Brigid O'Connell-Tran
Small-business owner (bakery), Portland, Oregon
Profiles by Brigid O'Connell-Tran
-
Giorgio Moroder (b. 1940) — Giorgio
Giorgio Moroder is often called the father of disco, and his innovative electronic sound went on to influence generations of pop and dance music long after disco itself stopped being the trend of the moment. I run the bakery with a playlist going most of the day, and there's a real art to music that makes repetitive, physical work — kneading, icing, standing on your feet from 4 a.m. — feel less grinding than it actually is. Moroder basically engineered a whole sound built on rhythm and forward motion, which is exactly what you want humming in the background while your hands are busy doing something else entirely. My wife Sam works ER shifts and swears certain music gets her through a twelve-hour night the same way; I believe her, and I believe it about disco specifically, since it was apparently built for exactly that kind of sustained, joyful momentum. Funny how much of what holds up decades later started as someone just trying to keep a room moving.
-
Trevor Nunn (b. 1940) — Trevor
Trevor Nunn is one of Britain's most acclaimed theatre directors, a former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, known for landmark productions including "Cats" and "Les Misérables" — shows that basically became cultural institutions in their own right rather than just successful runs. Running a small bakery is obviously nothing like running the Royal Shakespeare Company, but I understand a little bit about the gap between the version of your work that the public sees and the years of unglamorous, exacting decisions that actually produced it. Every perfect croissant on my counter represents a hundred failed batches nobody but me and my staff ever tasted. I imagine directing a production that becomes a genuine landmark works the same way — audiences see the finished, seamless thing, never the years of small corrected choices underneath it. Nunn built more than one production that outlived its original run by decades. That's not luck; that's someone who sweated every detail long before opening night.
-
Nikolai Valuev (b. 1973) — Nikolai
Nikolai Valuev is a Russian former professional boxer, a two-time world heavyweight champion, and at over seven feet tall he became one of the most instantly recognizable figures the sport has produced before he moved into politics afterward. I run a bakery counter that barely fits me and one assistant comfortably, so I have a certain sympathy, purely on the logistics level, for a man who apparently had to duck through most doorframes his entire career. What strikes me more, though, is the pivot — heavyweight champion to politician is not a small career change, and it takes a particular kind of confidence to walk away from being the most dominant version of yourself in one arena and go be a beginner again in a totally different one. My own bakery nearly folded twice, and both times I had to relearn what "stable" even meant from scratch. Valuev's transition looks a lot bigger than mine on paper, but I recognize the shape of that particular leap.
-
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) — Nikolai
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed richly orchestrated works like "Scheherazade" and, maybe even more importantly, spent a career mentoring a whole generation of Russian composers who came after him. I think about mentorship a lot in the bakery — every one of my employees started out barely knowing how to laminate dough properly, and now two of them could open their own places tomorrow, which is either the proudest or most financially insane thing I've done, depending which month you ask. There's something about a great teacher that doesn't show up in their own most famous piece; it shows up decades later, scattered across other people's work, which makes it much harder to measure and much easier to underrate. My grandmother used to say the best cooks are the ones whose recipes get stolen and improved on by someone else entirely. Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration lives on in his own symphonies, sure, but it sounds like it lives on even more in everyone he trained.
-
Ingrid Kristiansen (b. 1956) — Ingrid
Ingrid Kristiansen held world records in the marathon, the 10,000m, and the half marathon at overlapping points in her career, which is the kind of range that doesn't usually happen by accident — it happens because someone was disciplined across distances most runners specialize away from. I'm on my feet from 4 a.m. some mornings baking and I try to run three times a week and mostly fail, so I have a healthy, slightly jealous respect for anyone whose body cooperated with that level of sustained, varied effort. There's a version of endurance that's really about repetition and a version that's about range, and Kristiansen seems to have had both at once, across a career long enough that "held the record" isn't even singular for her. My margins are thin enough at the bakery that I think about sustainability constantly, in a completely different sense than hers, but the word still applies: the hard part usually isn't one good year, it's staying good long enough that nobody can call it a fluke.
-
Rosa Parks (1913-2005) — Rosa
Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat is one of those moments that's been told so many times it can start to feel like folklore instead of an actual, specific, brave decision made by a specific tired person on a specific day. I try to remember, writing about her, that the Montgomery Bus Boycott didn't organize itself afterward out of pure historical momentum — real people showed up and kept showing up, the same way my bakery only made it through two near-closures because regular customers kept choosing, repeatedly, to show up for something they believed in. That's obviously a smaller stakes comparison and I want to be careful not to flatten hers into mine. What I keep coming back to is how much of lasting change is just one person's refusal plus everyone else's willingness to keep going after. My wife Sam works in an ER and sees, in a much more immediate way than I do, how much any system depends on people who simply won't move when moving is expected of them. Parks is the clearest version of that instinct in American history.
-
Isabella d'Este (1474-1539) — Isabella
Isabella d'Este spent her life as a serious patron of Renaissance art and became one of the era's genuine intellectual forces, which is a title that gets flattened, in a lot of retellings, into "rich lady who liked pretty paintings." I run a bakery, so I have a professional bias toward taking patronage seriously as its own skill — knowing what to fund, who to trust with resources, and how to keep something creative actually alive is real work, even when it looks like just writing checks. D'Este apparently did that at a scale and with a level of taste that shaped how an entire period is remembered. It reminds me, a little, of the wave of regular customers who effectively saved my bakery twice, once in year two and once during the pandemic — not by baking anything themselves, but by deciding something was worth keeping alive and showing up for it. Patronage, in whatever century, is a kind of quiet co-authorship. D'Este seems to have understood that better than almost anyone around her.
-
Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) — Sofia
Sofia Kovalevskaya became the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate in mathematics and hold a professorship, at a time when the doors weren't just closed to her, they mostly weren't built with a handle on her side at all. I think about doors a lot — my dad arrived as a teenage boat refugee in 1979 with essentially none open to him, and building the bakery in 2016 meant a loan that terrified me and a savings account that didn't cover half of what I needed. Different scale of obstacle entirely, but the same basic math: sometimes the achievement isn't just the work, it's getting anyone to let you do the work at all. Kovalevskaya's story reads like she had to be undeniable to get a fraction of the access men around her got by default. My two grandmothers ran two completely different kinds of kitchens, and I've noticed the through-line in a lot of the profiles I write is women who had to be twice as good just to get counted once. Kovalevskaya's a clean, clear case of it.
