

That, in the most succinct form, describes the relationship between a journalist and a source. The “fair enough” belief, though, comes from so few people in public life these days.

But Max Heller understood the value of a free press. He also knew how to be a leader, how to inspire others.

I am sure he was not happy when I broke the news that the Hyatt Corp. was going to build a hotel on Main Street and that it would be the centerpiece of a renewed downtown. Or the other stories that followed about Main Street such as giving voice to the people who thought narrowing the street to two lanes folly.

But he never said.

It was never boring covering Max Heller.

And when he left office, I was not too far behind in asking for another beat.

The site once held a Woolworth five and dime, where Robinson-Simpson and dozens of other teens staged a sit-in almost every week for two and a half years. They didn’t want to sit at the crowded Negro lunch counter in the back of the store any more.

Many of Robinson-Simpson’s fellow protestors attended Wednesday’s announcement that an eight-story retail-office tower would be built there. But Robinson-Simpson preferred to stay away.

“Main Street got a piece of me, 100 pounds of flesh when I was at a tender age,” she said. “I’ve done my part.”

She holds those memories close, all these many years later.

Greenville’s Main Street in the 1960s was a busy place – movie theaters, hotels, all manner of retailers, banks. And it was a place of division. White and black water fountains, entrances, waiting rooms. The public pool was closed to blacks as was the library. At Kress, a block from Woolworth’s, black patrons had to take their meals from a side door.

The first sit-in at Woolworth’s came in the spring of 1960. Robinson-Simpson was there. She and the others sat quietly at the white’s only counter in the front of the store until asked to leave. They returned the next week and the next.

“Once the statement was made, we left,” she said.

In time, when it became obvious their statement was not being heard, they waited until the police were called. Robinson-Simpson was 15 the first time she was arrested. She spent a week in youth detention.

As a youth leader for the NAACP, she traveled the state and was arrested protesting at the State House in Columbia, in Rock Hill, Raleigh, twice more in Greenville.

The arrests weren’t working so they appealed to the City Council. It was after Robinson-Simpson left for college, first in North Carolina, then in New York, that the lunch counter was integrated. It took white business leaders sitting down with the civil rights leaders to make it happen.

“We had no doubt change was going to come,” Robinson-Simpson said. “We felt this was the time and we went forward.”

She went on to work as a floor clerk at New York Hospital, then set up tutoring programs at the Greenville Urban League and Greenville Tech. In 1996 she was elected to the Greenville County School Board, where she’s served as a voice for all children who in some manner might not have as big a voice as others.

This is her last term on the board.

“It’s healthy to pass the mantle,” she said. “There’s one young lady I’m trying to push into running.”

Robinson-Simpson never believed the Woolworth’s property should be left as some sort of shrine. The store had been empty from the mid-1990s until it was torn down last year, and had become dilapidated.

“We don’t want to stand in the way of progress,” she said.

What matters is that the statue paying tribute to Sterling High School, which served the African American population until it burned down in the 1970, remains at the corner of Washington and Main. On Wednesday, Mayor Knox White told the crowd the site was sacred for the African American community and, to loud applause, said the statue would not be moved.

Robinson-Simpson believes Greenville would never have emerged from its small-town textile cocoon without the civil rights movement and the changes it brought. The Sterling statue is there for everyone who wants to acknowledge how far the community has come in the past 50 years.

“We need to preserve the markers of who we are and the growth that’s taken place,” she said. “It keeps us grounded.”

But sometimes the one who comes in last has the best story.

And that was so in the Stars and Stripes Challenge, held last Sunday to raise money for cancer research and its victims.

Jana Morse was the last bicyclist to cross the finish line. She’s a 44-year-old internist who before Sunday had ridden no more than 45 miles at a time.

She took on the 100-mile challenge, a grueling ride from Gateway Park in Travelers Rest to Camp Spearhead to Campbell’s Covered Bridge to Dacusville and back to the park. Hills, mountains, flatland, the ultimate biking challenge.

Morse said she signed up simply because she wanted to help the cause. Her husband, Hywel, has been diagnosed with cancer twice, in December 2009 of leukemia and last October he unwent surgery – she calls it a seek and destroy mission – after a knot in his jaw was found to be malignant.

“I’ll do anything to raise money for cancer,” she said. “But when I signed up it was 70 degrees.”

Last Sunday it was in the 90s. She missed a rest stop at about 30 miles and by 50 she had severe cramping in her legs. She was becoming dehydrated but as a doctor knew the signs and knew just how far she could push herself. She’d been pedaling since 7:30 a.m. It was well past noon, and all the other racers had finished.

“We had heard this lady was out there,” said Kevin Dunn, the race organizer.

The sweeper vehicle, sent to pick up cones and make sure everyone is off the course, found her at about 90 miles. Inside the car was a medic and a coach. And the coach just happened to have his bike and gear.

USA Cycling coach John Williams rode with her the last 10 miles. He offered information about what the course ahead looked like and, perhaps most important encouragement.

When they rolled across the finish line at about 4 p.m., the dozen or so race volunteers still there, all cried.

“I had to walk away,” Dunn said. Three girls gave her roses. Her husband and their son, Timmy, were there.

By then, all the folks waiting for Morse had heard her story.

It’s not only the uncertainty and fear that cancer brings, but also that the couple has lost two children to a rare genetic malady called Vici syndrome. This syndrome is so rare the Morse children were the seventh and eighth children in the world to be diagnosed with it. Most patients live no more than a year, some as long as three.

Tomas, the eldest, and Carys, the youngest, were never able to walk or talk. Some days they suffered hundreds of seizures. Eventually they could not swallow. They had heart problems.

The syndrome is a lifetime of hospitals and dashed dreams. Timmy does not have the syndrome.

“Our vacation home was Greenville Hospital System,” Morse said.

Tomos defied the odds and lived for eight and a half years.

“We’re stubborn,” Morse said. During the ice storm of 2006, the Morses lost power and moved in with her brother. When they returned home, they got Tomos out of the car and he was dead.

Carys, with the same platinum blond hair and porcelain skin as her brother and other Vici syndrome patients, died in her sleep last October, two weeks after her father’s cancer surgery. Hywel had quit work as a chemical engineer to stay home with her. He nursed her even as he went through chemotherapy, which put the leukemia in remission.

And that – all those life challenges – was what she was riding for last Sunday.

“A lot of people are dealing with stuff like this and they want to hide from it,” Dunn said. “She didn’t want to hide. She was a zest for life.”

“Remission is not a cure,” she said. “I’m not going to lose anyone else.”