Charles Strafford became a close friend of my family and a frequent visitor to our packed, usually frenetic family home in Liverpool. He was a sophisticated, urbane man with a passion for helping people find the chances they deserved. A professional educator with a love of literature and classical music, he played the timpani, sang in choirs, and conducted music ensembles in Mersey‐side. He had a refined taste for good wines and brandies and lived in a finely furnished town house in northern England. He’d served as a major during World War II and had been part of the Normandy campaign. He kept a second home in Ranville in the Calvados region of northern France, where he had become a key figure in the local French community. Ranville now boasts a road named after him, the allée Charles Strafford. I visited him there in my university days, and he introduced me to local society and to the pleasures of French cuisine and calvados apple brandy, for which I am equally grateful.
For me, Charles Strafford was a window into another world. Through hands‐on, practical assistance, he facilitated my early journey from the back row of special education to what has become a lifelong passion for full‐scale educational reform. He was an inspirational role model for seeing the potential in other people and for creating opportunities for them to show what they can really do. Aside from my parents, he was my first true mentor and taught me the invaluable role mentors play in helping us reach our Element.
The Life‐Changing Connection
Finding our Element often requires the aid and guidance of others. Sometimes this comes from someone who sees something in us that we don’t see in ourselves, as was the case with Gillian Lynne. Sometimes it comes in the form of a person bringing out the best in us, as Peggy Fury did with Meg Ryan. For me, Charles Strafford saw that I would only reach my potential if my educators offered me greater challenges. He took the necessary steps to assure that it happened.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the person who was to mentor me for most of my adult life this far was also at school in Liverpool at the time, just a few miles away from me. I met Terry years later, when I was living and working in London in my late twenties. I was back in Liverpool for a week to run a course for teachers. She was teaching drama in a difficult, low‐income area of the city. We had an instant connection—which had absolutely nothing to do with teaching, education, or the Element—and we’ve been together ever since. She’s one of the finest mentors I know, not just to me but to friends, family, and everyone who works with her and for her. She knows intuitively the power and importance of mentors because they have been so important in her own life. While I was being mentored by Charles, she had a childhood mentor of her own. This is how she tells it:
“I went to an all‐girls Catholic high school run by an order of nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy—a misnomer if ever there was one. This was the ‘swinging sixties,’ and we weren’t doing any swinging, but we were doing a lot of praying and in particular, I was praying for a way out. By the time I was seventeen my only ambition was to leave home, move away from the suburbs and get to the bright lights of London fast. From there I was planning on getting to America and marrying Elvis Presley.
“My academic career had been one abject failure after another, but I loved to act and I loved to read. Then in my last year at school for the first time I had an inspirational English teacher, Sister Mary Columba, a tiny young woman who had a passion for W. B. Yeats and a passion for teaching. At the very first seminar, she picked me to read a poem to the class and, as I did, the hairs on the back of my neck tingled. I still have never read anything more beautiful or powerfuclass="underline"
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet;
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
“For the first time I really wanted to learn more and over the next two years she guided me to a love of Dickens and E. M. Forster to Wilfred Owen, Shakespeare, and Synge. We were a small tutorial group and every one of us was intensely engaged in her classes. She encouraged my writing, she made me give of my best and with her guidance I was able to challenge others intellectually and to shine.
“These books opened me to a world of possibilities and what intrigued me most was how open‐minded she was. After all, she was a Catholic nun and here we were discussing love and sex and the occult. No subject was taboo. We would spend hours discussing any theme that was thrown up, from the Oedipus complex in Coriolanus to the infidelity in Howards End. For a girl who had rarely been out of Liverpool this was heady stuff.
“I was her top pupil that year and I passed my English exams cum laude. At her suggestion I went on to study drama and literature at college. From then on I never doubted my ability to debate. I had friends for life in the writers we studied and I know that without her wonderful mentoring I would still be looking for Elvis.”
Mentors often appear in people’s lives at opportune times, though, as we saw with Eric Drexler and Marvin Minsky, sometimes “mentees” take an active role in choosing their mentors. Warren Buffett, a man who has himself inspired legions of investors, points to Benjamin Graham (known as the father of security analysis) as his mentor. Graham taught Buffett at Columbia University—giving Buffett the only A‐plus he ever bestowed in twenty‐two years of teaching—and then offered Buffett a job at his investment company. Buffett stayed there several years before heading off on his own. In his book Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Roger Lowenstein writes, “Ben Graham opened the door, and in a way that spoke to Buffett personally. He gave Buffett the tools to explore the market’s manifold possibilities, and also an approach that fit his student’s temper. Armed with Graham’s techniques, Buffett could dismiss his oracles and make use of his native talents. And steeled by the example of Graham’s character, Buffett would be able to work with his trademark self‐reliance.”
In a different domain entirely, the singer Ray Charles was a guiding light to countless people for his remarkable musical talent and his ability to overcome adversity. His story starts, though, with a man who taught him to tap into the music that was deep inside him.
In an interview with the Harvard Mentoring Project posted on www.WhoMentoredYou.org, Charles recalled, “Wiley Pitt‐man, he was a cat. I mean, if it hadn’t been for him, I don’t think I’d be a musician today. We lived next door to him. He had a little café, a general store, and he had a piano in there. Every afternoon around 2:00 p.m., 3:00 p.m., he’d start to practice. I was three years old and—I don’t know why I loved him, I can’t explain that—but any time he’d start to practicing and playing that boogie woogie—I loved that boogie woogie sound—I would stop playing as a child, I didn’t care who was out there in the yard, my buddies, or whoever, I would leave them, and go inside and sit by him and listen to him play.