-
Javier Bardem (b. 1969) — Javier
Javier Bardem has an Academy Award, sure, but what stuck with me reading his profile is the ocean conservation campaigning running alongside the film career the whole time, not as a retirement hobby but as an actual second commitment. I think about "what you build alongside the thing that pays you" a lot, because the bakery only survives some months because I also waited tables two nights a week during the pandemic just to make payroll for my own employees — the visible job and the invisible extra work that keeps anything alive. Bardem's advocacy isn't invisible exactly, but it's clearly not the headline either, and I respect people who keep showing up for a cause that doesn't reliably pay them attention or money. My father's side of the family came here as a refugee with almost nothing, so I have a soft spot generally for people who use whatever platform they've earned to actually push on something instead of just enjoying it. Sounds like Bardem's been doing that a long time.
-
Carlos Finlay (1833-1915) — Carlos
Carlos Finlay spent years insisting mosquitoes, not some vague miasma, were spreading yellow fever, and got mostly ignored by the medical establishment of his time before the idea finally took and went on to save countless lives. That's basically every stubborn, correct idea's origin story, and it reminds me a little of the bakery's first two years, when almost nobody outside my own regulars believed a tiny neighborhood spot could survive on Portland rent — except Finlay's stakes were actual epidemic disease and mine were, you know, croissants. Still, there's something in common: an idea that looks obvious in hindsight and looked like stubbornness at the time. My wife Sam is an ER nurse, so I hear a lot about how medicine still runs on people who were willing to be the annoying one in the room, insisting on the unglamorous, hard-to-prove thing. Finlay apparently had to wait decades to be vindicated. That's a long time to hold a belief nobody else shares. I think it's worth admiring the holding as much as the being-right.
-
Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) (b. 1948) — Yusuf
Yusuf Islam, known to a lot of people still as Cat Stevens, wrote 'Peace Train' and 'Wild World' before founding Small Kindness, a charity helping children affected by war and natural disaster, and I find something quietly moving in an artist whose most famous songs were already about peace and gentleness deciding, later, that the songs weren't quite enough and building something structural to back them up. My own family straddles an Irish side and a Vietnamese side, my father having arrived here as a teenage refugee in 1979, so charity work aimed specifically at children displaced by war lands somewhere personal for me, not abstract at all -- I know what it costs a family to rebuild from exactly that kind of loss, because mine did it, a generation before me. It would've been easy for him to just keep writing songs about a kinder world and let the songs be the whole contribution; instead he built an organization that actually does something concrete for kids living through the real version of the disruption his early music only gestured toward. That follow-through, decades later, is the part of his story I'd want remembered longest.
-
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) — Frances
Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote 'The Secret Garden' and 'A Little Princess,' both books built around resilience and the quiet healing power of nature, themes I've come to appreciate a lot more since becoming a mother than I ever did reading them as a kid myself. There's a scene in 'The Secret Garden' about a locked-up, neglected space slowly coming back to life once someone actually tends to it, and I think about that scene more than I'd expect while managing my own tiny patch of a backyard garden between bakery shifts, mostly failing at it, occasionally succeeding, always finding it strangely restorative either way. Burnett's books have stayed classics for over a century because that particular combination -- a child figuring out resilience through patient, unglamorous care of something living -- apparently never goes out of date, no matter how much everything else about childhood changes around it. My daughter's just old enough now for me to start reading her books like these, and I find myself watching her reactions almost as closely as I'm reading the actual story, curious what she'll recognize in it that I haven't thought of yet.
-
Carolyn Porco (b. 1953) — Carolyn
Carolyn Porco led the imaging team for NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn, which means she spent years being responsible for how an entire planet and its moons actually looked to the rest of us, translating raw data into the kind of stunning images that ended up genuinely changing how scientists and regular people alike understood that part of the solar system. There's something about that role -- being the person who has to render something enormous and complicated into a form other people can actually see and understand -- that I recognize a little from running a bakery, where half my job some days is translating a complicated, finicky process into something that just looks and tastes simple and inviting by the time it reaches the counter. Porco's images of Saturn's rings did more to make people care about that mission than any raw dataset ever could have on its own, which tells you something about how much presentation matters even in the most rigorous science. I don't understand the astrophysics behind any of it, honestly, but I understand the value of making something true also look like something worth stopping for.
-
Christine McVie (1943-2022) — Christine
Christine McVie wrote some of Fleetwood Mac's most enduring songs, the kind that are still on wedding playlists and grocery-store speakers decades later, its own quiet miracle when you think about how much music from any given era just disappears completely while a handful of songs somehow stay everywhere, permanently, without anybody having to work to keep them alive. 'Don't Stop' specifically has become the kind of song that shows up at exactly the moment somebody needs a little forward motion, a strange, useful thing for a piece of music to be able to do for total strangers decades after it was written for entirely different reasons. I think about staying power a lot in the bakery business, since most of what we make gets eaten within a day and forgotten, good or bad, by the following week -- there's something almost enviable about writing something that keeps working on people that long after you made it. My wife Sam plays McVie's songs on Sunday mornings sometimes while I'm doing the week's prep, and I've never once gotten tired of them, which by itself tells you something about the craft underneath.
-
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) — Katherine
Katherine Mansfield is remembered as one of the finest short story writers in English, and there's something particular about the short story as a form that I think about more than I probably should for someone who runs a bakery -- you don't get the luxury of a novel's length to build up to the truth, you have to get it exactly right in a much smaller, tighter space, the same way a good pastry doesn't have room to hide a mistake the way a big, forgiving loaf of bread sometimes can. Her writing is described as psychologically perceptive, which I take to mean she understood people quickly and precisely rather than slowly and generally, a skill I associate with my Irish grandmother, who could read a whole family's mood off one look at the kitchen table before anybody said a word. I don't have much technical knowledge of literary history, I'll admit that plainly, but I recognize the value of precision over volume in any craft, because it's exactly what separates a bakery item that actually works from one that's just fine -- small, exact, and correct beats big and approximate every time.
-
Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) — Katherine
Katherine Johnson did calculations by hand that were critical to America's earliest successful spaceflights, and for a long stretch of her career she did that work without the public recognition that finally caught up to her, decades later, through 'Hidden Figures' and a Presidential Medal of Freedom that arrived a lot closer to the end of her life than the beginning of her work. I think about delayed recognition a lot running a small business -- the bakery survived its hardest years because of regulars who kept showing up when nobody outside the neighborhood had any idea we existed, and it took a long time before anyone beyond those regulars noticed we'd built something worth noticing. Johnson's math was just as correct and just as essential decades before the world got around to properly crediting it; the work didn't get better once it was recognized, the recognition just finally caught up to work that had been excellent the whole time. I try to remember that on the bakery's slow months, when nothing about the actual bread has changed, just whether anybody outside is currently paying attention to it.
