Clara Barton: Professional Angel: David Williams

Posted At : May 21, 2008 1:00 AM
Related Categories: History

Excerpted from "Letters from Robert E. Lee: A Conversation with Elizabeth Brown Pryor" by Bruce Cole in Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, January/February 2008, and used by permission. http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2008-01/contents.html

Read by David Williams: Following his retirement in 1997, David came to the American Red Cross of Alaska as a volunteer serving as both the Volunteer Coordinator and a Disaster Volunteer. Since then he has been involved in numerous Red Cross relief operations in Alaska and nationally. Unfortunately, he flunked retirement and has become the Red Cross' Chapter Operations Officer.

Today is May 21. On this date in 1881, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. Many Americans know about Clara Barton's work ministering to the wounded in the Civil War, but Elizabeth Brown Pryor, author of Clara Barton: Professional Angel, highlights how Barton's efforts were much more than that:

Originally, the International Red Cross was founded only for battlefield work, but Clara Barton took it further, expanding it to disaster relief. "Emergency preparedness, the idea and the name, came from her." The idea of blood banks, storing supplies to be ready, ‘She pioneered all this. The idea of first aid. Even the name "first aid" she made up, and the whole idea that citizens could be trained to give at least basic care in an emergency and that people could have a little kit, like we all do - band-aids and all that - this is Clara Barton.' Pryor believes that "Everybody's life is better every day because of her."

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