In my early years it was undoubtedly my father. My father was director of a sanatorium for pulmonary tuberculosis, and at that time there were no antibiotics, tuberculosis was a terrible disease. And, he and I would walk in the woods around that sanatorium and he would discuss his worries about his patients. And from him, I certainly inherited this extreme concern about the well-being of patients. I’ve seen him very happy when he succeeded after months and months of rest and other things to have these people go home cured. I’ve also seen him crying and desperate after trying for a long time and a patient did not get well, and went home to die.

I had an uncle that played a great role in my life as far as sports. Like I said, in the South we would always play like three or four o’clock in the afternoon. I would have to go to school, and he would do my chores. When I say chores, that means I had to cut the wood, I had to wash the clothes; I had to do everything that everybody in the house had to do. So he would do all that stuff for me, and I was very happy about it because I wasn’t about to mess my arms up and my hands, so I could go and play ball and didn’t have to do too much.

I had some amazing teachers and coaches. I had a history teacher in the eleventh grade in American history named Norman Schmitt who was wonderful. He just made American history burst forth, and I was entranced by it. I always liked to study and get good grades, but there were always kids smarter. I might be in the top — oh, I don’t know — six percent of my class, but that meant there were five percent that were smarter, and indeed they were. I also had an amazing track coach, ironically named Jack Armstrong, very much like an all-American boy, and indeed, he was. When we ran competitively, we were second in the country in the AAU junior championships. His teams — as a testament to him, rather than any of the individuals like myself — when I graduated from high school, until that time, he had been 107 and 2 as a record in dual meets, which meant that he went through many different generations of kids, and the kids always mysteriously ended up being enormously capable, which was a testament to him. He would have all kinds of wonderful ways of motivating people. We used to train in the winter as well as the summer. We trained outdoors in the freezing cold, ran sprints and middle distances on frozen parking lots, which is a real challenge as the wind’s whipping and you’re wondering if your legs are going to go out from under you. No matter how miserable you felt, he would be there smiling, and as you rounded the location where he was, he’d say, “You’ve got to make some deposits on training day to make some withdrawals on meet day,” and he was very cheerful because, after a while, you were wondering why were you going through this level of agony. So I realized what I was doing was making these horrible deposits of sort of bashing myself physically, so when it was time to actually compete, it was effortless. So I’ve learned many lessons from great inspirational people. But that seemed totally practical to me, unfortunately, and I hated every minute of it, but I liked the winning when we had meets. That was just an example. But the camaraderie on the team was fantastic.

My parents were both physicians. The family physician type, not fancy researchers or anything like that. I picked up a sense of this idea that you do serve, you serve people actually. It’s an interesting thing. I don’t think they ever said that in any explicit term, but you could just see in terms of how — individual patients weren’t discussed — but just certain things were discussed, and you could see that that was important that you were doing something bigger than yourself. You were doing something for society. For some reason I was able to pick up on that, so I think that influenced. Especially my mother, who was a physician, who spent a lot of her hours in the office talking to her patients, and she would say talking was so important for many of her patients. Sometimes there weren’t even obvious things that a physician could do something about, but she said it meant a lot to them.