This is my great uncle Woody Burns, my hero and one of my greatest mentors. This man landed on Omaha Beach during World War II and marched across France to Germany, then back to Belgium to participate in the Battle of the Bulge and lived to share his story. Over time, we learned of him being hit by a train in Buffalo, New York, when he was eight years old. While in Europe at war, a grenade went off in his foxhole. The concussion tossed him just above the surface, where he remembered looking around and realizing this was not a place he wanted to be. When he fell back into the foxhole, the man next to him was dead. He felt that he had cheated death and it wouldn’t be the last time. For me, my uncle was a mix of Humphry Bogart with a side of James Cagney; he had many jobs and could seemingly do anything in my eyes, and this all came out of an 8th-grade education as that’s as far as he went in school. When he bought his home north of Santa Barbara in Goleta, employers had a difficult time attracting people to live so far away from Los Angeles, where the good jobs were, but something attracted him and my aunt to coastal living, and so this is where they’ve been for nearly 40 years.