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Stephen Sondheim
Award-winning Composer and Lyricist
I asked him (Oscar Hammerstein) if he would read it and he said sure, and so he called me the next day and I went over, and I said, "Now, you know, I want you to really treat this like a professional, as if you didn't know me, as if it just crossed your desk." And he said, "All right, in that case it's the worst thing that ever crossed my desk." And I was shocked, and he knew how disappointed I was, to put it mildly. He said, "Now I didn't say it wasn't talented," he said, "but if you want to go through it, I'll tell you what's wrong with it." And he started right from the first stage direction, and he treated me like an adult. He treated me as if I were a professional, and by the end of the afternoon I was on my way to being a professional.
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Wole Soyinka
Nobel Prize for Literature
Wole Soyinka: Those elections were very violent and the people resisted. This was the Western Region at the time. I was then teaching at the University of Ibadan. Violent, and the incumbent government used its power of incumbency in the region, in alliance with the power of the center. It was a federal structure. In spite of that, they could not rig the election successfully. And so what they did was just start altering the results. And even that proved exceedingly difficult for them. Finally the premier of the region decided to just forget the whole thing and announce his victory on radio. And I happened, you know, by very fortunate coincidence, I learned that this was going to become a fait accompli. And since he had the support of the federal government, something drastic had to be done. And so with some assistance, some of my usual collaborators, I managed to stop the broadcast, substitute my -- I pre-recorded my own statement. So I went to the studio and I took the premier's tape off and substituted my own and went away. And so I was tried -- very, very nasty charge. I was charged with armed robbery, because apparently this event was supposed to have taken place with the aid of a gun, and so -- very cunning people, coming to frame a charge of armed robbery, for a tape! Costs under a pound or whatever, and I substituted one, anyway -- so it wasn't -- and I left that one. So where was the robbery?
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Wole Soyinka
Nobel Prize for Literature
When I realized that war really was going to happen, I tried to -- and he (Christopher Okigbo) had left, like the other Igbo that fled to the East, where they were more secure. Chinua Achebe was in the East. We had other writers like Gabriel Okara in the East, and I felt maybe by linking up and resurrecting that tight community we might be able to do something to prevent that war, and so I traveled. By then the firing had started, the early skirmishes had begun. And I traveled by road to the East. I was promptly arrested as a suspected enemy by the Biafrans whom I had come to see, but of course, some time after, the police realized who I was and I was released. And who had come into my police station? He didn't know I was there. It was Christopher Okigbo, coming from the war front, coming for more equipment. And so we were reunited for the last time. He went back to the front. So the leader of the secessionist enclave, Ojukwu, we spoke, and then when I came back I was detained for having traveled to the East. I was accused of all kinds of things, including trying to buy jet fighters for the -- I don't know why people like to cook, you know, fantasies, around one's individual existence.
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Thomas Starzl
Father of Modern Transplantation
Thomas Starzl: I was always worried. Of course there were textbooks describing operations. Even if I had done an operation 100 times, if I had an operation that I had done two days before, I'd go back and read the book and refresh books, which quickly became tattered and exhausted by constant use. But I think the great worries that tended to accumulate, so that they eventually became very heavy, were about what happened afterwards to the people. So if you operated on somebody with a cancer, you were always worrying that you were going to get that unwelcome phone call from somebody that they had a recurrence. Or in the case of the transplant patient, because the mechanisms of engraftment were not known, transplantation was a field in which big things were accomplished without knowing why and how. There was no reason to hope at the beginning of transplantation that those operations were cured. That is, if you could put a kidney and it had a chance of lasting for a lifetime. So instead the idea was that you had an alien, foreign organ in there that was under constant attack, and even though it lasted for a year, or a couple of years, that it was slowly, slowly going to go away. And if you actually came to know those patients, and I did, at a personal level in almost every case, you were sitting around like a parent watching over a child with an inevitably slowly advancing disease, and that you were going to get a phone call that the end had come. So if you had patients for whom you had a particular affection, and those uncommonly often were children, you just had an idea that you'd never see them grow up. So it was a deadly wait actually.
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