My mother was actually born in Ohio but raised in West Virginia where her family had a laundry. She has a West Virginian accent. My father was born in China, but he's the son of an American citizen. My paternal grandfather was born in San Francisco in 1867.
My dad being an Army officer, I was just born to it. I was raised in a military manner, and it was a given that Army brats went to West Point, so I went to West Point in 1941. And being in the military has been my life.
I was born in Springfield and raised in West Springfield. My father ran a dry cleaning business and was a salesman.
I graduated from West Point in 1974. It was an all-male institution. I went back to teach at West Point in 1984 and found the place far better than it was when I had been a cadet... I attributed a good amount of that to the fact that we opened up the academy to women.
My father was career military. He was a veteran, he was a doctor of political science, he taught at West Point and Air Command Staff and lectured at the War College.
I was born into a Catholic family. I grew up in West Belfast. Faith was very important to us eight children and my mother and father. It was grounded in the Christian tradition of social involvement.
My father was up against so many different types of resistance. His whole life was an interplay of East and West. He was born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, which was under British rule then.
I was so locked in. At one point I remember thinking, I'm not going to be a father, boyfriend, friend, whatever. I'm here to play.
I knew what my father, more than anything else, wanted me to do. Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had.
I was born in the West Village in New York, and then when I was about four my family moved to what they joke is the suburbs, the Upper West Side. I lived there for most of my childhood.
I was born in the theatre. My father was a small time impresario on the West Coast and I was acting from the age of 7, but I started to write when I was 12 and by the time I was 14 I was making more money than I was acting.
I was born in St. Louis; I lived there for three weeks and then my father graduated from St. Louis University, so we all got in the car and split. I don't really remember much. I grew up in Connecticut most of my life and then four years in Germany. My father worked for a helicopter company, so we went over there.
At West Point, we first lived in Central Apartments in a third-floor walk-up next to the hospital where my father worked. My two younger brothers and I shared one big bedroom, and my parents had a tiny one.
Of all the memories I have of my father and of our relationship, none is warmer and more poignant than what happened a year before he died, when he came to visit me while I was teaching at West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver.
My father was very sick around the time I was born. The doctors thought he wouldn't live. He did recover, but I don't remember him as very active. I do remember lots of schtick around the dinner table. Generally, he and my brothers and I were all laughing at the same thing my mother did not find funny, whatever that was.
A few days after 9/11, I put the old cassette of 'Born in the U.S.A.,' twisted and worn, on the car deck as I drove past West Point, across the Bear Mountain Bridge, along the Hudson River. It was the perfect moment to hear it.