to witness the story of an incredible person a person who has made west michigan what it is today  welcome to west pacific and biography today we will meet an amazing man who came to west michigan in the middle of his life in that time he had come placed more than most people would have accomplished hundred thirty seven we were just as a family recovering from the depression and the building business was very poor during the depression years but i was able to attend calvin college because i could live at home and the tuition was low and one of the things you can do these days is earn enough money in the summers to go to college especially if you live at home but i could do that and i decided to study engineering and calvin and the university of michigan had what was called a three to plan you went to calvin college for three years then the university of michigan for two years and at the end of five years you got an engineering degree from michigan and then a b degree from kelvin so that was the  experiences in college and i would just say that calvin and michigan were both great experiences very complimentary one a liberal arts college and i would say when i was exploring the possibility of coming to hope college i really stress that i did have a liberal college degree liberace scholars agree even though i only got three years but but then going to michigan which was a world class university and great experience and and when i started in one nine hundred forty there are only twelve or fourteen thousand students at michigan so it was quite a different institution than it is today but that was a great experience year and so immediately as we finished up that year we began thinking about what you're going to do and i did take a job at dupont but i wasn't satisfied of the job the war was on and i really wanted to be in the service and so the navy had this very interesting program which is called the v seven program and it was for college graduates and you went for four months to a midshipman school and in fo months a navy tried to make us reserve officers a little bit like annapolis graduates and they had i believe three of these programs in the country i went to columbia and there was another one that northwestern university and there was one on the west coast what you could do just so it made that decision for you the only thing you could do is volunteer for submarines and so i had wanted to have the experience of going to sea and preferably on a smaller ship where there would be  more opportunities to do things and so i thought the best way to fulfill that ambition was to volunteer for submarines and so i was accepted and so that was the how i got into submarine duty i might mention that the only reserve officers they took on submarine duty were engineering graduates let's go graduates when i was a before submarine duty and in the reserves when you go in when i bowed to or submarines i knew nothing about submarines really other than you know just the popular ideas of it and so what they did what the navy did was send some of us reserve officers down to key west where they had some old world where once submarines been used for training purposes and so we had three months there but then i went to submarine school in new london and there were probably about two hundred fifty in our class and clued in one hundred recent naval academy graduates so there's quite a mixture of naval academy graduates and reserve officers and when the this is a three month program so when i finished i was assigned to the u s s hardhead which was being built and managed to walk wisconsin and now today people don't realize that they were building submarines a man to walk wisconsin during the war but there was a shipyard in manitowoc a small shipyard but a very good one and they recruited them to build submarines and they built twenty seven submarines and so we had our shakedown cruise that is when you test test the submarine on lake michigan and i still have to load memories of of that one as we were a new class of submarine not new class but a new design up until that point most of the submarines had been designed for a maximum depth of three hundred feet and this was the first one they built man to walk that was designed for four hundred foot depth so we had to find a spot in lake michigan which was four hundred feet deep so we could go to the test death and and so those are a few spots which are five hundred feet deep and and  so we found that and that's where we tested the deep submergence test the other was a twenty four hour full power run on lake michigan and i was a reserve officer green as grass in the calf and did something that he probably should have done i was after the deck but he was up there and it was foggy that morning and there were car ferries and so the radar operator would say ship five hundred five thousand yards here and there and then he said well i'm going down you have a van so i still remember so the first time i really was of a situation where you had to pay a lot of attention to what was going around you but i survived that and how that was like michigan and then at the end of this period we were now in chicago and they put the submarine on a floating dry dock and just west of chicago not pork in it but a tugboat pushes down the illinois river and down the mississippi river to new orleans where they took it out of floating dry dock and we went on our own then to through the panama canal through that and then on out to pro harbor and after some more training i mean that was some train really and and warfare like michigan was just testing the submarine so both in panama and in pro harbor we did some intensive training and they actually had a destroy assigned to us in this destroyer would just go out ten twelve miles and and steer a zig zag pattern and so we learned how to make attacks and so on and out of this i i had the job of plotting the enemy ship on a low plotting board and because the key thing is determine the course and and speed we left pearl harbor and we're patrolling on the east side of the philippines if you can visualize this patrolling off of one of the straits which is called syria gal strait but what happened in all of this was new to me one night we got a top secret message always and coded of course but when we decode it it was a top secret telling us where some japanese ships would be and i might just mention that periodically we even get these top secret messages and tell us where ships would be and we always wonder where