-
Helen Keller (1880-1968) — Helen
Helen Keller was left both deaf and blind by illness as a baby, and with her teacher Anne Sullivan's help, learned to communicate at all, before going on to become an author, lecturer, and lifelong advocate for people with disabilities -- which means practically every part of her achievement had to be built from a starting point most people never have to consider, let alone overcome. I think about the word 'nearly' a lot running a small business, because the bakery nearly closed twice and both times a wave of regular customers pulled us back from it, which shaped how much I believe in community mattering more than almost anything else a person can build alone. Keller's story is the community version of that same lesson taken to an entirely different scale -- one teacher's patient, sustained effort turning into a whole life of advocacy that opened doors for people who came after her with disabilities of their own. It's easy to read her story as being purely about her own individual will, and it clearly did take enormous will, but it also took somebody showing up consistently enough to build a bridge to her in the first place, which is the part I find myself thinking about most.
-
Nicole Mann (b. 1977) — Nicole
Nicole Mann became the first Native American woman to travel to space and then commanded a mission to the International Space Station, and I keep coming back to that word 'first,' because being first at anything means there was no recipe to follow -- no one before you who could tell you exactly how the proportions should work, you just had to build it and trust it would hold. That's a small, silly comparison to make next to actual spaceflight, but it's the honest one I've got, having built a bakery from savings and a genuinely terrifying loan with no guarantee any of it would work either. What gets me about Mann's story is the command part specifically -- not just being included, but being trusted to lead the whole mission, which means whatever doubts anyone might've had about a first got answered pretty definitively. My grandmothers kept two very different kitchens, an ocean apart in tradition, and both of them taught me that being trusted with something big, something that matters to more people than just you, is the real marker of having arrived, not just being allowed through the door in the first place.
-
Pam Grier (b. 1949) — Pamela
Pam Grier became an icon of 1970s cinema and then, after surviving cancer herself, spent years afterward as an advocate for early screening and cancer research, the kind of pivot that only happens when something genuinely scares you enough to make you useful about it instead of just quiet and relieved. I think about that instinct a lot, because the bakery nearly closed twice -- once in year two, once during the pandemic -- and both times, once we survived it, I found myself wanting to actually help other small businesses instead of just quietly being grateful we'd made it. Fear that turns into advocacy instead of just private relief is its own kind of ingredient, honestly, the thing that turns a scary story into something that's actually useful to somebody else going through the same thing later. Grier didn't have to talk publicly about her diagnosis or push screening awareness afterward; plenty of people who survive something serious just move on and don't look back. She looked back on purpose, and used it, which I think is the harder and better choice.
-
Anna Freud (1895-1982) — Anna
Anna Freud spent her career building an entire field around a fairly simple, radical idea -- that children's inner lives deserve the same serious attention adults' do -- and then spent the hardest years of that career actually applying it, working with children whose whole worlds had been blown apart by the Second World War. There's something in that combination, theory built specifically so it could be useful in the worst moments, that reminds me of running a small bakery through a pandemic: you can have all the recipes and the training in the world, but the real test is whether any of it still works when everything around you is falling apart at the same time. My own daughter is four now, and every time she has a hard day I think a little about how much careful, patient attention it takes to actually understand what's going on inside a kid instead of just managing the behavior on the surface. Freud built the whole scaffolding for that kind of attention, from scratch, during a period when a lot of the world had stopped being able to offer children much attention at all.
-
Amanda Seyfried (b. 1985) — Amanda
Amanda Seyfried, an actress and singer known for 'Mamma Mia!' and 'Les Misérables,' has become a vocal advocate for mental health awareness and animal rescue, using her platform for causes that don't always get the same fundraising attention as flashier ones. My wife Sam works as an ER nurse and we talk a lot at home about how mental health gets treated as an afterthought in most institutions, tacked onto the end of a policy instead of built into it from the start, so I notice when someone with real visibility puts actual weight behind naming that gap directly. Seyfried's been fairly candid about her own experience with anxiety, which is the kind of honesty that tends to matter more to people quietly struggling with the same thing than any polished celebrity statement would. Pairing that with animal rescue work isn't an obvious combination, but both causes share the same quality: they're the kind of steady, unglamorous commitment that rarely gets a headline of its own.
-
Ashley Graham (b. 1987) — Ashley
Ashley Graham, a model and body-positivity advocate, has helped broaden representation in the fashion industry and encourages healthier, more inclusive attitudes toward body image across an industry that historically had very little room for either. Between two very different sets of grandparents growing up, one Irish-American and one Vietnamese, I learned early that there's rarely just one right way to look, cook, or live, even though plenty of institutions act like there is. Graham's whole career pushes against that same narrow-default instinct, just applied to an industry built almost entirely around one narrow body type for generations. It's the kind of change that looks obvious in hindsight and took real nerve to push for in the moment, the same way it took nerve for me to open a bakery with a terrifying loan instead of waiting for permission that was never going to come. Widening what counts as normal is slow, unglamorous work, whatever industry you're doing it in.
-
Karen Horney (1885-1952) — Karen
Karen Horney, a pioneering psychoanalyst, challenged some of Sigmund Freud's theories about women and went on to develop influential new ideas about anxiety and self-image that are still shaping psychology today. Running a small bakery that's nearly closed twice has taught me more about anxiety and self-image than I ever expected a business to teach me, so I have a particular fondness for someone who took those exact subjects seriously as a field of actual study rather than just something you privately push through and never examine. Horney apparently looked at the established theories of her time, decided some of them didn't hold up when you actually accounted for women's real experience, and had the nerve to say so publicly in a field that wasn't eager to hear it. That's not so different from realizing the standard advice for running a small business doesn't quite account for a queer-owned bakery with a nontraditional family behind it — sometimes the received wisdom just wasn't built with you in mind, and somebody has to say that plainly.
-
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) — Alexander
Alexander Graham Bell is remembered first for patenting the first practical telephone, which changed how the entire world communicates, but what I find more interesting running a small business myself is how much he kept building afterward instead of just resting on that one invention. He worked extensively on hearing technology, clearly following a genuine personal thread of curiosity rather than just chasing a second payday, and he helped found the National Geographic Society, which is a wildly different kind of institution from a telephone patent. Starting one successful thing and then deciding to start something else entirely, in a completely different field, takes a specific kind of restlessness I recognize from opening a second bakery counter inside a grocery co-op this year, terrified the whole time that I was overextending something that had only just become stable. Bell apparently didn't stop at the safe, obvious next step either. He kept following whatever question was actually interesting to him, which is a harder way to build a career, but clearly, in his case, a more interesting one.
-
Eric Clapton (b. 1945) — Eric
Eric Clapton is one of the most influential guitarists rock ever produced, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three separate times, which is its own kind of remarkable consistency across decades of a notoriously fickle industry. What stands out to me more, running a small business that's nearly gone under twice, is that he took whatever he learned from his own hardest years and built something durable out of it -- the Crossroads Centre, a nonprofit addiction treatment facility that's helped plenty of people who will never appear on any album credit. That's the part of a comeback story that doesn't get its own highlight reel: not just surviving something difficult, but turning around afterward and building infrastructure so other people going through it have somewhere real to land. My bakery survived on the strength of regular customers who showed up during the two years it nearly folded, and I think about that kind of debt a lot -- what you owe forward once you've made it through something. Clapton apparently felt that too.
