There were definitely teachers who made a huge impact. I think about a woman whose name was Mrs. Fish who was my seventh grade English Language Arts teacher. What I remember about her was just how hard she pushed. I thought I was a perfectly strong student at this point, but she just pushed everyone to their limits. That was very instrumental for me. In fact, all the teachers I remember had that same thing: they just had such high expectations and wouldn’t stop pushing. I think she just conveyed the idea that good wasn’t good enough, and I think the skill development and critical thinking skills that that year developed were also instrumental. But I also think, I don’t know, there’s something about that year that probably instilled within me that ethic that you just have to keep pushing to get better and better, and that if you work hard enough it will pay off.

So Quigley taught a course called “The History of Civilizations,” and at the end, he said that the great gift of Western civilization to the human race was the idea of progress in a very specific way. He said it was the idea that the future can be better than the present and that every single person, not just the rulers, not just the elected leaders, not just the billionaires, every person has a personal moral obligation to make it so, to keep it going, to make the future better. And it resonated with me. I thought, “That’s the purpose of politics.” It made me really think even more than I had before that I might like a career in public service. It also made me aware of why in the aftermath of something like the 2008 crash you are going to have so much disorientation and anger and frustration because too many people have gotten up every day, and some still do, and looked in the mirror and thought all their tomorrows were going to be like yesterday. It’s the ultimate disempowerment. There’s nothing you can do for yourself, and even worse, for your family. It’s going to be all the same, and Quigley made us understand that our whole culture in Western civilization was designed to counter that, to believe that you personally could make a difference, and I never got over it.

In my early years it was undoubtedly my father. My father was director of a sanatorium for pulmonary tuberculosis, and at that time there were no antibiotics, tuberculosis was a terrible disease. And, he and I would walk in the woods around that sanatorium and he would discuss his worries about his patients. And from him, I certainly inherited this extreme concern about the well-being of patients. I’ve seen him very happy when he succeeded after months and months of rest and other things to have these people go home cured. I’ve also seen him crying and desperate after trying for a long time and a patient did not get well, and went home to die.

My dad certainly, and coaches I had that I was very close to. They took a big part in my developing an interest in sports, actually. One has passed away I was very close to. His name was Bill Slybaum. He was my coach in junior high school for tennis and then he moved up the ladder academically and went to the high school about the time I got there. He was my high school coach in basketball. I became very close to him. Later on, when I came back after the service, I went to Compton Junior College near Los Angeles, and he was the junior college basketball coach. I was very close to him.

But I was blessed with parents who taught me not to let anyone make me feel like I wasn’t good enough, and as my mother told me, “You are just as good as anyone else. You get an education and try to be somebody. Then you won’t have to be kicked around by anybody, and you won’t have to depend on anyone for your livelihood, not even a man.”

I never got to the point where I felt that nonviolence was not viable. ... I realized that it wasn’t that it wouldn’t work, it’s that people didn’t follow the proper steps in trying to achieve it because there are a set of principles and there are a set of steps in the methodology that we were taught about nonviolence. And when we follow those they work.