Life Philosophy

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What’s your secret for being so young at heart?

My secret is, I’m interested in everything. Some would say, it’s a curse. I feel it’s a blessing because, truly, I’m very rarely, if ever, bored. I’ve always been this way, for as long as I can remember. Ever since I was a small child, I used to spend time with the older people in my family. I remember one particular great, great, great aunt, who was almost 100 years old—she was 99 and counting. I was totally fascinat-ed to be with her, to talk with her. I felt I had a link with my family that I never, ever would have had, had it not been for my liking to be with older people. I had a respect and al-

is, he or she may be a foreign per-son, or he or she may be a per-son of different color. And if we immediately look upon that individual as a person of lesser worth, then we have both lost something. They have lost some-thing. I have lost something. And I don’t like to lose.

I’ve learned this, really, sim-ply from growing up. I learned it by watching, apparently, very poor, even impoverished people where I grew up—in a rural area. I watched how my father treated these people; he treated them with respect. When I got older, I learned that individuals who may have had a great deal of power or—in that particular part of the

most a veneration for them. So when I met you, I felt that your mission was something that was also a mission of my own because I’ve always looked for meaning in this way. Older people have a great deal more feeling for the mean-ing of life because, as the years go by, they should become increasingly more precious—they have to me. So I really don’t like to waste time with meaning-less relationships. I don’t mean to be cruel by saying that but I always feel that it’s important to give as much as I receive. But please don’t misunderstand. I do like to receive because I am always learning. I learn something from everyone I meet.

A nugget of wisdom to pass along to others . . .

One of the things that I feel is the most important thing I have learned in my life is that even the apparently dullest and most stupid person in the word knows how to do something better than anyone else. And if I know how to find that out, then I have a real, functional intelligence that helps me, but it also helps them. I have always felt that I have the ability to work with and direct people. I like people. I love working with people. And I think that when we work together with someone we respect, then we can both progress. If we look at someone and we say, “Oh, he’s not very well educated,” or “She doesn’t have very good manners,” or “He may be strange because we don’t understand his customs,” . . . The point

ets, doing filing, categorizing, or sorting through data. But in the evening, there are certain things you can do in a bank that you can’t do during the day time. One of these things is, of course, cleaning up.

There was a black man who was the janitor at the bank (in addition to hav-ing two other jobs, by the way), and somehow I started talking with him one evening as he was cleaning. He told me, “Well, if you meet someone and they seem stupid or dumb or ignorant,” he said, “Listen to them and try to find out what they know how to do.”

I was very impressed with that because this was a black man, and here he was talking to me—a white kid—the son of a pharmacist, someone who came from a highly educated family. That really struck me; I have never forgotten that man.

He also told me, “You know, if you work really hard and you educate your-self,” he said, “you will not only have a good life, but,” he added, “you can also have any beautiful woman you want. (Laughs.) I think he said this second part because I was a teenager and I think he thought that he was an expert at moti-vation. Of course, the part about having any woman wasn’t the most important thing I got out of that conversation. The biggest thing was about not judging

country, a great deal of wealth—treated these impoverished people poorly because they felt like, “Well, this is a low-class person,” “He’s not educated,” and so on. And everybody lost because of that. Everybody lost. Because if we just look at appearances, we look just at the exterior.

So what I’m saying really is, I believe we get gut feelings about people; we look at them and we get a certain feeling. If we don’t listen to that feel-ing, if we just look at their exterior appearance, the way they’re dressed, the way they speak, then we’ve made a bad error. Because I think we all have a way of knowing, before knowing. By that I mean the intellect will tell us certain things, but the intellect can often be completely wrong.

Here’s a story: I remember when I was in high school, I had a job working for a bank. I didn’t have contact with any people at this job because I was always busy sorting through the deposit tick-

“I’m starting my life over.”

people by appearances or their education, the way they dress, and so on. I will always remember that story.

