Inspired by MLK Day, I have been contemplating on personal heroes. For me, those are people who work for a moral and noble goal, are effective, and do so over the course of a lifetime without the diminishment of their achievements by scandal or other major moral failings coming to light.
I’ve got a few …
Wendell Berry
Jimmy Carter
Pete Seeger
Nicolai Vavilov
Jane Goodall
Interested in others’ personal heroes.
I’ll put Jane Goodall on my list, too. A primatologist/anthropologist who devoted her life to studying chimpanzee behavior in the field for 60 years. A devoted animal rights advocate and activist. I starting reading her National Geographic books and articles as a kid, and they sparked my interest in animal behavior and animal rights.
Carl Sagan. Noted astrophysicist/cosmologist/SETI pioneer and engaging popularizer of science. His books and TV series captivated my imagination and helped stoke my interest in cosmology, billions and billions of times over.
Franz Liszt: A favorite Romantic period composer and piano virtuoso (Lisztomania preceded Beatlemania by a century). A prodigious philanthropist and a tireless piano teacher who taught many students—for free. Helped instill a love of piano and Romantic-era classical music in me.
Carl Sagan: A Pale Blue Dot is the most moving thing I’ve ever read. Also really like The Demon Haunted World. And Cosmos of course.
Jackie Cochran: Likely the most skilled test pilot that has ever lived, but had the bad judgement to die of old age (instead of crashing) so she gets less attention for her accomplishments.
Harriet Tubman- Anybody can get so fed up with slavery that they say ‘I would rather die than live like this’ and attempt escape. But, then she said ‘I have to go back and free others’ and she kept going back while the price on her head kept going up and up. There’s a Jewish saying about Moses and Maimonides (known to us as rabbi Avram Moses Ben Maimon) “From Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses.” I add this third Moses to the list.
Ida Lewis. (1842-1911) She was a lighthouse keeper (took over from her father) and saved at least nineteen people (and one lamb which had been stolen by two of the people she saved) from drowning. She would row out to sea in conditions which had already swamped the boat of the people she went out the save, usually by herself, although at least once with her younger brother. Once she saved people who had fallen through ice, and nearly drowned herself in the process. And she did all of this in long skirts. She was an awesome first responder before the term was invented.
Wow, what a story! Not only that, bu she did all these rescues while being named Idawalley Zorada Lewis.
My dad
Well, if we’re going there, MY dad.
oh yeah…well…my dad was better than your…
…well …your dad’s pretty cool too. 
Two guys I used to race with/against. One was in his 90s & still competing when people ½ his age wouldn’t do what we did. Al was in his 70s & still doing repetitive/ultra races, which only the select few were crazy enough to attempt. I wanna be like them when I ‘grow up’
I also want to add Zora Neale Hurston and Ursula Le Guin. Who interestingly have a connection, as both Hurston and Le Guin’s father Alfred Kroeber became famous anthropologists and both studied under Franz Boas at Columbia.
I remember when SyFy made a movie from Wizard Of Earthsea. Primary among her complaints was that her novel had people with red/brown skin and the movie had all white actors except for Danny Glover.
It was also a really bad movie.
I believe it’s important for kids (and adults) to have sports heroes to look up to. But, it’s important for the players to be positive role models, especially for kids, as they often try to emulate their sports heroes.
Muhammad Ali was a sports hero of mine when I was a kid. He reinvigorated and dominated the sport of boxing. A great ambassador for the sport (despite his unpopular opposition to the Vietnam war) and a positive role model for kids. Others include:
Michael Jordan: Natural born elite athlete. Spearheaded a basketball dynasty. Great ambassador for basketball and a positive role model for kids, with only a minor chink in his legacy (gambling).
Tom Brady: Unnatural born elite athlete. Didn’t look all that impressive on paper, but hustled to the top of the QB pack through grit and hard work. Great ambassador for football and a positive role model for kids.
Serena Jameka Williams: Career domination of women’s tennis. Great ambassador for the sport and a positive role model for girls.
Secretariat (Big Red): Natural born champion thoroughbred horse. Had a big heart, both figuratively, and literally. Completely dominated the Triple Crown. An inspiration for humans. Great ambassador for thoroughbred racing and a positive role model for animals of all kind.
