The drug kingpin Frank Lucas was so disgusted with the IRS’s treatment of Louis that he once paid a $50,000 tax lien against the boxer. Even Max Schmeling came to the rescue, assisting with money when Louis was alive and then paying funeral expenses when the boxer died.
Louis’s tax troubles finally eased somewhat when the IRS settled with him in the early 1960s. The agreement didn’t make him debt free; it simply limited what he had to pay the IRS thereafter to a fixed portion of his annual income. He was, in fact, in debt to the federal government until his dying day.
Belated Honors
Joe Louis, a decorated army veteran and world-class athlete, remained a symbol of black achievement in spite of his difficulties with the IRS. Biographer Chris Mead notes that Louis “was the first black American to achieve lasting fame and popularity in the twentieth century.” More than that, he opened doors for fellow black Americans. Louis faced only one black boxer during his forty-three fights before World War II; by the time he retired as champion in 1949, the leading contenders for the title were black. When Jackie Robinson integrated baseball in 1947, he cited Louis as his role model: “I’ll try to do as good a job as Joe Louis has done.… He has done a great job for us and I will try to carry on.” “Louis had broken the ground,” Mead writes. “He had opened sports to blacks and made athletics a cutting edge of the civil rights movement.”
When Louis died, President Ronald Reagan waived the eligibility rules to allow him to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Joe Louis was a man who fought on many fronts and emerged as a great example to people of all races.
Lessons from Joe Louis
Put in the work: Before he became heavyweight champion, Joe Louis was quoted as saying, “If I reach the goal I have set for myself … I’ll walk out and leave the other fellows to argue over the spoils.” Louis set goals and achieved them by putting in the work, whether training relentlessly to defend his title a record twenty-five times or taking on whatever work he could to pay off his tax debt.
Remember that “a good name is better than money”: Louis credited his mother with instilling this lesson in him. He generously donated to military charities. He was a genuine American patriot who served his country and earned the Legion of Merit. In his 1938 fight against the German Max Schmeling, he had “the burden of representing all of America” against the Nazis, as he put it. His own government treated him shabbily, but he did whatever he could to repay his debts.
32
Peter Fechter
Death at the Wall
From 1961 to 1989, the ghastly palisade known as the Berlin Wall divided the city of Berlin. It sealed off the only escape hatch for people in the communist East who wanted freedom in the West.
No warning was given before August 13, 1961, when East German soldiers and police first stretched barbed wire and then began erecting the infamous wall.
In my home hangs a framed copy of a photo from that sad day. The image shows a young, apprehensive East German soldier glancing about as he prepares to let a small boy pass through the emerging barrier. No doubt the boy had spent the night with friends and found himself the next morning on the opposite side of the wall from his family.
But the communist regime ordered its men to let no one pass. The photo’s inscription explains that, at this very moment, a superior officer noticed what the soldier was doing and immediately detached him. “No one knows what became of him,” the inscription reads.
Only the most despicable tyrants could punish a man for letting a child get to his loved ones, but in the Evil Empire, that and much worse happened all the time.
By one estimate, 254 people died at the Berlin Wall during the twenty-eight years it stood. Most of them were killed in the infamous “death strip” next to the main barrier, which the East Germans packed with guard towers, dog runs, explosive devices, and trip-wire machine guns. The communist regime cynically referred to the barrier as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.”
Like millions of others, a strapping eighteen-year-old bricklayer named Peter Fechter yearned for so much more than the stifling dreariness of socialism. He had the courage to risk his own life to surmount that hideous barrier.
“Murderers!”
The Berlin Wall had been up for only a year when Fechter and his friend Helmut Kulbeik hatched a plan to escape. The two young men decided to conceal themselves in a carpenter’s woodshop near the wall and watch for an opportune moment to jump from a second-story window into the death strip. They would then run to and climb over the six-and-a-half-foot-high concrete barrier, laced with barbed wire, and emerge in freedom on the other side.
They set the plan in motion on August 17, 1962. When the moment came that guards were looking the other way, Fechter and Kulbeik jumped. Seconds later, during their mad dash to the wall, guards began firing. Amazingly, Kulbeik made it to freedom. Fechter was not so lucky. In plain view of witnesses numbering in the hundreds, he was hit in the pelvis. He fell to the ground, screaming in pain.
Words of Wisdom from Elfie Gallun
“There was something in the air, something wonderful, and then I realized it. My God, even the air was free! There was freedom in the air!”
No one on the East side, soldiers included, came to his aid. Westerners threw bandages over the wall, but Fechter couldn’t reach them. Bleeding profusely, he died alone an hour later. Demonstrators in West Berlin shouted, “Murderers!” at the East Berlin border guards, who eventually retrieved his lifeless body.
An Awful Chapter
Decades later, after the Berlin Wall came down, Peter Fechter’s family pushed for justice at last. Fechter’s sister Ruth charged former East German guards with her brother’s death. In 1997 two former guards were found guilty of manslaughter. They received sentences of twenty and twenty-one months in prison, though their sentences were suspended.
