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I'm David Kennedy.
I graduated from Stanford in 1963, and I joined the faculty
here in 1967, so I've been teaching at Stanford in the
history department for 42 years.
Did the Pulitzer Prize change my life?
Well, only in the sense that I came to discover that people
now valued my opinion about any range of things much more
highly than they did the day before, so it changed my life
in that way.
Well I was the first person in my family to go to college
and though my parents supported that, very strongly, they,
to be honest, weren't very sophisticated about it.
My father had essentially had his life really badly broken
by the Great Depression.
He was unemployed for seven years, so he just simply did not
have the means to send me to a private university.
I applied to Stanford and got a scholarship that paid half
tuition, about $500 dollars, and I very proudly showed this
to my father and assumed that that would be enough to clinch
his acceptance of my coming to Stanford, and he said, "No,
that's good, kid, but not enough."
Well I interviewed with this local Seattle-Stanford club to
get a supplemental scholarship and I did not get it, very
disappointing, and my father was still not ready to sign off
on this, but a few days later somebody from that interview
committee called me and said, "Hey kid, have you ever heard
of such a thing as a hashing job?", which I hadn't.
Of course it means helping out in the food service and
waiting on tables, cleaning dishes, that sort of thing, for
which you got your meals, your board.
So I said that's sounds fine to me and I told that to my
father and that saved a few hundred bucks and then he said,
"Ok, I guess we can handle it."
I think my life-long project, actually, is one that was
inspired by a professor I had at Stanford in a particular
course that he taught.
It was David Potter in a course called The American
Character, which I took in my junior year, where he framed
some questions about the nature of American society, and
what he called the American character, that I found just
deeply intriguing and intellectually fascinating.
That's what sent me off to graduate school in history and
it's that kind of life-long quest to understand this society
deeply, in its essence, that I think has been what's kept me
going all these years.
Well if I met my donor, I would thank him or her with all my
heart.
Without that financial aid I would not and could not have
come to Stanford University, and my life would be very, very
different.