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Excerpted From Parade
Magazine
May 6, 2001
"They Live The American
Dream" by Dan Rather 5/6/2001
COVER PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC O’CONNELL
(AIKENS), BRIAN BAHR/ALLSPORT (ACOSTA) AND NASA (COLLINS).DAN RATHER’S
JACKET ABOVE BY CABELA’S, SHIRT BY ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA, STYLING BY BRUCE
PASK/JUDY CASEY INC., GROOMING BY ANNIE ING/SALLY HARLOR.
it is the phrase we reach for
most often to describe this land of ours.
It has reflected what is best
in us as a country and a people. It is the American Dream, and it has
filled me with awe for as long as I can remember.
Growing up in Houston during
the Great Depression, it took shape for me around the radio, as I listened
spellbound to Edward R. Murrow’s World War II dispatches and dreamed
of becoming a reporter myself. My neighborhood was not a place that
led me to think I should be reaching for such a faraway star. Yet—and
this still gives me a thrill today—within 20 years, there I was, a correspondent
in New York City meeting Murrow, my childhood hero.
The American Dream, you see,
holds me in its grasp because I have been blessed to live my own version
of it. There is no typical American and no typical American Dream. For
some, the Dream is one of freedom; for others, it is of fortune or family
or service to one’s fellows. Some place greatest emphasis on the pursuit
of happiness or of keeping alive the innovative spirit. But however
we define it, it defines us as a people.
The people you’ll meet here
are the result of my quest to discover the American Dream as your neighbors
are creating it today. I think you will find them inspirational. I know
I did.
___________________________________________________________________
Adapted from The American Dream:
Stories From the Heart of Our Nation, by Dan Rather, ©2001, to be published
May 8 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins.
___________________________________________________________________
Delores Kesler
She started her company just
to survive and retired a millionaire.
Delores Kesler’s dream began
with a $10,000 loan she used to found ATS
Services, a temporary staffing agency in Jacksonville, Fla., in
1977. When she retired 20 years later, her company had projected revenues
of $2 billion. Kesler says she didn’t plan to
become a millionaire. Divorced
and with a small child at 22, she started her business after a series
of dead-end jobs left her struggling to make ends meet.
When she founded her company,
there were few women entrepreneurs.
But her father had often told Kesler she could do anything she
wanted to do, and she was determined to succeed. As time went on, however,
Kesler realized it was not just financial gain she was pursuing: She
wanted to make a contribution to her community. And, as her business
grew, she started requiring her employees to devote time to community
service and insisting that her company contribute to local charities.
And she didn’t stop there. In time, Kesler’s company was earning $50
million a year, and a large portion was going back into the community.
When Kesler retired, she set
a new course for her life. Today, the Delores
Pass Kesler Foundation focuses on changing young lives through education,
mentoring
and children’s programs. In 1997, she gave $1 million to the University
of North Florida to provide scholarships to students from Raines High
School in Jacksonville. She cried before an audience of thousands when
the principal thanked her. She told them that they didn’t know how good
it felt to be able to give that money away. “An awful lot of people
benefited from what started with a $10,000 loan,” Kesler says.
wayne ward ford
A troubled young man, he had
an odd premonition about his future.
Wayne Ford was in eighth grade
when a teacher asked the class to write their obituaries. How would
they like to be remembered? Ford, who lived in a rough area of Washington,
D.C., came up with a curious response: He said he would make his mark
in the Midwest. He would be active in politics and in charge of a community
center.
Wayne Ford would go on to get
in trouble in high school. “I was doing drugs, robbing, breaking into
apartments,” he recalls. To get away, he accepted a football scholarship
to a small, nearly all-white Minnesota college. Once there, however,
racism threatened to throw him off course. Instead, he turned his anger
to activism and founded the school’s black student union.
“Then,” he says, “it all started
to come together. The worst things in my life were the things that had
the potential to make me great.” Ford devoted himself to academics.
History especially gave him a new perspective. “When I started reading
it,” he says, “I thought, ‘My God, the world has gone through hell,
not just Wayne Ford.’”
After graduation, Ford turned
to politics. Today, he’s living the dream he had as a boy: He’s the
only black member of the Iowa State Legislature and the founder and
executive director of Urban Dreams, a nonprofit community program for
at-risk youth. Last year, he spoke before the Democratic National Convention.
It was one of the biggest achievements of his life, but he says, “It
wasn’t the cherry on the ice cream. The best is yet to come.”
Shawn Carlson
His grandfather’s struggle
to be accepted inspired him to encourage others.
Shawn Carlson says his dream
and his passion—the Society for Amateur Scientists, which he founded
—was inspired by his grandfather. “I’ve been privileged to know some
of the greatest scientists alive today,” says Carlson, who has a Ph.D.
in nuclear physics. “And no one had a greater raw scientific talent
than my grandfather.” But, he adds, his grandfather’s work was consistently
rejected “because he didn’t have the letters ‘Ph.D.’ next to his name.
