Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (10 page)

At last, heart pounding, I opened the booklet and read the first problem. In that instant, I could almost hear the discordant melody that played on TV with
The Twilight Zone
. In fact, I felt I had entered that never-never land. Hurriedly I skimmed through the booklet, laughing silently, confirming what I suddenly knew. The exam problems were identical to those written by the shadowy dream figure in my sleep.

I knew the answer to every question on the first page. “Piece of cake,” I mumbled as my pencil flew to write the solutions. The first page finished, I turned to the next page, and again the first problem was one I had seen written on the board in my dream. I could hardly believe it.

I didn't stop to analyze what was happening. I was so excited to know correct answers that I worked quickly, almost afraid I'd lose what I remembered. Near the end of the test, where my dream recall began to weaken, I didn't get every single problem. But it was enough. I knew I would pass.

“God, You pulled off a miracle,” I told Him as I left the classroom. “And I make a promise to You that I'll never put You into that situation again.”

I walked around campus for over an hour, elated, yet needing to be alone, wanting to figure out what had happened. I'd never had a dream like that before. Neither had anyone I'd ever known. And that experience contradicted everything I'd read about dreams in my psychological studies.

The only explanation just blew me away. The one answer was humbling in its simplicity. For whatever reason, the God of the universe, the God who holds galaxies in His hands, had seen a reason to reach down to a campus room on Planet Earth and send a dream to a discouraged ghetto kid who wanted to become a doctor.

I gasped at the sure knowledge of what had happened. I felt small and humble. Finally I laughed out loud, remembering that the Bible records such events, though they were few—times where God gave specific answers and directions to His people. God had done it for me in the twentieth century. Despite my failure, God had forgiven me and come through to pull off something marvelous for me.

“It's clear that You want me to be a doctor,” I said to God. “I'm going to do everything within my power to be one. I'm going to learn to study. I promise You that I'll never do this to You again.”

During my four years at Yale I did backslide a little, but never to the point of not being prepared. I started learning how to study, no longer concentrating on surface material and just what the professors were likely to ask on finals. I aimed to grasp everything in detail. In chemistry, for instance, I didn't want to know just answers but to understand the reasoning behind the formulas. From there, I applied the same principle to all my classes.

After this experience, I had no doubt that I would be a physician. I also had the sense that God not only wanted me to be a physician, but that He had special things for me to do. I'm not sure people always understand when I say that, but I had an inner certainty that I was on the right path in my life—the path God had chosen for me. Great things were going to happen in my life, and I had to do my part by preparing myself and being ready.

When the final chemistry grades came out, Benjamin S. Carson scored 97—right up there with the top of the class.

CHAPTER 9

Changing the Rules

D
uring my college years I worked at several different summer jobs, a practice I had started in high school where I worked in the school laboratory. The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I worked at Wayne State University in one of the biology laboratories.

Between high school graduation and entering Yale I needed a job badly. I had to have clothes for college, books, transportation money, and the dozens of other expenses I knew I'd face.

One of the counselors at our high school, Alma Whittley, knew my predicament and was very understanding. One day I poured out my story, and she listened with obvious concern. “I've got a few connections with the Ford Motor Company,” she said. While I sat next to her desk, she phoned their world headquarters. I particularly remember her saying, “Look, we have this young fellow here named Ben Carson. He's very bright and already has a scholarship to go to Yale in September. Right now the boy needs a job to save money for this fall.” She paused to listen, and I heard her add, “You have to give him a job.”
*

The person on the other end agreed.

The day after my last high school class my name went on the list of employees at the Ford Motor Company in the main administration building in Dearborn. I worked in the payroll office, a job I considered prestigious, or as my mother called it, big time, because they required me to wear a white shirt and tie every day.

That job taught me an important lesson about employment in the world beyond high school. Influence could get me inside the door, but my productivity and the quality of my work were the real tests. Just knowing a lot of information, while helpful, wasn't enough either. The principle goes like this: It's not what you know but the kind of job you do that makes the difference.

That summer I worked hard, as I did at every job, even the temporary ones. I determined that I would be the best person they had ever hired.

After completing my first year at Yale, I received a wonderful summer job as a supervisor with a highway crew—the people who clean up the trash along the highways. The federal government had set up a jobs program, mostly for inner-city students. The crew walked along the Interstate near Detroit and the western suburbs, picking up and bagging trash in an effort to keep the highways beautiful.

Most of the supervisors had a horrible time with discipline problems, and the inner-city kids had hundreds of reasons for not putting any effort into their work. “It's too hot to work today,” one would say. “I'm just too tired out from yesterday,” another said. “Why we gotta do all this? Tomorrow people will just litter it all up again. Who'll know if we cleaned it up or not?” “Why should we kill ourselves at this? The job just doesn't pay enough to do that.”

The other supervisors, I learned, figured that if each of the five to six young men in the crew filled two plastic bags a day, they were doing well.

These guys could do that much in one hour, and I knew it. I may be an overachiever, but it seemed a waste of my time to let my crew laze around picking up 12 bags of litter a day. From the first my crew consistently filled between 100 and 200 bags a day, and we covered enormous stretches of highway.

The amount of work my crew did flabbergasted my supervisiors in the Department of Public Works. “How come your guys can get so much work done?” they asked. “None of the other crews do that much.”

“Oh, I have my little secrets,” I'd say, and make a joke out of what I was doing. If I said too much, someone might interfere and make me change my rules.

I used a simple method, but I didn't go by the standard procedures—and I share this story because I think it illustrates another principle in my life. It's like the popular song of a few years ago that says “I did it my way.” Not because I oppose rules—it would be crazy to do surgery without obeying certain rules—but sometimes regulations hinder and need to be broken or ignored.

