![\"Jim](\"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Jim_OConnor.jpg\")
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(Tom: We can all do something to help others, even something as simple as cuddling a baby. He obviously did it very well.)<\/p>\n
His name was Jim O\u2019Connor. And he had been hiding the biggest secret in Los Angeles for 20 years.<\/p>\n
Jim O\u2019Connor grew up in Brooklyn, New York – in a neighbourhood where you learned early that life asked hard questions and you\u2019d better have hard answers. He served 3 years in the United States Navy, aboard the USS Enterprise, during the Vietnam War. He came home, earned his engineering degree, and moved to California. He became a mathematics teacher.<\/p>\n
If you went to St. Francis High School in La Ca\u00f1ada – a Catholic prep school for boys in the quiet suburbs of Los Angeles – you knew Mr. O\u2019Connor by reputation before you ever walked into his classroom.<\/p>\n
Strict. Exacting. Relentless. He ran his algebra and calculus classes with the same military precision he\u2019d learned aboard a warship in the South China Sea. No nonsense. No shortcuts. No excuses. The boys who came through his classroom either rose to meet his standards or they didn\u2019t, and he was equally fine with both outcomes as long as they gave him everything they had.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you have a class full of 32 teenage boys,\u201d he once told a reporter, \u201cyou better have some discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nobody who sat in Jim O\u2019Connor\u2019s classroom would have called him soft.<\/p>\n
1989. Children\u2019s Hospital Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
A friend asks Jim to come in and donate blood. It is a simple request – Jim has Type O negative blood, the universal donor type, the kind that can go into any patient in an emergency regardless of blood group. The hospital is always in need of it. Jim shows up, rolls up his sleeve, and gives.<\/p>\n
He keeps coming back.<\/p>\n
Over the first several years, he donates blood again and again, quietly accumulating a record that nobody at the school knows about. And while he is there, sitting in the donation centre, he watches the hospital volunteers move through the wards. He watches them carry small things – wrapped in blankets, held against shoulders.<\/p>\n
He asks a nurse what the programme is.<\/p>\n
She explains. The hospital\u2019s TLC Volunteers are a tiny group – a handful out of more than 550 total hospital volunteers – selected for the most delicate work, going to the rooms of infants who are sick, frightened, or simply alone. Babies whose parents have to work. Babies whose parents are too overwhelmed to be there every hour. Babies who have been abandoned, or are waiting for foster placement, or who have been born dependent on substances and spend their early days in a state of physical distress that makes everything – light, sound, touch – almost unbearable.<\/p>\n
These babies need to be held. Rocked. Sung to. Not by a machine or a monitor. By a person.<\/p>\n
Jim asks how to sign up.<\/p>\n
3 days a week. For 20 years.<\/p>\n
He builds it into his life the way other people build in a gym routine or a church service. Monday, Wednesday, Friday – or something close enough. He finishes at school and he goes to the hospital. He walks through the ward to the room where the nurses tell him he is needed most. He sits down. He picks up the baby. He holds it against his chest and he rocks it.<\/p>\n
He feeds them. He walks up and down the corridor at 11 o\u2019clock at night, a 60-something man in a quiet hospital hallway, holding a sick infant and humming something low and steady. He learns what each baby responds to – which ones need movement, which ones need stillness, which ones need sound, which ones just need warmth and the particular certainty that comes from being held by someone who is not going anywhere.<\/p>\n
Sherry Nolan, the clinical manager of the medical unit, watches him work for years. \u201cHe holds them, feeds them, walks around with them, gets to know them,\u201d she says. \u201cHe can always coax a smile out of them. They just stare at him adoringly. He can get the crabbiest baby to calm down. He\u2019s just a natural-born cuddler.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back at St. Francis, his students have no idea.<\/p>\n
For 20 years, the man they know as the hardest grader in the school – the one who has never in living memory given an easy ride to anyone – spends 3 days every week sitting in a darkened hospital room, whispering to a sick baby, willing it toward calm.<\/p>\n
He does not tell a single colleague. He does not tell his students. He does not want a story written about it. He just shows up.<\/p>\n
The blood donor plaque.<\/p>\n
In the early 2010s, 2 senior boys from St. Francis – Pat McGoldrick and Michael Tinglof – are put in charge of organising a student blood drive. They go out to Children\u2019s Hospital Los Angeles for a planning meeting. And the moment they mention which school they attend, something strange happens.<\/p>\n
Everyone they speak to lights up.<\/p>\n
Hospital staff, nurses, administrators – all of them saying some version of the same thing, \u201cOh, St. Francis! Do you know Jim O\u2019Connor? Isn\u2019t he just wonderful?\u201d<\/p>\n
Pat and Michael look at each other.<\/p>\n
Pat wanders into the blood donor centre and finds the wall – the plaque listing the hospital\u2019s top blood donors, the people who have given more than anyone else. He scans down the names.<\/p>\n
At the very top, in the number one position, is the name of his calculus teacher.<\/p>\n
Pat goes home and tells his classmates. Nobody believes him.<\/p>\n
When the CBS News story breaks – a journalist had heard about Jim and filmed a short piece that finds its way online – it travels around the world in days. Millions of people watch the footage of a 70-year-old retired Navy veteran with a grey crew cut sitting in a hospital chair, holding a tiny baby against his chest, rocking slowly, not saying anything. Just there. Just present.<\/p>\n
His students watch it in silence.<\/p>\n
The man who had spent 38 years making their mathematical lives difficult had donated 72 gallons of blood to Children\u2019s Hospital Los Angeles. He had volunteered there 3 days a week for 20 years. He was, by every measure the staff could offer, the most dedicated volunteer they had ever had.<\/p>\n
And he had done all of it without ever once mentioning it to a single person at school.<\/p>\n
When a reporter asked why he had kept it secret for so long, Jim O\u2019Connor looked genuinely puzzled by the question.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t hiding it,\u201d he said. \u201cI just didn\u2019t think it was anyone else\u2019s business.\u201d<\/p>\n
Share this with someone who still believes that what a person shows the world is who they really are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Tom: We can all do something to help others, even something as simple as cuddling a baby. He obviously did it very well.) His name was Jim O\u2019Connor. And he had been hiding the biggest secret in Los Angeles for 20 years. Jim O\u2019Connor grew up in Brooklyn, New York – in a neighbourhood where … <\/p>\n