GROWING UP DIFFERENT

Can leaders be identified at an early age, then nurtured and encouraged? The question is very nearly unanswerable, since a combination of innate ability, early influences, later opportunity and sheer luck seems to make leadership a wholly unpredictable eruption. Nonetheless, one TIME task force explored the proposition that at an early age leaders come to feel separate, different from their peers. Members of the group spent part of one session recounting their own formative experiences. Excerpts:

BILL BRADLEY, New York Knicks basketball player: I came from a small town in Missouri of 3,000 people. My father was the local banker. So I do not qualify for the Abe Lincoln syndrome. Do I feel separate? Yes. I did not identify with any of the institutions or with any of the groups I was placed in as a child.

RICHARD KNEIP, Governor of South Dakota: I would count myself separate from my family. I was one of nine children. My father started out as a shoemaker. He was a very hard man. It was not a loving kind of relationship then, but in the past ten years I could not have been closer to anyone than I was to my father. In his later years he mellowed. Earlier he was very anti-education. He threw me down the stairs of his office when I told him that I wanted to go to college. He thought it was a waste of time, unless you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer.

JOSEPH MATTINA, New York state supreme court justice: I grew up in an Italian neighborhood and my father was a shoemaker. My parents were born in Sicily and they could not speak English so I went to school speaking Italian. I flunked kindergarten--the only thing I flunked in my academic career. It was something that stuck in my mind. When I went to high school, suddenly the separateness was very apparent. There were not too many Italians. You could not get into the clubs or the fraternities. There was an Irish Catholic church, and there was a certain amount of bias there.

PETER MacDONALD, chairman, Navajo Tribal Council: I grew up in the middle of the Navajo reservation. There were no taxes, welfare or store, newspaper or anything, not even radio. Talk about separate. Up until I was seven and left the reservation, the only people in this world were Navajos. Respect for certain things was drilled into me. Also not to question those things which the elders have put together. When I left the reservation I did well because the basic thing that motivated me was respect for what was already accomplished. Today young people are beginning to question all kinds of norms.

BARBARA NEWELL, president, Wellesley College: My father was a college professor. He had dedicated 75 years of his life to social issues and reform and activism. The generation before him spent their lives in the same kind of thing. The issues of the world were served up at dinner. I did not have any sense of separatism. Actually, until I got out and did graduate work, I did not discover that it was not common for female economists to go out talking in public arenas about social change. Until that point it never occurred to me that my life was not absolutely common.

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, New York City human rights commissioner: I grew up in Washington, D.C. Both of my parents had gone to college--the hard way, but they had gone. I was the oldest of three girls. While we were children the second and third were always closer. They ran together and I was separate. I was also the overachieving older girl. Out of the experience of being an older child who quickly had younger siblings I developed another kind of role --to remain different and to remain critical.

JOSEPH RHODES, Pennsylvania state legislator: My father was black, from Alabama. My mother is Chinese, born in the Philippines. I went to a white elementary school in Pittsburgh where I was called a nigger. I went to a black high school where I was called a Chink. This sense of separation was right there from the beginning. I was born Catholic, but later was brought up as a Jehovah's Witness. That also gave me a sense of separation. You are not supposed to salute the flag, and in fourth grade all the kids beat on you: "Are you some kind of pinko Commie?"

GLORIA STEINEM, editor, Ms. magazine: Mine was a middle-class family in Toledo fallen on hard times, but we had books in the house. Like many women who don't conform, I didn't have brothers, so it is possible some of the dreams of the family were inadvertently invested in me. Show business was a pass ticket out of our neighborhood, so we all dreamed of being Teresa Brewer, who had made it. I did go to college. Then my father sent me an ad from a Las Vegas club for chorus girls. You had to be at least 5 ft. 7 and have a Phi Beta Kappa key [the group was called the Hi Phi Betas]. By that time I had become thoroughly convinced that you weren't supposed to be a leader, you were supposed to marry one. I learned to Uncle Tom, to giggle and laugh and say, "How clever of you to know what time it is." You conceal your intelligence and I went through many years of doing that. Another thing that has been helpful to me has been not going to school. I slipped out of socialization because I never went a full year until seventh or eighth grade.

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