I think the first real big influence was Colin Harvey [former Everton coach], I went and played for the U19s for Colin when I was 14, and that's really when the tactical part of the game came in.

My father was a great educator for me. He taught me so many things. He named me Carlos after a brother he lost — a very brilliant young man who died at 21 in Mexico. He had written very good poems. He was an intellectual. I think my father wanted to see his brother in me, so he put books into my hands at a very early age. He fostered my literary and artistic inclinations. So he was my best teacher.

My dad certainly, and coaches I had that I was very close to. They took a big part in my developing an interest in sports, actually. One has passed away I was very close to. His name was Bill Slybaum. He was my coach in junior high school for tennis and then he moved up the ladder academically and went to the high school about the time I got there. He was my high school coach in basketball. I became very close to him. Later on, when I came back after the service, I went to Compton Junior College near Los Angeles, and he was the junior college basketball coach. I was very close to him.

There are three teachers who are still involved in my life. Ray Wilson — who is my office manager, and who was a teacher in my high school, as well as my basketball coach in high school — is very much involved in my life, and is a real father figure for me. A gentleman named Earl Mosley, who never specifically taught me, but was always there, and was a role model for me, was a coach when I was a freshman. And then a guy named Charles McIlwaine, who is a teacher and a coach. In my high school years those three really stood out, really helped to become part of the support group that’s necessary when you’re experiencing all types of physical changes and mental changes, to help to explain things, and put them in the proper perspective.

Anyhow, I talked it over with my mother, and she said, “Well, if that’s what you want, go right ahead.” She was a wonderful woman. And so I did.

Well, this meant 16 months' time to do all the work for a doctor in zoology, including writing a thesis, and it meant working 16 or 17 hours every day and no such things as Saturdays or Sundays or vacations or going to the movies or going out with girls. I just... it was a total grind for 16 months. But I made it;

Birds are still very much my hobby

There's only one thing where I… if I had the opportunity to live my life over again where I probably would make a change.…I think if I had shortened that period and had earlier begun to work on basic evolutionary theory on history of biology and particularly on the philosophy of biology, I could have achieved some things which now I will never be able to achieve because at age 93, one knows that one doesn't live forever.

Very often I had to fight for the recognition of my ideas, particularly since, in those earlier days, I wasn’t in any prominent position where people would listen to me.

My father had a wonderful library, and we always bought books galore, and I devoured all the books of explorers that went to various places in the world. I admired what Humboldt had done and Bates and Darwin and the Swedish explorers, Sven Hedin and others. I was dreaming all the time about someday being an explorer, going to the tropics, going to the jungles, seeing new things, discovering strange animals and so forth, but of course it was a dream world.