My Sunday School class was talking about birthdays yesterday. The consensus is that they are important only during childhood and old age. A kid wants presents. When you're old, you don't want stuff, you're just glad to have a birthday!
The story at the beginning intrigued me. A little digging shows that it’s a true story, except that it was NOT the same child the second time. The fact that Figlock was a street sweeper means he was on the streets of the city all day every day and more likely to encounter falling children than the average man. The same child falling was a later embellishment, as are the versions of the story that put it in more recent decades. Ancestry.com lists two Joseph Figlocks in Detroit from the 1940 census. One was born in 1884 and the other in 1907. Possibly father and son?
My, how things change. Thirty years ago, every radio station supplied cheap ($20), heavy headphones that the air staff would abuse. They broke regularly, so you couldn't rely on having the necessary equipment at work. So I invested in a set of Sennheiser ultralights for $250, a princely sum for a dj back then. No one touched them but me. They looked so delicate, but worked great for decades.
Oh yeah, she plans to work during school. And she got grants and scholarships. Still won't cover everything. But I borrowed for school 40 years ago, and while it seemed a huge burden at the time, I paid it off in a few years without too much problem.