PHILADELPHIA –Even for identical twins, Elana McDonald and Delana Wardlaw have a lot in common.

Both Philadelphia physicians, the sisters graduated together from Central High School (class number 251), Temple University, and Penn State’s College of Medicine. They inherited their parents’ belief in the power of education. They also learned...Read more

Eight decades of marriage for Boca Raton, Florida, Jewish couple Lou and Edith Bluefeld includes many years working on a successful family kosher catering business.

Through Bluefeld Caterers – The Orchid Touch, the family was responsible for koshering the White House kitchen during the announcement of the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s ...Read more

ATLANTA — Peggy Fitzpatrick Tatum recently spent two weeks trying to book an appointment to get the COVID-19 vaccine before eventually landing a date.

Tatum's decision to get the vaccine may raise some eyebrows.

The 65-year-old retired federal employee is the great-granddaughter of one of hundreds of Black men in Macon County, Alabama, who ...Read more

My parents were married for 46 years. Right up until my dad died 10 years ago, he lived by a simple maxim: On all matters, big and small, my mother was right.

When she embarked on difficult personal journeys, it was because they were necessary. When she took daring professional leaps and suffered great setbacks, they were only temporary. In ...Read more

CHICAGO – The coronavirus had already taken her uncle and her grandmother. By the time Karina Reyes’ 47-year-old mother was hospitalized, Reyes and the rest of her family were all too familiar with planning a pandemic memorial.

Doctors told Reyes and her brothers that their mother, Elvia Mendoza, was not getting better. “Does a miracle ...Read more

FRESNO, Calif. – In the Before (as their children call pre-coronavirus), Rene and Veronica Ramirez sometimes joked after a hectic day that they were "livin' the dream."

It was a dream hard-won.

Veronica, a pediatrician, was the daughter of a single mother from Orosi, a rural Tulare County community without access to clean drinking water. ...Read more

LOS ANGELES – It was never a question that Stephanie Contreras-Reyes would take the most rigorous AP classes her high school offers. It was never a question that she would juggle these classes with a slate of impressive extracurriculars and weekly volunteering at two hospitals. It was never a question that she would apply to California's top ...Read more

HARTFORD, Conn. – At 89, Leroy Williams struggled with high blood pressure, congestive heart failure and a number of other chronic health problems.

But his ailments didn’t stop him from walking in the Manchester Road Race two years ago. Or from cultivating sunflowers at the West Hartford assisted living facility where he lived with his wife...Read more

After he was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 24, Mike Grover charged ahead with work and with life.

He married his fiancee, Lea, before 200 people in a rooftop ceremony at the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame in Chicago’s Little Italy. He fit in a New Zealand honeymoon between rounds of chemotherapy.

He went back to work as a...Read more

CHICAGO – On the first weekend after Chicago's Shedd Aquarium was forced to close by the new coronavirus that was endangering the country, the penguin handlers had an idea.

Taking advantage of the building’s quiet halls, the empty spaces where normally tourists would congregate in front of fish displays, they brought the rockhopper penguin ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS – During their planetarium field trip, the third-graders from Castle Elementary School in Oakdale, Minnesota, had plenty on their minds.

Is there any water on the moon? Which is the coldest planet, and the hottest one? What is a black hole? Would you freeze to death on Mars?

Kaitlin Ehret, the Bell Museum planetarium educator ...Read more

After 49 years on the job, Marge Moore still mops and sweeps her bus every day, trying to set a good example for her students. She keeps the vehicle at her house so she can wash it on the weekends — and she makes sure to wax it every other month.

When it’s especially frigid and the gear shift freezes, she drags her blow dryer, with an ...Read more

SEATTLE — Online school is not easy for anybody.

Online school is a lot tougher when you live in a small house with five brothers and a mom who works two jobs.

"Do you hear that background noise in my house?" says Renee Hipp, as the rambunctious sounds of her five boys talking, bickering, playing and living in one space echoes off the walls....Read more

It was a warm day this summer when Mom and I sat on the veranda of the nursing home for a rare in-person visit. We were both masked-up and a good six or more feet apart.

The young aide was momentarily distracted by another resident there.

That's when Mom stood up, walked over and took my hand in hers. Dementia be damned, COVID-19 be damned. ...Read more

My father went missing sometime on the morning of Dec. 2.

Within hours, I was searching his empty house along with the Freehold, N.J., police. For some reason, my first thought was how my late mother would've hated seeing them traipse across her carpets with their shoes on.

The beige Honda Civic wasn't in the garage.

He prizes that car as he ...Read more

LOS ANGELES – In the predawn hours on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Alyssa Fetters awoke her fiancé in severe pain.

Fetters was six weeks pregnant and had learned about two weeks prior that her pregnancy was ectopic — when the egg grows outside of the uterus. Learning that there would be no way for the egg to survive and that her own ...Read more