Andy Mackie of Washington state had undergone nine heart operations and was taking 15 different drugs when he decided to quit. He gave up the medicine and started using the money he saved to give away harmonicas and music lessons to local kids. Mackie figured it would be a gift before he died.
The now 70-year-old Mackie also makes and buys other musical instruments for interested children, and arranges for his older students to give lessons to younger kids.
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"I really thought it was the last thing I could ever do," he says.
And when he didn't die the next month, he bought a few hundred more.
Harmonicas in hand, he explains, "I just started going from school to school."
It's now 11 years and 13,000 harmonicas later.
The now 70-year-old Mackie also makes and buys other musical instruments for interested children, and arranges for his older students to give lessons to younger kids.
Mackie says, "I tell them music is a gift, you give it away - you give it away and you get to keep it forever."
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Jill
I wish there were more people like this.
Well not at deaths door part, but more people that put their money to the "arts" for children.
Oh, right. PMS.
Although the thought of thirteen thousand children with harmonicas did give me the creeping horrors for a moment.
And I'd almost guarantee that he WOULD be dead now if he'd stayed on the meds from the inevitable toxicity 15 different medications would cause.
Yet more proof Doctor's and Pharmaceutical companies are not the all knowing gods people seem to think they are.
A truly great story. What a wonderful man!