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Herschel Walker

All-American Football Player

Herschel Walker: I had a speech impediment when I was growing up. I could barely put a sentence together. I could barely talk. But my parents wouldn't let that be an excuse. They said, "Well, you have to work on it." I had a lot of teachers that really didn't pay that much attention to me. Having a speech impediment, they just figured then, it's going too tough for Herschel so we will put him over there in the corner, and we will work with him when we have time, after we work with the other kids. Even though that may have disappointed me in their views, it didn't disappoint me in the way my parents said, "Herschel, you just study this, you study that." And my speech got better. My grades came up. And when I graduated high school, I was valedictorian of my class.
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Herschel Walker

All-American Football Player

My sister, she is a little bit over a year older. She was fast, and I was that chubby kid. And she was always beating me, she always beat me. I just felt that I couldn't see a girl beating me all the time. And I said, I got to beat her, I got to beat her. And I just trained and trained, and you know, every time I went up to race her, she beat me. Every time I went up she beat me. And after you been beat over ten times, sometimes people got a tendency of quitting. And I said, no, I'm not going to quit, I'm not going to quit. And I kept doing it until I got where I could beat her. And what was so strange about it, is the first race that I ever beat her, I barely beat her. But I think that was like the spring board.
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Herschel Walker

All-American Football Player

Herschel Walker: The hardest thing I had to overcome in life? I think racism. That's so difficult because I don't think anyone can ever understand it. It's not the point that people don't want to understand it, but they don't want to touch it. So, like, that's a subject we can't touch, lets get away from it. But you know, it's there. And as long as it's there you got to cope with it. With me, I'm always the type of person, if something is in front of me, let me deal with it. Lets not push it under the rug, or push it to the side because, no matter what, it's going to keep coming up. You know, if you never deal with that dirt up under the carpet, it's going to get larger and larger, and it's going to keep coming up. Little bit by little, it's going to seep from underneath that carpet. So you deal with it now. You're going to try to get those piles out. I think that's been the most difficult thing.
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Mike Wallace

CBS News Correspondent

I wanted to go to work for CBS News, but I was perfectly content to go to work for whatever. It became apparent that ABC News wasn't going to hire me. I had talked to the President of NBC News. "No." I was asked if I wanted to go to KTLA out in Los Angeles, and I went out there to talk to them. Finally, I said, "You know, let's see if maybe CBS will not hire me on some kind of a basis, but exclusively for news." I had been at CBS. Dick Salant was the President of CBS News at the time. He said, "Well, I'll tell you what, the salary will be low." And, the salary that he offered was about a third or a quarter of what I had been making. Then he didn't say it, but, "You will be on a kind of probation until we discover what it is that " and so I grabbed it in March of 1963.
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Mike Wallace

CBS News Correspondent

Mike Wallace: Well, we were fortunate, because when 60 Minutes started in 1968, CBS was way ahead of the game in entertainment and everything else. They had money. They had ratings. They had a good audience. They had a remarkable news division. They had Murrow, et al., Walter Cronkite by that time. So, we were a loss leader, so to speak. "We'll put them on the air." It started out Tuesday nights at 10 o'clock against the NBC Tuesday night movie and I believe it was Marcus Welby on ABC. So, everybody figured we would get killed. And we did, for about the first three, four or five years, until we found our character. Then there was the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Revolution, and then finally the 1973 Yom Kippur War when suddenly there was no gasoline to drive to Grandma's house. By this time we had moved to Sunday, on a Sunday afternoon or a Sunday evening. People began to tune in, and by that time we had our act together. There was nothing like us. Nothing had ever been seen on American television like our broadcast. It developed a huge following. As I said, we went on the air in 1968, and the first five years we found out who we were, and the next five years we simply built an audience, and we were -- unbelievably -- first of all broadcasts on one or two occasions in the '70s, the '80s and the '90s because we were "appointment television." People wanted on a Sunday night at 7 o'clock to watch 60 Minutes.
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James Watson

Discoverer of the DNA Molecule

There was one person at Cal Tech who wrote a review which said my book should virtually be banned from children, because it will keep them from going into science. Maybe this person went into science for different reasons but, certainly, that hasn't been the effect. Most people who read the book say it was fun, and people say it inspired them to go into the field. So I don't think that touch of reality really -- but some people thought "this is evil," and I didn't.
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