From Andy Grove's Swimming Across
fortune.com
Escape From Budapest
In 1952, when he was a student at the Madach Gymnasium in Budapest, Hungary, Andris Grof had a favorite teacher, one Mr. Volenski, whose subject was physics. A small man with reddish hair, Mr. Volenski was a character who liked to use stories about his dog, Muki (an affectionate slang word meaning "little guy"), in his lessons. "I threw this object to my dog, Muki," he would say. "Would it be easier for him to catch it this way or that way?"
Mr. Volenski was older than most of the other teachers at the school, and though he had an excellent memory for things that had happened 20 years before, he might forget a student's name even if he had seen him just a few hours earlier. Grof always sat in the front row because a childhood bout of scarlet fever had left him hard of hearing, but even so he wasn't sure that Mr. Volenski knew who he was. So he was surprised when his parents returned from a teacher conference one day and told him with great pride that Mr. Volenski had said to the assembled parents, "Life is like a big lake. All the boys get in the water at one end and start swimming. Not all of them will swim across. But one of them, I'm sure, will. That one is Grof."
Excerpted from Swimming Across: A Memoir, by Andrew S. Grove, to be published November 2001 by Warner Books. Copyright (c) 2001. All rights reserved. |
