In 1988 Dolly Parton pulled every 7th and 8th grader in Sevier County into a room and told them to pick a buddy.
She made them sign a contract.. if BOTH graduate, she hands you both $500. One fails, nobody gets paid.
The county dropout rate went from 35% to 6%.
She handed out the checks herself.
In 1989 she offered $500 to every kid in the county who wanted to go to the local college.
When Gatlinburg burned in 2016, she sent 900 families $1,000 a month for six months.
You've probably heard that part.
Here's the part you haven't:
The fund raised more than expected, so she showed up in May and handed every one of those families another $5,000 on top.
Then she quietly put $3 million into the recovery group that handles the years after the news trucks leave.
She built her county an entire hospital.
She played a benefit concert in 2007, Dollywood and the Stampede matched it, and LeConte Medical Center opened in 2010 with a birthing unit and a women's center in it.
In 2022 she started covering 100% of tuition, books, and fees for Dollywood employees.
Full-time, part-time, AND seasonal.
In 1991 she paid for a bald eagle sanctuary because the birds couldn't be released back into the wild, no press release.
And when Hurricane Helene came through here in Western North Carolina, she wrote a personal check for $1 million and her companies matched it.
She didn't owe North Carolina anything, but she helped us anyway.
She started the Imagination Library because her daddy couldn't read or write. Before he passed, he told her it was the most important thing she ever did.
Rest in Peace, Dolly 🇺🇸
i wake up, i cry over spilt milk, put all of my eggs in one basket, bite off more than i can chew, jump the gun, fly off the handle and then die on that hill
In 2005, a six-month-old kitten named Oscar was adopted by a nursing home in the US to be raised as a therapy cat. However, the workers noticed something peculiar about him.
While Oscar usually preferred to be alone, he occasionally crawled into a resident's bed and snuggled beside them.
The eerie thing about this is that the resident that Oscar would cuddle with would usually die within hours.
Initially, the staff didn't think much of it, but after this happened 20 times, they started to believe that Oscar knew when someone was close to passing away, and so when they noticed the cat next to a resident, they would call their loved ones to warn them.
Researchers speculate that Oscar could smell biochemicals released by dying cells and so chose to comfort lonely residents.
On one occasion, the staff was convinced that a resident was about to pass away, but Oscar refused to sit with them. Instead, he chose another resident who looked healthier, and that person passed away first.
Oscar died in 2022, and over the course of his life he accurately predicted over 100 deaths.