Leslie Goddard is an award-winning actress and scholar who has been presenting history programs for more than twenty years. As a living historian, she has portrayed such celebrated historical figures as Abigail Adams, Clara Barton, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, Julia Child, Lucille Ball, and Audrey Hepburn to name but a few. Dr. Goddard holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University specializing in American studies and U.S. history as well as a master’s degree in theater. A former museum director, she is the author of three books on history and currently works full time as an author, public speaker, actress, and living historian.

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When Clara Barton was only 10, her brother David fell off the roof of the family barn. Clara took over as her brother’s nurse and spent two years at his bedside as he slowly recovered. As a girl, Clara was shy and had a stutter, and her worried mother asked a phrenologist to help her. The phrenologist said that she was shy and retiring and that the solution to her problem was to become a schoolteacher. Barton did not want to teach, but she began teaching in 1839 at the age of 18. She overcame her shyness, became a sought-after teacher, and believed in the value of her work. She once said, “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.”

In 1854, she gave up teaching and took a job in the United States Patent Office in Washington, D.C. She worked hard, got promoted, and within a year was making a salary equal to the men in the office (which angered the men).

By 1861, war was breaking out, and when supporters of the Confederacy attacked Union soldiers in Washington, D.C., Clara helped nurse wounded soldiers in the same way she had nursed her brother when they were young. During one of the first major engagements of the war, the Battle of Bull Run, the Union suffered a staggering defeat and as Clara read reports of the battle, she realized that the Union Army had not seriously considered or provided for wounded soldiers. She began to gather medical supplies and ride along in ambulances, providing aid and comfort to wounded soldiers on the frontlines.

After the war, she traveled to Geneva, Switzerland where she learned about the International Red Cross and its mission to be a neutral organization that helped wounded soldiers. When Clara returned to the United States, she pressed the Arthur administration for the creation of an American Red Cross, convinced that the organization could be used in crises well beyond the battlefield as well as in war. With its founding, she became its first president.

Clara Barton said, “I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.”

And she said, “The door that nobody else will go in at, seems always to swing open widely for me.

– Excerpted from Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac”