Dan Rather Interview (page: 2 / 9) Broadcast Journalist	Print Interview

Were you a good student?

Dan Rather: In elementary school I was a good student. I made very good grades in elementary school except in handwriting. Elementary school was one through six, there was no kindergarten; junior high was seven, eight and nine; senior high school was ten, eleven, twelfth. Looking back on it, the transition from elementary school to junior high school is often a difficult transition for children, and it was for me.

Alexander Hamilton was a bigger school. It had so many more students there wasn't the kind of nurturing I was accustomed to with Mrs. Simmons (the principal at Love), Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Spencer or the other teachers at Love. Dealing with a smaller group of students, one had a sense of great nurturing and personal attention. In junior high school you move from classroom to classroom. I had trouble making that transition. I also got ill. None of these are by way of excuse, it is by way of saying in junior high school I didn't do so well. I passed but I went from being one of the better students in elementary school to being just another student in junior high school. That continued.

I recovered from rheumatic fever about the time I went to senior high school. I was determined to play football. I had this absolute -- fixation would not be too strong -- but I had to letter in football in high school. And to this day, one of the more exciting times for me was when I did letter in high school. The John H. Reagan senior high school was a big, big city high school, over 3,000 students.

I began to come back as a student in senior high school. I certainly wasn't a class leader, but my grades began to come back and my study habits had come back. I think one reason was that in the tenth grade I took Spanish and I wasn't very good at it. I was also beginning to reach that stage boys do where you think you know everything and you think you're invincible.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I made a bad grade in Spanish and it was the first and only time I had brought home a really bad grade, and that was a shocker. We had a family council. My mother and father were big on councils, family councils. We had a family council with my mother, father, and my brother, sister and myself, about what we're going to do about Danny's D in Spanish. And what we were going to do about it, as it turned out, on the orders of my father and mother, we were going to go to summer school. "We" were not going to summer school, I was going to summer school. And so in addition to working that summer I went to summer school to make up the grade. That was a shocker for me and from then on out I studied harder.

I don't know where I finished in my high school class. My graduating class in high school was like 393 and I have no idea where I finished. But by the time I was a senior I was beginning to learn how to study, and I was beginning to realize that some things you can't fake in school. Some answers you either know it or you don't, and that was a revelation to me. I caught on later than most. So my grades in the 11th and 12th grade were better than they had been for the preceding four or five grades.

Were there books that inspired you or influenced you when you were growing up?

Dan Rather: Yes. I was very lucky about books.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In addition to being avid readers of newspapers, my parents were also book readers. They didn't read every night, except from the Bible. My mother read every night from the Bible. And I think, by way of looking back on it, that made me, even in my infancy, an acquaintance with books. Someone might scoff and say, "Well, infants don't really have it." But my maternal grandmother in Bloomington, Texas had two books in the house. One was the Bible and the other was the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. And when we visited Grandma Paige on the farm down near Bloomington, by kerosene lamp -- this is not an Abe Lincoln story but electricity had not come to rural -- my grandmother would read first from the Bible, and then read me to sleep by reading wonderful things in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. But in my mother and father's house, my mother read the Bible, if not every night, practically so, but they read books and they would discuss books. This was not part of the New York Review of Books crowd, believe me, but they were eager to improve themselves and they were very eager to have their children lead better lives than they led, and they believed that books were a kind of magic carpet for that.

Now in addition, I was extremely lucky.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One summer -- I can't remember my age but I couldn't have been more than seven or eight -- at the local park -- we called her "the lady in the park." Looking back on it, she was a social worker hired by the city, and she was just "the lady at the park." She came around and talked to you and tried to find out what you were interested in. The lady in the park talked to me one day about books. She read me something out of a children's book and then asked me if I'd like to go to the library. Now at that age, and that time, at that place, she may as well have been talking about Xanadu. I don't think I'd heard of a library, although my parents had books somehow or another, but I said, "Well yes. I'd like to go to the library." And she organized a little trip for two or three of us to the Heights Library on Heights Boulevard, which was indeed a magic place, and that was lucky for me. I loved it. It was obvious to the lady in the park that I loved it and she took me back there a number of times that summer, and near the end of the summer asked me if I would like to go to the main library downtown. And we took the 8th Street shuttle bus up Heights Boulevard to Washington Avenue and then transferred to the big bus and went to the main library. Such a place I had never seen. It seemed a kind of combination castle out of King Arthur's time and about as close as a child could imagine heaven to be. I remember we checked out Paul Bunyan. I had a library card by this time from the Houston Heights Library and I was allowed to check out one book from the main library and I checked out Paul Bunyan. Looking back on it, it was a decisive time for me, because it really turned me on to books and a lifetime of reading.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

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