Jacksonville Public Library

05/14/2026

Join us at the Jacksonville Public Library on May 16 at 10:00 AM for Adulting 2.0 with local contractor Jesus Santana! 🏡 Learn essential home repair tips, DIY maintenance tricks, and expert advice perfect for all homeowners. No registration needed!

05/13/2026

05/12/2026

"They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their two-week wellness visits without concern.

Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down -- a 7-week-old boy in Maryland with sudden seizures, an 11-pound girl in Alabama who stopped breathing for 20 seconds at a time, a baby boy in Kentucky who vomited before going limp, a brown-haired girl in Texas not yet two weeks old, bleeding around her belly button."

As recounted in a new ProPublica investigation, doctors fought desperately to save them -- transfusions, breathing tubes, a half-hour of resuscitation on one boy whose parents finally told them it was time to stop. The autopsies all came back with the same finding: vitamin K deficiency bleeding, a catastrophic condition that is, in nearly every case, entirely preventable.

The prevention is a single shot, given at birth, that has been standard in American hospitals for generations. The researchers who discovered vitamin K's role in blood clotting were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1943. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended the shot for all newborns since 1961.

Babies who don't receive it are 81 times more likely to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding than those who do, and of the babies who develop it, 1 in 5 will die. Many more will survive the bleeding -- where oxygen often can't reach their brains as blood pools around their skulls -- but emerge with lasting brain damage.

The overall death toll remains relatively small in official records, but it has been rising, and the numbers alone understate the full harm. The trend driving all of it is accelerating: according to a December study analyzing more than five million births, more than 5 percent of newborns did not receive vitamin K in 2024 -- a 77 percent increase since 2017. Some hospitals have seen their refusal rates more than double over that period, and at one Idaho hospital, nearly 1 in 5 newborns went without the shot last year.

Part of what makes this harder to combat is a basic fact of infant biology that many parents -- and even some providers -- don't fully appreciate. Newborns come into the world without sufficient vitamin K, and they don't accumulate it quickly. Babies who are exclusively breastfed face the greatest risk, since human milk delivers only a fraction of what they need. The shot addresses that vulnerability immediately and completely.

The shot has worked so well for so long that it has become a victim of its own success. "Since we've been treating babies with vitamin K, we haven't seen much deficiency bleeding," said Dr. Ivan Hand, director of neonatology at Kings County Hospital Center in New York and co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on vitamin K. "So people think it doesn't exist."

Among the more than a dozen pediatricians ProPublica interviewed, all agreed on which of the three standard newborn interventions was most vital. "I'm picking vitamin K every day," said Dr. Anna Morad, a pediatrician at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville. "Absolutely."

The science was settled so thoroughly, so long ago, that a generation of doctors never had to think much about explaining to parents why it mattered.

What filled that space was social media fearmongering. Although vitamin K is not a vaccine, it has been pulled into the same current of anti-intervention sentiment that has driven down childhood vaccination rates -- parents in online communities warning each other away from what they describe as unnecessary medical interference, comment sections full of posts declaring they would never inject their babies with "poisons from big pharma" and people with no medical training deploying scientific-sounding language to frighten families away from an intervention with a six-decade safety record.

The grief on the other side is quieter. Parents who lost babies or watched them suffer permanent damage have written about their experiences in obituaries and online memorials. "No one could've prepared us for the heartbreak we faced six weeks after our little miracle was born," one mother wrote after her daughter suffered a brain bleed that led to brain death.

Into this landscape, the federal government has offered silence. In April, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier -- a physician -- pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to simply reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused. "I've never said, literally never said, anything about it," Kennedy told her. "That's exactly the point," Schrier replied. "The doubt you've created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions."

The result is playing out in maternity wards across the country -- federal inaction, social media-driven suspicion of even the most established science, and a generation of parents making decisions based on fear and misinformation. Experts who spoke with ProPublica expect this entirely preventable death toll to keep climbing.

For the families already on the other side of that failure, there are no statistics. There is only what one grieving family wrote after their baby was gone: "We miss his sweet smell."