So I really do think there is something special in everyone and it may not be immediately apparent. It may be a soul quality. It may not have anything to do with an ability to do any particular type of work, or the ability to come up with the great ideas, etc... . It may simply be part of that person and the way they approach life and approach other people. If you see someone who treats everyone kindly and with courtesy, then I think you see a great person. They do that because they have regard and respect for all of humankind. Now, I grew up at a time when there was severe racial prejudice—very cruel treatment of black people—and I was very conscious of that. Perhaps part of the reason for this consciousness was because my mother was foreign born (although she grew up in the United States) and so there was a separation between my father’s family which has been in this country, almost since the very beginning. Of course, my father was respectful of my mother’s family, but they never really understood each other and I think the lack of understanding came from both sides; they nev-er really reached out to one another. The people from my mother’s family were of Czech origin, born in a part of what is now the Czech Republic and, frankly, they were clannish. It wasn’t that they didn’t associate with other people—they did—but they always kind of felt as though they were apart and different.

Love, Marriage and Family

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What would you tell me is your number one accomplishment, so far?

My marriage. It’s the thing that I’m most proud of. Because I’d always want-ed to have a family and when I met my present wife, Angela, she had two beau-tiful, very young children, the youngest was really a baby. I saw them as being very beautiful. I saw my family in front of me. And I believe that our family is not necessarily those of blood relationship. I think our family are people who we feel close to. I choose my family.

Do you remember the exact moment you met Angela?

Of course. (Smiles.) We met at the Unity Church on New Year’s Eve. No, it was not New Year’s Eve, it was New Year’s Day. I was in the coffee room. I had gone to church, I had a slight hangover and I decided, for some reason I can’t recall, that I should go to church. I have never been a religionist in the sense that I felt that it was really important for me to belong to any particular church because I believe that the spirit of truth is in all religions. I think it’s in the hearts of men. I think any of us can speak truth. It doesn’t matter whether we

go to church—we may never have gone to church—because it’s something that is given to us from the Source and I always have tried to reach the Source. Some people will think, “Well, are you talking about God?” Well, maybe. Whatever you call it.

Anyway, I went to church that day and the sermon was interesting to me, but I was sort of antsy—I really wanted a cup of coffee. So I walked out the door, but before I had a chance to shake hands with the minister—whom I knew because I did attend that church, it was a Unity Church—I went into the coffee room and I looked across the room and saw a woman with very curly hair. It was as though she had her antennae up. Now, I don’t flatter myself that she was calling me. I think she was calling in the way that I do—looking for people who belong to her family. So I made my way to the front of the room. I learned later that a man who was obviously enamored with her had warned her that I was a womanizer. I asked her name, she told me her name. However, when I asked her for her phone number, she did not give me her phone number. But because she had such a distinctive name, I was later able to look up her phone number. (Smiles.) That was the way that we met.

Going back to when you met Angela—you mentioned how that was a new start to your life.

(Smiles.) I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure you usually ask a question, “What was the best year or time in your life?” or something along those lines?

(Laughs.) I usually ask it later, but we can talk about it now if you want.

Well, as I sit here with you I feel like I’m still 43 years old, because that’s how old I was when I met Angela. That’s when my life start-ed over and I told myself, “Well, John, you know you have a chance to do everything that you’ve done

So you knew, as soon as you met her.

Yes, of course. Because there had been a lot of women in my life and that was by design, because I believe that to know you have to experience. If you want to know what a good relationship is with a woman, you have to experience some that are not so good. To me, it was like climbing up the ladder. I had come out of a relationship that was very unhappy. I stayed in that relationship because there were children, although I realized later how that wasn’t doing anything good for the children because I think it taught them that, “Hey, this is how a mother and father behave in an unhappy relationship.” So I just felt liberated when that relationship ended.

You know, speaking about this reminds me. . . . I think it is very important to at least mention here that I have six beautiful children who came out of both of my marriages. Four are the product of my first marriage, the other two are, as I mentioned earlier, the daughters of my wife, Angela. I also have, what we refer to in Texas, as a passel of grandchildren whom I also love dearly. My feelings about my children and grandchildren are a subject that I would love to discuss in detail at a later time, but, as they say, that’s a different subject for a different day.

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wisdom. But he never realized what I did for a living. That was very frustrating to me.