The trial revealed that the Fechter family’s ordeal had not ended with the horrifying death of their only son. In The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989, Christine Brecht writes that during the trial Ruth “movingly described how she and her family experienced the tragic death of her brother and had felt powerless to act against his public defamation.” The Fechters “had been sworn to secrecy, an involuntary obligation that put the family under tremendous pressure.” Ruth herself said: “We were ostracized and experienced hostile encounters daily. They were not born of our personal desire, but were instead imposed on us by others.”
The world must never forget this awful chapter in history. Nor should we ever forget that these heinous acts were committed in the name of a system that declared its “solidarity with the working class” and professed its devotion to “the people.”
We who embrace liberty don’t believe in shooting people because they don’t conform, and that is ultimately what socialism and communism are all about. We don’t plan other people’s lives, because we’re too busy at the full-time job of reforming and improving our own. We believe in persuasion, not coercion. We solve problems at penpoint, not gunpoint. We’re never so smug in our beliefs that we’re ready to dragoon the rest of society into our schemes.
All this is why so many of us get a rush every time we think of Ronald Reagan standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” This is why we were brought to tears in the heady days of 1989 when thousands of Berliners scaled the wall with their hammers, picks, and fists and pummeled that terrible edifice and the Marxist vision that fostered it.
Peter Fechter and the 253 others who died at the Berlin Wall are real heroes. They deserve to be remembered.
Postscript
Elfie Gallun is among the four people to whom this book is dedicated. A decade before the Berlin Wall rose, at barely the same age Peter Fechter was, she risked life and limb to flee her native East Germany. Somehow she made it and later married another hero of mine, Ned Gallun, a successful Wisconsin entrepreneur.
In 1984 Elfie wro
te to President Reagan and described the moments after her daring escape, moments that were denied to Peter Fechter:
There was something in the air, something wonderful, and then I realized it. My God, even the air was free! There was freedom in the air! Only 50 yards and yet the air smelled so different. I wanted to shout, “I am free! I am free!” but no words came from my lips because by then my heart was in my throat. There I stood in silence, having no one else to share that moment with me, and being lost in the wonder of Freedom.
In a little town just behind a hill two miles away, the lights were turned on. The Olympic fireworks of 1984, as spectacular as they were, could not compare to what I saw that dark night. Then I turned East toward Communism and it was so very dark, not one light. I had come out of the dark into the light.
President Reagan wrote back to Elfie a few weeks later. She and Ned cherish his letter to this day. It reads in part:
Those of us who were born free and have known freedom all our lives sometimes forget what a precious blessing it is. Your experience in a totalitarian country has given you a special appreciation of the God-given gift of freedom, an appreciation you can share with others. One look around the globe is enough to remind us how rare and fragile a thing freedom is, and how each generation is called upon to make the necessary sacrifices to safeguard it. Examples like yours shine therefore like a beacon of hope for others. That path you followed from darkness to light is truly the way to the future for all mankind. I pray that someday soon all nations may travel it together.
Lessons from Peter Fechter
Don’t take freedom for granted: “How rare and fragile a thing freedom is,” Ronald Reagan said. It’s easy to take our liberty for granted, but Peter Fechter and millions of others who have suffered under tyranny know how right Reagan was.
Don’t fall for claims that coercive efforts are done for “the people”: Communism was sold to the world as creating a “workers’ paradise.” But lovers of liberty understand that if an idea truly works, it doesn’t need to be advanced at gunpoint.
33
Norval Morey
Wealth Creation Through Entrepreneurship
How is it that we recognize someone as great? Is it by how often his or her name appears in the newspapers? Is it by how much he gives away, or by how many public offices she has held, or by how many degrees he lists after his name?
Greatness isn’t any of those things. It’s something that springs from character, the critical, self-determined stuff that defines a person. A great man or woman is one who does great things from the heart and doesn’t care whether it makes the news. Giving to worthy causes is a noble thing, but having the wisdom and the drive to do what it takes to earn it in the first place is what’s really great.
A person can become great in public office, but America is not a country whose strength and vitality come from government. As Ronald Reagan said, “We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.” And having a collection of degrees after your name doesn’t say anything about what you’ve done to put any of that to good use.
Norval K. Morey didn’t make his mark in public office or by racking up degrees (except for an honorary degree Harvard University awarded him). But he rose from practically nothing to extraordinary heights, thanks to his character, work ethic, and entrepreneurial spirit. This is why Morey—“Nub” to those of us who knew him—was a great man, the quintessence of the American Dream.
Humble Beginnings
Norval’s start in life was as humble as humble gets. So was his formal education, which ended with the sixth grade. Even that understates the matter. Perhaps the most truant kid in the public schools of Isabella County, Michigan, he didn’t learn much from a teacher after the fourth grade. Half a century later, he was awarded that honorary degree from Harvard after delivering a speech there on environmental harvesting.