are they getting this information and i question we didn't the officers would discuss this together and i remember we're just talking or are they by chance breaking the code and sure and have after the word came out that's what was happening but anyhow these ships were going to be zero i would say two hundred miles north of us within about eighteen hours so we immediately changed course we would intercept them and we intercepted them at night and they were due to if this message we got was correct or out one am and i think they were twenty minutes late but anyhow and so we were tracked and it would think different was the japanese didn't have radar and we did so we could track them at night and get their course  speeded and there were two ships actually and the larger one we attacked and it turned out to be a japanese like cruiser which we attacked and it sank after about five hours and so on but then i might just finish that we just finished the patrol then and then after that we went into perth western australia and that was our base and from there we made subsequent work patrols but just to get your low feeling for the big picture before i say bit more about that ship we're out sixty three days and you have to have enough food for eighty five men for sixty five days we are now feels that we could travel twelve or thirteen thousand miles all without going into port and so that was that was the nature of the war patrol when we got into port in perth australia we learned that another submarine had been going through that area for about twelve days later and picked up fo survivors and a life raft and so they rescued them and took them to australia so they knew what ship had been sunk and there were survivors of that ship so those were the only survivors that i was aware of until nine hundred eighty eight when i went to my first reunion of the crew of our submarine and they had a reunion of the crews of all the submarines that were built manitowoc and across was fascinating to see lifeboats and rowed three hundred miles which was the spot where we ship sunk the ship to the philippines and and that one of the officers in this life boat unit had written a story up in japan in the one nine hundred eighty s and become a best seller so when i got home this is story intrigued me so i this an inquiry i got the name of the officer the author who isn't it turned out to be an officer in this light cruiser and wrote him and told him i was pleased to hear about the survivors a number of survivors and pleased to hear that his book was so successful that then he wrote me a nice letter back and then about six months later he sent me a translation of this book and it was with absolutely fascinating to read the whole story from the japanese how they tried to save the ship and and but then the main story was the life boats and how they rode twelve hundred miles and a minute three hundred miles and twelve days and finally made it to the philippines and so i was on trigger the story and then ask you to help get that book published in the u s the translation but it was a very good translation so i wrote back and said i'd be glad to try my hand at rewriting this little bit like clancy's books with our story in the japanese story and that's the book that was written and was published finally in august of one hundred forty four just fifty years after the event took place we called it i call that encounter at sea and i've had a lot of interest in sequels to that to that oh month or so after the book was published i had a call from the japanese embassy in washington is that and our wise meeting each other and so there was a wonderful ceremony on one of these destroyers and of course he always exchanged gifts with japanese and so we had a wonderful time together and i've we've been friends ever since i went when i was in the navy and for those three years as you begin thinking about what you're going to do in the war's over and i decided like to try my hand at teaching engineering i really admired my professors at michigan and thought i'd like to do this so i went to michigan as soon as i got out and in february of one nine hundred forty six and roll in the spring semester at michigan and and then i had the opportunity to teach at penn state for a couple of years just as an instructor to see if i really want to do that and i enjoyed it and then i went to mit for a doctoral program so that was kind of that sequence as well after the war in one nine hundred forty six ludden decided to pursue a teaching career in engineering in the summer of that same year he met a young woman margaret de witt would become his wife and i was back at michigan in the spring of harrowing one day that's over there i leave to teach kind statement and she went to michigan and so we got together again the following spring break break which is i was nine months between the first and second day and i wasn't quite sure how to court a girl who has just started medical i had about two years to go and my doctoral program so she knew graduate was due to graduate in one thousand nine hundred fifty and was going to in turn and for a year in the boston area and well i finished up my thesis at mit so that was our plan but then an unusual thing happened which changed our careers a great deal two months before she was due to graduate and she had already bought the wedding dress and had wedding dates that she came down with tb which i was not unusual for medical students in those days and they had a very conservative treatment at the university of michigan hospital where they kept her which involves a complete bed rest for a period of time and for her that it was eleven months and then at the end of eleven months you could start dangling your feet over the edge of the bed for five minutes and then the next week ten minutes and then you could set up for five minutes and then you could begin to walk for five minutes and so when she had two and a half hours a day out of bed she was discharged from the hospital and continue this gradual program so we got married when she had five hours a day out of bed but by that time i decided teach at the university of michigan was at and harbor actually teaching when she got out of the hospital and we got married and then she did finish the last two months of medical school on a part time basis and passed all the boards and but we decided that at our age we should have a family and we kept having children till we had five of them and was until we can hope college as she went