The full ProPublica investigation is essential reading for every parent and every provider at https://www.propublica.org/article/more-parents-decline-vitamin-k-shot-newborns

To introduce children to trailblazing women of public health, we highly recommend "Dr. Jo: How Sara Josephine Baker Saved the Lives of America's Children" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dr-jo) and "Never Give Up: Dr. Kati Karikó and the Race for the Future of Vaccines" for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/never-give-up)

To introduce today's kids to what used to be a common childhood disease prior to vaccinations, polio, we highly recommend the books "Blue" (https://www.amightygirl.com/blue) and "Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio" (https://www.amightygirl.com/small-steps), both for ages 9 and up

For a fun picture book about a young rabbit who discovers the cure to a mysterious malady sickening her forest friends, check out "Charlotte the Scientist Finds A Cure" for ages 4 to 8 at https://www.amightygirl.com/charlotte-the-scientist-finds-a-cure

There is also an excellent book about 21 trailblazing women in medicine, “Bold Women of Medicine" for ages 12 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/bold-women-of-medicine

For more children's books about pioneering women of science, visit our blog post, "60 Children's Books to Inspire Science-Loving Mighty Girls," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13914

05/07/2026

The book featuring letters from Richard Feynman to his first wife, Arline Greenbaum, is titled "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman". It is on order, so look for it on the new arrival shelves.

He wrote her a letter every day for the rest of his life.
His wife Arline died of tuberculosis on June 16, 1945, in a hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was twenty-five years old. Richard Feynman was twenty-seven. He had been working at Los Alamos on the bomb. He had driven to her bedside that afternoon. The clock in the room had stopped at the moment she died — the same clock he had repaired several times so she could see the time from her bed. He thought, even then, with the part of his mind he could not turn off: that is unlikely. That is statistically very unlikely.
He drove back to Los Alamos that night and went on working.
For sixteen months he did not allow himself to grieve. He worked. He made jokes. He played the bongos in his dorm room. He attended dinners and faculty meetings. He cracked the safes of senior physicists for entertainment.
Then, sixteen months after she died, he wrote her a letter.
He told her he loved her. He told her what he had been doing. He told her he had thought he should not tell her, because she was dead, but that the not-telling had become harder than the telling. He sealed the letter and added a postscript at the end.
Please excuse my not mailing this. I don't know your new address.
The letter was found in a box in his office after his own death, forty-three years later.
That was the man.
Richard Phillips Feynman was born in Queens, New York, in 1918. His father had wanted a son who asked questions, and so from the time Richard could speak, his father had taught him that the name of a thing was not the same as understanding it. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, his father told him, and when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing about the bird. You will only know what humans have called it. To know the bird, you have to watch it.
Feynman watched.
He went to MIT. He went to Princeton. By the time he was twenty-three he was at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project, the youngest senior physicist in the program. Robert Oppenheimer had recruited him personally. Hans Bethe used him as a sparring partner. Niels Bohr asked for him by name when he visited the lab, because Bohr had noticed that Feynman was the only physicist in the building who would tell him, plainly and without ceremony, when his ideas were wrong.
He cracked the safes for fun.
The military had locked the most classified documents of the project — bomb designs, isotope yields, schematics — inside heavy combination safes. The officers running the security were proud of these safes. Feynman, who had no combination, started opening them anyway. He had noticed that the safe dials had small mechanical tolerances. The last two digits of a combination could be guessed within a margin of two on either side. He had also noticed that physicists, asked to invent a combination from memory, almost always chose either a birthday or the first six digits of a mathematical constant. Pi. e. The square root of two.
He opened dozens of safes across the lab. He left notes inside.
This was not a hard combination. — RPF.
The officers were furious. He kept doing it. He believed, with the part of him that could not stop being a physicist for thirty seconds together, that the right of a thing to be called secure had to be earned by testing it, not asserted by labeling it. Secrecy as ceremony, he called it. Magic, not engineering. He distrusted any system that protected itself by refusing to be examined.
This habit would matter, forty years later, in a way that the officers in 1944 could not have predicted.
After the war he went to Cornell, then to Caltech. He won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for a reformulation of quantum electrodynamics that is now in every physics textbook on Earth. He hated prestige. He found it embarrassing. When the Swedish Academy called to inform him, he asked the caller whether there was a way to refuse it without causing offense. There was not.
He taught undergraduates. He played bongos in a samba band in Pasadena. He picked locks. He drew on napkins. He explained quantum electrodynamics to a waitress at a diner who had asked him what he did, and she understood it. He liked her better than most physicists.
In January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded seventy-three seconds after launch, killing all seven astronauts on board. Feynman was sixty-seven years old and dying of two rare cancers at once. The presidential commission appointed to investigate the disaster asked him to join.
He went.
The commission held its hearings in Washington. The engineers who had built the rocket gave technical testimony for days about pressure tolerances, joint sealing dynamics, thermal coefficients. Feynman listened. He had already understood, from his own conversations with low-level engineers at the manufacturer, that the rubber O-rings at the joints of the solid rocket boosters had failed because they had become brittle in the cold weather on the morning of the launch. The senior officials at NASA had been told. They had launched anyway.
On February 11, 1986, in a televised hearing of the commission, Feynman raised his hand. He had asked for a glass of ice water. He took a sample of the same O-ring rubber out of his pocket. He had brought it himself. He squeezed it in a small clamp. He put the clamp into the ice water for several seconds. He took the rubber out. He pressed it. It did not spring back. The rubber had lost its elasticity in the cold.
He looked up at the camera.
I believe that has some significance for our problem.
The ice water came from the witness table.
The clamp had been bought that morning at a hardware store.
He died two years later, on February 15, 1988. He was sixty-nine. The two cancers he had been fighting for a decade had won. His last words, recorded by his sister Joan, were that dying was boring and he would prefer not to do it twice.
The letter he had written to Arline was found in the box.
He had loved her since they were thirteen.
The clock had stopped at the moment she died.
He had thought, even then: that is statistically very unlikely.

