WHAT I LEARNED
Sometimes our needs feel overwhelming, but a focus on the bigger picture can keep us from indulging in them.
PETER FALK
Actor
When I was three years old my preschool teacher called my mother and said she wondered if there was something wrong with my eyes. Many times during the day I would cock my head in this unnatural way in order to look at something. She wondered right. The doctor told my mother I had cancer of the eye and it had to be removed and yesterday was not too soon.
My mother, God love her, moved fast. She took me to two more doctors that same day, and they all said the same thing: it was a cancerous tumor—a well-known eye cancer, retina blastoma—and it could kill. I was operated on two days later. Probably the earliest memory of my life was being in the hospital on the morning of the operation, standing in front of the elevator with my mother. When the elevator arrived my mother said, “Oh my goodness, I forgot my pocketbook,” and then she told me to get in the elevator and tell the doctor to wait, she’d be right back. I was three, and I remember getting out of the elevator where there were men all in white. I told them to wait for my mother, she was getting her pocketbook. That was the last thing I remember about that day.
The next earliest memory was running around a large room eating an apple and talking to a lot of adults who were lying in beds but not saying anything. I also remember standing in front of a store window, my mother’s hand on my shoulder, looking at photographs of men wearing black eye patches and my mother asking me which I liked best. Obviously the experience made a deep impression on me. Eventually I was fitted for a glass eye.
As I was growing up, I recall dreading the moment when some kid would ask, “Hey, what’s the matter with your eye? It looks funny” or “How come one eye moves and the other don’t?” This sensitivity started decreasing in my early teens and was completely gone by high school. The kids were always electing me president. I felt comfortable with everybody and played sports. I hung out with the guys on the street corner and in poolrooms where everybody needled anybody about anything—it was a very healthy atmosphere for me. That’s where I learned I could get a laugh.
At Ossining High School the baseball field was right in back of the school and the grandstand was very close to the playing field, particularly on the third base side. This is significant because on this particular day it was a play at third base and the umpire called me out. It was a bad call. I was clearly safe. I knew it and everybody in the stands knew it. They sat so close to the field, they could see and hear everything. In front of everyone, I whipped out my eye and handed it to the umpire: “You’ll do better with this one.” Talk about getting a laugh. I got a roar. Even the guys on the other team were rolling in the grass.
I once went in for an eye test—you know, the one where you read the letters of the alphabet on a chart that’s hanging on the wall. The guy conducting the test looked like he’d been doing this for a lot of years. To put it mildly, he was not too interested. He mumbled hello, indicated a chair. I sat down and he said, “We’ll start with the left eye.” So I covered the right eye and read the chart with my left, and he wrote down the numbers. He then said, “Now we’ll do the right eye.” I said, “The right eye is glass.” He said, “Well, do the best you can.”
The early eyes were all glass. The plastic ones didn’t come in until the late 1960s. When I was a kid, the doctors told me to make sure that every night I took out the glass eye and put it into a glass of water. Naturally, after doing this for sixteen years, you get sloppy—you forget, there’s not a glass handy, you’re drunk, you’re tired, whatever. I would frequently just toss the eye under the pillow.
I was attracted to a young lady who had a Pekingese that sometimes slept with her. One night she afforded me the same privilege as the Pekingese. The following morning, I looked under the pillow—no eye. You guessed it! There was the Pekingese—a pig in shit—crunching away on my eye. Until they brought in plastic, that’s the last time I slept in a bed that included a Pekingese.
Over the years, I went to four colleges—one of them was Hamilton. There, I got lucky. The four guys living across the dorm hall were extraordinarily funny, vital guys who introduced me to the world of ideas. For this story you need only know one of these guys—Pete Woitoch. A boy wonder physicist on a science scholarship, Pete played fabulous jazz piano. Art Tatum at that time—and even now, fifty years later—was arguably the planet’s number one jazz pianist. Tatum passed through Utica, New York, regularly to play a local nightclub. Whenever he was there, he called Woitoch and invited him to sit in. I didn’t know this. So the three guys came into my room and told me about Tatum and the invitation for that night and how we were all going. I should have been thrilled, but I wasn’t.
When I had woken up that morning I couldn’t find my eye. I remembered putting it down on an end table, but when I looked it wasn’t there. I explained this to the guys, and when I said I couldn’t go, they wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s a nightclub—it’s dark—nobody is looking at you. They’re interested in Tatum, in themselves, in Woitoch—not in you.” Actually, what they were saying made sense—I knew I could keep my lid closed and I was dying to go, so I relented. We headed out to the club.
What a great evening. The crowd loved Pete—so did Tatum—and when it got late and the place emptied, the five of us stood around the piano listening to Tatum play. Art liked his gin and usually had a jigger within reach. At one point, playing with only one hand, he slid the jigger in my direction. “I’ve had enough,” he said. “Help yourself—it’s world-class gin.”
I liked the idea of drinking Art Tatum’s gin, so I lifted the jigger not to make a toast but as a gesture of gratitude in his direction. Then I noticed something at the bottom of the jigger; my glass eye—sitting there in the gin, at the bottom of that jigger. MY GLASS EYE!