-
Jacob deGrom (b. 1988) — Jacob
There's a version of excellence that isn't loud about itself, and Jacob deGrom seems to be exactly that -- a two-time Cy Young winner regarded as one of the most dominant pitchers of his generation, and yet what his own teammates apparently talk about is how quiet and hardworking he is about it, not how much attention he draws. That tracks with something I've noticed running a bakery for going on a decade now: the best croissants in the case never announce themselves, they just get eaten first because they were made right, every single layer, every single morning, whether or not anyone was watching that particular batch come out of the oven. DeGrom's whole reputation is built on that kind of unglamorous repetition -- the same discipline, pitch after pitch, season after season, without needing a highlight reel to justify it. My grandmother used to say good bread doesn't need a sign out front. I think about that every time somebody mentions deGrom's name and the word 'quiet' shows up right next to 'dominant.'
-
Joshua Chamberlain (1828-1914) — Joshua
Joshua Chamberlain was a college professor who became a Union Army officer, and his determined defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg is remembered as an actual turning point in the battle — a moment where the outcome could genuinely have gone the other way, and didn't, because of decisions made under enormous pressure. I think about crisis moments like that in a much smaller way, because my bakery nearly closed twice, once in year two and once during the pandemic, and both times it was close enough that a different decision at the wrong moment could have ended it for good. Chamberlain's stakes were obviously incomparably higher, but there's something in that experience of holding a line when everything is genuinely uncertain that I recognize even from a much smaller kitchen. He went on to serve as Governor of Maine afterward, which tells you the instinct to keep serving and building didn't stop once the immediate crisis passed. Some people just keep showing up for the next hard thing.
-
Andrew Wiles (b. 1953) — Andrew
Andrew Wiles worked in near-total secrecy for seven years to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, a mathematical puzzle that had stumped people for 350 years, and something about that specific kind of patience resonates with me even though I run a bakery and he's a mathematician — there's a version of slow, careful, mostly invisible work in both of our fields, where nobody sees the process, just the final result once it finally comes together. Seven years is an enormous stretch of time to keep faith in a project nobody else can see progress on, especially with no guarantee it would ever actually work out. My bakery nearly closed twice in its own much shorter, much less mathematically impressive history, and both times what kept it alive was believing it was worth continuing even when the outcome wasn't obvious yet. Wiles finally cracked it in 1994 and earned worldwide acclaim, closing a genuinely ancient mystery. That kind of long, quiet persistence deserves exactly the credit it got.
-
Donald Knuth (b. 1938) — Donald
Donald Knuth wrote 'The Art of Computer Programming,' a multivolume work that apparently shaped the entire field of computer science, and he also built the TeX typesetting system that scientists and mathematicians still use today to actually publish their work cleanly. I run a bakery, so I think in terms of recipes and precision — the difference between something that mostly works and something that's actually been tested and refined until it's reliable every single time — and from what I gather, Knuth's whole career has been in that second category, meticulous, almost obsessively careful, building tools other people could depend on for decades afterward. There's a particular kind of unglamorous, exacting labor behind anything that ends up being load-bearing infrastructure for an entire field, whether that's a programming reference or, on a much smaller scale, a bread recipe a whole neighborhood ends up depending on every Saturday morning. Both take longer than people assume, and both are worth it once they hold.
-
David Bowie (1947-2016) — David
David Bowie spent decades reinventing himself — a new sound, a new look, a whole new persona every few years, like he refused to let any single version of himself go stale. I run a bakery, so maybe I think about everything in terms of proofing and rising, but there's something in Bowie's constant reinvention that reminds me of a good sourdough starter: you keep feeding it, keep it alive, and it never comes out exactly the same way twice, and that's the whole point. What I admire most is what he did with all that shape-shifting — he made it feel safe, even joyful, for other people to be strange or different too. My wife Sam and I are raising our daughter to know there's no one correct way to be yourself, and honestly Bowie gave a whole lot of people permission to believe that decades before it was an easy thing to say out loud. Genre-defying, yes, but more importantly, permission-giving.
-
Jane Fonda (b. 1937) — Jane
A career spanning more than six decades is basically a recipe you keep adjusting your whole life — you don't get it right on the first attempt, and Jane Fonda's version has clearly gone through a lot of revisions, from an Academy Award-winning acting career into becoming a prominent environmental and social activist along the way. I think about my own bakery, which has nearly closed twice and somehow is still standing, and how it's a completely different business now than the one I opened with a terrifying loan in 2016 — same core ingredients, totally different shape. Sixty-plus years is long enough to become several different versions of a career inside one lifetime, and I have a lot of respect for anybody who keeps evolving instead of just repeating the same thing because it once worked. My wife's an ER nurse and she says the people who last longest in hard jobs are the ones who let themselves change with the work instead of fighting it. Fonda's story reads like someone who took that advice a long time before either of us did.
-
Kathryn D. Sullivan (b. 1951) — Kathryn
Some careers you can build in layers, like a good cake, and some careers only make sense the way Kathryn D. Sullivan's does — geologist, astronaut, first American woman to walk in space, and eventually the first person ever to reach both space and the deepest point in the ocean. That's not a layer cake, honestly, that's more like baking one thing entirely, then turning around and mastering the total opposite, and being world-class at both. My whole professional life is thin margins and one very specific craft, so a résumé that spans the literal highest and lowest points on Earth kind of breaks my brain in a good way. I think about my bakery's two near-closures a lot when I read a story like this — not because the scale compares, it obviously doesn't, but because there's something in common between 'push all the way to one extreme, survive it, then go push toward the opposite extreme' that feels true no matter the field. Sullivan didn't pick a lane and stay in it. She built two completely different kinds of expertise and used both.
-
Victoria Beckham (b. 1974) — Victoria
Victoria Beckham was a member of the Spice Girls before building an entirely separate, successful second career as a fashion designer, earning genuine acclaim for her own eponymous label rather than coasting on the pop fame alone. I opened this bakery after leaving an unfinished English degree behind, so I've got a real fondness for anybody who builds a whole second act from scratch instead of just riding out whatever made them famous the first time around. Fashion and pop music aren't the same trade at all, any more than baking and waitressing are, but starting over in a completely different field once you've already tasted one kind of success takes a specific nerve most people never bother testing. I nearly closed this place twice in its first ten years, and both times I had to relearn what I was actually building from scratch. Beckham apparently did that voluntarily, on top of an already-successful career, which is a braver move than most people give her credit for.