05/07/2026

For most of human history, the stars had no names except the ones poets gave them.
There were exceptions. The brightest few hundred had been catalogued by the astronomers of Alexandria, the Persians, the Arabs of Baghdad, and a handful of European observatories. Beyond those few hundred, the night sky was a nameless field — millions of points of light, recorded on photographic plates by the new long-exposure cameras of the late nineteenth century, but uncatalogued and unreadable as anything more than glittering noise.
The plates piled up in the basement of the Harvard College Observatory through the 1880s and 1890s. Glass photographic plates, eight inches by ten, each one capturing a small section of sky and the spectrum of every star within it. A spectrum is the rainbow you get when starlight is broken by a prism into its constituent colors — and the dark lines crossing that rainbow are the chemical fingerprints of the star's composition, temperature, and age. Every spectrum, read correctly, tells you what kind of star you are looking at.
The problem was that nobody could read them fast enough.
Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard Observatory, had been hiring women since the 1870s to do the work — paying them twenty-five cents an hour, less than half what a man with the same skill would have earned. The women were called, officially, computers — a term that meant a person who computed things, decades before it meant a machine. By 1900 there were roughly twenty of them in the basement.
One of them, hired in 1896, was a thirty-three-year-old woman from Dover, Delaware, who could barely hear.
She had contracted scarlet fever at Wellesley College in 1894 and lost most of her hearing as a complication. She had finished her physics degree anyway. When her mother died in 1894 she had written to her old physics teacher at Wellesley asking for work. The teacher had referred her to Pickering. Pickering had hired her.
Her name was Annie Jump Cannon.
The category system for stellar spectra at the time was a mess. There were two competing schemes — one alphabetical, one based on hydrogen-line strength — and neither one tracked cleanly with the underlying physics.
Annie Jump Cannon rebuilt the system from scratch.
She kept the alphabetical letters but reordered them, dropped the categories that did not correspond to anything physical, and added subdivisions where she found them needed. The order she settled on was O, B, A, F, G, K, M. It was based on a single underlying variable — the surface temperature of the star. O was the hottest. M was the coolest. The Sun was a G.
She is the reason every astronomy student since 1922 has memorized the mnemonic Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me.
Then she began classifying.
She had developed, at her desk, a technique for reading spectra that no one else has ever fully replicated. She would glance at a plate under the eyepiece, identify the spectral class of a star, and call out the letter to a recorder at her side. She did not pause. She did not check her work. She read spectra, by the late 1910s, at a rate of approximately three per minute. She maintained that pace for thirty years.
Between 1911 and 1915 she classified the spectra of approximately five thousand stars per month.
By 1924 she had personally classified the spectra of more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand stars — a body of work published in nine volumes between 1918 and 1924 as the Henry Draper Catalogue.
By the time she retired in the late 1930s, the total number of stars she had personally classified by hand had reached, by various estimates, between 350,000 and 400,000.
It is the largest body of stellar classification ever produced by a single human being. No person has ever come close to it before or since.
She held no academic appointment that Harvard would formally recognize until 1938, when she was sixty-eight years old and had been doing the work for forty-two years. The 1938 appointment was the William C. Bond Astronomer of Harvard. It was the first time the university had ever given her a title with the word Astronomer in it.
She had been awarded the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1931 — the first woman to receive it. She had received an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1925 — the first woman ever awarded one by Oxford University in any field.
She was paid, that same year, thirty cents an hour.
She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 13, 1941, at the age of seventy-seven.
The New York Times obituary called her the most distinguished woman astronomer in the world.
Every astronomer working today, at every observatory and university and space telescope on earth or in orbit, uses the spectral classification system Annie Jump Cannon built at her desk in the basement of the Harvard College Observatory between 1901 and 1924.
The classification scheme is in every astronomy textbook in print.
The Henry Draper Catalogue itself — nine volumes, two hundred and twenty-five thousand stars — has never gone out of print.
It has been continuously republished by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, in updated editions, every decade since 1949.
You can buy the current edition online tonight.
It still bears her name.

