From selling peanuts and beer in yankee stadium to creating a theory of transformational leadership: An interview with bernie bass

Abstract

Question: When and where were you born? And what did your parents do? Did you serve in the military? Bass: I was born on June 11, 1925, in the Bronx, New York City, where I lived until I was 16 years old and attended DeWitt-Clinton high school. We moved to Manhattan after my mother died. By age 14, I was selling popcorn, hot dogs, soft drinks, and beer in Yankee stadium and the Polo Grounds. I saw a lot of important baseball games, including the 1941 World Series (the so-called “subway series”) between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. At age 18, I joined the U.S. Army Airforce (USAAF) to become a navigator-bombardier and ended up in B-29 flight engineering school. Then, the atomic bomb was dropped. I never flew in combat and was discharged in November 1945.