Elderly people are considered easy target for robbers because they appear vulnerable.
However, no matter their age, these people’s experience and wisdom can come in handy when they find themselves in trouble.
One intruder who decided to steal from the residents of a senior-citizen complex regretted his decision after he came across a 67-year-old lady who had a black belt in martial arts. She didn’t appear strong at all, especially because of her age and her height of under 5ft, but as we all know, looks can be deceiving.
The intruder entered the home of Lorenza Marrujo, but she didn’t get scared and told him to back off, as per Los Angeles-based KCAL-TV. He fled her place, but shortly after, she heard screams coming from the neighboring apartment. She rushed to see what was going on when she saw the intruder attacking one of her friends, 81-year-old Elizabeth McCray. He shook her until she fell on the floor, but Lorenza wouldn’t let him hurt her friend any longer.
Speaking to KCAL-TV, Lorenza recalled how her friend told her, “He’s gonna kill us,” to what she replied, “Not tonight.”
“I squeezed myself between her [Elizabeth] and him…then I jumped on him and I was punching him and I had the cane against his throat.
“At the same time his arm came up and I twisted it around, he was shouting ‘you’re hurting me, you’re hurting me.’ and I said ‘I don’t care what happens to you, you have no right to hurt an elderly person,’” brave Lorenza explained.
She managed to hold him to the ground until police arrived. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, and he was arrested.
For Lorenza’s interview go to the video below and don’t forget to share it with your friends.
When we think of all those old shows we loved watching, one of the first that pops up is The BeverlyHillbillies. It follows the life and the adventures of the members of the Clampett family, who become reach overnight and decide to move to Beverly Hills. The only problem is that they are hillbillies and don’t really fit in the new surrounding.
The show brought so much laughter to so many people and remains until this day one of the best there are. In fact, just three weeks after the first episode aired back in 1962, it reached No.1, faster than any other show in history.
Among the actors who made the series what it is are Buddy Ebsen, in the role of Jed Clampett, Donna Douglas as Elly May Clampett, Max Baer Jr. who played Jethro Bodine, Jed’s dim-witted nephew, and Irene Ryan, Jed’s mother-in-law.
Source: Youtube/Password
Before landing the iconic role of Daisy May “Granny” Moses, Irene had a successful radio career. She was born Oct 17, 1902 in El Paso, Texas and knew her place was in the showbiz from very early age. She did musical comedy and variety and traveled across the country. During one of those trips, she met her husband Tim Ryan whom she married in 1922. The two performed together for many years and stayed married for two decades before they decided to untie the knot.
The two had their own radio program called Tim and Irene and performed the classic “Dumb Dora” act for many years.
Source: Youtube/kiwitrainguy
During the World War II, Irene joined comedian Bob Hope in giving performances to the American troops stationed in Europe.
“Believe me when I say that laughter up at the front lines is a very precious thing – precious to those grand guys who are giving and taking the awful business that goes on there,” Bob Hope told Library of Congress.
“There’s a lump the size of Grant’s Tomb in your throat when they come up to you and shake your hand and mumble ‘Thanks.’ Imagine those guys thanking me! Look what they’re doing for me. And for you.”
Source: Youtube/kiwitrainguy
When she auditioned for the role which changed her life forever, that of Granny Daisy Moses, the casting agent believed she wasn’t the perfect fit. According to El Paso Times, Irene called Paul Henning, the writer and producer of The Beverly Hillbillies, and said, “Look, Paul, do I have to go home and get my grey wig and shawl to convince you? If you get anybody older to play the role, she wont be able to stand the pace. I know what those 7-to-7 schedules are like.”
However, that wasn’t what the producer recalled happened.
“Irene Ryan had paid us a visit and she came by the office. We had used her on The Dennis Day Show and she came by and I said ’Irene, do you think you can play the part of a Hillbilly?’” Henning said, according to Emmy TV Legends.
“And she said ’are you kidding? I was at a stock company when we played a theater in Arkansas. We kept waiting for the curtain to go up backstage and finally the curtain didn’t go up and there were nobody in the theater. So we went up and talked to the manager and asked why he didn’t let the people in. And he said that that if he’d let them in before the curtain came up, they would whittle away the seats. So I know hillbilly.’”
She got to read the part once again and that was it.
Source: Youtube/Tata Soda
Irene was nominated for an Emmy Award twice for her iconic role, in 1963 and 1964, both for Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actress in a Series.
Once the series was over, she went on to pursue her life-long dream, Broadway.
Among the rest, she starred as grandmother “Berthe” in the Broadway musical Pippin’ which earned her a Tony Award nomination in 1973 for Best Featured Actress In a Musical.
Later, she founded the Irene Ryan Acting Competition, a foundation which gives scholarships to promising acting students. Even today, the organization awards sixteen regional and two national scholarships.
