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George Mitchell
Presidential Medal of Freedom
I've worked since I was really a very small boy. Everybody in my family held numerous jobs. I delivered newspapers, shoveled snow, washed cars. I myself worked as a janitor all through junior high school and high school, cleaning the local boys' club, the local government office, the unemployment compensation office, other facilities, and my brother and I ran kind of what we'd now call a janitorial service at night. So after school, we'd go and play ball and then go to all these offices, and as soon as they'd close, we'd go and sweep up and clean up. So I've always worked throughout my entire life, and my parents did impart that to me, a very strong work ethic. My parents, particularly my father, had a profound belief in America. His view was that if you were lucky enough to live in America, and you had an education, and you were willing to work hard, you couldn't possibly fail. Those were the keys to success, and he drummed that into us throughout our whole life.
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Scott Momaday
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
I was born at the Kiowa Indian Hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma, taken to my grandmother's place. They lived in conditions of dire poverty. I didn't know it at the time. We didn't have any electricity or plumbing. I grew up on Indian Reservations. I was born during the Depression. My parents were looking for work, they found it with what was then called the Indian Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So, I lived on the Navajo reservation when I was little. I lived on two of the Apache reservations, and lived at the Pueblo of Jemez for the longest period of time. So I had a Pan-Indian experience before I knew what that term meant. And it turned out to be fortunate, I think, in terms of writing, because I had an unusual experience -- and a very rich one -- of the southwestern landscape, the Indian world. And that became for me a very important subject.
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Scott Momaday
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Scott Momaday: It's important to me because I am who I am. I have a certain temperament. I was born with certain potentials and possibilities, and I have been fortunate in realizing some of those possibilities. I was inspired to write at a tender age by my mother, who was a writer. I was fortunate to that extent, and I did follow in her footsteps and develop a voice, the voice of a writer. That's what a writer does. I tell young people often, "Don't worry about having a distinctive voice right now, it comes with experience and practice. You will develop a voice." Someone once said to me "Don't worry about imitating someone, that's how you learn." And eventually you will verge out and go on your own voice. I simply kept my goal in mind, and persisted. Perseverance is a large part of writing. So what success I have achieved has come about because of that, simply following the line.
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Greg Mortenson
Best-Selling Author, Three Cups of Tea
Greg Mortenson: There's a lot of physical preparation, which means doing a lot of physical training to put yourself into an aerobic threshold where, you know, running a marathon but then going on more, so that your body gets used to the continued exertion on your body. There's mental preparation. K2 is much more remote than Mount Everest, and also, we didn't have porters, or we didn't have oxygen. So we had to be able to use our own resources -- in case we had some problem on the mountain -- to get off the mountain. And then finally, it cost about $10,000 for me at the time. So I had to spend time raising money and getting all the gear together, financially and physically and mentally. And also kind of spiritually really, realizing that I took this on as a very serious way to honor my sister Christa. Because I was very devastated when she died. We were very close. I had to really struggle, saying, "Why does the world have such a special person have to leave us?" She was a big inspiration for many of us. So there was a lot of thinking about why this happened. And yet, Christa in all her life was a woman of great joy and courage and faith. So there's all different kinds of things to get ready to climb a mountain.
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