back into medicine but she had a very nice finish with a very nice career as a psychiatrist i was also just thinking of my years in the military i think one of the most important things i learned was something about leadership and i would just say that growing up i was not one of those natural naturally born leaders but once when i was in the navy and you're an officer on board a submarine you just have to take responsibility and exercise leadership and three things i really learned which stood me well and good stead later on one was we had a clear sense of mission it was not a good vision in one sense but it was the same japanese ships and so you knew what what you were about and the second thing was as an officer you take leadership but it was really a team everybody on a submarine had a duty there were no spare people on it and so just being underway in particular when you made an attack you were functioning as a team and i learned the real value of relationship between leadership in the sense of leading a team and the kind of respect you have for each other and the kurds you want  give and and the third thing i did learn something is there's a measure of danger in a takes a measure of courage and you learn something about keeping cool in difficult situations which stood me in good stead throughout the years so i would just mention that again and as kind of the way of building on these experiences because when i came to michigan began teaching there i had no aspirations for administration or leadership i was just going to teach and do research and as a young assistant professor you know that's expected of you and michigan was was a research university and i would just also add that those years at mit were eerily i research university it was it's a great learning experience also to prepare me for teaching at michigan so i had a great experience at mit which i can carry over into my work at michigan but i would just mention one other event in my early years at michigan which has been a very rewarding experience and this involves writing a textbook and if you'd ever asked me an earlier years i thought i could write a textbook it would have been for this for my minds but the way it came about is this when i was teaching those two years as an instructor at penn state i was teaching thermodynamics i always enjoyed this subject it's kind of a rigorous stimulating challenging subject but there was a textbook by a professor from mit whose name is joseph keenan which i realize was a very significant theoretical but i really couldn't fully understand it just reading it so when i went to mit i took two semesters of thermodynamics from professor keenan and i really understood his approach and it was a rigorous but very wonderful approach determined enemies compared to conventional books so when i started teaching at michigan i couldn't find a textbook that really having st was the way i wanted to teach students so i started writing notes for my students taking professor keenan's approach and trying to make it readable and understandable to undergraduates and i found i could do that and then publishers got a little interested and they're always looking for a future authors and so they asked me for copies of what i was doing then and finally i  three of them were quite interested in that had me sign a contract so i signed a contract with wiley and then the real work began because it was one thing to write notes for students and having to write for the public and for sale and i worked on that book and all my stuff in a lot of my spare time for four years and it ended up about five hundred fifty pages but i wrote every every page of th longhand because there's a lot of equations and symbols and and then i kept editing it and i rewrote it once again longhand for i gave it to a type a so you can see that it was a long process and  my wife and that wonderful thing we had a small spare bedroom upstairs and that's where i wrote this book and i didn't have a lot of money so i bought a door and finished door and put some legs under it and i put it in that room and that's where i would write all my spare time and but i could just close the door in that room and and just leave my papers on the table and take it up there again when i came to it so that's that's how i wrote that book but then you spen and the book really took off as a lot of professors around the country were looking for something more rigorous and i just hit the market just right then and soon the book has been used in a lot of colleges and universities in the country and then it was translated into foreign languages and and i was particularly delighted to receive a copy of it in hindi and another copy in arabic and so i had correspondence with professors all around the world who were using this textbook so it's one of those unexpected things but again this is a case where what i learned at mit really impacted what i did at  michigan so that's a little story that textbook and i might add it's this next edition i ask a very bright younger professor who had been my graduate student to  kept revising it and we had a good agreement time invite reviser he got a higher percentage of the royalties and i got less what really made me feel feel old was a few years ago and it has it's own tag retired and he recruited then i get five percent of the royalties so not unless it's fun to see the books though and use them and i might just add that recently i just got a chinese translation and also a korean translation as well as a few other languages so that  was just a fun thing to do would be successful as gardens career progressed he was given the opportunity to take several positions of leadership as i said i didn't have any real aspirations for administration but i was invited in one hundred fifty eight to become chairman of the apartment which was we had about twenty five factory members an apartment  and i enjoy doing that too but i was prepared to disco back to teaching full time to give up administration and then i was invited to become dean of the engineering college in one hundred sixty five and that was a good experience i was a full time administrative experience been department chair was had by half time administration so i always taught a course and always had some graduate students but then when i became dean i that was a full time administrative job and i enjoyed doing that we had about three thousand undergraduates in one thousand graduate students so it was a wonderful experience and a great faculty