Irene passed away at the age of 70, in 1973. She suffered a stroke while on stage in New York six weeks prior to her passing. Reports say she had inoperable glioblastoma but was not aware of that. Her public relations agent Frank Liberman told The New York Times that Irene was rushed to Los Angeles for a treatment, but she didn’t pull through.
Source: Youtube/kiwitrainguy
Irene Ryan truly was one of a kind. Her incredible acting and all the laughter she brought to us make her one of the best actresses in the history of film.
Are you ready for some cuteness that will make your day? If yes, stay here for the video which melted the hearts of over 50 million people. It shows two twin babies who are less than a month old taking a bath together. What makes this video so special is that the little brothers have their arms and legs wrapped all over each other. It is very obvious they believe they are still in their mommy’s womb, especially because the person giving them a bath uses a special technique developed by one grandmother and a maternity nurse of many years, Sonia Rochel from Paris France.
Source: YouTube/ Le Bain de Sonia
The aim of this type of bath is to provide the feeling of comfort babies feel before they are welcomed into the world. It is only applied to babies who are less than two months old.
It is true when they say that the bond between twins is like no other. It’s deeper, stronger, and definitely unmatched. Well, twins know each other long before they are born.
Source: YouTube/ Le Bain de Sonia
You can check out the heartwarming video below. Enjoy and don’t forget to share it with your friends. Soothing indeed.
Sydney Smith is a 35-year-old woman from Los Angeles who has attracted a lot of attention on the social media over the years because of her distinctive looks.
Ever since she was a young girl, Smith’s friends and classmates called her ‘giraffe’ because of her long neck. The thing is that she never found that offensive. On the contrary, she has always loved her neck and believed it made her special.
As time passed by, Smiths somehow felt the urge to live by that name, so she did something that put her under the spotlight. Just as the women from the Kayan tribe from Southeast Asia who wear neck rings for the sake of giving an impression that it is bigger than it actually is, Smith herself placed rings around her neck.
Her parents described what their daughter did as ridiculous and believed it would be just a short-lived obsession, but Smith was determined to extend her neck further and wore her rings everywhere.
The thing is that the neck itself can’t really be stretched with those rings. What they do is press down on the collar bone and compresses the rib cage, which makes the neck only look longer.
The Kayan women start wearing the brass coils at the age of five because they believe they make them more beautiful and represent a symbol of their cultural identity.
Getty Images
“I was the first western woman (that I know of) attempting to elongate my neck,” Smith wrote on the social media.
Some three years after she started wearing her copper rings that she made herself, she claimed that her neck got longer for 10 to 11 inches. She even took them off shortly, but didn’t feel comfortable without them.
“I had missed the comfort from the pressure on the top of my neck and shoulders and had been thinking about doing it again for a while,” Smith said. “The comfort and exhilaration of this process was really all I was after.”
Another reason why she got back to the rings was seeing Lady Gaga at a concert. The singer’s “freak empowerment message” inspired Smith to be different even further so she had a friend redo her rings before she put them on again.
Over the years, Smith’s photos and her story were shared online every now and then and everyone was eager to see how much her neck stretched with time. People starred at her and she even had a hard time finding a proper job, but that didn’t bother her until she started feeling trapped.
“I could not function as a long-necked woman with fifteen rings in the US. You could only do it if you were willing to isolate yourself completely and you never have to leave home. I spent five years of my life with rings around my neck and I became very introverted and isolated,” she told the Daily Mail in 2017.
“If you’re a trust fund baby and do not ever need to leave the house, do not ever need to drive, then maybe you can pull it off,” she added.
Today, Smith lives her life without the rings. However, wearing them for years affected her health as her neck muscles became very fragile. It took some time for her to get back to normal.
“People have this misconception that they think your neck is going to look super long when you remove the rings,” she told the Daily Mail.
“Some of you are disappointed to see me without the rings nowadays, but I feel myself evolving past them. Accept me now or don’t. I’ve never fully been accepted by the world with or without my rings. Either way, it’s the same. Self love is what matters most.”
As many of her followers were eager to learn more of her decision to take her rings away, she decided to give a little more insight and wrote on Instagram in December 2021: “It’s been a few years since I removed my neck rings and the stories keep circulating. It’s been hard finding something equally as exciting since I took my rings off. In the end, I felt trapped and defined by my neck rings, as people expected me to continue as Giraffe Woman. In western society, it is very difficult to maintain that sort of lifestyle. Unlike the small villages in Cambodia where the longneck women live a more simple lifestyle that is conducive to their rings. With that being said, there was no way I could continue with the rings in Western society, with all of its demands.”
Today, Smith works as a light worker and a twin flame specialist which is related to spiritual awakening.
Margaret Hubl was a woman of many virtues. When she passed away in 2016 at the age of 86, her family was convinced even further of the love she had for each and every person who was part of her life.