Those sons of bitches—my buddies from across the hall—they had stolen my eye and set me up. I can still see Tatum laughing—his shoulders shaking, the tears running down his cheeks, his hand reaching for a handkerchief, wiping the water from his eyes. It was a beautifully crafted scam. I’ll give ’em that.
WHAT I LEARNED
My mistake was in not realizing that a glass eye doesn’t just disappear from an end table. I should have been onto them. I also learned that there can be humor in things you’d never imagine, especially if you’ve had a few drinks.
JOHN HOPE BRYANT
Founder, Chairman, and CEO,
Operation HOPE
My life makes sense to me.
What I mean by this is that everything I do today is personal to me and reflects lessons learned from and through the education of living a full life: all instructed in some way by the way I grew up in South Central Los Angeles and Compton, California.
I remember my mother, Ms. Juanita Smith, telling me she loved me every day, and as a result I never really had much of a self-esteem problem as a child. My father, Mr. Johnnie Will Smith, made a payroll out of the front door of our home as the owner of Johnnie Cement Works, which gave me a powerful sense of “yes, I can.” I am sure that led me to starting my first business, the Neighborhood Candy House, at age ten. I borrowed $40 from my mother, who just wanted me to stop bugging her and “go away,” and made $300 a week—at ten years old. But then I found girls and lost the business. This was a recurring theme in my life for a while. Later, friends would always ask me the same question: “How did you get it in your mind that you could start a business at age ten?” My response? “It never dawned on me that I couldn’t. You see, I saw my father do it.”
From my mother I got a powerful sense of self-esteem and self- love. That is why I often say there is a difference between being broke and being poor. Being broke is a temporary economic condition, but being poor is a disabling state of mind and a depressed condition of your spirit—you must vow to never, ever be poor again.
Seeing my father pay his employees every week from the front door o
f our home gave me a powerful sense of purpose. He was literally giving these men life and the dignity of providing for their families. But I also learned from my dad the power of financial literacy, or financial illiteracy. You see, my dad has owned his own business for more than fifty years now and did a fine job raising me and my brother and sister, but my dad was not financially literate. As a result, my brilliant father would often make $1 but manage to spend $1.50 and, worse still, not know it. He would meet the local community mortgage broker with a smile, and trust, asking only the loan payment amount but never the interest rate. You can finance a $400 iPod and end up years later having paid a whopping $5,000 for it over time. Just imagine the interest rate on a thirty-year mortgage.
Financial disagreements are the number one reason for divorce in America today, and money was at the heart of my loving parents’ ultimate divorce when I was a child. Today, my mom lives financially independent in Houston, Texas, and my brilliant father lives with me, or shall I say in a new three-unit apartment building I built for him. This is why I am passionate about financial literacy and why Operation HOPE has educated more than two hundred thousand low-wealth youths in financial literacy to date. Because it is not about making more money, but making better decisions with the money you make.
Probably the greatest lesson I learned from what I call Life University was when I was eighteen years old. You see, after years of believing too much of my own press as a very mediocre actor, and making countless bad decisions based on my ego and not good business sense or common sense, I went from living in a rented beach house in Malibu, California, to living in my Jeep behind a florist near the Los Angeles airport. That’s right, I was homeless for six months of my life when I was eighteen. Worse still, the world I knew had written me off because, frankly, I was not a very nice person and many thought I got what I deserved. Well, it took me years to understand that that entire false ego I was carrying around was nothing more than insecurity and low self-esteem revisited. Obviously, I had not listened to my mother long enough. But when my mother could not get through to me, God found a way to communicate. Someone once told me, “Sometimes God has to tear you down in order to be able to build you back up.” This was certainly the case in my life.
I rebuilt my life, because sitting there alone in the back of that leased Montero Jeep, I realized that I may have made a mistake, but I was not a mistake. I was God’s child, and He had a plan and destiny that was all mine. It had my name on it, alone. All I had to do was claim it. And I had to get out of my own way too. One of my mentors is Ambassador Saburo Yuzawa of Japan. I remember on one of my trips to visit him he told me, “John, the whole purpose of life is to be transparent to God’s will.” I said, “Wow, how do I do that?” His response: “Learn to get out of your own way.” Enough said.
At the end of the day, I could not blame the white man for my being homeless. I could not blame the Ku Klux Klan for my being homeless. I could not blame my mother or my father for my being homeless. I could only blame me. I was the maker of my destiny, and I had screwed this one up but good. But once again, “God doesn’t make dirt,” and I knew that my hopes and dreams were just as valuable as anyone else’s. I simply had to assume responsibility for achieving them. I guess that is why I am such a personal responsibility junkie today. My life taught me that, quoting author Deepak Chopra, “the universe has a perfect accounting system.” Whatever goes around comes around. That’s good news if you are putting good news out every day into the world, and trying your best to serve others and humanity, while at the same time advancing your own unique goals, dreams, and desires.
