english u3

Unit3 Walter Anderson :hero on parade Walter Anderson joined the ranks of the Horatio Alger Society the same year I did. I felt a special kinship to him as I heard his story---for reasons that will be obvious as I relate it here.Walter grew up in a four-room railroad flat on the wrong side of the tracks in Mt. Vernon, New York, in an atmosphere made volatile and violent by an illiterate, abusive, alcoholic father. “I lived with fear every day, nearly every minute of my childhood,’’Walter remembers. “Often my father would beat me for things I might do, not for things I had done.I felt safer on the street corner than in my own home.”Like me, my friend Walter credits his mother and reading as key influences in his life, His mom always tried to shield him from his father’s ab use. “I never doubted my mother’s love.”Walter says. “She encouraged me to read despite the fact that my father would beat me if he found me reading. Years later, after my father’s death, I asked her why she would do so when she knew father would beat me, and she said, “I believed that if you could learn to read, somehow you would found your way out and you did”.The Mt. Vernon Public Library became a secret sanctuary where Walter regularly escaped the abuse of his father and the cruel ridicule of classmates who laughed at the holes in his ragged clothes. “I read myself out of poverty,”he says. “By reading I coul d go everywhere, I could beeverybody .I could imagine myself out of a slum.”Six days after his seventeenth birthday, he found another way out. He joined the Marines. That decision altered his perspective, his values, and his life forever. “I was able to develop self-respect, self-esteem, and a belief in noble motives and noble purposes. I learned about honor and dignity.” In 1965, just months before he was to complete his active duty, Walter volunteered for Vietnam.When he return home from overseas and was discharged, Walter first took a job as a laboratory assistant, then as a sales trainee. But what he really wanted to do more t han anything else was to write. “Ever since I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I had a tremendous need to empress myself.”Carrying the only thing he had ever had published, an emotional and articulate “letter to the editor” he had written from the front lines in Vietnam, Walter walked into a newspaper office to plead with the editor for a job. After reading Walter’s one-clipping portfolio, the editor of the Reporter Dispatch in White Plain, New York, hired him for $90 a week.While working as a reporter in White Plain, Walter enrolled in a local community college and graduated two years later---first in his class of six hundred students. By that time he was “night editor” of his paper and had started his own action-line column, which was syndicated in seven other newspaper Nearby Mercy College awarded him a fullscholarship to continue his education. He graduated from there summa cum laude, once again class valedictorian.After serving as editor and general manager of two daily newspapers, first in New Rochelle and then back in White Plains where he began his career, he moved to Parade magazine. He served as managing editor there before being promoted to editor of the largest-circulation Sunday magazine in the world at the age of thirty-five.From the time he took over the editorial reins of Parade in 1980, until he was inducted into the Alger Society with me, circulation of his magazine had risen from 21 million copies in 129 Sunday newspapers to more than 37 million copies in 353 papers.In the course of his journalistic success, Walter met and interviewed a lot of famous people from whom he learned some valuable lessons. “I thought for the longest time that I was the only human being who worried that others would find out that I was inferior, that I was vulnerable, that I deserved to be rejected. I now know that all sane human beings worry that others will find out that they are not quite good enough, that they can be hurt, that maybe they don’t belong.”So, from his own life and from what he had learned from talking to some of the successful people in our society, Walter has compiled his “seven rules to live by.” I think they make a pretty good prescription for curing the victim mentality.Here are Walt er’s seven rules:1.Know who is responsible:“I am responsible.” when youbegin these three words, you can build a new life, even anew world.2.Believe in something big:When we commit to high ideals,we succeed before the outcome is known. Your life is wortha noble motive.3.Practice tolerance:You’ll like yourself a lot more and sowell others.4.Be brave:Remember, courage is acting with fear, notwithout it. If the cha llenge is important to you, you’resupposed to be nervous; we worry only about things we careabout.5.Love someone: Because you should know joy.6.Be ambitious:No single effort will solve all of yourproblems, achieve of your dreams, or even be enough---andthat’s okay. To want to be more than we are real and normaland healthy.7.Smile: Because no one else can do this for you.。