-
Oscar Robertson (b. 1938) — Oscar
Oscar Robertson, "The Big O," became in 1962 the first NBA player ever to average a triple-double for an entire season, a feat so rare it wasn't matched again for over fifty years afterward. Fifty years is longer than my bakery, my parents' whole working lives, and probably my grandmother's kitchen combined, and it's a genuinely wild thing to sit with — an entire half-century passing, generations of new players and new training methods arriving, and the bar he set simply held anyway. I think about standards like that in a much smaller way at the bakery, trying to hit the exact same quality on a croissant every single morning regardless of who's on shift that day; consistency at any real level takes far more discipline than people assume from the outside. Robertson apparently set a standard so far ahead of his era that basketball itself needed half a century of evolution just to produce someone who could touch it again.
-
Max Verstappen (b. 1997) — Maximilian
Max Verstappen becoming a Formula One World Champion, and one of the most successful drivers of his generation, is a career built on split-second precision that I honestly find a little terrifying to think about too closely, the same fine margin for error I feel some mornings at four a.m. when I'm the only one awake and the oven timing has to be exact or the whole batch is ruined. His actual given name, Max Emilian, is a nice little detail buried under the nickname everybody actually uses, which reminds me a bit of how differently my own daughter's two grandmothers say her name, each in their own family's rhythm, and how much identity can hide inside something as small as a name's full version versus its everyday one. Being one of the most successful drivers of an entire generation means sustaining that level of precision race after race, not just for one perfect afternoon, which is the harder, less glamorous half of any kind of excellence, racing or baking both.
-
Salvatore Adamo (b. 1943) — Salvatore
Salvatore Adamo built decades of popularity across Europe on romantic ballads like "Tombe la neige," which is the kind of sustained, gentle career I find myself drawn to more the older I get and the more I appreciate things that don't need to shout to be loved. There's something almost like a good, simple recipe in a song that stays beloved for that long — nothing flashy added, just something warm and well-made that people keep coming back to across generations, the way my Vietnamese grandmother's plain rice dishes and my Irish grandmother's soda bread both stuck around in my own family for completely different, equally sentimental reasons. Staying popular across decades, in multiple countries, without needing to reinvent yourself dramatically each time, takes a different kind of staying power than a flashier career would. I like artists whose whole appeal is durability and warmth rather than novelty, mostly because that's exactly what I'm trying to build in my own small, precarious business too.
-
Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) — Salvatore
Salvatore Quasimodo winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for poetry that captured both the tragedy and the hope of postwar life reminds me a little of the recipes that get handed down after hard years in a family — the ones that taste like scarcity and celebration at the same time, because whoever wrote them down was living through both at once. I think about that duality a lot from running a small bakery that nearly closed twice; you learn pretty fast that grief and hope aren't actually opposites, they just take turns showing up in the same kitchen, or apparently the same body of poetry. Being recognized at that level for capturing something that emotionally complicated, in verse, tells me Quasimodo wasn't choosing one note to strike, he was holding both at once and trusting readers to feel the whole chord. That's the harder, more honest way to tell a difficult story, in a poem or in a bakery ledger, and I have real respect for anyone who manages it without flattening either half.
-
Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) — Wayne
Wayne Thiebaud painted cakes and pies and diner counters like they deserved the same serious attention as any grand historical subject, thick, buttery brushstrokes that somehow make a slice of pie look almost architectural, and as a baker I have an enormous, slightly biased soft spot for an artist who took dessert that seriously as a subject worth painting. There's something validating about it, honestly — I spend hours getting a lemon tart's glaze exactly right, and here's a whole respected American painter who apparently understood that the everyday, unglamorous stuff of a bakery case is worth the same careful eye as anything else in a museum. Thiebaud became a defining figure in American art doing exactly that, elevating cakes and pies instead of ignoring them as too ordinary to matter. I've got a print of one of his paintings taped up near our register, actually, mostly because it makes customers smile when they notice it, but also because it's nice having proof, right there on the wall, that somebody important once agreed baked goods deserve real reverence.
-
Jordan Spieth (b. 1993) — Jordan
Jordan Spieth won three of professional golf's four major championships, which is an enormous accomplishment in a sport that's absolutely merciless about small mistakes compounding over four long days. Golf's never been my sport, my wife Sam is far more into it than I am, but I appreciate anything built on that much precision and patience, the same instincts that keep a laminated dough from falling apart if you rush even one fold. Winning three majors puts him in genuinely rare company, and doing it as young as he did adds its own kind of pressure most of us never have to face in our own careers — succeeding early enough that the whole rest of your life gets measured against it. I think about that a little with the bakery too, actually, since our first couple of years got a certain amount of attention that then became its own quiet weight to live up to. Early success is a real gift, but it comes with strings nobody warns you about until you're already holding them.
-
Caleb — Caleb
Caleb is one of those Hebrew Bible figures who doesn't get nearly the attention of the bigger names, but his whole role in the story is being the one who stayed hopeful when everybody around him wanted to turn back — he and Joshua scouted out a hard, uncertain situation and came back saying it was worth pushing forward anyway, even when the rest of the group was terrified. I've had exactly one moment like that in my life, twice actually, when the bakery nearly went under and I had to decide whether to keep going or close the doors for good, and both times it was other people, not just my own nerve, who convinced me the hard path was still worth it. My daughter's growing up between two grandmothers who each pray and cook and talk about faith in totally different languages and traditions, and stories like Caleb's, encouragement over fear, patience over panic, feel like something both sides of her family would recognize immediately, even with everything else about their backgrounds being so different.
-
Jackson Browne (b. 1948) — Jackson
Jackson Browne built a catalog of songs, Late for the Sky among them, that hold up as well now as when he made them, which is its own quiet kind of achievement — a lot of music from that era hasn't aged nearly as gracefully. I've got his records playing in the bakery some mornings before we open, that particular hour when it's just me, the ovens warming up, and something honest and unhurried on the speakers before the day gets loud. There's a directness to his songwriting that I associate with the best recipes, the ones that don't need fifteen ingredients to work, just the right few done with real care. Getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame decades into a career like that isn't about one big hit, it's about a body of work that people kept coming back to on its own terms, year after year. That's the kind of longevity I'm hoping for with this bakery too, honestly. Not flashy. Just something people keep wanting more of.
-
Dominic Thiem (b. 1993) — Dominic
Dominic Thiem spent years as one of the best tennis players in the world without quite breaking through at the very top of a major, losing finals to guys built like immovable objects, before he finally won the US Open in 2020. I like that story better than the ones where somebody wins everything right away, if I'm honest, the same way I trust a sourdough starter that's been fed patiently for months over one that got rushed on the counter overnight. My bakery nearly closed twice in its first several years, and both times it was regular customers who kept it alive, not some sudden stroke of genius on my part, and I think there's a real lesson in Thiem's story about how long "almost" can last before it finally turns into something real. He kept showing up to the biggest stages in his sport and kept coming up just short, which takes its own kind of nerve, honestly, more than winning the first one clean ever would. Some of the best things really do take that long to prove themselves.