Back in the day, when her children were still very young, she started sewing clothes for them. Over time, she excelled this skill and started quilting comfy blankets for her family. Hubl and her husband had three children on their own, but they also adopted her niece and nephew when their parents were killed in a car crash in 1969.
Source: @tits_mcgheee/Reddit
On the day of Hubl’s funeral, her granddaughter, Christina Tollman, asked from the members of the family to bring the handmade quits her grandma made for them to the church so that they could serve as a visual reminder of late Hubl’s craftsmanship.
What Tollman didn’t expect was for the entire place to be covered in her grandma’s work. She wasn’t even aware that the lovely elderly lady had created that many quilts over the years.
“Never did I imagine how many there were. We covered almost every single pew in that church. I never knew how many she actually made,” she told Today.
Source: tits_mcgheee/Reddit
While cleaning Hubl’s house, her children and grandchildren found a notebook filled with dates and names of people she made the quilts for.
“When we sat down to go through her things we found this — I call it a pocket notebook. Inside it says whose quilt she was working on, what day she put it in the quilt frame and which day she took it out,” the granddaughter said.
Source: Photo from Christina Tollman via TODAY
Hubl even had some finished creations at home but was waiting for a special occasion to give them to certain people. Tollman read the names and decided to give her granny’s quilts to the people she made them for, three of Tollman’s cousins, on the day of the funeral.
“I actually have three cousins that are not married, and the day of her funeral was the day that they got to see their quilts for the first time,” she said. “That was really kind of a neat moment.”
Source: @womensart1/Twitter
“She wanted us to have something to wrap up and keep warm in when we went away to school,” Tollman said.
People recalled the times they used the quilts and remembered the good times they spent around Hubl. “This is the love that Grandma made for each of us. This is what she made for each of us to wrap up in when we hurt,” her granddaughter said. “When we miss her.”
Isn’t this a beautiful way to celebrate someone’s life?
One of the characters which added to the NCIS popularity is definitely the smart and but-kicking detective Ziva David portrayed by beautiful Cote de Pablo.
Cote was born María José de Pablo Fernández on November 12, 1979, in Santiago, Chile. When she was 10, her family settled down in Miami Florida. Moving places wasn’t easy for Cote who needed to learn a new language and make new friends. It was during her school years that she decided to be called Cote, mainly because her classmates had a hard time pronouncing her birth name right.
Andreas Branch/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Over time, she found her place under the American sky.
“But I was raised here. And I found my niche because I went to a performing arts high school. I had always been interested in the arts, but performing became even more important because it was a way to communicate with people in my new country,” she told Prevention. “It wasn’t till I got to the United States that I learned to speak English.
“Those were defining years for me. I always describe myself as sort of a hippie. Deep inside, I’m not a glamorous person,” the actress added. “I come from a traditional, conservative world. But this kind of hippie world at school allowed me to explore the creativity and imagination that live inside all of us.”
Shutterstock/Kathy Hutchins
Once in America, Cote’s mother started working for Telemundo, a Spanish-speaking television channel, and Cote inherited the love for arts from her.
At the age of 15, Cote co-hosted episodes of the Latin-American talk show Control with former Entertainment Tonight host Carlos Ponce. She attended Carnegie Mellon University where she studied music and theatre.
After appearing in commercials and a number of television series, including ones in All My Children and Fling, Cote was cast to portray Ziva David on NCIS from 2005 to 2013. She later made short comebacks, but didn’t return as a regular in the show.
Speaking of her character, Cote said that she and Ziva had a lot in common. “My character’s strength is like mine, to a completely different degree. Losing family members because of a war,” Cote told Prevention. “I have moments when I just have to hold my heart. But I also have to remember that if I played the character from my point of view, she’d be falling apart all the time. She has to keep it together–it’s the world she grew up in.”
Shutterstock/Tinseltown
Over the course of the years she was on NCIS, Cote formed strong bonds with most of her co-stars, but that with Mark Harmon seemed to be the strongest of all. They have been close since the moment they met and Cote speaks of Harmon with admiration.
“[Mark Harmon] is more of a friend mentor. He was always like a father figure to me. Obviously, Ziva and Gibbs have that, but Cote and Mark have that as well,” she told BUILD.
“He’s a very busy, famous man. Obviously, there are many months where you just don’t talk, but it’s really nice to know that sometimes when you have friendships but certainly in the family – that’s a given- you can go time without talking, but you’ve laid a foundation. A foundation that is solid.
“From that foundation, you can really go anywhere. You can go years without talking,” Cote added. “Really heavy-duty things can happen, and then all the sudden you’re back, and you can pick up right where you left off.”
John Shearer/WireImage
Asked why she left the show which defined her life and career, Cote said during an occasion that she made such a decision out of respect for her character.
