My wife, Nellie, my high school sweetheart. She helped me in so many ways. I suppose people today might say it’s hard to believe, but I was an extremely shy person. Maybe being raised in the country had something to do with it. She got me to go to take public speaking classes, which I probably wouldn’t have done. I know that was of great help to me. And then, in so many other ways. She was a year behind me in high school. I’ve got a picture of us when she was 15 and I was 16. I don’t know why but, when we met, it was just love at first sight. She is the only girl I ever went with. I was a year ahead of her and I went away to college. Then, she graduated from high school and worked, and we didn’t get to see each other that much because times were hard. Even though it’s only 70 or 80 miles from Lafayette to Burnsville, the bus might have been 10 or 15 cents. I didn’t have it and she didn’t either. We didn’t get together much but we knew as soon as I graduated and got a job, we would get married and we did. She was a tremendous influence in so many ways. I’d say that my college coach, Piggie Lambert, is one of the most principled persons I’ve ever known. He had a lot of effect on my life. The head of the English Department at Purdue University, Dr. Creek, took a liking to me and tried to get me to forget sports completely and just concentrate on becoming a college English professor. There was some sort of a scholarship that he could get me for graduate school, but, I wanted to get married and get a job. So, I’d say that my father and mother, I don’t want to neglect my mother, and my wife and Piggie Lambert, my college coach at Purdue, probably had more influence on what I became as a teacher. That’s all I was: a teacher. That’s all I was as a basketball coach, just a teacher.

My mother in that way I've described. My daddy taught me how much a man could do in dealing directly with a multiplicity of responsibilities. Outside my family, the main person, outside of my father, the main man who has had an influence on my life is Admiral Hyman Rickover. I was one of the two young officers in the program to build atomic submarines. There were two built: the Nautilus and the Sea Wolf. I was in charge of the crew that was helping to build the Sea Wolf and building the nuclear power plant that later became a prototype. Rickover was a man who demanded absolute excellence and total dedication from all those who worked under him. He demanded as much from himself. And so he set a standard of commitment and perfection in life that I had never experienced before. He really had a great impact on my life.

Dr. Alton Ochsner certainly was, from a surgical standpoint, my mentor, and the one who influenced me more than anyone else. He was also, like my father, a very strict disciplinarian, and a perfectionist. I liked the way he did things, even though he made you toe the mark. He was almost like a father to me. Took me under his wing, and helped me in every possible way, especially in the research laboratory. He was a brilliant researcher himself. I learned a great deal from him, in terms of how you develop yourself, how you conduct yourself, and the importance of experience and the importance of doing things until you do it perfectly. He had a great influence on me. I am really indebted to his memory, for what he did for me.

Well, I am always trying to study, and when I came to New York, I was fortunate enough to meet Stanley Crouch, who is a writer. He had tremendous influence on me intellectually, because he had like a million books in his apartment, and a thousand records. So when I met him and saw all the records and books and stuff, and he didn’t graduate from college either, he just would voraciously read books. Every time I’d see him, he’d be talking about, “Hey, check this book out.” And I didn’t know any of that stuff, and I felt stupid when I was around him. And he knew more about the music than I did. I was 17 or 18, and he’d be saying “Well what about this record?” Him and also Albert Murray, who was Stanley Crouch’s mentor. Albert Murray has written the greatest books on jazz, Stomping the Blues, which is on blues, but it is one of the greatest books written about the poetics of jazz music, what the musician should be trying to do. And from having the opportunity to be around Stanley and Albert Murray, Stanley much more than Albert Murray, because I’m always too embarrassed to be around him, because he knows so much I always feel like I’m just in the way. But it really made me develop my intellectual curiosity, and Al Murray would give me books to read, and tell me where to go, and tell me about an important exhibit in town, “Go check this out.” I talk to Stanley almost every day. We never talk about just anything, it’s always something definite: “Did you check out this new Romare Bearden book that they put out?” He keeps me on a certain level of intellectual engagement. And always understand that you have to constantly work to develop your intellect, and just increase your curiosity.

I didn’t realize that scientists were like that, and that people were like that. I would have thought — and I like to hope — that I encourage people rather than discourage people. I think you can say no and still say, “Boy, that might be a tough problem, but if you really work at it maybe you’ll solve it,” rather than, “No, it will never happen.”

A typical day is probably lots of meetings and stuff. But if it’s an idea that we’re developing, what might happen is I might talk to some of the people in the lab, maybe have them come in the office and brainstorm with them, and say, “Well, here’s a problem that we need to solve,” or need to solve better. So just as an example, when I had this idea that we could create better materials, I got about four or five people together with different backgrounds — chemistry, engineering, safety, toxicology — and we started putting chemical structures on the blackboard and say, “Well, this might work,” or “This might not be safe,” and ended up with certain structures that we thought would be good. And then, one of the guys would go out and try to make those structures, and we’d go from there.

In fact, what I usually say to people, “Probably some of the most successful scientists are the ones that know how to deal with failure well.” Because it’s easy to feel good when you succeed. That’s an easy thing. But you’re probably going to fail in science a lot more than you succeed, so you really have to learn how to deal with it and not let it beat you.