and so i enjoyed that it would once again i was ready to go back to teaching and that's when hope  proached me about the possibility of coming to hope college at the peak of an accomplished academic career at the university of michigan garden was presented with the opportunity for a new challenge it was this new challenge the presidency of hope college that brought him to west michigan because in the fall of one nine hundred seventy one that i was first approached by hope and i wasn't looking for a job and would i be interested in exploring this possibility so i thought maybe at this stage of life this would be an interesting thing to do and so i had the some conversations with the search committee at hope college  and they seemed interested in me and i thought i should explore it further but as i said i was happy at michigan and i might say we've had just built a new house large enough for five children which there is out of a bit of a cramp housing situation and i think we're going to stay there for the rest of our my career when hope approached me and and so i i had an essay lesson which i'll pass on here because that i passed on to many people over the years and there was a friend roger hines who is well known to many few people in holland who had been the provost at michigan and then he was a chance for berkeley and he'd come back to that and arbor in the fall of one hundred seventy one so roger knew hope college and knew me and so i i thought i'd like to see what roger would say whether that i should keep pursuing this or not and i was sort of hoping he'd say you don't want to leave michigan to go to home college instead he said something which i found to be very significant advice for me and for many people and that is he said to me it's a great thing to get a new challenge in your late forty's or early fifty's and i was fifty one and he said for you i think about this are a great place so that kept me going in my interest in hope college and so i was a key factor in my finally coming to hope college and but at the same time i would mention that one hundred seventy two and seventy one and seventy two were the day student protest days lots of turmoil and campuses presidents were having a hard time further hope and then without a president for two years which l a measure of uncertainty among the faculty and students so on the one hand i could see a great opportunity but it was also a great challenge given the climate of the day and the situation at hope college but i felt this  hundred seventy two and i would just say that i understand it was why it was difficult for the fact later except me first of all i was a calvin college graduate and then i was an engineer i wasn't a liberal arts person and i was at a big university and apart from my years at calvin i hadn't had liberal arts college experience so there was a period of adjustment and but when we got through a period of two or three years of adjustment we began to i would say the fact we in the community had no b and i knew them and the next twelve years were really very rewarding years at whole college and and  look back at this is really a great experience but but then i go back and say what i learned about leadership and a submarine as an officer has stood me in good stead when i did the administrative work at michigan and a while serving as president hope college i recognize that hope college really had a great tradition and i had a great reputation great on my body but the context of the day of student protest and so on was as i mentioned a challenge but also there was a a new life was sort of being developed for hope college a new sense of mission one of the most important things i believe i contributed whole college was to clarify their sense of mission and make a commitment to excellence and you know part of it commitment to being a first class undergraduate residential liberal arts college and to do so in the context of the christian faith and that was kind of helping to clarify the mission and that goes back to what i said about submarine days to him you know what your mission is is such a helpful thing when you're really underway day by day i would also say i i learned at michigan the importance of really recruiting good faculty and and i just so proud  were proud of the faculty that was here but also proud of the fact we we recruited over the years and then we want to recruit them the responsibilities encourage support them and i just mention one little incident  i called on the mellon foundation in new york and they had a good reception there and they had just a doctor the program of making grants to support in liberal arts colleges to lee scholarship and i was so brought in me at mit in michigan that some combination of teaching and scholarship together is what makes a great institution now is a liberal arts college is going to have less emphasis on scholarship and more on teaching but how do you support discover lee activities and so the sciences that hope and really thrive because there's lots of grants for science and they have great tradition of and so i believe was forty thousand dollars a year which was a great salmon so we could develop a program of supporting faculty during the summer to do scholarly work and in about how high school teachers will  and and and then the other thing was facilities there was a great need for facilities at hope college and because i even go back to my experience of working with my father in and buildings i had at least some feeling for buildings and architecture and the thing i had to really learn was raising funds but they all go together and so we were able to do a good deal of building when i was at college the down center was  a great example but eventually just toward the end of my career at hope with both the library and some people say what your major contribution was facilities but i would say it was the academic quality and the facilities were only the tool to support the frankly in the students so if i look back at my years it would really be the quality of excellence that we were able to achieve at hope college hundred eighty seven after fifteen years as the president of hope college decided to retire although for people like retire it is not a very applicable term one of the things that one faces when things are going well as a what stage do you retire in the conventional retirement age is sixty five but i was in good health and enjoying it and i thought things were going well so i finally decided to retire on the june