05/07/2026

The doctor in Miami told her, around 1985, that she needed to stop riding.
She was about seventy-three years old. Her heart had grown to roughly three times its normal size — a condition of long-term cardiomyopathy that, for most patients, ends in either rest or death. The doctor had recommended rest. Bessie Stringfield had told him, in the words she would tell her biographer years later, If I don't ride, I won't live long.
She kept riding for another seven years.
She had been riding, by that point, for fifty-seven years. She had been born Betsy Beatrice White, in 1911 or 1912, in Edenton, North Carolina — a small to***co town on the Albemarle Sound. Her parents were Maggie Cherry and James White. The family eventually moved north. By the time she was a teenager she was living somewhere in or around Boston.
She told the world, for the rest of her life, a different story. She told the world she had been born in Kingston, Jamaica, brought to America as a small child, orphaned at five, and adopted by an Irish-American Catholic widow on Beacon Hill who had given her a 1928 Indian Scout for her sixteenth birthday. She told this story for sixty years. Her niece confirmed in 2018 that most of it was invented.
What is not invented is what she did once she was on the motorcycle.
She taught herself to ride, at sixteen, on a used 1928 Indian Scout. In 1930, at the age of nineteen, she flipped a penny onto a road map of the United States and rode where it landed. She did this seven more times over the next decade. She rode through the forty-eight contiguous states. She rode, eventually, through Haiti, Brazil, and Europe. There were no interstate highways. The roads through the rural South were dirt. She was a young Black woman traveling alone on a motorcycle through Jim Crow America in the 1930s.
She was refused service at hotels and roadside inns. She slept on her motorcycle at filling stations. She slept in fields. White families in some Southern towns took her in for a night. White families in others ran her off. A white man in a pickup truck once deliberately ran her off the road in the rural South. She picked up the bike. She kept riding.
She earned money by performing motorcycle stunts at carnivals — figure eights at speed, riding standing on the seat. She entered flat-track races. She won several of them. She was refused the prize money on the grounds that the rules did not permit women to compete.
In the early 1940s the Army began recruiting civilian motorcycle dispatch riders to carry classified documents between domestic military bases — a job for which women were considered, in 1942, to be unqualified. Bessie Stringfield qualified. She trained alongside the Black male soldiers of a segregated unit. She was, when she completed the training, the only woman in her unit. The Army gave her a small military crest to mount on her motorcycle. She rode her own bike — a blue 61-cubic-inch Harley-Davidson Knucklehead, her seventh — and she carried mail and documents in her saddlebags between bases on the East Coast, the South, and the Midwest.
During her four years of dispatch service she crossed the United States eight more times.
She moved to Miami in the 1950s and made the second-strangest decision of her life: she chose to live in the South. She bought a house. She qualified as a licensed practical nurse. The Miami police refused to issue her a motorcycle license. The captain of the local precinct told her that Negro women were not permitted to ride motorcycles in his city.
She walked into the precinct house. She asked to see the captain. She proposed a deal. She would ride for him. If he was not satisfied, she would surrender her bike. He agreed.
They drove together to a public park.
She rode the figure eights. She rode the slow turns. She rode standing on the seat.
He issued the license.
She founded the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club in Miami shortly afterward. The local press settled on "The Motorcycle Queen of Miami." The nickname stuck for the rest of her life. She owned, across her career, twenty-seven Harley-Davidsons.
She married six times. She lost three babies with her first husband, all in infancy. She had no surviving children. She kept the surname of her third husband.
She died at home in Miami on February 16, 1993, at the age of about eighty-two, of heart failure.
She had ridden a motorcycle, by that point, for sixty-five years.
Most of her twenty-seven Harleys, her riding gear, and her personal possessions are now on display at the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
She was inducted into the American Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2000 the American Motorcyclist Association established the Bessie Stringfield Award, given annually to a woman who has introduced motorcycling to new audiences.
She had told her biographer, in their last conversation:
They tell me my heart is three times the size it's supposed to be.
She had spent sixty-five years building it.