I have heroes with caveats - there are people I look up to, but I remember that they are humans with flaws. The flaws, even serious ones, don’t necessarily cancel out the good traits that make them my heroes. But it’s important to me not to elevate these people beyond mere humans.
So here is my list of heroes, with some of their flaws.
Ted Williams
Best hitter who ever played baseball, and he brought the same intellect, drive and precision to everything that was important to him (expert fisherman, Marine Corps jet pilot).
He was one of the earliest celebrities involved with the Jimmy Fund, and spent a lot of time visiting sick kids in the hospital. However, he wouldn’t allow the press to publicize these visits, which he enforced by promising to stop doing it and blame the first writer who penned an article about it. None of them dared.
The Red Sox were the last team to integrate. They got their first black player (Pumpsie Green) in the late 50s, by which time Williams was the old man of the team. Williams immediately made Green his warmup partner because he wanted everyone to see Green playing catch with him and being accepted. You could say Williams didn’t risk much by doing that, but he didn’t have to either.
His flaws… Williams was a very prickly individual and I’m not sure I would have liked him personally. He treated many people close to him with indifference, and his marriages were disastrous. His son turned out to be a real piece of work. Also a terrible baseball manager because he was unable to understand that mere mortals didn’t have his ability and insights.
Gandhi
One of the bravest individuals in history. He subjected himself to physical harm for his principles, and held himself to very high standards of behavior when it came to them. Read about how he insisted on receiving no outside help during the Great Salt March.
He took on the British Empire and won. At a time when colonization was normal. A half naked guy in India beat the British. He embarrassed them into abandoning their colony by showing the world their brutal behavior. Absolutely incredible. Without him, we might not have had Martin Luther King.
His flaws… Gandhi may have done some weird stuff with girls to prove to himself that he was fully in control of his desires. Also had a bad relationship with his sons. Like many people who do important things, this seems to have been at the cost of his relationships to people close to him.
Neil Armstrong
Everyone knows he was the first person to walk on the moon. Pfff. Look at his earlier career, the stuff he did that made him qualified to be in that position. Naval aviator (and some good stories there), test pilot, Gemini astronaut. He commanded Gemini 8 and was the first person to conduct a docking of a manned spacecraft. Then there was a problem with one of the Gemini’s thrusters which sent them tumbling. He and his partner, Dave Scott (who also went to the moon) used their test pilot backgrounds to work through the problem, eliminating causes until they figured out what to do. All while spinning uncontrollably in space, with no ground contact. I’ve read Armstrong’s report - it’s written in heavy engineering language, but when you realize what they did it’s nearly unbelievable. I fly airplanes for a living, and I can’t imagine being able to work that logically under that kind of pressure. There are a lot of incidents in Armstrong’s life like that one. He was on Apollo 11 for a reason.
Flaws… Armstrong gets a lot of flack for being standoffish. I don’t think that’s quite fair. He was certainly a quiet person who seemed hard to know. But he seemed to get along well with his sons later in life.
I agree with Neil Armstrong. Some folks dismiss Armstrong as being a minor cog who was just a passenger on a spaceship built by NASA scientists and engineers. But, he was more than that. He was the best of the best of a very small group of elite individuals. He had the right stuff.
I’ve argued before in other threads that Neil Armstrong may be the only human since the dawn of history to have a substantial blurb in deep future history books (or whatever digital format they’ll use to list historical accounts long from now).
When (and if) we become an interstellar civilization, I predict people like Jesus, Mohamed, Gandhi, Alexander the Great, Einstein, Hitler, Donald Trump, and maybe even the Kardashians will fade into obscurity. But, millennia from now, people will still want to know who was the first human to step onto an extraterrestrial natural satellite.
I fully expect that long before we have a way off this planet we will have destroyed its ability to sustain us. So nobody’s going to be around to remember anyone for any reason. My heroes are heroes to me because despite being able to see terrible evil in the present and yet to come, they bore witness to the Good, and tried to increase it.
I guess I also have a negative amount of interest in space exploration, or sports – neither fits my personal criteria above. So that biases me right there.
I’m a bit more optimistic about our chances of colonizing beyond Earth before we completely render our planet inhospitable to life. Whether or not we deserve that chance is a different story.
And, I do believe risking life and limb (as Armstrong did) for the betterment of humankind is Good.
Okay. Although c’mon, he probably did it for the rush, too.