-
Xavier Dolan (b. 1989) — Xavier
Xavier Dolan became one of the youngest directors ever to win a major award at Cannes, which is the kind of thing that makes my stomach flip a little in sympathy, honestly, because I remember what it felt like starting my own bakery at not much more than that age with savings and a genuinely terrifying loan and no real proof yet that any of it would work. There's a specific kind of vulnerability in doing something ambitious early, before you've built up the thick skin that comes later from surviving a few disasters. Dolan clearly had the vision and the nerve to put serious, personal work in front of the most demanding audience in film at an age when most people are still figuring out what they even want to make. I don't know his films well, I'll admit, running a bakery doesn't leave a lot of time for the art house circuit, but I recognize the particular bravery of showing people your real work before you've had decades to get comfortable with being seen.
-
Hugo Weaving (b. 1960) — Hugo
Hugo Weaving has one of those voices that could probably sell you anything, and he's used it across two of the most iconic franchises there are — The Matrix and Lord of the Rings — playing characters that couldn't be more different from each other in tone. I think about range like that the way I think about a good bakery case: you want the plain, dependable croissant and the weird, ambitious seasonal thing sitting side by side, and both need to actually be excellent, not just different for the sake of it. Weaving's Agent Smith is all cold, clipped menace, and then Elrond is this whole other register, mournful and elegant, and somehow it's obviously the same skilled hand behind both. I've built a menu around exactly that principle for years now, trying to make sure nothing on it is there just to look interesting — it all has to actually earn its place. Sounds like Weaving's approached a whole career the same way, choosing roles that stretch what he can do instead of just repeating what already worked.
-
Marguerite Perey (1909-1975) — Marguerite
Marguerite Perey discovered the element francium and became the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences, which as someone with a half-finished English degree I did not regret leaving, I find genuinely awe-inspiring in a "I could never" kind of way — actual hard science, actual institutional barrier broken, not metaphorically but literally being the first woman let into that room. There's something about being first into a space that wasn't built with you in mind that I think about with my own bakery too, in a much smaller way — my wife Sam and I raising our daughter as two moms means we're often the first version of a family some institutions haven't quite figured out how to file yet. Perey didn't just discover something new in the world, she had to also force open a door nobody had opened for a woman before her. That's two hard jobs done at once, and either one alone would've been enough of an achievement to be proud of for a lifetime.
-
Adriana Lima (b. 1981) — Adriana
Adriana Lima was one of the longest-running Victoria's Secret Angels and one of the highest-paid models in the world, which on its face sounds like pure glamour, but "longest-running" is the word that actually catches my attention as a small-business owner — staying at the top of a notoriously fast-churning, brutal industry for that many years takes real discipline and business sense underneath all the visible sparkle. Running my bakery has taught me that surviving long-term in any competitive field, food or fashion, means the unglamorous stuff behind the scenes matters as much as the product people actually see. I imagine there was a whole operation of discipline, scheduling, and sheer professional consistency behind Lima's career that nobody claps for the way they clap for the campaigns themselves. My own margins are thinner than a modeling contract's, sure, but the underlying lesson feels the same: the people who last in any hard industry are usually the ones who treated the boring parts as seriously as the exciting ones.
-
Chiara Ferragni (b. 1987) — Chiara
Chiara Ferragni took one of the first major global fashion blogs and built it into an actual business empire, which as someone who started a bakery with savings and a genuinely terrifying loan, I recognize the shape of immediately — somebody saw an opportunity nobody else had fully mapped out yet and had the nerve to actually build something real on top of it before the ground was settled under her. That's the scary, unglamorous part entrepreneurship media doesn't show much: being early means there's no playbook, you're just making the recipe up as you go and hoping the ingredients hold together. I think about my own bakery's early years, figuring out margins and staffing with no real model to copy, every time I read about someone who turned a genuinely new kind of idea into something lasting. Ferragni built infrastructure, a real business, out of something people initially dismissed as just a hobby online. I have real respect for anybody who gets told "that's not a real business" and proves it very much is.
-
Florence Griffith Joyner (1959-1998) — Florence
Florence Griffith Joyner, "Flo-Jo," still holds the world records in the 100m and 200m, records that have stood since the 1980s, which in a sport where records usually get broken every few years is basically unheard of — that's decades of nobody else in the entire world running that fast. I think about longevity a lot in the bakery business, where "surviving" itself is the win most days, and there's something in Flo-Jo's records that reminds me records aren't just about one great race, they're about a level of preparation and talent so far ahead of the field that it just doesn't get caught up to for generations. She also had real style doing it, which isn't nothing — she made the sport visually unforgettable, not just fast. My bakery's never going to set any world records, but I do think about the idea that some things, built right the first time with real care, just hold up far longer than anybody expects them to. That's worth celebrating on any scale.
-
Priscilla Chan (b. 1985) — Priscilla
Priscilla Chan trained as a pediatrician before co-founding the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to advance science, education, and justice, and there's something about that combination — actual hands-on medical training plus a big philanthropic platform — that reads to me like someone who knows the difference between good intentions and knowing what a system actually needs on the ground. Running a small business has taught me that the ideas that survive contact with reality are the ones built by people who've actually done the unglamorous, close-up work first, not just the ones with the biggest checkbook. A pediatrician sees exactly where a system fails real families, one appointment at a time, which is a very different education than a boardroom gives you. I think about my own bakery's two near-closures and how it was the people who actually understood the day-to-day grind of it who ended up saving it, not the ones who just admired it from outside. Chan's medical background feels like the same kind of grounding, just applied at an enormously larger scale than my little shop.
-
Nora Guthrie (b. 1950) — Nora
Nora Guthrie has spent decades as president of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, preserving and sharing her father's musical legacy, and there's something in that work I recognize from my own family, actually — my two grandmothers kept two very different kitchens, Boston Irish on one side and Vietnamese on the other, and I've spent a fair amount of this summer explaining to my four-year-old why that's true, why heritage doesn't always look the same from both sides of a family. Guthrie's job isn't creating something new, it's the quieter, equally demanding work of keeping something already valuable intact and accessible for people who never got to experience it firsthand. That's a specific kind of devotion, being the keeper of someone else's legacy rather than building your own from scratch, and I imagine it comes with its own complicated pride, similar to what I feel running a bakery built partly on two grandmothers' very different recipes. You're never just doing your own thing; you're carrying something forward that started long before you and will hopefully outlast you too.
