49º - "feel like" 45º here in Marengo, Iowa at 9:00 pm Sunday - low of 35º this morning.
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| Great Grandkids, David and Jessica this morning. |
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| Jessica |
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| Jessica and Cameron |
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| David and Cameron |
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| Went to Easter Sunday church service with Cam's, Ashley & Heath's |
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| Before lunch today |
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| Before Lunch today |
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| Before Lunch today |
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| Lunch today |
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| Lunch today |
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Will head west towards Clarinda in the morning. LCM
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While other billionaires race to space, this 82-year-old woman is quietly giving away $7 billion—and you've probably never heard her name.
Meet Judy Faulkner. No yacht. No private island. No monuments bearing her name.
Just a basement in Madison, Wisconsin, $70,000 borrowed from friends, and an idea that would save millions of lives.
The year was 1979. Healthcare was broken in ways most people never saw. Your medical records? Trapped in filing cabinets. Move to a new city? Your doctor knew nothing about your history. Critical allergies? Lost in the paperwork shuffle. People died in those gaps.
Judy saw the problem with unusual clarity. She'd worked in healthcare computing since the 1960s—back when "computing" meant punch cards and room-sized machines. She understood both medicine and code. And she knew that if medical information could follow patients seamlessly, everything would change.
So she built Epic Systems.
From that basement, with two part-time employees and a computer she programmed herself, she created what would become one of the most powerful healthcare technology companies in the world. Today, Epic holds medical records for patients across half the hospital beds in America. When your doctor pulls up your chart, checks your allergies, sees your test results from another hospital—there's a good chance Epic made that possible.
But here's where Judy's story diverges from every Silicon Valley playbook you've ever heard.
She never sold.
Never took venture capital. Never went public. Never chased the exit that founders are supposed to want. She kept Epic private because she believed patients should never be secondary to profit margins.
"Why be owned by people whose primary interest is return on equity?" she once asked.
It was a revolutionary stance. While other tech founders optimized for IPOs and acquisition deals, Judy optimized for something different: systems built to last decades, not quarters. Relationships with hospitals, not revenue spikes. Product quality over market dominance.
She grew Epic slowly, carefully, deliberately. At 82, she still goes to work every day at Epic's 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin—a whimsical place with storybook-inspired buildings that one executive described as a mix between Bill Gates and Willy Wonka.
But the wealth came anyway. Billions of dollars. Inevitable, given Epic's success and scale.
And that's when the most important decision arrived.
Most billionaires, when they sign the Giving Pledge, commit to giving away their wealth someday. After death. Through foundations that will operate in their names long after they're gone. It's legacy planning dressed as philanthropy.
Judy went further.
In 2015, she pledged to give away 99 percent of her fortune. Not someday. Not after she's gone. Now. While she can see where it goes and ensure it's used well.
She named her foundation "Roots & Wings"—inspired by a conversation with her children years earlier, when they asked what they needed most from her.
Food, they said. Money. Security.
She shook her head. "You need roots and wings."
Roots: food, shelter, healthcare, education—the essentials that ground a life.
Wings: opportunity, dignity, the chance to rise.
In 2020, her foundation gave $15 million to over 100 organizations. By 2024, that number grew to $67 million distributed to more than 300 nonprofits. Her goal? $100 million annually by 2027.
She's systematically selling her Epic shares back to the company—ensuring employees benefit from ownership—and giving every dollar away. Into healthcare access for underserved communities. Education for children who need it. Housing stability for families on the edge.
Of the hundreds of billionaires who have signed the Giving Pledge, only a small fraction actually give away substantial wealth while they're alive. Most treat philanthropy as something that happens after they no longer need the money.
Judy Faulkner is giving it away now, while it can still matter in the world she inhabits.
In an era when wealth often becomes spectacle—vanity projects, ostentatious displays, monuments to ego—Judy chose stewardship.
Her legacy won't be measured in rockets or towers with her name on them.
It will be measured in lives saved because doctors had the information they needed. In children educated because someone believed learning matters more than profit. In families stabilized because help arrived before collapse.
She taught her children they needed roots and wings.
Now she's spending her fortune making sure millions of others can have both.
Not for tax benefits. Not for PR. Not for legacy polishing.
