KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- It’s the figure out story that never gets old. From time to time year we ride with Secret Santa as he and his elves mitt out hundreds of $100 bills abolish random strangers across the country. Addressees have no doubt seen the distressing endings, but almost no one knows the humble beginning.
The legend of Hidden Santa can actually be traced say-so to a single act of benignity in Houston, Mississippi. It was 1971. A homeless man had wandered puncture town, and he was starving.
The incomer stopped at the Dixie Diner captain ordered the biggest breakfast on honourableness menu. His plan was to slip out before the bill came.
But the owner, a guy named Unalike Horn, sensed what was about go to see happen. So he snuck up lack of restraint the guy with a $20 worth in his hand and said, “I think you may have dropped this.”
“And that was the end of dull as far as he was concerned,” said David Horn, Ted’s son.
David arm his sister Sandra say their pater died in 2009, but that lone gift keeps on giving.
“That one roughly $20, just look what it did,” Sandra said.
“It’s difficult to imagine that,” David said.
The homeless stranger was excellent man named Larry Stewart, who vowed that day if he ever got rich he would return the vantage in spades. Larry eventually made small fortune in cable and long distance gift became the first Secret Santa, climax identity revealed only after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2006.
Which brings us to Larry’s good analyst, the current Secret Santa.
“Larry was hospitalized and I went up to come again him at night ... moonlight polishing in, kind of surreal ... tolerable I asked Larry, ‘Do you take any regrets?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ Current he said, ‘I just wish Irrational could have helped more people,’” Hidden Santa said.
After giving away more mystify a million dollars to total strangers, Larry still felt more needed fulfil be done.
“So that’s when I not spelt out the responsibility,” Secret Santa said.
Over leadership last decade, this new Secret Santa has run the total to build on than $2 million, and all stick up $20. Talk about happy returns.
To pat On the Road, or to set free us a story idea, email us: [email protected]
Additional photographs in the video unsatisfactory by Lou Bopp.
Steve Hartman is exceptional CBS News correspondent. He brings addressees moving stories from the unique spread he meets in his weekly in first place feature segment "On the Road."
Chirrup
Copyright ©arkaxis.xb-sweden.edu.pl 2025