-
Mia Farrow (b. 1945) — Mia
Mia Farrow's had a decades-long career on film and stage, 'Rosemary's Baby' being the one most people know, but it's the UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador work that stays with me longer than any single role would. My daughter recently started asking pointed questions about why her two grandmothers 'don't talk the same way,' which has had me thinking all summer about heritage and how differently people carry the world's harder realities depending on what they've actually witnessed up close. I imagine humanitarian work does something similar to a person — you can't do that kind of work for real, over years, without it changing how you see everything else in your life afterward, your acting career included. There's a version of celebrity humanitarian work that's mostly for show, and I have no way of knowing where any specific person falls on that spectrum from the outside. But sustaining that role for a long stretch, on top of an already demanding career, suggests it mattered to her beyond the optics. That's the kind of layered life I find myself paying more attention to lately.
-
Charlotte Church (b. 1986) — Charlotte
Reinventing yourself once is hard enough; Charlotte Church basically had to do it in public, growing up as a child prodigy soprano and then building a whole second career as a pop and stage performer once she was no longer, well, a child. I think about reinvention a lot running a small bakery — the first few years I made what I thought people wanted, and it took nearly closing twice before I figured out what the place actually was. Church didn't get that kind of quiet trial and error; she had to grow up and change genres with people already watching and already having decided who she was supposed to be. That's a much harder recipe to adjust once the whole neighborhood already knows your original one by heart. I have a lot of respect for anyone who's willing to risk disappointing the people who loved the first version of them, in service of becoming something more honest to who they actually are now. That takes more nerve than starting from nothing at all.
-
Olivia de Havilland (1916-2020) — Olivia
Two Academy Awards for 'Gone with the Wind' and 'The Heiress' would be plenty of legacy for most actresses, but Olivia de Havilland's real staying power, as far as I'm concerned, is the lawsuit — the one she brought against Warner Bros. that ended up changing labor rights for actors across all of Hollywood. As someone who runs a small bakery and thinks constantly about margins, minimum wage, and healthcare costs for my four employees, I have a soft spot for anybody who looked at an unfair system from the inside and actually did something structural about it instead of just quietly living with it. It's easy to remember the glamorous roles and forget that behind almost every industry, even the ones that look shiny from the outside, there's somebody who had to fight to make the working conditions decent for everyone who came after. De Havilland won her Oscars, sure, but she also won something that outlasted any single performance — better terms for people whose names nobody would ever put on a marquee. That's the part of her story I'd frame and hang on the wall.
-
Bonnie Tyler (b. 1951) — Bonnie
Bonnie Tyler had one of the best-selling singles of the entire 1980s with 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' a song so enormous it's basically become a load-bearing wall of pop culture at this point, the kind of hit that still gets requested at weddings decades later whether the DJ wants to play it or not. I think about longevity like that a lot running a small bakery, where you're constantly hoping one good recipe becomes the thing people keep coming back for years after you first baked it. One perfect, well-timed hit clearly did that for her, in a completely different industry, on a much bigger scale than my cinnamon rolls ever will. My wife Sam, who works ER nights and has very specific music opinions born entirely out of exhaustion, considers that song nearly sacred, which tells you something about a hit powerful enough to matter to someone with zero patience left for anything mediocre. Some things earn their staying power fair and square, one unforgettable chorus at a time.
-
Monica Bellucci (b. 1964) — Monica
Monica Bellucci is widely regarded as one of European cinema's most celebrated leading women, which is the kind of reputation that, like a good sourdough starter, doesn't happen overnight — it takes years of consistent, careful work before people start treating you as a sure thing instead of a promising newcomer. My Irish grandmother would have had strong opinions about Italian glamour, mostly admiring ones held at a slight, wary distance, and my Vietnamese grandmother would have had no opinions about European cinema at all and been perfectly content that way, which about sums up how differently my two families experienced the wider world. What I appreciate about a career built on being 'celebrated' rather than merely famous is that it implies staying power, the kind of reputation built one good, considered choice at a time rather than one viral moment. My bakery's taken the same slow route — no overnight sensation, just years of showing up and doing the work carefully. Bellucci apparently did the film version of that.
-
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) — Walter
Sir Walter Scott essentially helped invent an entire literary form with the historical novel, which is the kind of foundational contribution that's easy to take for granted now, the same way nobody thinks twice about sourdough starters even though somebody, at some point, had to be the first person to figure out how that actually works reliably. Writing Ivanhoe and helping establish a whole new way of blending real history with invented story means Scott wasn't just good at the craft that already existed, he was building the shape of a genre other writers would use for the next two centuries. I find myself thinking in terms of what people build and nearly lose, or what people build entirely from nothing, and inventing a literary form that durable definitely counts as building something lasting from scratch. That kind of foundational, generous contribution — creating a form other people get to use freely afterward — is the kind of legacy I find genuinely moving, even from this much historical distance.
-
Ida Lupino (1918-1995) — Ida
Ida Lupino directed her own films in 1950s Hollywood at a time when almost no women were allowed anywhere near that chair, and she used that rare position to tackle genuinely bold social issues on screen instead of playing it safe once she'd finally gotten in the door. That kind of nerve, using hard-won access to actually say something risky rather than just enjoying having arrived, reminds me a lot of the choices I've had to make keeping my bakery afloat through two near-closures — you can play it safe once you've survived, or you can keep taking the harder, more honest path even when it costs you. I nearly lost this place twice, once in year two and once during the pandemic, and both times what saved it was doing right by my community rather than the easy thing. Lupino apparently had that same instinct as a filmmaker, using her platform for something that actually mattered instead of just protecting the seat she'd fought so hard to get.
-
Vera Wang (b. 1949) — Vera
There's a particular kind of pressure in making something for the most important day of someone's life, and Vera Wang built an entire celebrated career out of exactly that pressure, designing wedding dresses worn by celebrity after celebrity with the kind of elegance that turns a dress into a memory. I think about this in bakery terms, honestly — a wedding cake carries the same weight, one shot, no do-overs, everybody's eyes on it. My wife Sam and I got married in a small ceremony that definitely did not feature a Vera Wang gown, more of a thrifted-and-altered situation, but I understand completely the specific craft of getting something exactly right for a moment that only happens once. Building a brand around that level of trust, again and again, for decades, takes both real design talent and a kind of quiet reliability that doesn't show up in the glamour shots. That's the part of any creative small business I respect most — not the flash, the consistency underneath it.
-
Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) — Herbert
Herbert A. Simon won a Nobel Prize in economics and also helped pioneer artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, which is the kind of career that spans two entirely different fields well enough to matter permanently in both, a range I find genuinely impressive given how much specialization most careers demand these days. I use AI tools for scheduling and social media captions at the bakery, in a very small, practical way, so it's strange and a little humbling to read about someone who was literally there at the actual beginning of the field, decades before it touched something as ordinary as my Instagram captions. There's something almost bakery-adjacent about combining two disciplines that people assume don't belong together, the way I've spent years combining my two grandmothers' completely different culinary traditions into recipes that shouldn't work on paper and somehow do. Simon apparently did that at a much higher level, blending economics and cognitive science into something new that neither field could've produced alone.
