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When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reasons and deliberations to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults with his judicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to be informed in what he writes as well as any that writ before him.
— John Milton (1644), Areopagitica
My great-grandparents lived in the land of Herman Boerhaave and Abel Tasman, most of my grandparents were born there. When I was a boy I took an interest in coin collecting, like the Lincoln cent and the Canadian penny that circulated in Michigan. In a local library I read about meteorology, a perpetual spur to understanding. A schoolmate showed me how chess was played; it captured my attention. As an adolescent I read Hans Kmoch's Pawn Power in Chess. The YMCA offered swimming lessons in its pool, a summer camp, and a room for weekly meetings of the city chess club.
I was amazed that my crystal radio worked without batteries -- the power to drive the earphone was "in the air". At that time there was no internet, but shortwave communications offered a window on the world. I studied Morse code, took up amateur radio practice. Radio Amateur's Handbook served as a textbook. The League magazine QST discussed impedance matching a transmitter to an antenna, opening up the frequency domain. Though I was fascinated with electronics, reading Mathematics and the Imagination gave abstraction and One Two Three...Infinity opened the cosmos.
I put some of my physical energy into learning to ride a unicycle. In the final year of junior high school there was a science fair in which I competed with a problem in combinatorics. The creative experience of innovative mathematics was rewarding enough without award. (Originality is expected in Wikibooks but not allowed in Wikipedia. See for example b:Geometry/Unified Angles or works that have been archived by Wayback Machine: Complementary numerals, Corner flow and Common ground, and Adventures in 9-space.)
After junior high school I started studying through the summers, taking a courses in speech and typewriteing the first summer. I participated in policy debates as a high school student, and learned to use the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature to find articles on topic. The textbook by Mary P. Dolciani on algebra and trigonometry taught that a function is a type of binary relation. It described matrix multiplication and included an exercise to verify an involutory matrix. The NSF sponsored science and mathematics programs for high school juniors. Students learned a little calculus and a bit of physics. I wrote a report on electroluminescence based on readings at the Carnegie library downtown. We also spent a few weeks on college campuses with classes presented by professors. Each of my parents had a cousin in academia, so that was my career goal. Advisors told me to get three academic degrees and to learn to read French, German and Russian mathematics.