April 26, 2005
Have you heard the Denzel Washington story?
Updated: Please read the big-time update at the bottom.

Over the weekend, I got an e-mail that was forwarded from a friend to a friend to a friend and so on until it got to me. In that e-mail were some photos, and a couple of paragraphs of text. Here they are, with emphasis added by yours truly:

Don't know whether you heard about this but Denzel was visiting Brook Army Medical Center, in San Antonio,Texas (BAMC) the other day. This is where soldiers that have been evacuated from Germany come to be hospitalized in the States, especially burn victims. They have buildings there called Fisher Houses. The Fisher House is a hotel where soldiers' families can stay, for little or no charge, while their soldier is staying in the hospital. BAMC has quite a few of these houses on base but as you can imagine, they are almost completely filled most of the time.

While Denzel Washington was visiting BAMC, they gave him a tour of one of the Fisher Houses. He asked how much one of them would cost to build. He took his check book out and wrote a check for the full amount right there on the spot. The soldiers overseas were amazed to hear this story and want to get the word out to the American public, because it warmed their hearts to hear it. I hope you will spread this story.

That's a pretty surprising and impressive story. I mean, it shouldn't be surprising. The generosity of the American people, including celebrities, is well documented. But this story is surprising for two reasons. First, the dramatic, almost melodramatic nature of it, and second because it isn't headline news on every society page in the country.

Naturally my skepticism was piqued.

My first stop was LexisNexis … but unfortunately LexisNexis is offline, and they're not saying why. I think the subscription service is still available, but the pay-per-result "a la carte" service isn't. So that sucked.

Next stop: Google News, the poor man's LexisNexis. I found exactly one citation, from the April 15 edition of the Ironwood (Mich.) Daily Globe. And frankly, it smelled terrible. The item in the Globe was copied almost word-for-word from the e-mail I got. That was no help at all.

At this point, I was thinking either myth or old news. So I did what anybody would do: I picked up the phone and called the Fisher House in San Antonio. There I spoke to an amazingly helpful duty officer — if you need help with anything, ever, find a sergeant — who was able to put me in contact with James Weiskopf, VP of Communications for the Fisher House Foundation.

I haven't spoken to Mr. Weiskopf yet; I'm waiting for a call back. But along the way, I was able to find out that Denzel Washington really did visit the Fisher House at BAMC, and that he really did make a donation toward the construction of a new Fisher House.

But the more dramatic, almost melodramatic parts of the story? Probably false, I'm sorry to say.

According to Internet Web site Snopes.com, Washington did visit Fisher House in December 2004, and he did subsequently make a donation to the foundation. But the donation wasn't as big as this e-mail rumor reports, and it wasn't a "whip-out-the-checkbook-on-the-spot" situation. He mailed in his donation later just like a normal person.

Of course, Snopes.com has been found to be wrong pretty often when it comes to matters related to politics and the military, so I didn't stop there. I'm still waiting to hear back from Mr. Weiskopf at Fisher House, and when I speak to him I'll see if I can't talk him into going on the record for me, just to clear this up once and for all.

But at this point, it looks like this is another instance of a perfectly good story that got blown out of proportion in the rumor mill. Which is a shame, because compared to the myth — that Washington whipped out his checkbook right then and there — the truth seems pale. It shouldn't, because generosity without melodrama is still generosity, which is why e-mail rumors like this annoy me so.

Update
I just got off the phone with Jim Weiskopf of Fisher House. "The story is true up to the point where they have him writing a check on the spot," he told me. "He and his wife were very moved by what they saw in the Fisher House, and he made a pledge to our executive director who was there that day and then followed up several weeks later by sending us a very substantial donation."

Washington never intended to make a donation large enough to cover the entire cost of the house, Weiskopf said. That detail in the story seems to have come from a simple misunderstanding. "That same day, Dave Coker, our executive director, went down to Brook Army Medical Center, bringing with him the offer from our chairman to build a third Fisher House at Brook Army Medical Center," Weiskopf said. "That night there was a dinner that the commanding general hosted, and Denzel and his wife stayed around for the beginning of it. The general talked about the offer of the third house, and also talked about Denzel making a pledge, and someone in the audience put the two together."

According to Weiskopf, some versions of the e-mail rumor going around mention that Washington has a son who's serving in Iraq. That detail is pure fiction.

Washington's generosity didn't end with his donation, though. He's appearing in a play in New York right now, and Weiskopf told me that the actor donated 25 seats at the show to wounded and injured service members.

The edited audio of my conversation with Jim Weiskopf is available here. (It's in 3GPP format, which is playable on any computer with QuickTime installed. If you use Windows and don't have QuickTime, get it. It's free, and you need it.) Note that this clip has been edited to remove irrelevant parts of the conversation and digital noise and artifacts.

By Jeff Harrell | Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 10:48 AM | Edit | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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