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The Best Of Boys And Girls
Joe Hall of Panama City, Fla., Tapped For Honor
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Joe Hall (CBS)
His award, donated by Oprah Winfrey, provides him with a $13,000 scholarship for post-secondary education. The scholarships are part of "Oprah's Angel Network," a nationwide fund drive begun in 1997.
CBS News Correspondent Diana Olick reported for CBS News The Early Show on the five finalists, including Joe, who has risen above physical and verbal abuse from his parents.
"I think I'm just an average guy who tries very hard to do everything well," says Joe. "I do not think I'm the best athlete. I'm not the smartest guy. I just go out and try to do my best at every single thing and just try real hard."
Joe didn't always try very hard. When Joe first walked into the local Boys and Girls Club, he was 5 years old, and he was already angry and dysfunctional.
"Well, I've experienced a number of difficult and very hard circumstances at home -- alcoholism, various types of abuse, things like that," he says.
A lot of people would look at him and say he has had no opportunities. And, yet, he thinks he does.
"I didn't have any hope when I was young," he says. "I didn't get it at home. When they brought me here…they told me… 'Joe, I don't care what's happened to you in the past. You're a new person. You're here, and you can do whatever you want to do.'"
With that strength of character, Joe moved out of his father's house. His mother was already gone.
A friend's family took him in. And Joe took it from there, earning a 3.9 high school GPA and lettering in four sports.
His father told Joe he was worthless, and yet, he has striven to achieve. Where does that come from?
"Sometimes I even ask myself that, you know," Joe replies.
Joe is in college now. Someday, he would like to be a senator or president. That's a long trip from where he is now.
"Yes, it is," Joe concedes. "It's a very long trip, but it can happen. Anything can happen. I would love to give back to my community, Panama City, Bay County, that was so good to me. Without them, there wouldn't be a Joe Hall. Joe Hall, in the future, has a big debt to pay."
| PROFILES OF THE OTHER FINALISTS |
- Jenika Smallwood of Wilmington, Del., a teen-age mother working at the Boys and Girls Club. She attends classes at a local community college and recently joined the Army National Guard to help her pay for college.
She was in a Boys and Girls Club at a young age, but ran into trouble, she says, wheshe "let friends influence me instead of thinking for myself."
Jenika became pregnant and dropped out of the club, figuring she would be an embarrassment. But the club director kept calling her.
"After he talked to me, he realized I hadn't changed my goals. It was just going to be a lot harder road for me to travel," recalls Jenika.
So, Jenika went back, and now she counsels young girls like herself to abstain from sex, "because you learn from your experiences. And if you don't learn from your experiences, then you're doomed to fall into the same trap again."
Jenika wants to go into law enforcement, to give back to her community, in return for everything she has learned there.
"Nobody's perfect and…you need to think about your choices before you act, and…you need to be responsible for your actions," she says. - Jerry Simmons of Mescalero, N.M.: Jerry is half Navajo and half Sioux, but spent most of his formative years on an Apache reservation. He is a member of a forest firefighting unit and volunteers at the Lincoln County Medical Center. He wants to be a doctor.
When Jerry looks in the mirror, he sees a superman. But he worries that what he sees in the mirror, is not necessarily what others see.
"Well, when they see us, I think mainly they see us as, 'Oh, there's another dumb drunk Indian,'" he says.
Jerry lives on an Apache reservation in Mescalero, but he went to high school in the next town and will attend Stanford University this fall.
"I want to get ahead," he explains. "I want to get out of here. I want to make something of myself and do something for my people."
That's where medicine comes in. Jerry wants to improve health care on the reservation, and those who know him have no doubt he will.
Says Michael Romero, one of his teachers, "I've never met a student as in-depth as he is in what he knows."
But, despite his own family's support, Jerry knows he's turning his back, at least for a while, on his people.
People of his culture, he explains, "want you to stay because your family is your top priority, and sometimes they see you as leaving your family, like going off to college, is almost bad." - Jeremy Rubin of Tacoma, Wash.: As a volunteer, Jeremy has actively worked to relieve racial tensions in both his school and school district. Jeremy wants to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and he has an interest in politics. It's important to him to help eliminate the negative image people have of young black men.
For Jeremy, going to college is a family dream. "My parents unfortunately weren't able to finish college, so I'll be the first," he explains.
Jeremy's father left when he was just a year old -- another rejected son, but another chance for the Boys and Girls Clubs.
"The Boys and Girls Club was always a place of acceptance, no matter if you came from a broken home or what,""If maybe you came from the streets, when you got here, everybody was equal."
Jeremy volunteers at the club when he has time. He works for Lee Johnson of Aginoid Technologies, learning the business of big business. While his main goal is the be a CEO, he also would like to be governor of Washington, or maybe president of the United States.
"If he were to run for office tomorrow, I would vote for him," says Johnson.
But Jeremy knows it won't be easy.
"Well, there's a lot of stereotypes," he says. "You hear it all the time, that the black men are lazy, or we're thugs, or whatever it may be. The only thing that I can do is be accountable for myself and continue to set a good standard and be a good role model." - Chris Gale of Holland, Mich.: Chris has to take care of himself and his brother since his mother became confined to a wheelchair, the result of injuries inflicted by her former husband. He has also taken part-time jobs in order to bring money into the home. He and his younger brother must take responsibility for many of the adult tasks around the house, right down to paying the bills.
He did not make the best grades at his high school, but he did make the best of a bad situation.
"With Christopher, there was a lot of tension," says his mother, Delia Gale. "He was very, very angry and very hurt, and there was a lot of times that he saw a lot of rejection in his life -- a lot of rejection first from his father and, to some extent, from his community."
Adds Chris, "From a young man, I was expected to be the quote unquote man of the household, and I had a lot of extra responsibilities."
Those responsibilities included taking care of his younger brothers and his mother. But if Chris lost much of his youth, he found acceptance at his local Boys and Girls Club. And acceptance is what he needed most.
Chris wants to be a teacher, and he says the club is a big reason that he is going to college.
"There's something in me that always wants to reach out and be able to give someone else what they need to make it a little easier on them," he explains. "It's nice to be able to look in the mirror in the mornings -- if I have time, I do -- and be able to say, 'You know, I'm proud of the person I'm looking at in the mirror.'"
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