I was born in the small town of Gorizia, Italy, on 31 March, 1934. My father was an electrical engineer at the local telephone company and my mother an elementary school teacher.
NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.
I grew up in Michigan and - where to start? I mean, my dad was a doctor who worked at a jail. He was more like a jail administrator. My mom was a public school teacher. There's no artists in my family whatsoever.
I grew up middle class - my dad was a high school teacher; there were five kids in our family. We all shared a nine-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom. That was exciting. And my wife is Irish Catholic and also very, very barely middle class.
My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn't have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.
Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.
My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s.
My junior high school teacher, Bennie Williams, was really more than a music teacher. She taught us poetry. She helped us put on school shows. She did all these kinds of things to help us stand in each other's shoes, and it was a really powerful time. That's when I discovered that I could sing.
Over the years, I've worked for and alongside the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association. That's because I am proud of our public school teachers - including my niece who teaches down in Louisiana - just as I am proud of our nation's education system.
I'm quite sure there are other things that I could have done in life whether it's working for Humana, teaching in college, high school teacher. Coaching stuck.
