Prologue
All You Need To Do Is Dream
“I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody…”
–Marlon Brando, On The Waterfront
In 1948, an African American girl woke at 4 in the morning in Moultrie, Georgia, squinting in the darkness of a small house unlit by electricity. Her thick short hair glistened from humidity, and her bright, intelligent eyes suggesting keen intellect and fierce determination were not only visible but vital for the day to come. You see, unlike most girls her age, Reatha Clark was not going to ballet class or soccer practice. She was off to pick cotton.
The Chevy pickup pulled up, and Reatha jumped in the cab with five other girls, literally climbing over the hatch like a fence. Once they arrived, fillin’ bags were waiting. The next 12 hours were spent under a hot, blazing sun until the 200-pound quota was filled. She earned $6, which helped her family descended from African slaves who did the same work. They never talked about that.
In 1954, Joanne Schieble, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, fell in love with Abdulfattah Jandali, a grad assistant. When she became pregnant, the couple flew to Syria to meet his parents according to Muslim tradition. She called her father, a mechanic from Sheboygan, to seek his approval to marry Jandali. The conversation was short, “I will disown you.” She gave the child up for adoption.
Jacklyn Gise became pregnant while a sophomore in high school. She and the boy’s father, Ted Jorgensen, a bike shop owner and unicyclist in a circus act, were married in Juarez. When school authorities found out, she was expelled. They allowed her to graduate on the infernal condition that she would not talk or eat with other students. They had a son named after her father, Jeffrey Preston. Before the boy was two years old, the couple divorced.
Mark was an identical twin. His parents were both police officers from Orange, New Jersey, and his father fit the tough-guy cop’s image. Mark would describe him retrospectively in a more positive light as “hard-charging and hard-drinking.” By the time Mark was in his teens, he had suffered a broken jaw, was hit by a car, shot in the face with a pellet gun, and most of his knuckles had been broken in fistfights.
The Randhawas and their four children, Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India, emigrated to the United States when the father, Ajit Singh, was offered a job at an all-black college in South Carolina. Mrs. Raj Kaur Randhawa opened a small dress shop, and although her oldest daughter, Nimrata, was 12, too young to work legally, she was employed as a bookkeeper.
Michael’s parents got divorced when he was ten, and when his father left home, he felt abandoned. Carrying the same name may have led to feelings of estrangement, and by the sixth grade, he was afflicted with a severe form of Attention Deficit Disorder.
When we read these stories, one can’t help but think they were lifted from a Kafka manuscript that was too depressing to publish. How can nature’s most innocent and vulnerable be made to suffer, swaddled not in a baby’s blanket but failure’s dirty rags? What did they do to deserve this? The follow on question, who do we blame? Pundits and activists would find a cause to cry income inequality or racism, or gender bias. Then amount a loud protest and set up a GoFundMe campaign. What manner of abstraction can we focus our anger on? These are the questions we ask with no hope of useful answers. Is there a better way?
As anyone remotely familiar with family adversity, there is a whole lot of government intervention out there that will bend, staple, and mutilate their little lives from the time they open their eyes. As Virgil hinted over 2,000 years ago, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. Each child is assured of a bumpy ride from one foster home to the next. After graduating from juvenile detention to a life of incarceration among adults like themselves, they will have reached full potential in a society which only understands institutional solutions. Then, like Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, we can sigh and say if only given a chance, they “coulda been somebody.”
This is why the outcome may come as a great surprise. These misfortunate and occasionally unwanted children became among the most famous and successful people in the world. Their lives reached stratospheric levels that achieved milestones few could ever imagine. How they grew up, attained impossible dreams, stayed the course, and why their unfortunate backgrounds led to success is the thesis of Be Somebody: Extraordinary Lives.
Dr. Reatha Clark King
- Dr. Reatha Clark King became a Fortune 500 officer and president of a university before joining Exxon Mobil and Wells Fargo boards after graduating with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago. She mastered everything she put her mind to, and she would add, including picking cotton.
Steven Paul Jobs
- Joanne Jandali’s son, better known as Steve Jobs, grew up to become the founder of Apple Computer.
Jeffrey Preston Bezos
- After Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen divorced Ted, she married a Cuban immigrant, Mike Bezos, who adopted her son at age four. He became Jeff Bezos, graduated from Princeton, and drove out to Seattle, where he founded Amazon.com.
Commander (and Senator) Mark Edward Kelly
- Kelly became the Space Shuttle commander (as was his brother Scott). His jaw must have healed nicely because he became a star on the speaking stump, and in 2020, was elected U.S. Senator from Arizona.
Ambassador and Governor Nimrata (Nikki) Haley
- Nimrata Haley, better known as Nikki, became governor of South Carolina, where her bookkeeping skills came in handy, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Olympian Michal Fred Phelps II
- Phelps took swim lessons more seriously than most of us. When he announced his retirement at the Olympics in Rio 2016 at the age of 31, he had collected 23 golds, three silvers, and two bronze medals, becoming the most decorated Olympian in history. Today, he devotes his time to children with emotional and mental disabilities.
When I began researching Be Somebody: Extraordinary Lives, I had no idea it would lead to 1500 hours of full-length candid interviews for a Telly Award-winning Youtube channel, IconicVoices.tv. In the process, I came to know people like Warren Buffett, General David Petraeus, Dr. Reatha Clark King, Soledad O’Brien, and Senator John McCain, and forty or so other extraordinarily successful people.
They all had a secret. Although they were in abundance, it wasn’t wealth or smarts, as much as a quality that set them apart. If the rest of us are homo sapiens, these were a separate branch of the species, homo eminens, which in Latin means notable, standing alone, remarkable. When you examine the people in my research, you will see the common factor is they could lead extraordinary lives against all odds. Resilience plays a role in every story, so much so that when all other factors were isolated, what seemed extraordinary turned out to be quite ordinary except for their ability to maintain a steady course to their destiny.
