A long-lost sister right next door, and more

last updated 8 January 2015

A long-lost sister right next door

North Dakotan John Maixner spent years exchanging friendly hellos with Walmart greeter Buddine Bullinger, only to discover recently that she is his long-lost sister. Maixner, a brother, and three sisters were given up for adoption 50 years ago, and just last year he began searching for his birth family. When he tracked down a picture of his siblings, his jaw dropped as he realized that he knew Bullinger. The pair now speak by phone nearly every day, and Maixner has reconnected with his siblings and their children. “I gained a huge family,” he said.

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Colorado slopestyle skier Gus Kenworthy is getting gushing accolades—not just for the silver medal he won at the Sochi Olympics, but also for adopting a stray dog and four puppies he found there. Kenworthy instantly fell in love with the female pooch and her pups, which he discovered wandering at the base of the mountain where he medaled, so he postponed his victorious return to the U.S. in order to get all the animals’ paperwork in order—no small feat considering Russia’s policy on exterminating street dogs at the Games. “Puppy love is real to puppies,” Kenworthy tweeted.

Honoring a soldier's legacy

In 2009, Reno, Nev., police Detective Robert Smith was given a battered suitcase from an auctioned-off storage unit. Inside he found hundreds of love letters from Maj. Lamont Haas to his wife, Betty Lou—from the moment Haas enlisted, in 1941, to the month he died in a midair collision over France, in 1944. Though Haas never made it home, Smith spent four years making sure his letters did. Betty Lou died in 1987, but last week Smith returned the suitcase to Haas’s daughter, who was 4 months old when her father was killed. Haas’s legacy was worth saving, Smith said. “I think he’s a genuine American hero.”