Motivate Your Team! Cheer Up A Friend! Inspire Yourself!
Motivate Your Team! Cheer Up A Friend! Inspire Yourself!
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| Wooden's Wisdom - Volume 13 | Issue 744 |
| Craig Impelman Speaking | Championship Coaches | Champion's Leadership Library Login | |
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"YOU OFTEN FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR." "Whether you look for the good or look for the bad in a person, you’ll find it." — Abraham Lincoln
Coach Wooden wrote: "You often find what you’re looking for." Coach believed the most important word in our language is love. When you look for the best in people — when you genuinely love them — you tend to bring out the best in them.
The life of Father Edward Flanagan is an inspiring example of this idea.
Edward Joseph Flanagan was born in 1886 on a small farm in County Roscommon, Ireland, one of eleven children. In 1904 he immigrated to the United States to become a Catholic Priest. In 1912 he was ordained and assigned to Omaha, Nebraska.
Omaha in the early twentieth century was a growing city with a hidden crisis. Homeless and neglected boys wandered its streets, sleeping in alleys, stealing food, and landing in harsh reform schools that emphasized punishment over restoration. Many people believed some children were simply "bad." Father Flanagan rejected that idea entirely. He insisted that environment and example shaped behavior and that with structure, guidance, and love, a child’s future could change.
In 1917 he rented a modest house in Omaha with borrowed money and welcomed five boys into what he called Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home. He had no endowment, just beds, meals, school, prayer, chores, and consistent expectations. He went door to door asking for donated furniture and supplies. The house quickly filled, and the need continued to grow.
By 1921, convinced the boys needed more than shelter, Father Flanagan purchased farmland outside Omaha and began building not an orphanage, but a town. Streets, sidewalks, homes, a school, a chapel, athletic fields, a post office, and even a fire department rose from open fields. The boys elected their own mayor and council members, learning responsibility through participation. His famous declaration captured his philosophy: "There are no bad boys. There is only bad environment, bad training, bad example and bad thinking."
Boys Town gained national attention in 1938 when the film Boys Town, starring Spencer Tracy (who won the Academy Award) as Father Flanagan, introduced the village to millions. It flourished.
After World War II he traveled through Asia and later Europe, meeting with officials and visiting children affected by war. While on this mission, he suffered a fatal heart attack in May 1948. His body was returned to Nebraska and buried in Boys Town.
Today Boys Town still stands in Nebraska as both a historic village and the headquarters of a national nonprofit organization. Approximately 400 boys and girls live on the campus in family-style homes led by trained Family Teachers. The organization has expanded nationwide, offering residential treatment, foster care and adoption services, family counseling, in-home support programs, schools for children with behavioral challenges, a nationally recognized Boys Town National Research Hospital, and a 24/7 crisis hotline serving families across the country.
What began with five boys in a rented house now reaches millions of children and families each year. I want to try and be more like Father Flanagan.
Yours in Coaching, Craig Impelman
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Friendship Friendship needs no studied phrases,
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