Going Places: How America's Best and Brightest Got Started Down the Road of Life

TRACE ADKINS

COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER

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Trace Adkins, a six-foot-six, 250-pound former gospel singer, stands out in a crowd. When you meet him, you’re struck at once by how immense he is—yet his sensitivity is impossible to miss. You immediately feel you know him. Perhaps it’s because he’s a lot like you. He’s had his ups and downs and then some. He’s been married, divorced, married, divorced, and married again, this time happily at last. He talks about his children and asks you about yours. He worries about the impact of broken homes.

Trace took a while to find himself. At Louisiana Tech he played football and studied both music and petroleum technology, which ultimately led to a job working on oil rigs. But when he finally got a break in Nashville, his music career took off.

The songs Trace sings are honest and open. Through them, you see the man he is.

GO WHERE THE FACTORY IS AND GET IN THE GAME

I’d been playing clubs in Texas for about four years and I had pretty much given up hope. I was burned out on the whole scene. I just thought, Well, it’s not going to happen for me. I’d been under the impression that somebody was going to see me playing in one of those little clubs and say, Come here. I want to make you a star. It never happened, and I got frustrated. So I spent the next three years working in the oil fields.

I truly enjoyed the work. I liked the camaraderie and the machismo of the whole thing. It’s a hard-core world out in the oil field, working on the drilling rigs, and I liked it. Then one day, out of the blue, the guy who had been booking me in those clubs called me on the phone to ask if I was singing anymore. I told him no. He said, Well, that’s unfortunate. One of these days you’re going to have to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself the question, I wonder what would’ve happened if . . . ? I told him, I just couldn’t take it anymore, man. And he replied, That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean that if you really want it, you’ve got to throw down the pom-poms. Go where the factory is and get in the game. Get yourself to Nashville.

I hung up the phone and really thought about what he’d said. The prospect of moving was kind of scary. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to leave the only home I’d ever known. But you know what? The thought of me being sixty-five years old, looking in the mirror, and asking myself that question scared me worse. John Milam was his name. I will always be indebted to him and I’ll never forget him for that.

For some people, success finds them, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. I knew that Nashville is where singers become stars. And I knew that John was right. It took his shaking me up like that and making me take a good hard look at myself to give me the courage to take the step. I decided that I would try out Nashville for three or four years, and if it didn’t happen I would still be in good enough physical shape to go back and work in the oil fields.

When I got to Nashville I knew very few people, but there was this one guy who had played guitar with me while I was in Texas. He had moved to Nashville and gotten a gig playing with an act on the Grand Ole Opry every weekend, and he was playing clubs in the area. He gave me advice that really served me well. He said, Whatever you do, don’t spend your own money. When you’re trying to make it, he explained, everyone will be coming up to you and saying that they can make you a star. They’ll tell you that you need to come to their studio to cut some demos—do this, do that—and that it will only cost you fifteen thousand dollars. He said, Don’t do it. Just walk away, don’t even talk to those people. If you’re good enough, they’ll spend their money. Just don’t spend yours.

You hear a lot of other stories about people moving to Nashville doing showcases, singing demos, and knocking on everybody’s door, but that’s not how it happened for me. I didn’t do that. I moved up there, I got a pretty good job working construction for DuPont, and I got a little house gig. There was a small club, about three miles from where I was living, and I went in and auditioned for the lady that owned the place. She gave me a job playing Fridays and Saturdays every weekend and that’s all I did for awhile. Then it just started happening. I started meeting people and networking. I met songwriters and other pickers, and word started to get out. But it was by chance that I ended up meeting the president of Capitol Records at the airport baggage claim. My girlfriend, now my wife, and I were standing there and she spotted him. She knew him and we started talking and she told him, You really ought to come out to the club and listen to Trace sing this weekend. He said okay, but I really didn’t expect him to come.

Well, he showed up. I played one set and he walked up on stage, gave me his card, and said, I’ll give you a record deal. I said, Okay. Well, that about floored me. I don’t know if I slept at all that night, but the next morning I waited until what I thought was a reasonable hour and I gave him a call. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t drunk the night before when he made the offer! He said he really meant it. He was signing me.

