“Occasionally, doors have opened to me,” Senator Fred Dalton Thompson told Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday in a recent interview, “and I had sense enough to see that they were opening, and I would walk through them.” Senator Thompson’s uniquely American life has been marked not only by recognizing opportunity when it arose, but by answering the call to public service and leadership.

It started in Sheffield, Ala., where he was born to Ruth and Fletcher Thompson on August 19, 1942. Soon after his birth, the tight-knit family moved just across the state line to nearby Lawrenceburg, Tenn., which embraced Thompson as a native son. There, he learned the importance of family, hard work, faith and education. He attended school, including Lawrence County High, during the week and the First Street Church of Christ on Sundays.

Even then, Thompson’s sharp sense of humor and knack for the dramatic had begun to show. Friends and coaches recall a football game in which Thompson lay at midfield, recovering from a particularly hard hit. When the coaching staff ran out to check on the prone Thompson, he looked up at them and asked, “How's the crowd taking it?"

Thompson, married while still in high school and graduated in 1960, would be the first member of his family to go on to college. He earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy and political science from Memphis State University in 1964 and his law degree from Vanderbilt University in 1967, working his way through school.