Biographer Rich Donnell explains that the Great Depression was Norval’s “ticket out of the seventh grade.” Nub loved relating the story about how, after a couple of days in his seventh-grade class, his teacher told him he was smarter than her so he didn’t need to come back. So he quit. He spent the first half of the 1930s working the family farm, cutting and hauling wood, and taking on every odd job he could find. He then moved to Idaho to work as a logger near Lewiston. Returning to Michigan at the start of World War II, he labored in defense plants in Detroit until he was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1942. He faced danger head-on as a combat squad leader in northern Italy. Back in his home state after the war, he became a sawmill operator. Wood was his passion and his career for the next four decades.
Words of Wisdom from Norval Morey
“Freedom opened the door to opportunity, success, expansion, and hundreds of good paying jobs. I understand what the free enterprise system allowed me to do and I want to help preserve that system.”
In 1957, at age thirty-seven, Norval took a big chance. He designed a portable device to strip bark from pulp wood and launched the Morbark Debarker Company in the tiny village of Winn, Michigan. The company made only one product. The payroll: two people.
When Norval died forty years later, head of the company to the last, Morbark was a 1.5-million-square-foot manufacturing complex with nearly five hundred employees producing hundreds of heavy-equipment designs for sale around the world. The company builds high-performance machines for customers in the forestry, recycling, sawmill, biomass, landscaping, irrigation, and tree care markets. It helps customers harvest, process, and convert organic materials into valuable, usable, and environmentally sound products.
Planting Flowers
In seventy-seven years of life, Norval Morey journeyed farther than most of us ever will if we live to be one hundred. He was a pioneering inventor, an entrepreneurial genius, a job creator, a benefactor of education. Not bad for a guy whose formal education ended on the third day of the seventh grade. He knew the truth of what advertising guru Leo Burnett once said: “When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.”
Here was a man who had achieved great wealth and could have sat back at the age of sixty and said, “I quit; I’ve earned a life of leisure now.” No one would have begrudged him for that. But he went on for another seventeen years—working, creating, employing, growing a company, even building a school for hundreds of Isabella County children.
Norval not only knew what it takes to make a successful company tick; he knew what it takes to make a successful country tick as well. He spoke out in favor of individual liberty and free enterprise. He supported candidates who came down squarely in favor of those principles. One of those candidates, in fact, was me. He was my staunchest supporter when I ran for Congress in the primary and general elections of 1982. He wasn’t like so many businesspeople today, easily browbeaten by the left and afraid to defend the free markets that allowed them to succeed.
Those who didn’t have the pleasure of knowing Norval well could be forgiven for thinking that he was a little “different.” He could be cantankerous, but that was because he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He could be impatient, but that was because he wanted to get things done. He didn’t exactly speak the King’s English, but that never mattered because he always made eminently good sense. He never cared for kings anyway. Nub was a down-to-earth, no-pretense guy whose least concern was whether or not he impressed you. I never once heard him say anything boastful.
Framed and sitting on my office desk is a quotation from a president of the United States that just as easily could have come from Norval Morey: “Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who know me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower when I thought a flower would grow.”
Postscript
Over the years I have come to know many fine entrepreneurs like Norval Morey. In many ways, he reminds me of another longtime friend and one of those to whom this book is dedicated, Ron Manners.
Born in 1936 in Kalgoorlie, Austra
lia, Ron assumed the management of his family’s mining business before he was twenty, building it into a major concern. He founded other natural resource companies as well and in 2011 was inducted into the Australian Prospectors and Miners Hall of Fame as a “living legend.” In an age when too many businesspeople are afraid to be “controversial” by defending freedom and free markets, Ron (like Norval Morey) does so actively and publicly. In 1997 he founded the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation, which, I am proud to say, supports freedom-loving organizations like my own all over the world. He and his charming wife, Jenny, live in Perth, Australia.
Lessons from Norval Morey
Risk failure: The right to start a business is a key element of the American Dream. So is the right to fail. When Norval Morey founded his company with only one product and one other employee, success was hardly foreordained. Norval had the work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit, and winning ideas to achieve success—but he also had the courage to risk failure.
Don’t bash the wealth creators: It’s popular to bash the “One-Percenters” for their wealth. But what of those people who built their wealth and in the process created jobs and wealth for so many others? Morey parlayed a grade school education into a major business that employed five hundred people and created valuable products. His efforts and genius helped other people far more than they helped him.
34
Jerzy Popiełuszko
Witness to Truth and Freedom
More than a century ago, in Life and Destiny, ethicist Felix Adler reflected on what the lives of the deceased can teach the living:
Let us live truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. And let the memory of our dead help us to do this. For they are not wholly separated from us, if we remain loyal to them. In spirit they are with us. And we may think of them as silent, invisible, but real presences in our households.
Real Heroes Page 20