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 Crow

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,

you know, they didn't pay people in the Navy very much. And so 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.

There's just ladies in the neighborhood, these Mexican-American families that just took us in.

And a thing called Community Chess, which is what the United Way became.

They took care of us. And eventually they flew my mother's sister out from Chicago.

And then she sort of organized everything,

moved my mother to Chicago where she ultimately died in the Rush Presbyterian Hospital from her cancer in an experimental treatment that killed her.

She would have died anyway, but it killed her, left behind four children.

We got all split up in that particular setting, got sent out to her sisters, lived in different places.

And so then a few months after that, my dad and I are on a bench right on Lake Michigan, and he's crying and upset and doesn't know what to do, doesn't know how to take care of us.

We're all split up.

...