Famous People Who Kept On Trying
 

We’ve all heard the stories of famous people who had rough or bumpy starts. Here’s a few for the record:

• Lucille Ball: She began studying to be an actress in 1927 and was told by the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School, “Try any other profession. Any other.”
 

• Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds: In 1959, a Universal Pictures executive dismissed them at the same meeting with the following statements. To Burt Reynolds: “You have no talent.” To Clint Eastwood: “You have a chip on your tooth, your Adam’s apple sticks out too far and you talk too slow.”
 

• Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jean Baker): In 1944, Emmeline Snively, director of the Blue Book Modeling Agency, told modeling hopeful Norma Jean, “You’d better learn secretarial work or else get married.”
 

• Elvis Presley: In 1954, Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis after one performance. He told Presley, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”
 

• Alexander Graham Bell: When he invented the tele­phone in 1876, it did not ring off the hook with calls from potential backers. After making a demonstra­tion call, President Rutherford Hayes said, “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”
 

• Thomas Edison: He was one of the greatest inventors in American history. When he first attended school in Port Huron, MI, his teachers complained that he was “too slow” and hard to handle. As a result, Edison’s mother decided to take her son out of school and teach him at home. In his lifetime, Edison produced more than 1,300 inventions.
 

• Chester Carlson: In the 1940s, this young inventor took his idea to 20 corporations, including some of the biggest in the country. They all turned him down. In 1947, after seven long years of rejections, he finally got a tiny company in Rochester, NY, the Haloid Company, to purchase the rights to his electrostatic paper-copying process. Haloid became Xerox Corpora­tion, and both it and Carlson became very rich.
 

• Pablo Casals: When he reached the age of 95, a young reporter threw him the following question: “Mr. Casals, you are 95 and the greatest cellist who ever lived. Why do you still practice six hours a day?” Mr. Casals answered, “Because I think I’m making progress.”
 

• Franklin D. Roosevelt: Paralyzed by polio at 39, he went on to become one of America’s most beloved and influential leaders. He was elected president of the United States four times.
 

• Julia Child: In 1953, she and her two collaborators signed a publishing contract to produce a book tenta­tively titled French Cooking for the American Kitchen. Julia and her colleagues worked on the book for five years. The publisher rejected the 850-page manuscript. Child and her partners worked for another year totally revising the manuscript. Again the publisher rejected it, but Julia Child did not give up. She and her collaborators went back to work again, found a new publisher and in 1961, eight years after beginning, they published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which has sold more than 1 million copies.
 

• Douglas MacArthur: He might never have gained power and fame without persistence. When he applied for admission to West Point, he was turned down, not once, but twice. When he tried a third time, was accepted and marched into the history books.
 

• Abraham Lincoln: He entered the Blackhawk War as a captain. By the end of the war, he had been demot­ed to the rank of private.  

— From the IdeaBank website