It was luck—and there’s a lot of luck involved in this business. You have to have some talent, but there’s a lot of luck that goes into it. But I also know that it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t taken a chance and moved to Nashville. The hard work started after I got the record deal, and it continues today. Now that I’ve made it this far, there are new things I want to achieve. So I just keep pressing harder.

DR. ARTHUR AGATSTON

CARDIOLOGIST AND AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLING THE SOUTH BEACH DIET

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Dr. Arthur Agatston is one of the most congenial people you could meet. A few minutes after meeting me in Miami (his home), he found out that my children had accompanied me to South Beach because I had to work there on Halloween. He immediately offered me his house to use as a home base for trick-or-treating with my kids. He’s that kind of guy—generous and thoughtful.

When we arrived I was shocked (but my children were delighted—they were a little leery of being at a diet doctor’s house on Halloween) to find that Arthur’s wife, Sari, had a platter full of cookies and cake laid out for them! I was pregnant with my fifth child at the time and was craving sweets, so I was happy, too! Months later, after I had the baby, I wanted to lose post-pregnancy weight and I decided to try out Dr. Agatston’s South Beach Diet. I lost thirty-five pounds in five months. My husband, Mr. Hill, lost twenty-eight pounds. After dieting, The South Beach Diet Cookbook became our guide for daily healthy eating and easy cooking. I think the world of both Arthur and Sari Agatston.

HAVE GOALS, WORK TOWARD THOSE GOALS, AND NEVER GIVE UP

Frankly, a lot of the good advice I got early on in my life came from audio tapes. When I first became a cardiologist, I listened to tapes by people such as Earl Nightingale—self-improvement development tapes that stress having goals and working persistently toward those goals. I find that persistence is a big factor in having a successful life.

In the years when I was hospital-based and coming up with new techniques and ideas, I met a lot of classic resistance. I never gave up and I kept pushing. In fact, at our hospital we actually had the original ultrafast heart scanner called the Imatron. We used the machine for an initial study that explored whether or not qualifying calcium in the coronary arteries was a predictor of heart attacks and strokes. We lost the scanner due to economic reasons, but eventually raised money for the hospital to buy a new one. Then the hospital administration changed, and we lost that scanner again.

Still, I never gave up. I was working with Dr. Warren Janowitz, and when we completed the first paper on our findings, I was surprised that it wasn’t immediately accepted by the general medical community. Many physicians felt threatened because our procedure was noninvasive and they were afraid it might replace the angiogram. It wasn’t intended to do that, although it certainly was intended to prevent people from needing the angiogram. But I’ve realized that when you have a new idea or a new approach, you’re almost always going to be faced with resistance. When I described new ideas, like the fast heart scan, to medical students or residents, they got it right away—but people who were out in practice and older were often tough to convert. Their ideas were set; they couldn’t think in new directions.

PERSISTENCE IS THE KEY

It was frustrating, especially in the beginning, because I was looking for constructive criticism. I quickly became identified with the new heart scan. I developed the Agatston score, which measures coronary artery calcium, and after it began being widely used on patients I was eager to know if there was anything I could do to improve the procedure. Unfortunately, it was tough to get helpful advice or constructive criticism from my colleagues.

But then I spoke with another physician, Doug Boyd, about my frustration. Doug had figured out a better way to do a CT scan. The original CT scan moved fairly awkwardly around the body and Doug’s method sped up the entire process. Even so, at first, people were resistant to his improvements. Having been through it all himself, Doug told me that new discoveries in medicine and in science often take a long, long time before they’re accepted. He told me the story of Dr. Joseph Lister, a nineteenth-century surgeon who proved that using aseptic techniques decreased the infection rates and complications of surgery. Lister’s discovery was revolutionary, but it took about twenty years before it was generally accepted. (And today users of Listerine have him to thank every time they gargle.) He also talked about Alexander Graham Bell, who revealed the telephone at county fairs. People used it to make a phone call from one end of the fair to the other, but they looked at it as a novelty, not as something that could be practical. Even Edison’s invention of the light bulb was underrated at the time.

