My mother, Dorothy Watson, had met my father in a Greek class at Northwestern University.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My father was an athlete, a great athlete, fought in the Marines in World War I. He was all sports and activity. My mother was all academics. I still have the complete works of Shakespeare that she had.
My dad is Greek and my mum Jamaican. My grandparents brought me up for most of my childhood, but I saw my mum and dad all the time.
My mom and dad are second-generation Greek-Americans who instilled in our middle-class family the values of hard work, self-reliance, and service, exemplified by my father's tenure as a U.S. Marine who was stationed at Camp David under President Truman.
My father, Emil Palade, was professor of philosophy, and my mother, Constanta Cantemir-Palade, was a teacher. The family environment explains why I acquired early in life great respect for books, scholars and education.
My father was my teacher. But most importantly he was a great dad.
My father was a chemist on the Yale faculty, my mother a housewife.
My mother and father met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was a senior and she was a junior, and their marriage didn't last very long.
I went to a basic school, which had children from all corners of the world, and met my best friend and had to learn Greek because she didn't speak English.
I met my wife, Jennifer, while sitting next to her on the airplane on the way to England. I was heading to Oxford as a Marshall scholar.
My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.