Former college president Alfred Gottschalk learned from
many sources. “I learned how to cook and sew and clean from
my mother, and I worked during the summers as a waiter in the
Catskills. My father died when I was 16, so I was required to
learn courage early.... My mentors would include my father,
my mother, my rabbi, and my football coach. The football
team was made up of Irish and blacks and Italians and Poles,
and they were my family. That’s where, in a sense, I became an
American, and where I learned that you must never quit.”
Roger Gould’s mentors came from the university. He said, “I
had forty cousins, and I was the only one of us who went to col-
lege. They were affluent, but they put absolutely no premium
on education. They valued wiles, street smarts, never educa-
tion. So I faced a blank screen... no preconceptions, restric-
tions, or restraints. I was very inspired by the classics. They
were my transition into another life, my own private under-
ground, which I could appreciate by myself and never talk to
anyone about. In my first semester in college, it was as if some-
one had opened a great big candy store of ideas, and it was all
up for grabs. A professor of philosophy immediately became
my intellectual father. I decided I wanted to be a philosopher,
and therefore I had to know everything.”
Former CalFed CEO Robert Dockson found his principal
mentors and models entirely in books. “My mentors were peo-
ple I read about, such as Richard Byrd, the explorer, rather
than people I knew. I was just terribly inspired by Byrd. I don’t
envy any man and I haven’t tried to emulate anyone—except
on the golf course.”
Friends offer inspiration and encouragement, and more.
Then AAUW head Anne Bryant told me, “Friends are vital.
You learn from them, because they tell you the truth.”
On Becoming a Leader