-
Milton Hershey (1857-1945) — Milton
Milton Hershey built one of the world's most famous chocolate companies and then used a genuinely enormous chunk of that fortune to found a school for underprivileged children, which is the part of his story that actually gets me, more than the chocolate itself, though I love a good chocolate story as much as anyone in my profession. Running a small business myself, I know how easy it would be to hoard whatever margin you finally manage to build after years of thin ones, and how much harder, and rarer, it is to actively give a meaningful chunk of it away once you've got it. My own bakery nearly closed twice, and both times it was community generosity, not my own resources, that pulled it through, so I have a particular soft spot for people who build something successful and then turn around and pour real support back into a community that needs it. Hershey apparently understood that a fortune built off of other people's sweet tooth owed something back to people who needed more than sugar.
-
Harold Bloom (1930-2019) — Harold
Harold Bloom spent decades at Yale as one of the most influential literary critics of his era, championing what he considered the great works of world literature with a passion that apparently bordered on evangelical. I left an English degree unfinished for culinary school, no regrets, but I still read constantly, mostly cookbooks and the occasional memoir now, and I recognize something familiar in a person whose life's work was essentially convincing other people that certain books mattered enough to be worth their limited time. That's not so different from running a neighborhood bakery, honestly — trying to convince people, one taste at a time, that this particular loaf or this particular pastry deserves a place in their actual life, not just their to-do list. Bloom apparently did that with the entire literary canon, decade after decade, insisting certain books earned their reputation rather than merely inheriting it. I like anyone whose whole career is arguing, with real conviction, that quality is worth defending against whatever's simply convenient or trendy that year.
-
Earl Campbell (b. 1955) — Earl
Earl Campbell is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, celebrated as one of the most powerful rushers the NFL has ever seen, which as someone who spends her mornings kneading dough starting at 4 a.m. has given me an unexpectedly personal appreciation for sheer, repetitive physical force applied consistently over years. My wrists ache just thinking about the kind of sustained bodily effort a Hall of Fame career like that requires, week after week, season after season, with real physical cost that doesn't always show up until decades later. I don't follow football closely — bakery hours don't leave much room for Sunday games — but I respect anyone whose whole professional identity is built on being powerful and reliable at the exact same time, since those two qualities don't always travel together. My own two grandmothers came from very different physical traditions of hard, bodily labor, and something in Campbell's story, built on strength that held up under real pressure, feels like it belongs to that same lineage of people who did the hard physical thing and made it count.
-
Barry Gibb (b. 1946) — Barry
Barry Gibb is the last surviving Bee Gee, co-writer of some of the most enduring disco-era hits ever recorded, which means he's spent years now carrying an entire group's legacy essentially alone, still writing and performing under the weight of songs he originally made with his brothers. That's a particular kind of grief mixed with responsibility that I find genuinely moving, having built my own bakery with people I love, and knowing how much of any shared creative work is actually about who you built it with, not just what got built. Disco gets dismissed sometimes as lightweight, but those songs have had a staying power that's outlasted plenty of music considered more serious at the time, which tells you the craftsmanship underneath the glitter was real all along. I think about that a lot with my own bakery's simpler recipes — the ones that look easy are usually the hardest to get exactly right, and the ones that last are rarely accidents. Gibb built something that lasted, and now he's the one left to carry it forward.
-
Gertrude Ederle (1905-2003) — Gertrude
Gertrude Ederle swam across the English Channel quicker than every man who'd tried it before her, and became a household name, and I think what gets lost in a story like that is just how much unglamorous, repetitive training must have happened before anyone was cheering — that's the part of any big achievement I find myself drawn to now, running a business where the wins are mostly invisible, daily, and exhausting long before anybody notices the bakery survived another hard year. My bakery nearly closed twice, and both times it wasn't one dramatic save, it was months of unglamorous work and a wave of loyal customers who kept showing up. Ederle's crossing looks like one triumphant day from the outside, but I guarantee the real story is thousands of unremarkable training hours nobody photographed. I have enormous respect for anyone who does that kind of invisible, repetitive work long enough that the payoff finally becomes visible to everyone else all at once. That's most of small-business life too, honestly.
-
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (1897-1966) — Mabel
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was out there championing women's voting rights as a literal teenager, and then spent the rest of her life doing quieter, deeply necessary community and social service work in New York's Chinatown instead of chasing more visible acclaim afterward. That choice, trading the spotlight for sustained, local, unglamorous service, is one I recognize from small-business life — most of the actual good you do for a neighborhood happens in the years after anyone's paying attention to the big flashy moment. My own family straddles two very different immigrant experiences, my mother's Irish-American side and my father's Vietnamese refugee side, and I think a lot about what it means to actually show up for a specific community over decades rather than just having one big public moment and moving on. Lee clearly understood that the real work was going to be the long, patient, everyday kind, and she did it anyway, for a very long time, without needing the applause to keep going.
-
Wilma Rudolph (1940-1994) — Wilma
Wilma Rudolph overcame childhood polio and became the first woman from the U.S. to take home three track and field golds from one Olympic Games, and honestly the 'overcame' part deserves way more attention than it usually gets in the retelling — that's not a footnote, that's the whole story underneath the medals. I've nearly lost my bakery twice, once in year two and once during the pandemic, and both times it was the actual foundation, the unglamorous rebuilding work, that mattered more than any award the place has won since. Rudolph's medals are remarkable, but the years of rehabilitation and sheer physical rebuilding that came before them are the real achievement in my eyes. My daughter recently started asking why her two grandmothers 'don't talk the same way,' and it's made me think a lot lately about the quiet, hard groundwork that has to happen before anyone gets to see the polished, celebrated version of a story. Rudolph's foundation was polio recovery. Mine's been two brutal survival years. Different scale, same shape.
-
Leon Bridges (b. 1989) — Leon
Leon Bridges took classic American soul music and made it feel completely alive again for a new generation, which is a specific kind of craft I recognize from running a neighborhood bakery — taking something traditional, something your grandmother's generation would recognize instantly, and making it feel necessary again for people who've never had it before. His album 'Coming Home' earned real critical acclaim precisely because it didn't feel like nostalgia, it felt like continuation. My own family blends two very different culinary and cultural traditions, my Irish-American mother's side and my Vietnamese father's side, and I think about this exact tension constantly in the bakery — honoring where a recipe or a sound came from while still making it feel like it belongs right now, to this specific moment. Bridges clearly figured out how to do that with soul music instead of sourdough, and it takes the same kind of respect for the source material paired with the confidence to make it your own.