Confidence

Six Lessons for Six Sons
by Joe Massengale, David Clow

Joe Massengale rose above his hardscrabble roots to become a successful Beverly Hills businessman, creating a tree service from scratch and building it into an enduring and profitable enterprise. Through years of hard work, Joe achieved the prosperous life he sought but never forgot the life lessons he learned along the way, especially those his father Hugh taught him. He made sure to impart those lessons to his six sons, each of whom became a success in his own right.

What his sons learned from Joe — what it means to be a man, a father, a son, a productive member of society, a person of integrity — is brought to life in Six Lessons for Six Sons. Joe tells his story in vignettes interwoven with observations from his sons, who talk about how they've put these simple yet resonant values into practice. Notable contributors — including Guy Bluford, the first African-American in space; Academy Award-winning actress Anjelica Huston; and Olympic Gold Medal-winning decathlete Rafer Johnson — offer perspectives on how the messages at the core of Joe's story have enriched their own lives and, most important, how they can enrich yours.

Six Lessons for Six Sons is a proven blueprint for personal accomplishment and fulfillment, a stirring story of one family's journey through a century of American change, and an inspiration for anyone who wants to become a positive role model for others.

What if success was as simple as six lessons?

Lesson One: Confidence. Believe in yourself, and other people will, too.

Lesson Two: Fortitude Find the strength to keep trying, no matter how hard you've tried before.

Lesson Three: Pride. Pride is a commitment: to your family and — most of all — to yourself.

Lesson Four: Persistence. Learn from your triumphs but also pay attention to what the hard knocks have to teach you.

Lesson Five: Fearlessness. Fear is always looking for a crack in your foundation. Keep yours solid.

Lesson Six: Focus. You are free to be the person you want to be — but you have to work for it.

Chapter 1

I was fourteen years old in 1957, and a student at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, a little silver sphere called Sputnik. It was a startling moment for America, and like the rest of the nation, my family listened with concern to the signal on the radio, a raspy beep beep beep, as it passed overhead.

The airplane was invented by Americans. The first pilot to fly the Atlantic solo was American. So was the first to fly over the South Pole. We expected to be the first nation into space. We were wrong.

We were wrong again when I was a freshman at Penn State in April 1961, when Vostok 1 carried Senior Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin into the first manned Earth orbit. America was humbled. It wasn't just a matter of bragging rights between rival countries. This was the middle of the Cold War. Our leaders viewed supremacy in space as vital to survival on the ground. We had to win because we had to survive. And we were behind.

Moments like that shook the confidence of the nation. But we came back, daring ourselves to reach and work, to lose for the moment if losses happened, but never to give up. We made fatal mistakes. We lost admirable people on the way. But the impossible goal President Kennedy set for America, to be on the moon by 1970, became possible by the combination of technical achievement and sheer will.

We might sometimes take for granted today what was so challenging and dangerous at the time. We might assume that because the early explorers made it look easy, it was. If we make the mistake of taking a difficult thing lightly, we miss the point: it's fun to do the hard things. It's fulfilling to set an impossible task and reach it. No one grows by settling for the possible. Nothing gets better by staying the same.

My parents never needed to repeat ideas like this to my brothers and me when we were growing up. They both had master's degrees, and it was understood that we'd all go to college and all seek to stretch ourselves in challenging fields. A counselor once told me that I wasn't college material, perhaps because I wasn't the most enthusiastic reader in high school unless it was something about engineering or math. It might make my story more romantic if I could say I was inspired by being underestimated, and all the more determined to succeed. The truth is, I ignored that counselor. I'd been raised to know what I wanted, and to pursue it no matter what, and I knew I had what I needed. I knew it when I was one of a handful of African-American students at school, and when I was training for combat, and when I wanted to fly on the shuttle. Confidence was my parents' greatest gift. Nothing could take it from me.

This nation could have given up at the sound of that little beep beep beep doing what we'd failed to do in 1957. Instead, we pushed ahead. I might have given up at being told I wouldn't be able to live my dreams. I didn't, and neither should you. Never give up. Never.

I had a moment of free time now and then while looking down from orbit over the earth, riding the space shuttle along the same trajectory as Sputnik and Gagarin, taking the same step that the astronauts before me took to the moon and that the ones to come will take on their way to the stars, to think about the confidence my folks gave me. I knew that that's what put me there. Imagine where it might take you.

Guy Bluford, Jr., Ph.D., spent fifteen years with NASA as one of its elite astronauts. The first African-American in space, he was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1997. Today Dr. Bluford serves as president of the Aerospace Technology Group (ATG), an aerospace technology and business consulting organization, and conducts a very active civic life.

JOE MASSENGALE was seven years old when his father left the house one morning to confront Jim Craig over an unpaid debt. Joe's whole life might have changed that day.

"People were murdered for nothing all the time," Joe remembers. "There wasn't any protection for Black folks then. It could happen to any of us in a moment. I remember one man who died by mistake. They thought he'd taken up with a White woman. The killers murdered his brother and left a note: 'Sorry, we got the wrong one.'

"Mister Jim Craig had taken money my dad had earned from growing cotton. Now, Papa was a friendly man, smiling and cheerful. He loved people and mixed easy. But he was a straight man and he had a family to feed, and you couldn't cross him that way. And he was furious. My mother tried to keep him at home — 'Hugh, don't you go down there!' — but he left our house and went into Marshall. I followed him."

The confrontation occurred at the most dangerous possible place, the Harrison County Courthouse in the center of town.

"Courthouse Square was where the White men pulled their wagons up and gathered to talk and smoke during the day," Joe says. "Blacks didn't gather here except on Saturday afternoon. There might have been other Black men there that day. But it wouldn't have made any difference. "There was old Mister Jim, in a straw hat and khaki suit. My father said, 'Mister Jim, I want the money you got from selling my cotton.' Mister Jim said, 'Nigger, get on out of here.' And my daddy knocked him to his knees.

"Around there they lynched Black men who hit a White man. They'd hang them from a tree by the Courthouse and leave the body up overnight. The newspaper would take a picture of it to remind Black folks just what was what around there. And the men ran up and shouted, 'Let's kill this nigger.'"

By 1861, when Texas seceded from the Union, Marshall was one of the largest and most prosperous communities in the state. Known as "the Athens of Texas," it was the cradle of many of the state's most important leaders, a rail center for the nation west of the Mississippi and a key producer of military leadership and supplies for the Confederacy.

Secessionist spirits ran high there. Texas's first and last Confederate governors were from Marshall. The town served as the Confederate capital of the state of Missouri when Missouri itself declined to join the cause. After the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, Marshall was the administrative center of the C.S.A. government in the far west.

The Civil War records of the Texas Republican, a local newspaper, tell of Marshall teenagers forming military units and drilling to fight, and of the local women trading recipes for homemade substitutes so they could ship the best food and cloth to the soldiers. Marshall folk learned to tan leather and make cloth shoes so they could get along without imports from the factories in New England. They spun thread and made dyes to weave their own cloth, and turned all their old rags and bedding into first-aid supplies. "Don't forget to save garden seeds," the paper advised, "for if the war continues, it will be impossible to get them next year. Besides, we must, in any event, learn to live without the North." Lincoln was hanged in effigy in Marshall in 1861 — "thus," said the newspaper, "would the Abolition President himself be served were he to enter a Southern state."

Copyright © 2006 by Joe Massengale. Excerpted by permission of Harmony, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Entrepreneur Joe Massengale is the owner of Joe's Expert Tree Service. He lives in Los Angeles.

David Clow is a business consultant and journalist. He lives in Los Angeles.