Dr. Boyd’s stories all added up to one encouraging piece of advice: Persistence is the key.

IF YOU DON’T BEND, YOU’LL BREAK

When I first started teaching the South Beach Diet to my patients, I was convinced I had hit on something good. I’m reminded of the TV show Davy Crockett, which I watched when I was a little kid. Make sure you’re right, Davy would say, then go ahead. With the South Beach Diet, I was sure I was right.

When you come up with something new, a lot of people want to take shots at you. When one school of nutrition published entirely obnoxious comments about my diet in their newsletter, my first reaction was to fire off an angry response. But I’ve finally learned to let those things roll off me and disappear. That comes from my mother’s advice: If you don’t bend, you’ll break.

GEORGE ALLEN

UNITED STATES SENATOR

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Sometimes you’ll meet someone new and you just can’t tell exactly what kind of person he or she truly is. It’s especially difficult in Washington, D.C., where folks are pretty skilled at making people like them. You don’t always know where they stand.

The first time I met Senator George Allen, on the other hand, I was struck by how genuine he seemed. Working in television so long, though, I’ve learned that the way people appear when the camera is on can be strikingly different from how they act when the camera is off. Like most people, I knew about the senator’s late father, George Allen, a football coaching legend who turned around the Los Angeles Rams and then the Washington Redskins. So I figured Senator Allen probably grew up surrounded by politicians and celebrities and had figured out how to talk a good game.

Yet each time I spoke with him, either on camera or off, he continued to impress me with how un-Washington he was. He is genuine, the kind of person you’d be lucky to have as your neighbor. With his easy style, he very much reminds me of one of his political heroes, Ronald Reagan.

AT LEAST THE BOMBS AREN’T FALLING

The advice that guides my life came from my parents. My mother is French-Tunisian. During World War II, the Nazis imprisoned her grandfather. When we were young, she’d tell us stories about how her family survived, but lived in constant fear. She’d recall how the Nazis would begin shooting and bombing if they saw lights. When our family faced a setback she’d always say, Well, at least the bombs aren’t falling. That led to my philosophy that so long as you stay alive, you can keep on fighting.

I grew up in a football family, and those Redskins games that my dad coached were like life or death. My father would say that losing a game was like dying—but every time you win, you are reborn. The losses would turn our house into a funeral parlor, but my mother would be there to say, At least the bombs aren’t falling. That advice always helps me keep life’s setbacks or problems in perspective.

As a kid I would go astray from time to time. I considered my pranks to be good horseplay, though others did not. Dad would tell me, You’ve got a great future. You have a lot of opportunities. But if you follow down this track, those opportunities won’t be there. You’re gonna get in trouble and that’ll deny you scholarships and other things in life. I wasn’t considering a career in politics then, but it got me to thinking. The advice he repeated over and over was, Don’t ruin your life by making wrong decisions.

I learned how true his words were when I was cowboying near Winnemucca, Nevada. I learned a lot about life out there. I knew I wanted to own my own land someday, and I figured the best way to learn about farming and ranching was to go out and actually work on one. This ranch was close to bankruptcy and desperate enough to hire me on. The rancher picked me up from the Husky gas station and we drove about twenty-five miles out of town. The ranch was a big one, probably around five hundred thousand acres. The days were long, hard, and hot. Most days it was me and the Cow Boss beating the cattle over the desert, up to the hills and mountains where there was some grass and water, and out on the flats where the alfalfa and oats were being grown for pellet meal. I had my own string of horses, and before sunrise I had to shoe them, water them, and feed them. After that I could feed myself. By seven in the morning, it was already scorching. It would get up over a hundred degrees. It was so hot that the only place you’d sweat was under your wristwatch. The rest would evaporate.

