Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

I guess they just took it for granted that that was what I was interested in and let nature take its course.

Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

You have to have hope. Otherwise, I don't think you could handle it. Of course, you have to have both luck and pluck to make it.

When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well.

It was depressing, ... I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.

I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.