AUTODIDACT

One of my nephews called me with a problem he was having in his manufacturing engineering class at college. I told him that I couldn't help him as I was abysmally ignorant of the area and he said that he figured I would have had that kind of issue at work. I laughed and answered, "I had engineers to figure out that stuff FOR me!" I told him that he should call his Uncle Duke. He said, "But Uncle Duke didn't go to college." I said, "Well, he's the smartest guy I know about that kind of stuff." I then told him that Uncle Duke was an autodidact and my nephew said he didn't know what that meant and I told him that it meant "self-taught". Michael, another nephew, was visiting and he overheard the conversation.

A few weeks later, in talking to my nephew, he stated, "Boy, that Uncle Duke is smart!" He had indeed called my brother with the problem and my brother was able to help solve it.

A couple of months after that, Michael and his girlfriend were visiting and Michael was telling her about the different members of the family who were expecting to play poker that evening and I heard Michael say, "Yeah, my Uncle Duke is an autodidact!" What a pleasure to hear him explain to her the meaning of "autodidact".

It's good to know they can still learn something! It reminds me of the Mark Twain story of how at the age of 16 Mark couldn't believe how DUMB his parents were, but by the time he reached 21 he couldn't believe how SMART they had become!


FOOTNOTE: Famous Autodidacts

Louisa May Alcott...................Henry Ford
Woody Allen.........................Benjamin Franklin
Hans Christian Anderson.............Robert Frost
Maya Angelou........................Bill Gates
Alexander Graham Bell...............Ernest Hemingway
Elizabeth Barrett Browning..........Steven Jobs
Truman Capote.......................George Washington
Grover Cleveland....................Abraham Lincoln
Walter Cronkite.....................Malcolm X
Charles Dickens.....................William McKinley
Walt Disney.........................James Monroe
Bob Dylan...........................Florence Nightingale
Thomas Edison.......................Edgar Allen Poe
Albert Einstein.....................John D. Rockefeller

from the Autodidactics Hall of Fame