05/07/2026

She was born into slavery on a to***co and rice plantation on the Isle of Wight, in Liberty County, Georgia, on August 6, 1848.
Her name was Susan Ann Baker. Her grandmother, a free Black woman named Dolly Reed, lived in Savannah, thirty-five miles north along the coast.
In 1855, when Susan was seven years old, her grandmother took her in.
The state of Georgia, by an act of the legislature passed in 1829, had made it a criminal offense to teach any enslaved or free Black person to read or write.
Dolly Reed enrolled her granddaughter in two secret schools.
The first was taught by a free Black woman named Mrs. Woodhouse, in the kitchen of her own house on Bay Lane in Savannah. The students entered through the back door, one at a time, with their schoolbooks wrapped in newspaper. The second was taught by a free Black widow named Mary Beasley.
Susan supplemented her lessons with reading instruction from two white youths who knowingly violated state law to teach her.
By the time she was thirteen she was, in violation of the laws of the State of Georgia, fully literate.
In April of 1862, Union forces captured Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River. Susan's uncle led her onto a federal gunboat. They were taken to the South Carolina Sea Islands.
The Union officers discovered her literacy.
They asked her, at the age of fourteen, to open a school.
She opened it. Approximately forty students — children during the day, adults at night. It was the first openly operated school for freed African Americans in the state of Georgia.
In late 1862 she married Edward King, a Black sergeant in the First South Carolina Volunteers — the first regiment of formerly enslaved men officially mustered into the United States Army, later redesignated the 33rd United States Colored Troops.
She joined the regiment as its laundress.
She was fourteen years old.
She would remain with the regiment for the next four years and three months.
In addition to laundry, she served as the regiment's nurse. She nursed wounded soldiers under fire. She nursed the regiment through a smallpox outbreak in the South Carolina Sea Islands in 1863. She never caught the disease. She worked at field hospitals near Beaufort, South Carolina, where she met and worked alongside Clara Barton.
She taught the men of the regiment to read and write in their off-duty hours. She taught them to clean and assemble their rifles. By her own subsequent admission she had become a competent markswoman by the end of the war.
The men of the 33rd United States Colored Troops were paid less than white Union soldiers throughout the first eighteen months of their service. They received no pay at all from October 1862 to August 1864. Equal pay and back pay were authorized by Congress in June 1864.
The women attached to the United States Colored regiments — laundresses, cooks, nurses — were never paid at all.
Susie King Taylor wrote, in her own memoir of those four years and three months, in a single sentence:
I gave my services willingly for four years and three months without receiving a dollar.
She was discharged with the regiment on February 9, 1866.
She returned with her husband to Savannah, where she opened a school for newly freed Black children, charging one dollar a month per pupil. Edward King died in a docking accident in September 1866, three months before the birth of their son.
The opening of the first public schools for Black children in Savannah cut into her enrollment. By 1872 she had been forced to take work as a domestic servant.
She moved with the white family she worked for to Boston in 1872. She married a man named Russell Taylor in Boston in 1879. She founded Corps 67 of the Massachusetts Woman's Relief Corps — the Black women's auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic — in 1886. She was elected its president in 1893.
In 1902, in Boston, at the age of fifty-four, she self-published a small book titled Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers.
It is the only memoir written by a Black woman who served with the Union Army during the American Civil War.
She died at her home in Boston on October 6, 1912, at the age of sixty-four. She is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Boston.
Her book is in the Library of Congress. It has been continuously reprinted since 1968.
The United States government has, to this day, never compensated Susie King Taylor or any of the women who served beside her.

