Teddy Roosevelt

When you’re born in North Dakota, you get a few idols to choose from: Peggy Lee, Lawrence Welk, Roger Maris — or Theodore Roosevelt. For me the choice was easy. When I was a child, my family would take summer road trips to Medora, North Dakota, where Roosevelt rediscovered himself after the tragic loss of his wife and mother on the same day in 1884, to visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park. On those long car rides, I read and reread Edmund Morris’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, so many times that its pages are tattered and torn.