WHAT I LEARNED
I also learned something spectacularly important: that you cannot have a rainbow without a storm first. That your problems are actually essential for your growth in this life. That without problems, without legitimate suffering, you don’t grow. That education and knowledge come from books and schools, but wisdom comes from God and experience. We need both.
What I learned was to embrace my potential and my pain in life.
I learned to redefine success as “going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
I learned that I should not let compliments go to my head, nor criticisms to my heart.
I learned that God doesn’t make dirt, and even when you make a mistake, you are not a mistake.
I learned that a saint is a sinner that got up.
I learned that you cannot have a rainbow without a storm first.
NANCY A. GRACE
CNN Headline News Anchor
I prosecuted felony cases for nearly a decade in one of the oldest, grandest courthouses in the South, the Atlanta Fulton County Courthouse. The courtrooms were vast and marble-floored, with high wooden benches for the judges, huge long oak tables for counsel, and rows and rows of wooden pews for spectators and witnesses. The district attorney was housed in the same courthouse. Sitting there at my desk in the late afternoon, working up a trial, I heard the calendar clerk coming down the hall pushing a cart containing a huge load of cases. She plopped a big stack of brand-new manila folders onto my desk. Each had a label across the top with a defendant’s name and a number—an indictment number. I started sorting through.
Reading each folder, I skimmed through the usual car thefts, burglaries, shopliftings, drug possession and trafficking—the whole criminal code was represented. I pulled out two new murder cases and one aggravated child molestation case as the most serious and most time-consuming to prepare for trial. That was the first moment I learned the name Walter Gates, charged with aggravated child molestation. I read the entire file and knew instinctively I was in for a fight, and the defendant, Walter Gates, had plenty of money to fight back: he was a millionaire. He had cornered the Atlanta market on the tourist trade of horse-drawn carriage rides through parks, historical sites, and downtown Atlanta. He branched out from there into limo services and the transportation trade in general. He had also hired some of the best criminal defense attorneys in the business.
What also caught my eye were the ages of the victims, just five and seven years old. My stomach clenched when I saw the addresses of the victims and the molester: they were the same. I called my investigator, Ernest, and we walked out of the courthouse within the hour to go to the house.
The home was lovely, much nicer than the place I rented near the courthouse. We did a slow drive-by and checked out the neighborhood, the cars in the driveway, whatever we could see. It was straight out of Leave It to Beaver. My first question was why the victims and the alleged molester lived in the same home. I quickly deduced that the girls’ mother turned a blind eye to what was happening and allowed her children’s molester to live in her home. This affirmed a phenomenon I’ve yet to understand: women siding with husbands, boyfriends, live-ins, or exes over their own children, choosing to ignore the monster under their roof. In this case, the live-in, Walter Gates, was also the mother’s employer, for whom she had worked for a very long time.
We rang the doorbell—no answer. Ernest knocked on the door frame loudly with the butt of his police walkie-talkie. We waited, convinced someone was home, but no one ever answered. As we drove away, I looked back, feeling someone was there who couldn’t or wouldn’t come to the door. I did the only thing I could at that point: investigate through research.
After a few days of digging, including going to the district attorney archives building to find files more than twenty years old, I discovered there were child molestation allegations against Walter Gates going back decades, and to date, he had served not one day of hard jail time. I remember finding a twenty-year-old original police report on yellowed paper, typed with a manual police station typewriter. It was from a “school detective” who wrote a narrative of Gates’s natural daughter, twelve years old at the time, coming to school with a horrible black eye, her lips swollen and bloody. She told school detectives outright that her father had raped her, beating her viciously when she resisted. The case was never pursued. Nothin
g happened. Someone chose to do nothing.
All the other cases also dealt with numerous children, stepchildren, and little daughters of Gates’s girlfriends. Why? Either money or influence must have kept him insulated from the justice system, and I was determined these would be the last children he touched.
The morning I finally got to meet the two little sisters in the case in chief, my heart broke. They were beautiful, shy, quiet, and smart. Their starched dresses were lovely and detailed, their hair adorned with multiple little colored barrettes. On the outside, they were perfect, untouched, like two porcelain dolls. I looked at the mom and couldn’t help but question her harshly. She claimed she didn’t believe her own daughters and that her husband, Walter Gates, would never touch them in that way. But their medical exams said differently: neither girl had a hymen left, indicating not just fondling but full-blown sexual intercourse. When I explained this to the mother, she seemed not to hear me. I kept saying it until she blurted out defensively that somebody else must have done it . . . not him.
I took the girls together away from the mom and spoke to them. They were clearly afraid, but once away from their mom, and with slow, measured baby steps, they explained to me exactly who had been molesting them and how. They spoke in the language of children, a language adults don’t always understand. It is a language that has to be unlocked to interpret. Sometimes little children can’t identify dates or exact times, so I rely on timing by events like the Christmas tree being up or a birthday party. Instead of street addresses, locations like “near the grocery” or “behind the school” suffice to establish jurisdiction. Once the code was cracked, the sisters’ message was clear. They absolutely had been molested by their mother’s live-in.
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