05/05/2026

In honor of World Press Freedom Day, here's a "Modern Superhero: Defender of the Free Press!" This Mighty Girl's clever costume celebrating press freedom was submitted to our Halloween Gallery.

For a selection of powerful books for tweens and teens about the experience of girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes without the freedom of the press, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426

For children's books about trailblazing female journalists, we recommend “She Persisted: Nellie Bly” for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-persisted-nellie-bly), "Nellie Bly and Investigative Journalism for Kids" for 8 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/nellie-bly-investigative), and "Ida M. Tarbell: The Woman Who Challenged Big Business -- And Won" for ages 12 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/ida-m-tarbell)

For fictional stories starring Mighty Girl reporters, check out "Hilde Cracks the Case: Hero Dog!" for ages 6 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/hero-dog), "The Newspaper Club" for ages 8 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-newspaper-club), and "Revenge of the Red Club" for ages 10 to 13 (https://www.amightygirl.com/revenge-of-the-red-club)

For adults interested in learning more about pioneering women in journalism, we recommend "Sensational: The Hidden History of America's 'Girl Stunt Reporters' (https://www.amightygirl.com/sensational) and "You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War" (https://www.amightygirl.com/you-don-t-belong-here)

For books for children and teens that celebrate the even-handedness that exemplifies the integrity of professional journalists, visit our "Fairness & Justice" book section at http://amgrl.co/2BbcRG0

05/05/2026

In the winter of 1944, a fifteen-year-old girl danced in a blacked-out room in occupied Holland. The windows were covered. The audience made no sound -- not during the performance, not after. Any noise could alert the N***s. Any light could mean death.

These were the "zwarte avonden" -- the black evenings -- secret performances held across the Netherlands to raise money for the Dutch Resistance. The money fed families in hiding. It bought forged documents. It kept people alive.

The girl dancing was Audrey Hepburn.

"The best audiences I ever had," she said decades later, "made not a single sound at the end of my performance."

Born on this day in 1929 in Brussels, Audrey Hepburn spent most of her childhood moving between Belgium, England, and the Netherlands. Her mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, was Dutch aristocracy. Her father, a British banker, abandoned the family when Audrey was six. He would spend the war interned on the Isle of Man after being arrested as a member of the British Union of Fascists.

In 1939, with war looming, her mother moved them to Arnhem in the Netherlands, believing it would stay neutral as it had in the first World War.

She was wrong. In May 1940, the Germans invaded. Audrey was eleven years old.

To hide her English-sounding name, she began going by Edda van Heemstra. She enrolled at the Arnhem Conservatory and threw herself into ballet, dreaming of becoming a professional dancer. For a while, life went on -- performances at the city theater, lessons, practice. But the occupation darkened everything. Jewish musicians and dancers disappeared one by one. German officers sat in the front rows.

"I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him," she recalled years later. "And he stepped on the train."

In 1942, the N***s executed her uncle Otto van Limburg Stirum in retaliation for resistance activities. His body was dumped in a mass grave. One of her half-brothers was deported to a forced labor camp in Berlin. The other went into hiding. Whatever sympathy her mother had once held for the N**i regime died with Uncle Otto.

The family moved to the village of Velp and began working with the local resistance. Dr. Hendrik Visser 't Hooft, the resistance leader, used children as couriers because the Germans tended to ignore them. Audrey, who spoke fluent English, was perfect for the job. She carried messages. She delivered food and instructions to downed Allied pilots hiding in the forests. Once, when a German patrol approached while she was on a mission, she bent down and pretended to pick wildflowers. They passed without stopping.

"We saw young men put against the wall and shot," she said, "and they'd close the street and then open it and you could pass by again. Don't discount anything awful you hear or read about the N***s. It's worse than you could ever imagine."

