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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
I worked on my high school newspaper. I hung around newspapers. I sometimes would take the bus downtown and just hang around the old Houston Press. I ran coffee there and sort of struck up friendships with newspaper people. And I wrote a lot and kept a journal. It was only years later when I read a Walker Percy essay on the difference between a journal and a diary that I even knew the difference between a journal and a diary, but it turns out I was actually keeping a journal, as crude as it was. A journal is you tell what happened and what you thought about it.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
This was not a college radio station. It was a commercial radio station, 250 watt AM station, lowest wattage allowed by the FCC. KSAN, run by the late Pastor Ted Lott. He was the whole thing, but he needed somebody part-time to help him, and Hugh got me the job at the radio station. I wrote ads. I tried to sell ads. I wasn't any good at selling. And it was great for me. For one: it helped keep me in school. Two: there was so much to do you didn't have time to think about it, and so you just did it. Three: it was such a small environment that I was allowed to make mistakes, and you learn by making mistakes.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
I worked for AP, and worked for UP, and worked with the old INS, the International News Service. Later I worked at a radio station. I was the sports information director at the college, which paid, I think, eight dollars a week. I did the statistics for the college teams. But this was a very strong learning curve period for me that I didn't realize at the time, but I was really soaking up a lot of education, skills that I could later use at the radio station. I did everything at the radio station. I was a disk jockey. I did live programs at night for the local funeral home. I sang with them when they sang the gospel choir. I did play-by-play football, basketball, baseball, track. Whoever heard of doing play by play track? I did it. And I did it all. Football? I did junior high school football on Wednesday. I did the black high school football games on Thursday. This was a segregated society in the 1940s. I did the high school football games -- white high school games -- on Friday, and I did the college games on Saturday. That's a lot of air time. A lot of time to be ad libbing. And I didn't realize at the time but I was in the process of making myself a very strong ad libber. I don't mean that in any conceited way but just -- you can't do that much live broadcasting and not develop the ability to ad lib. And under Hugh Cunningham's tutelage I was reading great books because he demanded that we do that, and also putting a newspaper together. So this was a busy time. It was a tremendous learning curve for me.
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George Rathmann
Founding Chairman, Amgen
The technique that I learned to use was data. What I could do in going back to Abbott was I knew the company by that time, I'd had five years there, so I had analyzed the company and said, "Here's where recombinant DNA might work. It might work in your pharmaceutical division. It might work in the diagnostic division. It might help you in Ross Labs and some additions to Similac. It might help you in your chemical program. We could do something with subtilisin and possibly have a diet pill improvement, or possibly do it by recombinant DNA." Most of the things I talked about have come to pass, but Amgen's relationship with Abbott was actually limited to a diagnostic one. We didn't do a lot of the other things. But I was pretty effective because I was full of knowledge, and the power of the science was not -- they didn't miss that -- that we could have impacted every one of those fields. And eventually recombinant DNA did, by the way.
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Sally Ride
First American Woman in Space
I was a physics major actually from almost the first day that I walked in the door at Swarthmore, and I was certainly a physics major -- declared a physics major -- when I first got to Stanford. But about midway through my junior year at Stanford, I had been taking so many physics and chemistry and math courses, which were all required for a physics major, that I just needed some courses, almost to regain my sanity, get a little more balance into my life, and I started taking English courses pretty much on a whim. I had a friend who was an English major and so I decided to go ahead and try a couple of English classes, and I really enjoyed them. It turned out that I kept taking the English classes, had a focus on Shakespearean literature, and ended up with enough units to also have a major in English.
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Sally Ride
First American Woman in Space
Sally Ride: I had never flown anything, not a thing. I had flown in very large airplanes, but I had never flown anything. But NASA was looking for -- you know, the astronaut corps at that time was still primarily test pilots, but they had some scientists in the corps, and they had made it clear that with the Space Shuttle program, they actually needed an astronaut corps that was more than 50 percent scientists and engineers, less than 50 percent test pilots, so they made it very, very clear that they wanted people with science and engineering backgrounds, and that the test pilot or even a pilot background was not required, they'd teach us everything we needed to know about that.
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Sally Ride
First American Woman in Space
Sally Ride: I was surprised to be chosen. I was fairly certain that I would make it a reasonably long way in the selection process, because I was pretty well qualified to apply. I was going to have a Ph.D. by the time the selection process was over, and I had a good athletic background, which NASA -- they don't necessarily look for an athletic background, but they look for a variety of different backgrounds that show that you have got a variety of interests and particularly showed that you can collaborate well with people, work as part of a team, communicate with people. So I knew that I had a reasonable chance to go a reasonable distance in the selection process, but I didn't think for a minute that I was going to be selected.
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