But because she genuinely believes that wealth, held without ego, can become something rare: a tool for care, a foundation for dignity, a quiet force that lifts others without demanding applause.
Judy Faulkner is 82 years old, worth billions, and still going to work every day at the company she built from a basement with borrowed money.
She could have sold decades ago. Could have retired to comfort. Could have multiplied her wealth through an IPO and justified keeping it a thousand different ways.
Instead, she's giving 99 percent away while she's alive to see it matter.
Most billionaires talk about giving back someday.
Judy Faulkner is actually doing it.
And hardly anyone knows her name.
Maybe it's time that changed.
July 20, 1969. Three minutes before landing on the moon.
Inside the lunar module Eagle, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin watched their computer screen flash urgent warnings.
“1202 alarm.”
Then: “1201 alarm.”
No one at Mission Control fully understood what these codes meant. The astronauts didn’t either. They had seconds to decide: abort the landing — or continue?
240,000 miles away, the software was already solving the problem.
Margaret Hamilton’s code recognized the computer was overloaded. It prioritized critical tasks. It discarded non-essential processes. It kept Eagle focused on landing safely.
Mission Control made the call: “We’re GO on that alarm.”
At 4:17 PM, Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquility.
The moon landing succeeded because of software written by a 33-year-old woman whose work had been dismissed as “quite amusing” just four years earlier.
Margaret Hamilton was born in 1936 in Paoli, Indiana — a world where computers didn’t even exist yet.
She loved mathematics. At Earlham College, she earned her degree in math with a philosophy minor in 1958. Her plan was simple: take a temporary job to support her husband James through Harvard Law School, then return to pursue her own graduate degree.
At 24, she took a programming job at MIT. It was meant to be temporary.
Instead, it changed space exploration.
In 1965, MIT partnered with NASA to develop guidance systems for Apollo — the mission to land humans on the moon. Margaret Hamilton was hired to lead the Software Engineering Division.
There was just one problem: software engineering didn’t exist.
No schools taught it. No textbooks explained it. No methods defined it. Hamilton was building the discipline from scratch.
“When I first got into it, nobody knew what we were doing,” she said. “It was like the Wild West.”
Worse, software wasn’t taken seriously. It was “treated like a stepchild,” she explained — seen as art and magic, not science.
Hamilton began calling her work “software engineering” to give it credibility — to place it alongside hardware engineering as an equal.
People laughed.
“When I first started using this phrase, it was considered quite amusing,” she said. “It was an ongoing joke.”
But Hamilton kept pushing. Her team was responsible for ALL flight software for Apollo’s Command and Lunar modules — computers weighing just 70 pounds that had to work perfectly the first time.
No margin for error. No second chance.
“The software had to be man-rated,” she said. “It had to detect errors and recover in real time.”
Hamilton was also a working mother. She often brought her young daughter Lauren to the lab on weekends.
One day, Lauren decided to “play astronaut.” She pressed buttons on the simulator.
The system crashed.
Hamilton immediately saw the risk: a real astronaut could make the same mistake during a mission.
She recommended adding protective code to prevent it.
NASA’s response: “Astronauts are trained not to make mistakes.”
Her request was denied.
Then came Apollo 8 — the first crewed mission to orbit the moon.
Astronaut Jim Lovell pressed the exact same command Lauren had triggered.
The navigation data was wiped out.
Hamilton and her team worked urgently, restoring the system within hours. The mission was saved.
Now she had approval to add protective safeguards for future flights.
But her most critical contribution came on July 20, 1969.
Apollo 11 was minutes from landing when the alarms began. Buzz Aldrin had requested altitude data — something routine in training. But it activated an unnecessary radar system.
The computer was running eight programs at once. It was designed for seven.
It was overloaded at the worst possible moment.
But Hamilton had already planned for this exact scenario.
Her software recognized the overload. It sent priority alarms. Then it did something revolutionary: it dropped lower-priority tasks, restarted essential ones, and focused only on what mattered — landing safely.
The system stayed alive.
Later, Hamilton said: “If the computer hadn’t taken recovery action, I doubt Apollo 11 would have been successful.”
There’s a famous photo from 1969: Margaret Hamilton standing beside a stack of Apollo code printouts.
