Mike Rowe scholarship highlights the lost virtues of hard work and sweat

[Geee]

Washington Examiner

LUSBY, Maryland — Tracy Wilson is sitting in the cutest little ranch house in this Calvert County town. It is her dream house — literally her dream house, she explains, as she has had the image of this very home in her mind, down to the color scheme of the exterior.

It is four in the afternoon, and the single mother of two just got home from another dream — her job. She spends her days working as an instrumentation technician in the flight test program at Boeing.

“I get to spend my days working on F-18s,” she exclaims several times during the interview. She says it with such joy that her appreciation for her craft becomes infectious.

Life wasn’t always this balanced for the Exeter, Pennsylvania, native. In her senior year of high school, she underwent open-heart surgery for a hole in her heart after the healthy basketball athlete suffered a stroke. “The stroke temporarily took my speech and my handwriting," she said. "So I was freaking out because I was so ready to start the next part of my life after high school.”

[Valin]