Hazel Wolf was two years old at the beginning of the 20th century—she was born in Canada in 1898. When she was 14, she started sticking her neck out to make the world a better place, and she\'s never stopped.

Young Hazel thought it wasn\'t fair for her school to have sports for boys but not for girls. That\'s the way it was at almost all schools then, but Hazel didn\'t care if other people thought that was fine. She was sure it was wrong. She asked her school principal to let girls play basketball.

He said he\'d give her equipment and time on the school court if she could find 10 girls who wanted to play—and he was sure she couldn\'t. But, Hazel had 10 girls waiting in the hall outside the principal\'s office. He was surprised, but he laughed and kept his promise.

Ever since, Wolf has surprised people, made them laugh, and gotten them to see things her way.
She wants people to be treated fairly, to have jobs, safe housing, peace, and a healthy environment. Over and over again, she\'s gotten involved in issues that other people fight about. Wolf finds ways to get them to stop fighting, to laugh, and to cooperate.

In recent years she\'s worked to save the last of the ancient trees in the US Pacific Northwest. At the same time, she insists that timber workers must have other jobs to do instead of cutting down these trees, even though timber workers and environmentalists rarely help each other.

A nature lover, Wolf is a hiker and a kayaker. She\'s also an officer of the Seattle Audubon Society, a group that studies birds and protect the places where they live. Wolf has started more new Audubon groups that anyone else in the entire US.

When Wolf found that Native Americans and the big environmental groups weren\'t working together, she went to the tribal leaders and got them to join forces with groups like Audubon. Together they have a better chance of protecting the land, air and water that they all care so deeply about. She was in her 80s when she did this.

Wolf has had very little time to herself in her long life and she\'s stood up to powerful people who haven\'t agreed with her. She\'s even kept her sense of humor when faced with going to jail for peacefully protesting. \"I always thought if I ever went to jail, I\'d get to work a jigsaw puzzle,\" she said. \"But the one opportunity I had, I didn\'t get to finish it because someone bailed me out.\"

Many years ago, she almost lost her chance to be a US citizen because some US immigration officials called her a troublemaker. But to thousands of people, Hazel Wolf isn\'t a troublemaker—she\'s a hero—and she\'s a Giraffe.

Update: Wolf died in 2000, after resolving to make it into the 21st century. She was 101.