For example, when I was working in the pub-lic relations business, he would understand writ-ing—he understood that because he was very well read. But he didn’t understand that I was influencing or attempting to influence the way that a certain segment of the public felt about a particular product, individual or a cause because I worked with non-profit organizations. I worked with people who were very entrepreneurial and very egotistical—very powerful people. And I got their names into print. With others, my job was to keep their names out of print.

And so when my father—his name was Frank—did not understand my PR work, it made me feel worthless, basically. I always wanted for my father to love me and have a respect for what I did. He did not, unfortunately.

before. You apparently are blessed with good health. You have genes which, if you can judge by family lifespan, you may live another 43, 45, 50 years.” So, I felt, “Well, I’m starting my life over.” And my life had been absolutely wonder-ful since that time.

It’s interesting, looking back on it now I don’t think I felt like most people who were 43 years old, chronologically, at that time. At 43, I had thrown off the stress, strain and trauma from a previous marriage. As I said, I stayed with the marriage because of a misplaced sense of loyalty, because of a family tradi-tion where there had been no divorces for over 100 years and where I was told, “Oh, a parent’s responsibility is to stay in the marriage and you don’t have to be happy. It was almost like, “You can’t expect to be happy.” Well, I did expect to be happy. And I am happy now. (Smiles.)

Perhaps this is related to something you just said—what was the most pain-ful or most challenging thing you have experienced, and what and how did you learn from that experience?

I think it would be that my father never understood what I was doing for a living. My father completed all but the last year of medical school. He was a wonderful pharmacist and he was a man of great intellect and considerable

How did you come to handle those feelings?

Well, what I did when I was in the public relations business was I, frankly, created as much peer approval for myself as I could. Peer approval was very important to me. There were other people in the public relations and advertising agency business who looked upon me as a wizard, in a sense. And I didn’t pay very much attention to the money part of it. Instead, I wanted recognition. I got peer recognition. I got recognition, but not from my father. I never did. Never.

In terms of what I learned from that? I learned that you have to find in your-self your own value and your own worth. And, for a man, this is very hard to accomplish if you do not have a woman by your side. I think that’s very impor-tant—to have a good woman by your side. If you don’t, it’s very hard.

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Workand career

I always liked to create things, to organize events, and I had started doing this kind of thing back when I was in college at the University of Houston. As a university student, I worked for the Houston Chronicle—one of the city’s three newspapers—and when you work for a newspaper, you get paid for the mate-rial you submit. If there’s not enough real news going on, then you have to go and create something. So I would do things like . . . (Smiles.) Once during the football season, the University of Houston was playing the University of Arkan-sas and I instigated one of the sororities to build a giant paper mache replica of

“You have to find in yourself

your own value and

your own worth.”

a hog—it was an Arkansas razorback. The hog was something like two stories high. (Smiles.) It took them three months to build it—it was partly frame, you know, with paper mache over it. Now, of course, I wasn’t doing the work. What I said was, “If you do this, you’ll get some really good coverage for the sorority.” The students were all very excited and they said, “Oh, national will probably give us an award.” So I was al-ways instigating things like this.

I remember when El-vin Presley recorded, “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog,” there was a dog on the campus that had only three legs and he would hang out in the student union build-ing. So I took the dog one day, and I managed to get him to put his paws on the

juke box, (laughs) you know, in a posed position. I had a friend who was a photographer, so I arranged for him to come over to take a photo which I then took to the Houston Chronicle where it ran . . . they gave it a real good play. So people really knew me around town because of things like this.

Also, when I was freshman at the university, I worked for the school’s public relations office and that’s when I met Dan Rather, who was then working in the city room at the Houston Chronicle as a newscaster for a local radio station; the station was owned by the same company that owned the Chronicle.

He was doing something called, “rip and read” where he would take the UPI or AP stories that came over the wire, literally rip them off the oldstyle teletype machines and then deliver them as hot news over the radio. Often, I was the one who would bring Mr. Rather the PR material about the University of Houston as part of what I was doing for the school. You know, we had a new president, I would bring him background material on the president. Or if they were constructing a new building on the campus and somebody was hired as a new professor, I would bring him the news release and he would say to me, “Pate,” he’d say, “How does that man pronounce his name? Is it McElhaney or McEnheiny?” (Smiles.)