Amazingly, there was no landing pit for pole vaulters at the 1908 London Olympics, nothing really to soften the return to earth. Nor was there a box or hole in which to plant the pole. Instead, a nail or spike attached to the bottom of the pole was the only means of securing it for takeoff. Of course, this was long before the use of fiberglass poles that catapulted vaulters to such heights. The gold medalist in London was Edward Cooke, who cleared 12 ft. 2 in. (the current world record is 20 ft. 1-3/4 in.). Matching Cooke’s height, but on more tries, was fellow American and silver medalist A.C. Gilbert, whose greatest claim to fame came later as the inventor of the Erector Set, a popular construction toy. He became known as “The Man Who Saved Christmas for Children” after he talked the government’s national defense council out of placing a moratorium on toy sales in 1918 as a wartime sacrifice.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