Leaving NCIS was huge for Cote, but she moved on to other significant projects. Among the rest, she landed roles in The 33, Prototype, and Seneca.
Cote, who is 42, hasn’t been married. She, however, knows what she’s looking for in the person she would spend her life with.
“One of the things I love is just being able to have a conversation with somebody, being able to be vulnerable and to feel somebody else’s vulnerability,” she told Cheat Sheet in 2010. “And more so than that, to find the fun and the laughter. If you can laugh with a person, everything’s fine.”
“Eventually, I think it will happen… Things have been slow to come. I think happily they will come when the time is right,” Cote told Rachel Ray in 2013.
Gregg DeGuire/WireImage
Although she’s not part of NCIS any more, Cote remains one of the most popular characters.
Sheila Marsh has spent her entire life working at the Park Racecourse. Ever since she was 20 years old, she dedicated all her life to the horses she took care of. Her family knew those magnificent creatures were her great love in life and were proud of the attention and care Sheila gave to the horses over the years.
Unfortunately, Sheila was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 77. On her deathbed, besides her children and loved ones, she asked to see her horses for one last time, especially one mare named Brownen. Sheila was Brownen’s caretaker for almost 20 years and they shared a special bond.
Aware of her mother’s health condition and the little time she had, Sheila’s daughter, Tina, pleaded the staff at the Wigan clinic to let her say one final goodbye to her horses. They were willing to satisfy Sheila’s dying wish and brought her gurney to the parking area where her beloved horses were eagerly waiting for her.
When the time came for Brownen to meet her friend of many years, she buried her nose in her cheek as though she was trying to kiss her. Sheila felt joy and gathered strength to whisper Brownen’s name.
“Mom had a hard time talking on her last day, but she clearly called Brownen by name and kissed her,” Tina said.
The photo of Sheila and Brownen kissing was a touching one. It showed that love is the most powerful force on Earth.
“I cried, and every one of the medical attendants also cried. She received consolation, it was such a delightful second! She had a very unique relationship with Brownen. She took care of her for 18 or 19 years, since Brownen was 7. It was touching for us all, because it was very vital.”
Witnessing such strong connection between a human and an animal is beyond wonderful.
Sheila couldn’t leave this world without bidding farewell. She had given her horses love, and she received that love back.
It was during the World War II when a young woman named Trudy Menard managed to find a job at the Rootes aircraft factory in Speke, Britain. Little did she know, however, that her life would change forever.
Once she started her job, she was told she would be the assistant of a young engineer named Barclay Patoir who traveled all the way from British Guiana, now known as Guyana, to the United Kingdom to help with the shortage of people working at the factory. “There was a shortage of engineer skills in Britain in World War Two so young men from the Caribbean volunteered to help the mother country,” he later explained.
Trudy was hesitant about working alongside Barclay. Why, you may wonder. Because she was white and he was black. What’s most, Trudy had never seen or been into contact with a black person before, so she was even afraid to get near him.
YouTube/ BBC News
At the beginning, the two barely exchanged a single word, but as time passed by, they grew fond of each other. One day, while there was a break in the production, he invited her on a date and she was more than happy to accept the much-anticipated invitation.
The two took a train to Southport. On the way, they could notice people starring at them with judgment in their look, but neither Trudy nor Barclay cared about what others thought of their relationship.
The times were different back in the day and although Liverpool had one of the first established Black settlements, racism was everywhere.
“I didn’t tell my mother when I was going to see Barclay,” Trudy recalled. “She thought I was going in to town to meet the girls. She had noticed I was very happy but she didn’t know why. When she did find out she threatened to throw me out the house.”
YouTube/ BBC News
Despite many were against their relationship, in 1944, the two decided to get married. Sadly, an interracial marriage was something people couldn’t accept, not even the priest they went to and asked to marry them.
“He said, ‘There’s so many colored men coming over here and going back home leaving the women with children. So I’m not marrying you.’ We were upset about that,” Trudy recalled.
Instead of a church marriage, Trudy and Barclay organized a small ceremony at the Liverpool Register Office. There were only two people in attendance, except for the newlyweds; Trudy’s sister and one of Barclay’s friends.
They settled in Manchester and welcomed two daughters. Over the course of the years, this couple watched things change when it came to interracial couples and they were glad marrying someone from a different race wasn’t that of a big issue any longer.
“Before people would stop and watch you, or whisper and laugh as you passed and now they’re not bothered,” Barclay said.
“People don’t walk on the other side of the street like they used to,” Trudy commented.
This loving couple stayed together for 76 years before they both passed away in May 2020, within hours of each other.
Barclay was 100, and Trudy was 99.
Despite everything they were forced to go through in their youth, these two led quite a life together.
For more on their beautiful and inspiring love story check out the video below. Don’t forget to share it with your friends just to remind them that true love is always worth fighting for.
