Gladys Aylward (1902-1970)
Filed under the name Gladys · March 5, 2026
I don't scare easy, thirty-four years in a steel mill will do that to a man, but reading about Gladys Aylward leading dozens of orphaned children across mountains to safety during wartime China puts my nerve to shame. That's a different category of courage than anything I ever had to muster on a factory floor, where the worst I usually faced was a foreman who didn't want to hear about safety violations. She wasn't a soldier, wasn't trained for it, just a missionary who decided those children weren't going to be left behind, and then did the impossibly hard physical work of actually getting them over those mountains herself. My union days taught me that the people who actually get things done are rarely the ones with the fanciest titles, just the ones who refuse to leave a job half-finished. Sounds like she was exactly that kind of person, just operating on a scale most of us will never be tested against. Donna and I talked about this one over dinner for a good while.