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"The Rest of the Story" Examples

Following are two sample selections from Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story by Paul Aurandt.  New York:  Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977.

Escape!

            Of all the positions in the field of journalism, that of war correspondent is perhaps most dangerous.  Some are captured, some escape.  Some die.

            Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Spencer was the London Morning Post’s newest correspondent.  His assignment was the Boer War, in South Africa.

            Had young Leonard foreseen the peril awaiting him, he would probably have taken the assignment anyway.  That’s how Leonard was.

            About twenty miles from Ladysmith, Leonard could hear the booming guns.  He was aboard a British armored train that would take him as close to the front as he could get.

            The train got too close.  There was a sudden crash.  The train had struck a boulder on the tracks … a Boer booby trap.  It was an ambush!

            Immediately, a fusillade of rifle fire followed.  Surprised, British troops on the train fired back.

            And Leonard?  Leonard ignored the gunshots and exploding shells.  He jumped off the train, directed the British defense, helped to clear the wreckage.

            In fact, without the aid of this youthful correspondent from the Morning Post, the train might well have been lost and the British troops massacred.

            Instead, the wreckage was cleared, the train did pull out of the trap and carried a good many British soldiers with it.

            The one left behind to face the enemy…was Leonard!  No, the story does not end sadly there.

Leonard was captured, unharmed.  Even though Leonard was technically a war correspondent, the Boer commander was sufficiently impressed with his bravery…to have Leonard thrown into prison at Pretoria.

            The Pretoria prison was among the world’s most carefully guarded strongholds.  Still, that did not stop Leonard from plotting an escape with two other British captives.

            As darkness fell, the trio waited for their opportunity.  It was now pitch black.  The sentries exchanged their posts.  Leonard sprang across an open area, hurdled a fence of barbed-wire mesh.  When he looked back, there was no one.  His comrades had missed their chance!

            Three hundred miles of hostile territory lay between Leonard and his freedom.  For a while, he followed the railroad tracks to the east, stumbling alone, through the dark, dodging enemy patrols.  Tired, hungry, thirsty…Leonard plodded long into the night, knowing that, each painful foot of the way, one false step could be his last.

            The night turned to day and back to night again, until the days and nights blurred.

            Finally Leonard reached a mining town.  His luck wearing thin but holding, he knocked on the door of the only Britisher in the territory and was smuggled onto a train loaded with bales of wool.

            The train would carry him to the British consul.  To safety.

            And that’s how Leonard Spencer, the London Morning Post’s fledgling correspondent, got his story…and his reputation for daring.

            History has all but forgotten this incident in his life in order to make room for later glory.

            The fortune that once seemed to be wearing thin had only begun…and one day rubbed off on all of England.

            For the young correspondent who once upon a time saved a British armored train and escaped the enemy under impossible circumstances…continued to do the impossible for the rest of his life.

            We knew him as Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill!

            And now you know THE REST OF THE STORY.

Gentle John Henry

             Gentle John Henry was born in Griffin, Georgia, the son of a Confederate Army major.

            As a boy, John was taught proper bearing and courtly manners, befitting his prestigious family.  But one thing disturbed his daddy:  John could not hold his own in a fight.

            Fully grown in his late teens, John stood five ten, was painfully thin…and was tortured by his fear of physical violence.

            One day, the violence was unavoidable.

            He was roughed up by a ruffian over the right to use a swimming hole.  John’s father promptly sent him to Baltimore, to advance the boy’s education in a less threatening environment.  He was enrolled in the Baltimore Dental college.

            John was entirely agreeable.  With the hometown bullies at a safe distance, he studied diligently for two years and completed the course in dentistry.  Then he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he would begin his postgraduate practice.

            For a while, John worked alongside one of the most prominent dentists in that city, frequently taking over his elder colleague’s practice.

            Eventually homesickness set in and John, now twenty-two, returned to Griffin to establish himself there.

            It was a comfortable little office, at the southwestern corner of Solomon and State.  And though John’s life appeared to be complete, there was another personal concern which had been haunting him.  Tuberculosis.

            The already gentle young man became even more subdued as the worry over his health increased.  One day, a quaking, wan John Henry sat in the office of his general practitioner and was told he was going to die.

            John asked how long he had to live.

            The physician’s gaze fell.  He was quiet for a moment.  “Perhaps a drier climate might add a year or two.”  And that was all he said.

            So it seemed that gentle John Henry…the boy who couldn’t hold his own in a fight…the retiring young man who had fled violence to become a dentist…had returned home to a battle he could not win.

            But, just this once in his brief, unassuming, mild-mannered life, John Henry wanted to fight back!

            How could he die if he had not yet lived?

            Next day, John packed his bags and his dental instruments.  If even a few precious hours could be gained in a drier climate, then that’s where John would go.

            First stop, Dallas…on a one-way trip to immortality.

            It was a Dallas cowpoke dental patient who first met the new John Henry.  The cowboy complained about his treatment, the ensuing argument escalated, the dentist pulled out a .45…and blew the cowboy clean away.

            The frustration of a waning, yet-to-be-experienced life carved for the notorious itinerant Wild West gambler thirty notches on his gun.  John Henry would one day die of the respiratory disease that plagued him.  It was not a year…or two…but fourteen years later!  And in those fourteen years, John bet and blazed and blasted his way into the pages of western history.

            John Henry was once described as “the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever saw!”  This unequivocal praise…came from Marshal Wyatt Earp.

            Perhaps by now you’ve guessed that John Henry…the boy who couldn’t hold his own in a fight…the mild-mannered dentist who found life only after facing death…the much-feared, drinking, gambling, gun-slinging friend of Wyatt Earp…was John Henry “Doc” Holliday!

            And now you know THE REST OF THE STORY.