Reuben's Heroes

“One guy I punched, I know I chipped a bit of his tooth, nothing big because I pulled it out of my knuckle… then I threw it at him out of rage.”

The US Navy were said to have given one man the specific job of breaking Brown's record. "To his everlasting credit he got up to 1,600 and then had a nervous breakdown," says Brown.

reuben wrote:80-Year-Old Russian Headbutts Bear, Survives

One time, already well into old age, the veteran trapper was demonstrating a powerful new steel trap to a classroom of his peers when it suddenly slammed shut on his wrist, shattering his watch and sending pain shooting up his arm.

Without blinking or missing a beat, the trapper turned back to the stunned class and said “Now what are you going to do? You’re caught in your own trap. You have to get out because you can’t go home because your wife will laugh at you.”

Day and night he wrote visas. He issued as many visas in a day as would normally be issued in a month. His wife, Yukiko, massaged his hands at night, aching from the constant effort. When Japan finally closed down the embassy in September 1940, he took the stationery with him and continued to write visas that had no legal standing but worked because of the seal of the government and his name. At least 6,000 visas were issued for people to travel through Japan to other destinations, and in many cases entire families traveled on a single visa. It has been estimated that over 40,000 people are alive today because of this one man.

Mr. Martin, a former youth pastor, was inspired to learn blacksmithing after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, in which a deranged young man with an AR-15 assault rifle killed 20 children and six educators. Three months later, Mr. Martin started Raw Tools, a nonprofit organization dedicated to converting the “swords” of contemporary America —- handguns, assault weapons and semiautomatic rifles —- into garden tools, or erstwhile plowshares, at once fulfilling the Old Testament mandate and forging a new kind of public ritual for processing grief.