Mitch Albom

So he quit school and quit the basketball team to stand on the porch.

And he was only like 15.

And he stood on the porch and whenever they would come around, he'd say, get out of here, you know, and they'd say, well, where's your mother?

She doesn't want to have anything to do with you.

He became like a sentinel on his own porch.

So I wrote that story.

I went and interviewed him.

I interviewed his mother.

And I would do umpteen stories like that because I felt that I needed to reflect the city that I worked in.

And that was the truth of the city that I worked in, too.

Not just the, you know, the piston success or the parades or the Red Wings, you know, winning Stanley Cups, but the flip side of it.

Well, as you know, there was a terrible earthquake in January of 2010 in Haiti.

A pastor came to me and said he'd had an orphanage there, but it had been destroyed, and he couldn't get down there, and he thought that all the kids were dead.

Could I help him get down there?

And he came to me because I have a radio program in Detroit, and I used some connections I had, and we were able to get a small plane trip into Haiti just a couple weeks after the earthquake when no commercial flights were going and nobody was getting down there.

And

couldn't get cell service or anything.

And we went in and what I saw there was the worst devastation that I've, I hope to ever see in my life.

People were just, there were people dead in the street.

There were people doing triage, doctors in the street, people climbing on piles of rubble, pulling out rocks and looking for loved ones, you know, people without water, electricity, any food.