When my father was a little boy living next to the train tracks that ran through Goode, VA, his family was very poor. They were so poor that starting at the age of seven, he was sent out each winter morning with his cousins to walk along the tracks to pick up the chunks of coal that had fallen out of the coal cars that passed behind their house several times a day. As he walked along those cold steel tracks, picking up those precious black nuggets he could have never imagined, never have dreamed that one day he, a poor Black boy from the country, would be in the Air Force living and traveling with his own family in France, Germany, England, Morocco, Maine, Massachusetts, Spokane and back to Hampton, VA. He has told me about his happy, but fatherless childhood many times. Each time, he ends the tale wishing that every child living in poverty could hear his rags to riches story so that they could feel free to dream big and have hope for their futures.