That's the way I got along in life. I don't ever remember being particularly jealous of anybody, because I figured if I can't do it myself, I don't deserve to get it.

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.

By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.

I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn't see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education.

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.

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.