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Stephen Sondheim
Award-winning Composer and Lyricist
Stephen Sondheim: It was a long afternoon. Well, it was probably two and a half hours, but the packed information I got in makes it seem longer. And you know, at that age you're a sponge, you just absorb everything. And he (Oscar Hammerstein) gave me the distillation of 30 years of experience. Now, not all in that afternoon, because then he set up a course for me, so to speak. He said, "If you want to learn to write musicals, why don't you take a good play, one that you like, and make it into a musical? And then, after you've done that, then take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then take a story, not one that you've written, but that is not in the dramatic form, like a novel or something like that, make it into a musical. And then make up your own story and make it into a musical." He said, by the time you get all those four done, you'll know something. And that's exactly what I did.
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Stephen Sondheim
Award-winning Composer and Lyricist
When I was 17, it was their third show. They'd written Oklahoma! and Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Oscar asked me if I'd like to work on it, because they were rehearsing over the summer, which was between college terms for me. So that's exactly what I did. I was a gopher. You know, fetched coffee and typed script. And he just wanted me to inculcate myself. And I learned a great deal watching because, particularly, the show was highly experimental and it was a failure. And both those things were very important to me, because one of the things I learned was to be brave, and the other thing, not to expect that everything's going to come out perfectly.
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Thomas Starzl
Father of Modern Transplantation
Thomas Starzl: I had so much work down there over a period of two years that I did something like 1,000 majors a year for two years. And normally you go through a surgical training program and if you end up doing 100 majors that would be considered quite enough. And most of those cases, I was doing what I was doing without any supervision. But I was prepared for that, because I had already spent four years at Johns Hopkins. I had already had the equivalent of a normal surgical training program. So I didn't have any uneasy feelings about shouldering the responsibility, but just the mere root volume was such that I got to the point where I really didn't want to operate anymore. And I never wanted to do high volume surgery from that time onward, even though I was eventually forced into that situation, most acutely after I had come here. When we were doing procedures that weren't being done any place else in the country, or for that matter in the world, now the volume came up again, just as it had way back then.
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Thomas Starzl
Father of Modern Transplantation
You have to concede that the acquisition of skill is a big deal. And Miami was a place where the skill level went from -- and confidence level -- went from here up to here, especially when I had come to realize that I was getting as referrals -- I was a resident there, but I was getting referrals from people all over town, all over Miami -- of difficult cases, so that certain operations were available in Miami only if I did them. But that's just the acquisition of skill. The lasting trail that began in Miami was the research that I had done there in dogs, in a makeshift laboratory that was created by stealing stuff from -- the equipment maybe, and fluids for IV treatment -- and I did some experiments with the liver that eventually resulted in the development of liver transplantation. In fact, the first steps were taken in Miami. So as soon as I left Miami and went to Chicago I picked up where I had left off in Miami.
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Thomas Starzl
Father of Modern Transplantation
Thomas Starzl: I think the more important skills, manual skills, were developed more by being a printer. I learned how to be a printer. And 70 years ago, most typing, except for linotyping -- you wouldn't even know what that is, I'm sure, but linotyping was a process where you typed a script, whatever was going to be in the newspapers. But it was typed with a system different than a typewriter. So linotypers were very special people that had their own alphabet, their own keyboard. So I learned how to linotype, which in a way was a disadvantage because I learned a form of typing that doesn't exist today, is not the kind that people took up with their Olivettis.
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