"The Waterbury branch is always looked at as the little branch that could, " Gildea said.

WSJ: Conn. caught short on rail line down in Feb. storm

Against enormous odds, as William Gildea recalls in his episodic biography, Gans had by 1906 achieved the seemingly impossible.

ECONOMIST: The black white hope

Next door, a native speaker of the Irish language, Thomas Gildea, won by campaigning for his constituents' right to watch British television without paying for it.

ECONOMIST: Ireland

Mr Gildea, a talented sports journalist with a ready following among American readers, is nostalgic for the days when crowds of 125, 000 jammed into wooden stadiums to watch prizefights although not, of course, for the racism that then infected this and other sports.

ECONOMIST: The black white hope

It was a blind man, Bob Gildea, who got me "hooked" on braille in 1969, enlisting me as a computer programmer on a joint MIT-Mitre Corporation project that allowed teachers within the Atlanta schools to have materials quickly translated into braille for blind students integrated into regular classes.

WHITEHOUSE: Providing Literacy for Informed Citizenry through Braille | The White House