thirtieth red turned sixty seven that was nine hundred eighty seven and i didn't have any particular plans as to what to do in retirement i wanted to stay active in some ways but what happened was about two or three months before i retired i was asked to be part of a group of business people in town and represent hope college with this group to think through what could happen to the downtown because just at that time there was a lot of talk about a mall coming into downtown and a few years before that probably around eighty five one hundred eighty five there was one developer thought he could build a mall downtown but he needed to make sure that there was core decided take that responsibility they bought someone over a million dollars worth of property they raised some money they borrowed over half a million dollars from the bank and those were the days when prime was  twelve fifteen percent so they had half a million dollars of debt and a million dollars for the property and then the developer couldn't complete them all so this and was left headquartered with holding the bag for this property in that bank that and so the chairman of had core deal and when he brought some people together say how can we turn this property into an asset and so i was part of that group starting just a few months before i was going to retire and it was a wonderful group to work with but no one was doing any staff work so after i retired there was one other person in this group tom walker and who had been a vice president for facilities at herman miller we got together and after i retired on june thirty in that july said let's do some staff work for three months to see if we can't move this process forward and at prince as well known in this community of course it was part of this group and he provided he had a vacant office where we could work and so tom and i began sketching out a vision for the future of downtown and and then i had a a friend at michigan in the school natural resources bill johnson who was a gifted planner of campuses and downtown's and so i contacted him to see if he would take as i was a client and he would it be two and a prince gave us the money to so we could hire him and and that's how we really got started on the renewal of downtown and one of the other things that really struck me as i was reflecting on the downtown experience was again how that teamwork approach of the submarine days really was was the success of downtown because on the one hand  altering and i could create a vision and bill johnson could flesh it out but it was really a lot of other people interested in downtown and doing their part and one of the things we still had to solve was what to do with this land that had core had bought because they still had the debt so we had the idea of forming a partnership limited partnership technically it was for profit but our goal was to raise somewhere between two million and four million dollars so we could buy this land from had core hold it until the right developments could come along which would flesh out the vision that bill johnson had sketched out for us but could we raise two to four million dollars and so this is one of those things where you just launch out wondering if you can do it but we formed this review development limited partnership and the units were one hundred thousand dollars and so we finally got people individuals and companies to subscribe for three million dollars in these hundred thousand our units and so then we could buy the land from had core and had core could pay the bank off and then they actually had core with the money left at four units in the in the partnership and prince was the general partner he took five units and so then once you could get that far other people came along and and so that was and we kept buying property as it became available downtown because one of the things i learned from bill johnson was get a vision don't fit in the details but get the property that you need to do it and then as opportunity comes  along the project will unfold we thought it might take five or six years it actually took ten or twelve years but we finally returned all of the money of this three million dollars to the people who had given to us after twelve years and one of the projects we did was to build the curtis center at the corner of of college and seventh street and what we wanted to do with that project is kind of create a model for the quality of buildings we wanted downtown now that due time we saw that we did build that was the only project but then you can just see a lot of the things which have happened now over the last fifteen years have happened to fulfill the vision which bill johnson created for the downtown through this framework of ideas that he gave us so that's a look at the story of downtown and  and is thriving today and it's a great send us a sense of satisfaction to a lot of people and i said clearly mentioned that the main street program which started even before we did has been a key factor and i could mention one other little thing and that has to do with the snow melt system ed prince was he said we had to put a snow melt system downtown and i wasn't fully convinced even though my background would fit right in with this and then we discovered and learned about any swedish system which they had used in sweden involving plastic tubing and unique connections and a unique design that would just fit downtown and so we decided to push that but this required cooperation from the board of public works through the power plant because that's where the waste heat would come from had to be approved by the city council and so we wondered could we get this can we get this through and and the be done it wasn't really enthusiastic about this and so they would have to be part of it so it was kind of a miracle i think that finally the city council approved it and the b p dove is going along with it and now everybody's proud of it and three years later the b p dubey had the pictures nobel in the cover of its annual report so that's one of the nice excess stories which had as origins with the insistence of of ed prince and i played some role in that and and that's how we got the snow melt system down and how seeing all the benefits that he holland ceiling foundation could provide a garden accept position on the foundation for the other community activity i got involved in after retirement was the holland community foundation and i was asked to go on the board of this and the community foundation