In September 1944, the Allies launched Operation Market Garden -- the disastrous attempt to capture the bridge at Arnhem. British paratroopers were stranded behind enemy lines. Audrey's family hid one of them in their cellar for nearly a week, bringing him food, knowing that discovery meant ex*****on.

Then came the Hunger Winter. After Dutch railway workers went on strike to support the Allies, the Germans cut off food supplies to the western Netherlands. Starvation spread. Audrey's family ate tulip bulbs. Then grass. Then whatever they could find.

"I went as long as three days without food," she recalled. "For months, breakfast was hot water and one slice of bread made from brown beans."

She developed edema and anemia. She grew too weak to dance. More than 20,000 people would not survive the winter. By the time the Canadians liberated Velp on April 16, 1945, Audrey was near death herself.

Then came the food and medicine, delivered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration -- the work that would later be carried on by UNICEF after it was founded in 1946. Aid workers set up stations at local schools. Audrey picked out sweaters and skirts that had been shipped from America.

She never forgot what it felt like to be saved.

After the war, Hepburn moved to Amsterdam to study ballet with Sonia Gaskell, then to London on a scholarship with the legendary Marie Rambert. But Rambert delivered difficult news: despite her talent, Audrey had started professional training too late, was too tall for the male dancers of the era, and her constitution had been weakened by wartime malnutrition. She would never be a prima ballerina. She turned to chorus work, then acting -- and in 1952, she landed her first major film role in "Secret People," playing a young ballerina and performing all her own dance sequences. She is pictured here in a still from that film.

Within a year, she was a Hollywood star -- "Roman Holiday," then "Sabrina," "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "My Fair Lady." She won an Academy Award at twenty-four. She became one of the most famous women in the world.

But she rarely spoke about the war. The memories were too painful. And there was the complicated matter of her parents -- both had been N**i sympathizers before the occupation. How do you explain that your mother once admired Hi**er, even if she changed? That your father had been interned as a fascist?

So Audrey Hepburn became the woman the world wanted her to be: elegant, luminous, untouchable. She let them see Holly Golightly. She kept Edda van Heemstra to herself.

Then, in 1988, she became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF.

She was fifty-nine years old. She had largely retired from acting. And now she was walking into famine zones and refugee camps, holding dying children, demanding that the world pay attention.

"I have a broken heart," she said after visiting Ethiopia. "I feel desperate. I can't stand the idea that two million people are in imminent danger of starving to death, many of them children."

She traveled to Sudan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Central America, Somalia. She testified before Congress. She gave interview after interview, trying to make people understand what she had seen. She was not playing a role. She was finally telling the truth about who she had always been.

"I can testify to what UNICEF means to children," she said, "because I was among those who received food and medical relief right after World War II. I have a long-lasting gratitude and trust for what UNICEF does."

Audrey Hepburn died on January 20, 1993, at the age of sixty-three. She had spent her final five years doing the work she said mattered most -- fighting for children the rest of the world had forgotten.

The girl who danced in blacked-out rooms. The girl who carried messages through the forest. The girl who nearly starved. She had survived thanks to the kindness of others, and she had spent her life making sure others could survive too.

In honor of Audrey Hepburn's 97th birthday today, please consider making a donation to support UNICEF's humanitarian aid programs on behalf of children in need worldwide at http://www.unicef.org/

Adult readers can learn more about Audrey Hepburn's little-known WWII story, including her work with the Dutch Resistance, in the riveting book, "Dutch Girl," at https://www.amightygirl.com/dutch-girl

There are also two inspiring picture book biographies about Audrey Hepburn's life as an actress and humanitarian, we highly recommend “Just Being Audrey” (https://www.amightygirl.com/just-being-audrey) and Audrey Hepburn: Little People, Big Dreams (https://www.amightygirl.com/audrey-hepburn-little-people-big-dreams), both for ages 5 and up

For books to inspire kids to make a difference in the world -- both locally and globally -- check out our blog post “Making an Impact: 40 Mighty Girl Books About Charity and Community Service” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10983

For many books about girls and women living through the WWII period, including numerous stories related to the Holocaust, visit our "WWII & Holocaust" section at http://amgrl.co/2ry9Ccu