Daddy’s Bedtime Story #3: Roberto Clemente’s Heroism
Background: I’ve started a blog-based collection of bedtime stories for children, both stories I’ve told my kids and stories that other parents (and grandparents) tell their kids. If you’ve got a good bedtime story, please send it to me for consideration in this collection.
The core of these stories will be those I tell my 9-year-old daughter. She’s pretty demanding–some weeks I pretty much have to come up with a bedtime story every night, which isn’t easy.
My daughter is very interested in racism (which she’s studied in school), baseball, and daddy’s childhood, so many of the stories reflect those. She’s only 9, but she enjoys learning about adult issues. Sometimes if I tell her a story she thinks isn’t sufficiently adult, she’ll say, “C’mon dad, that’s just a baby story.”
The stories I tell are usually just things that I remembered, sometimes recent but often from 20 or 30 years ago. Some of them are stories my father told me when I was a kid.
I write these down as I told them, and they are NOT up to my usual standards of journalistic accuracy–given the limits of human memory, many (if not most) probably have at least one factual error in them, sometimes far more.
They are also simplistic. I’m not going back and fixing them to make them more accurate or nuanced–they are here as I told them. If you have a bedtime story you’d like to add to my collection, please send it to me at glenn@glennsacks.com. With your submission, please let me know how you want to be identified, if at all.
Roberto Clemente was a great outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates during the 1960s. There weren’t as many Latin players in baseball back then, and Clemente was a big hero in Latin America. All over Latin America kids looked up to him and wrote him fan letters.
Most countries in Latin America are very poor, and this troubled Clemente, so he would try to do what he could to help. He set up charities in Puerto Rico, where he was from, and other Latin American countries.
One of the poorest countries in Latin America was Nicaragua. It was run by a man named Somoza who kept his people down through force and terror, while he and his buddies looted the country. His National Guard kept control over the poor people, most of whom hated Somoza. Years later there was a revolution and the poor people threw Somoza out.
Anyway, in 1972, as if the people of Nicaragua didn’t have enough problems, there was a terrible earthquake in Managua, the capital city. People were without food, without water, without medical supplies, and they were desperate.
Clemente decided he had to do something about this, so he organized supplies and paid for them to be flown in an airplane down to Managua. While they were loading the supplies, Clemente saw on TV that National Guardsmen were stealing the international aid that was coming there. Other countries were sending aid to help the people in Nicaragua and the Guardsmen were stealing it for themselves and selling it, so the poor people couldn’t get medical supplies or food.
Clemente was outraged by this. He said, “I will go down there myself. Those soldiers won’t steal if Roberto Clemente is there. I will tell them to stop and they will stop.”
So Clemente got on the plane, too. But the plane was overloaded with supplies and weighed too much. They shouldn’t have had so much, but Clemente wanted to bring as much as possible to the people suffering in Nicaragua. The plane crashed, and Clemente was killed.
People throughout Latin America and the United States wept when they heard this, because everybody loved him so much. Baseball soon put him in the Hall of Fame, and even today there’s a “Roberto Clemente Award” for the baseball player who does the most for charity and the poor.
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