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Charles Kuralt
A Life On the Road
Charles Kuralt: I had a little insight into life that most kids growing up in small town North Carolina probably didn't have. My mother was a school teacher, and a good role model for me. But, my father was the real one. He was a social worker and, for years, head of the social services department in my home town. And so, through his eyes I saw the underside of society. I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time. I think that was an advantage for me. I knew a little bit more about real life than most kids did, I think. And then, the storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store or the country courthouse on a Saturday afternoon without running into storytellers. And, I had some favorites. I was charmed to sit and listen. And my father, who was a New Englander and a little more reticent, not a great storyteller himself, also was charmed. And so, he and I would stand around and listen to these old guys tell whoppers. And, I think that appreciation for stories probably helped me.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
I knew the fossils. I knew the background. I had a lot of energy, and I was fairly cheap, and so I would be sent off with a vehicle and a couple of men to explore the possibility of A or the possibility of B, and so I got into field work and prehistory that way. Fortunately, my first real venture into looking for fossils in a small group resulted in a very important discovery. That was in late '63 or early '64, where we discovered a lower jaw of an Australopithecus that had not been found before. It was in perfect condition. We found it on the first attempt, and so that got me very excited, and I began to realize that there were probably a lot more of these things, and that if you find these things, you get a position in the ladder which you can't get to unless you have either got an education or something else. So by finding important things, you immediately get into the game, which you'd been excluded from otherwise.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
Richard Leakey: Finding fossils, you've got to be looking in the right place, so an understanding of geology is very important. You've got to be able to locate areas where there might be fossils, because of the geological evidence or conditions under which fossils are formed, and conditions under which fossils might now be re-exposed through erosion. Then you've got to ascertain that there are fossils where you are looking, and then you have got to look mighty hard, and you can look and look and look and not find anything, go back exactly to the same place a year later, and there was something there all the time. It really is a question of persistence and doggedness, but you could look as doggedly as you like in the wrong place and never find it. So there is an element of subliminal knowledge that plays a major part that a lot of people obviously don't have. I had it because I was raised in it. It was second nature to me.
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Leon Lederman
Nobel Prize in Physics
Leon Lederman: We formed a team. We formed a not-for-profit academy called The Teachers Academy in Chicago, and we were trying to set up a model for changing all the cities in the United States. I mean, my own research is in particle physics, which involves huge accelerators, and we learned from that, that you might as well do it right by doing the whole system. So here we are in the third largest school system in the nation, Chicago, trying to re-train all the teachers. Not a teacher in one school here, or two schools, or ten schools, or fifty schools, but 600 schools, all the teachers in Chicago. Re-train them in ways of teaching math and science that are delightful because it's a wonderful way to start a kid in being interested in learning.
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Leon Lederman
Nobel Prize in Physics
Leon Lederman: I love science, and I think the hardest thing for young people is to know what they want. It takes effort to really know what you want. You want an extra income? If you're really interested in becoming wealthy, then you don't want to go into science. It's not impossible, but unlikely that that's a road to wealth. You really have to know what makes you happy and that takes a little effort. What makes you pleasurable? What makes you say, "Thank God it's Monday," instead of "Thank God it's Friday." That's a lot. You're going to spend some vast fraction of your life in your business, whatever it is, whether it's running a lathe, running a corporation, or running an experiment. Therefore, you want to really enjoy that, otherwise it's a dumb thing you're going to do. If you hate to go to work, even though you're making three times as much as a scientist, probably you're life will not be that satisfying. The biggest effort is, know thyself. That's Shakespeare, right? "To thine own self be true." It's not easy, so you've got to have some experiences. I generally advise kids to, you know, take the hardest courses, because that's useful. Aim high, because you can always fall back, but if you aim low, there's nothing to fall back to. You know? Try hard things, and there's always fall-back. You can always do less and still have fun at it. Especially in college: smorgasbord! Try everything. Listen to the best professor, whether it's a Latin professor, or an economics professor.
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