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When I met 19 year old
Jennifer Moran ,
she was less than half my age, but already she possessed courage and tenacity
than many will accumulate in a lifetime. Jennifer was introduced
to me by mutual friends Mark Boudreaux of New Orleans'
radio
station WWL and
his wife Yvette.
Jennifer was still on crutches and every move she made
was attended by agonizing pain. The year was 1985. A
few days prior to that, Mark and Yvette had come to me with a tiny
paragraph torn from a recent issue of the Times
Picayune newspaper, which briefly
stated that three New Orleans
youth had survived a
boating accident in Lake Ponchartrain, and
that all three were listed in
serious to critical condition in a New Orleans hospital.
Mark and Yvette were distressed that the single column, one
inch article on page 16 failed to mention that this
remarkable young friend
of theirs had not only survived the accident, but that she had then set out
broken, bleeding and in agonizing pain to seek help for her more
critically injured brother, Bryant, and her best friend,
Monique May.
"She's a hero!" exclaimed Mark. "They don't seem to get it."
How right he was.
As I interviewed Jennifer I sat
intrigued by her spunk.
Then I met her brother, and as he struggled to speak to me,
coarse words gurgling through a wired jaw while tears
welled in his injured bloodshot eyes while he emphasized how proud he was of his
"little sister", I became even more
mesmerized. But as the
story further unfolded, I became spellbound as I learned that
Jennifer Moran was the granddaughter of Pal Moran, the
famous World's lightweight boxing
champion of the 1030s and 1940s, who is reputed to have fought
more 20 round matches than any fighter in boxing history.
Perhaps Jennifer Moran had
inherited some special gene from her grandfather: one of bravery, courage and
endurance -- something that specially equipped her to deal with the terrifying circumstances of that
"Night of
Uncommon Courage".
That was the title of the article I wrote
for Woman's Day Magazine,
and I invite you now to read the article
and judge for yourself. Surely you will agree that
Jennifer Moran is an
extraordinary young woman.
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