“Amateur scientists,” he says,
“are overflowing with passion,” and his aim is to teach them standards
and procedures so the larger scientific world will take them seriously.
He and his wife, Michelle, sank their life savings of $10,000 into starting
the Society for Amateur Scientists in 1994 and endured several tough
years. Then Carlson was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, which
allowed him to keep the Society afloat.
Although he has been criticized
by some in the scientific community, Carlson continues to pursue his
dream of opening scientific innovation to everyone. “The ability to
come up with something original and be respected because you are a maverick—that’s
very much part of the American tradition,” he says.
oscar carlos acosta
Everything he wanted was within
his grasp. Then, it seemed, it was gone.
As a boy in tiny Elida, N.M.,
Oscar Acosta had a talent for throwing a baseball that brought him a
college scholarship and a chance at athletic glory. Getting to the Majors
was his dream, and he neglected everything else—his schoolwork and his
wife and children—to get there. “I became consumed,” he says. He made
it to the minor leagues, but when a torn rotator cuff ended his pitching
career, his life spiraled out of control. His wife took the kids and
left. He was broke. He lost any belief in himself. “I’d just given up,”
he says. “I thought I was destined to go back and be a cowpuncher the
rest of my life.”
When he got a second chance—an
offer to coach in the Texas Rangers’ minor league system—Acosta says,
he realized it was time to change. His identity, he swore, would never
be tied exclusively to baseball. He reconciled with his wife and for
the next 11 years built back what he’d lost, taking his blessings as
they came. “I told my daughter, if God wants me to be a minor league
instructor, that’s what I’m going to do,” he says.
Acosta did make it to the Majors—as
a pitching coach for the Chicago Cubs. Now 44, he lives not far from
where he grew up. Recently, Acosta watched his son play in a Little
League game on the same field where he’d learned to pitch. “This was
a big deal,” Acosta says. “It was like watching myself—like my life
had started all over.”
eileen collins
She found what she wanted to
do in life, but how in the world would she get there?
The first woman to pilot the
Space Shuttle and to command a Shuttle mission grew up in public housing
in Elmira, N.Y. There wasn’t much money for family outings when she
was a child. “One thing my father liked to do,” recalls Eileen Collins,
“was take us to the airport to watch the planes take off.” She knew
she wanted to fly, so Collins saved up
for lessons, and she had enough by the time she attended community
college. Once in the pilot’s seat, her future seemed clear: “You know
how you find the thing that you like to do in life?” she says. “I found
it.”
Collins pursued her dream,
joining Air Force ROTC at Syracuse University and being among the first
women allowed into the pilot-training program. But she didn’t stop there.
Eventually, she set her sights even higher—on NASA.
She recalls an early look out
the window of the Shuttle: “Looking back at Earth is just beautiful.
It’s blue, it’s white, it’s tan. The jungles are a dark green. There’s
so much water. It’s just amazing.” And when Collins got the opportunity
to land the Shuttle—the first woman to do so—she says, “I knew all those
women pilots out there were watching me and thinking, ‘Eileen, you better
make a good landing.’” She did.
“I’m an explorer,” says Collins,
now 44. “I want to go places that are new and different, learn new things.
I think that’s what being human is all about. It’s what life is all
about—exploring and learning.”
curtis G. aikens sr.
His dream—and his future—were
on hold until he finally decided to ask for help.
Curtis Aikens, who grew up
in rural Conyers, Ga., puts a face to one of those literacy statistics
we hear but sometimes cannot believe: He went through high school and
five semesters of college without learning how to read. One of the millions
who fall through the cracks and keep falling, Aikens believes that he
would have disappeared completely if he hadn’t, at 26, finally asked
for help. Of his literacy tutors, Aikens says, “They didn’t change my
life. They saved my life.”
Aikens put his new skills to
good use. A lifelong lover of cooking and food, he started his own produce
company in his hometown, became a food columnist and began to focus
on his version of the American Dream: “I said to myself, ‘I’m going
to become a celebrity.’” But it wasn’t fame alone he was pursuing, he
explains. “It was so, when I talk about the fact that I couldn’t read,
other nonreading adults will say, ‘If he can do it, I can too!’” Today,
Aikens has three cookbooks to his name and appears on Calling All Cooks
on the Food Network. But, he says, he hasn’t reached his goal. “I’m
still trying to obtain the American Dream, because I want to give everybody
the ability to read. I know that sounds hokey, but there it is.”
You may sense a common thread
running through many of these stories. The American Dream affords us
opportunity and the freedom to seize it. It has also created, in my
experience, some of the most generous people in the world. Americans
who find their own dream make the dreams of their fellow citizens possible
as well. For them, and for the rest of us, the Dream remains both a
hope and a promise, even as we add to its meaning with each new chapter
of our lives.
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