The stack is taller than she is.
That’s how much code her team wrote — by hand, on paper. Punch cards. Rope memory woven by factory workers threading copper wires through magnetic cores.
The women who built it were called “LOL” — “little old ladies.”
Hamilton was called the “rope mother.”
This is how Apollo’s software was created.
After Apollo, Hamilton founded two software companies and published more than 130 papers. Her methods became the foundation of modern software engineering.
But for decades, her name remained largely unknown.
In 2003 — 34 years after Apollo 11 — NASA awarded her the Exceptional Space Act Award, including $37,200, the largest individual award they had given.
In 2016 — 47 years later — Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Our astronauts didn’t have much time,” he said, “but thankfully they had Margaret Hamilton.”
In 2017, LEGO released a Margaret Hamilton figure beside her famous code stack.
In 2019, Google created a massive portrait of her using 107,000 mirrors at a solar facility — visible in moonlight on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.
Margaret Hamilton is now in her late eighties.
The term she introduced — “software engineering” — is now one of the most respected professions in the world.
The discipline once mocked as “amusing” now powers everything from smartphones to spacecraft.
She built an entire field from nothing. She fought to have software taken seriously. She wrote code that had to work perfectly the first time. She warned that humans make mistakes — and proved it.
And she did it as a working mother in the 1960s, bringing her daughter to the lab on weekends.
Three minutes before landing, alarms screamed.
Her code saved the mission.
She called it “software engineering.”
They laughed.
It took 47 years for her medal.
This afternoon I picked up some of the many twings and small branches that are on the lawn. About 3:30 it started pouring rain again.
We leave about 7 in the morning for Marengo, IA to visit with Cam and his family over the weekend.
LCM
56º and rain just quit. Since we hadn't seen any rain all winter, driving in rain yesterday and this rain overnight kind of unusual!
Will not have internet at home until Tuesday afternoon. Phone as a Hotspot is terribly slow; after 25 minutes trying to upload a photo on the computer I gave up. This Now is on phone.
Got to Clarinda about 6 pm yesterday after getting supper in Maryville, MO after driving in rain most of the day.
A cool 69º here in Livingston, TX aat 10:00 pm Monday night.
Things haven't gone as planned. After driving in thick fog for most of two hours we had a wheel bearing go out on the trailer about 10:30 this morning, only 80 miles into the 480 miles planned to drive .
So, we cancelled our reservation 400 miles up the road and grabbed a site here. Would be 644 miles now from here to Cape Girardeau and we don't think repairs can be made until mid-morning to noon. We were going to visit with Don & Vicki tomorrow afternoon, but this would be more than a 14 hour drive which is way more than I want to drive in one day pulling the trailer and we wouldn't get there until sometime during the day Wednesday. Due to our needing to leave Cape Girardeau on Thursday for Clarinda for the funeral on Friday for Phyllis' cousin Judy, this would be a very short visit. So we called Vicki and explained it to her and told her we would be down to see them in May before Decoration Day. (She had planned on our driving over to the Illinois site of their cemetary to put out flowers- so will do that for her then).
Depending on how early we get out of here tomorrow, we should get to our Clarinda home Wednesday, or Thursday at the latest. Is about 800 miles to Clarinda from here. We don't like to drive over 350 miles in a day pulling the trailer, but have made exceptions and may have to now.
LCM
A cool 70º here near Dayton, TX (some 37 miles northeast of Houston) at 8:00 pm. Cool breeze, not running AC and windows open in the trailer. Got here about 6:00 this evening after driving 380 miles, leaving the First Methodist Church parking lot at 10:35 am after singing Easter Cantata at 9:00 am srvice and a brief breakfast served in the basement afterwards. Didn't have to unhook trailer, only have electricity hooked up - can pull out easily early in the morning.
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| During Cantata performance 3-29-26 at First Methodist Church in Harlingen, TX |
Will download the video and post it on my YouTube page sometime in the future when am at home in Clarinda.
I took these four photos during the 20-minute warmup/rehearsal before the service started.
We are, for sure, going from Cape Girardeau on Thursday to Clarinda, IA so we can attend Judy Heuer's funeral there on Friday, making our way to Marengo, IA and the extended family there on Saturday morning.
More later, Lynn
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