Mentor

[littlelamb]

Who has been a mentor to you and why?

[longview]

In the area of life skills, I can think of three older women who were mentors.  One, a high school teacher.  The second, the mother of a guy I dated.  And the third, my Al-anon sponsor. 

They all had qualities, like faith, strong character, humor, honesty, kindness, and a strong sense of personal responsibility that I also wanted to have. 

[DumbAss Tanker]

There have been many over the years that have mentored me one way or the other, as well as long stretches where I was on my own and really could have used one at a few points where I made less-than optimal decisions.  Really the two biggest positive ones were probably my Mom in my youth and again in her later years, and my old battalion Master Gunner, MSG Wood, when I was a young NCO.  The last ten years or so I've been more of a mentor than a protege, which comes with the age and experience I guess...those who are enough older and wiser to give me useful mentoring have mostly retired at this point.

[Thor]

The constant transfers left my mentors behind. I had a few good Chiefs (Navy type Chiefs) at my first command (East Coast). They REALLY had their shit together. Then I transferred to the West Coast. Most of my division Chiefs there were products of the FUMU system, drunks or something, I dunno. The only "mentor" I had on the West Coast was my Judo Coach, who was also a Chief at AirPac. He transferred while I was deployed. I pretty much lost it all because I went through a divorce and had no support.

[DefiantSix]

Prior to my high school physics teacher getting a hold of me, the closest thing I had to a career ambition was that I had dreams of being a gun smuggler.

Then Mr. Osman caught me drawing helicopter parts in his class (when I should have been paying attention to something else, to be sure).  Rather than come down on me like a ton of bricks (like I was expecting, of course), he suggested that perhaps if I wanted to draw, I should sign up for his Mechanical Drawing class (he was also the drafting teacher in that school.  From there I was encouraged to jump into the burgeoning world of CAD, and after that, I was "hooked".

[Chris_]

Captain John L. Nicholson, USN (RET) ran the NJROTC at my high school for 18 years. Probably the single greatest influence on me before 21.
My karate teacher. Bad ass, isn't always hard ass, one of the most gentle people I know.

[franksolich]

The parents, of course, but they left this time and place when I was still a teenager.

Both grandmothers, the aunts, the uncles, the brothers and sisters.

My fifth-grade teacher.

An older couple in Lincoln, Nebraska, he a prominent corporate attorney and she a Republican National Committeewoman from Nebraska, who took a lost teenager under their wing; I knew them, and depended upon them, more than twice as long as I had known my own parents.

The president of a wholesale hardware company in Lincoln, a bank director, and one of the "Doolittle's Raiders" (in fact, the only one who 100% fulfilled his mission), who helped (motivated) a recalcitrant student get through college.

The late David Hunter of Lincoln, Nebraska, who stole millions because of his infatuation with a much-younger woman, and later put a revolver into his mouth and pulled the trigger; he was prominent, in fact a leader, in Democrat politics, and as mean and violent and crooked as Hell, but he was also the best boss I ever had.

Clare Boothe Luce, with whom I carried on a long chatty correspondence until she died.

All the speech therapists I had during my last two years before graduating from the University of Nebraska.

Two old old one-time country doctors, one from the Sandhills of Nebraska, the other from Minnesota.

Friends in high school and college and thereafter, but those were equals, really, not "mentors."

Anything that is good about myself comes from all the above; all that is bad about myself is my own damned fault, and I freely admit it.