YOU CAN PUSH YOURSELF TO THE LIMIT AND YOU’LL STILL SURVIVE

The only conversation to be had out there was with the Cow Boss, or with the cattle themselves. The Cow Boss didn’t say much, so I’d just yell general insults the cattle’s way and they’d bellow back. We had 3,800 head of cattle. Most were range cattle so you didn’t have to bother with them except for roundup, but the others, close to eight hundred of them, were constantly moving. The first day I rode for about fifteen to eighteen miles. When we’d finally gotten the cattle up to where the water was, I hopped down to get a drink. But the Cow Boss said, The cattle are already in it. It’s all muddy. I said, I’ve been up and going for eight hours. I need a drink. He replied, You can go all day without drinking water. That was that. The ranch was a dot in the bottom of the valley and I was sure I’d pass out before I got back. I just prayed that my horse would follow the Cow Boss and I’d get home. I’ll tell you, after the first week that saddle felt so hard it was like sitting on a spear. You’d be up before dawn and you wouldn’t get back until late at night. It really taught me that you can work hard, you can push yourself to the limit, and you’ll still survive.

People talk about the bickering that goes on in Washington, but it’s nothing like Nevada. Whenever you had an argument with somebody about something, you literally had to fight for what you were saying. People figured that if you weren’t ready to fight for what you said, you really didn’t believe it. Just about everything is legal in Nevada, and you can usually get away with the things that aren’t legal. Talk about the chance to make wrong decisions! When every temptation is in front of you, you learn a lot about yourself. I have nothing against people who do things that are legal in Nevada even if they aren’t legal in other states, but it wasn’t for me. Still, it was good exposure to the way other people lived in those days. If they got fired, they didn’t care. They’d go to Seattle and hire on to work on the Alaska pipeline, the last refuge after the great western range.

IT DOESN’T MATTER IF SOMEBODY’S NOT WATCHING, BECAUSE GOD IS

While working in Nevada I was also studying to be a lawyer. On Saturday nights we would all go into town and the other cowboys would be doing things that generally got them in trouble. Because I was studying law, they expected me to know how to get them out of trouble. I did give them good advice, and got one guy out of a big fix. But I told them, You can’t keep doing these things. The judge won’t fall for it the second time around. Some of the crimes were really serious; one time I had to talk one of the guys out of killing another. It was rough. I figure all these folks are probably dead or in prison by now. That time was one of the most formative in my life, because I was completely on my own, living by my own wits, and determining my own postulates for what was right or wrong. It was certainly hard to acclimate back to law school after that experience!

I guess what really carried me through that time was another piece of advice from my mother. She would always say, It doesn’t matter if somebody’s not watching, because God is. Meaning even if you can do something that’s wrong and get away with it, you never really do get away with it. Somehow at some point it comes back to you and everything evens up.

Carol Alt and her father

CAROL ALT

SUPERMODEL

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There is a good reason models are often stereotyped as ditzes. A lot of them are. They make their living, hard work though it is, by looking good, not because they have immense intellects. Most give little thought to the inevitability of aging.

Having spent a great deal of time in the New York City area, I’ve often seen young girls move to town, work, shop, and party like there’s no tomorrow. Often, the late nights result in late starts on shoots—to the client’s dismay, and a rapid decline in job offers. Other times, young women with little experience in balancing income against expenses find themselves in debt up to their eyeballs.

Very few of them end up like supermodel Carol Alt. Yes, she is stunningly beautiful, but she is also smart. For proof, consider this: It’s estimated that Carol has been on the cover of six to eight hundred magazines. She’s also had sixty-five TV or film appearances, her own TV show, and her own line of cosmetics, and she’s the author of a bestselling book that has nothing to do with modeling. She is a bright and refreshing role model.

SAVE YOUR MONEY

When I first started modeling, my father was very concerned about my being out in the world. We didn’t know how much money I would make, or how far I would go, or how long my career would last. My father told me, Carol, you can only sleep in one bed at a time. You can only wear one pair of shoes at a time. Save your money, because you never know what will happen. Interestingly, it was my mother who was really the saver in the family. My father spent everything. My father used to say, We wouldn’t have a pot to piss in if it weren’t for your mother. That left a deep impression on me when it came to planning for the future. One day you may be feasting, the next you’ll be facing famine. If you live every day like it’s a feast, you won’t have