had been around for about thirty years and it had kind of waned in terms of its interest in it but there was a renewal of interest in the community foundation so it was a very strategic time to join it but at that time  they had about four hundred thousand dollars in an endowment fund and the key idea of community foundations is to build up and down and fund and the income is used year after year to support the foundation one nice way that someone to put it is the united fund is your checkbook and the community foundation is your savings account and so we realize that forty thousand dollars is good and an adama fund is going to do much so with my background in fund raising it out at hope it seemed natural that we could do somewhat more of fundraising than a wonderful thing happened and that is the calyx foundation recognizing the power of community foundations offered a grant to every community foundation in the state of one million dollars provided the foundation would raise two million dollars for its and down one fund so given the fact that we had four hundred thousand dollars the opportunity to raise two million and get one more million was a great challenge and so just in those years i was present on the foundation and it was wonderful to see the response of the community and  and so we were able to raise that the two million and etc then another interesting thing happened the zylon community foundation a small foundation had applied for the kelley foundation grant and they got it but they were just a fledgling community foundation and they were having trouble raising the two million dollars and so there was some talk about could we merge the holland in the sailing community foundations and the second thing was if we did with the kelly foundation allow us to keep the second grand so for the kelly foundation like the idea of merging them so that's how the merger came between the zealand and holland retirement found he had more time to get involved in his church and other christian organizations the other major activity that i'd have done in retirement really relates to the church and christian organizations and as i mentioned to you i took the christian faith fairly seriously early in life particularly my college years and it's been the basis of my life and our family life but  during my years in particular at hope and also at michigan i didn't have a lot of time to become active in the church and shortly after i retired i was invited to become an elder and i church which i did and i enjoyed that i was also invited to go on the board of words of hope a ministry radio ministry of the reform church in america and that was a very good experience and i was also invited to go on the board of bethany christian services on a wonderful adoption agency and serving youth and families in grand rapids from a christian perspective and enjoyed those experiences on those boards so some of these are the kinds of that to these that i have been to use part of his very significant wealth to establish an institute that would benefit human kind and so one part was a research institute and another was an education institute and so i was asked to be on the board of the education institute and just and it's very founding of it and so i agreed to do this and had to help form the mission of this education institute and also be on the board while the research since it was been founded and i'm still serving in those capacities and again that was one of those unique opportunities that came my way that i was able to respond to and it's been a very experience and the for the first activity of this education institute we did we had these activities right here in holland at the hayward center and i invited thirty superintendents and principals from around the country to spend a week here in holland and recruited some top scholars from universities to come east for two days and so we had a wonderful week for three successive summers and then i edited the talks and these were published as books as well so that was a great experience but one of the nice things for me was the enthusiasm these people from all over the country had for holland michigan and for hope college and for the downtown we had and for all the good things we have in our community so i just mention that also as a kind of a retirement activity well as i just wrap up these reflections on my life and how various things prepared me for our year thirty one years in holland which have certainly been a great experience for us in our family a couple  thoughts of come to mind and i've touched on these already but i'll just try to pull them together what it was i think there are some things which are so important to learn early in life and i think one of these is the joy and the sense of fulfillment that one can have and work and i certainly learned that as i mentioned from my father and so if i was going to courage people has to learn to work and enjoy it and have the fulfillment of accomplishing things and doing them well i think that will stand people in good stead their entire lives another thing of course is education and to take advantage of every educational opportunity one has certainly the formal education through high school and and trade school or college which everyone is inclined to do is important but just to develop a spirit of learning which carries through life and how many people there are today using computers daily in their work that they had to learn later in life and so to develop an attitude of learning and enjoying learning both for your pleasure and for develop as a pet and to develop as a person as well as to enhance one's a work in skills and the third thing i would just say is the tremendous importance of values and character in the long run this really is what stands out and to develop and sense of integrity that one's word means something and i mentioned sort of the would lead very legitimate reasons the fact that hope had to question my who i was and so on but what really turned turned the corner i think was when we really learned to trust each other and if one's word means something that's an important thing in building trust and of course basic to this also is ones faith and for me at least my values and sense of integrity have been shaped by the christian faith and so that one also has a sense of god's presence and god's direction and the grace of christ through life but that's has been the source of my motivation and value system but i just mention that so you know a little bit more