For example, the fourth day on the job I said to my guys, “It's going to be real hot today—”

“You can say that again!” one of them said, and immediately they all eagerly agreed.

“So,” I said, “I'm going to make you a deal. First, beginning tomorrow, we start at six in the morning while it's still cool—”

“Man, nobody in the whole world gets up that early—”

“Just listen to my whole plan,” I said to the interrupter. Our crews were supposed to work from 7:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. with an hour off for lunch. “If you guys—and it has to be all six of you—will be ready to start work so that we can get out on the road at six, and you work fast to fill up 150 bags, then after that you're through for the day.” Before anyone could start questioning me I clarified what I meant

“You see, if you can collect all that trash in two hours, I'll take you back, and you're off the rest of the day. You still earn a full day's pay. But you have to bring in 150 bags no matter how long it takes.”

We bashed the idea back and forth, but they saw what I wanted. It had only taken a couple of days to get them to pick up 100 bags a day, and it was hot, hard work in the afternoon. But they loved taunting the other crews and telling how much they had done, and they were ready for the new challenge. These kids were learning to take pride in their work, as lowly as many of them considered their jobs.

They agreed with my arrangement. The next morning all six of them were ready to go at 6:00 a.m. And how they worked—hard and fast. They learned to clean a whole stretch of highway in two to three hours—the same amount of work that they had previously stretched out for the whole day.

“OK, guys,” I'd say as soon as I counted the last bag. “We take the rest of the day off.”

They loved it and worked with a joyful playfulness. Their best moments came when we'd be hauling ourselves into the Department of Transportation by 9:00, just as the other crews were getting started.

“You guys going to work today?” one of my guys would yell.

“Man, not much trash out there today,” another one would say. “Superman and his hot shots have cleaned up most of it.”

“Hope you don't get sunburned out there!” they yelled as a truck pulled out.

Obviously the supervisors knew what I was doing, because they saw us coming back in, and they certainly had reports of our going out early. They never said anything. If they had, all I would have had to do was produce evidence of our work.

We weren't supposed to work that way, because the rules set the specific work hours. Yet not one supervisor ever commented on what I was doing with my crew. More than anything else, I believe they kept silent because we were getting the job done and doing it faster and better than any of the other crews.

Some people are born to work, and others are pushed into it by their moms. But doing what must be done as quickly and as well as possible has been my strategy for everything, including medicine. We don't necessarily have to play by the strict rules if we can find a way that works better, as long as it's reasonable and doesn't hurt anybody. Someone told me that creativity is just learning to do something with a different perspective. So maybe that's what it is—being creative.

The following summer, after my second year of college, I came back to Detroit to work again as a supervisor with my road crew. At the end of the previous year, Carl Seufert, the top man in the Department of Transportation, had left me with the words “Come on back next summer. We'll have a place for you.”

However, the economy hit a slump in the summer of '71, especially in the capital of the automobile industry. Supervisory positions, because they paid well, were incredibly hard to get. Most of the college students who got those jobs had significant personal or political connections. They had been hired months in advance while I was still in New Haven.

Since Carl Seufert had promised me a job, I didn't consider confirming it during the Christmas vacation period. When I applied in late May, the personnel director said, “I'm sorry. Those jobs are all gone.” She explained the situation of few jobs and more applicants, but I already knew that.

I didn't blame that woman, and I knew arguing with her wouldn't get me anywhere. I should have put in my application earlier like the others.

But I confidently reasoned that I had worked every summer, and I would find another job easily enough.

I was wrong. Like hundreds of college students, I found that there were absolutely no jobs anywhere. I beat the streets for two weeks. Each morning I'd get on the bus, ride downtown, and apply at every business establishment I came across.

“Sorry, no jobs.” I must have heard that statement, or variations of it, a hundred times. Sometimes I heard genuine sympathy in the voice that said it. At other places, I felt as if I was number 8,000 to come in, and the person was tired of repeating the same thing and just wished we'd all go away.

In the middle of this depressing search for employment, Ward Randall, Jr., was a bright light in my life.

Ward, a White attorney in the Detroit area, had graduated from Yale two decades before me. We met at a local alumni meeting while I was still a student. He took a liking to me because we both shared a keen interest in classical music. During the summer of 1971 when I was searching for a job in downtown Detroit, we frequently met for lunch and then went to the noonday concerts. Many of them were organ concerts in one of the churches downtown.

Besides that, Ward frequently invited me to go with his family to various concerts and symphonies, and he introduced me to a lot of the cultural interests around Detroit that I wouldn't have had the opportunity to attend because of my lack of finances. He was just a real nice man, a real encouragement to me, and I still appreciate him today.

After walking all over the city, I finally decided,
I'm going to make up my own rules on this one. I've tried all the conventional ways of finding a job and found nothing. Nothing. Nothing
.

Then I remembered my regional interview for entrance into Yale and the person who had interviewed me—a nice man named Mr. Standart. He was also the vice president of Young and Rubicum Advertising, one of the large national advertising companies.

First I tried the personnel office of his company and received the familiar words “I'm sorry, we have no temporary jobs available.”

Casting aside my pride and giving myself another pep talk, I got on the elevator to the executive suites. Because Mr. Standart had interviewed me for Yale and given me a fine recommendation, I figured he must have had a good opinion of me. But I hadn't figured out how I'd get past his secretary. I remembered that nobody, absolutely nobody, got into his office without an appointment. Then I figured, “What have I got to lose?”

When Mr. Standart's secretary looked up at me, I said, “My name is Ben Carson. I'm a student from Yale, and I'd like to see Mr. Standart for just a minute—”