Gerald Johnson

Gerald Johnson was a smart kid growing up on Cleveland's East Side, on East 120th near Princeton Avenue. So smart that he kept getting tested, then sent to a different public elementary school.

"For me, in the first grade, I remember sitting in a room across from a guy and him drilling me with questions and shortly after that I was taken out of my class and sent to Charles Dickens Elementary School," he said. "I was there for a year, and at the end of that year they sent me to Cranwood Elementary. For me, being smart kept getting me pulled from my school, from my friends. It felt like my intelligence was costing me something."

He remembers clearly learning during his 9th grade graduation from Alexander Hamilton Junior High School that he'd been awarded a Better Chance Scholarship to go to Hawken School, the elite private institution in Gates Mills. Very few people in his neighborhood got the chance to attend Hawken.

"I cried," he recalled. "I didn't want to go. I wanted to go to John F. Kennedy with my friends, the kids that I had come to know and in an environment I was familiar with. And let's be frank, I was a black kid, I'd be one of six in my class. It wasn't the idea that I had in mind, I will say that."

But that was a life choice. A big one. And with his parents' urging and support, he made the choice to go to that school. The first of many pivotal decisions, he says, that propelled his career.