This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories and with someone who's been named one of the world's 50 greatest leaders. Michael Crowe is the

president of Arizona State University and has one of the most fascinating and unusual backgrounds

for an academic, although he thinks that he shouldn't be such a rare bird. Here's Michael with his story.

I had teenage parents who had run away to get married and ended up being a product of that

early love, I guess.

And so my dad was in the Navy.

My mother just graduated from high school.

My dad was 19.

My mother was 18.

I lived in a public housing apartment building. So we were what was called Section 8 families.

So we lived on public assistance, public housing.

Because even though my dad was in the Navy, they didn't pay people in the Navy very much.

And so I was able as a kid to grow up in a loving, caring family.

But we moved constantly, lots of stresses and strains, constant moving

21 times before I graduated from high school when I was 17. We lived in Imperial Beach, California,

and my dad was at the time in Asia on the USS Constellation. And then she starts getting sick and I come home from school in the third grade and

she has passed out, she's actually bled out on the floor from her cancer.

That had cut some artery or something.

She wasn't dead, but she had stage four cancer that you come to learn later.

And so then eventually my dad comes back from Japan.

My mother's in the hospital, she's unconscious. She can't really talk to anybody.

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