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.

Donald Crouch in high school said, “Do you like these words?” I was then writing words of my own. He said, “Do you like these words? Do you like the way they sound in your head?” He said, “Well, they sound ten times better when you give ’em out in the air. It’s too bad you can’t say these words.” He began to challenge me, to nudge me toward speaking again, and by using my own poetry — and then other poets because he himself was a compatriot of Robert Frost, he himself was a poet. He himself said he learned a poem a day. In case he went blind, he’d have a whole book of poems in his head. And he nudged me toward that, toward acknowledging and appreciating the beauty of words.

My great aunt was probably the greatest influence in my life. She was crippled. She never walked in her life. She crawled over the floor all her life. When my mother had to go out into the fields when we were smaller children, and then later go to California, she left us with my aunt, and my aunt could do everything except walk. She cooked the food for us, would bring everything to the stove. We had an old wood-burning stove. She cooked the food for us. She washed our clothes on this old washboard. We had to bring all the stuff there, the water, the soap, the washboard itself. She also disciplined us. So we had to break our own switch to get our punishment if we did something wrong. So we’d go out and break our own switch and come back and take our punishment.

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.

That’s difficult for someone to talk about themselves. If I’ve helped improve the game of golf and if I’ve helped improve people’s outlook on life and the game of golf, that would be something that I would be very happy for. I would really like to think that maybe I have left something that other people will look at and say, when people come in back of them, that they have given them the same opportunity that we had. And that means give our kids the opportunities that we’ve had through these years. And if I can do that and leave something along those lines to people, I’ll be very happy for that.