By Julie Wrinn
As a high school student in Lexington, John Bell had two thoughts about college: he wanted to go out of state, and he wanted to study architecture. For a variety of reasons, neither wish came true.
“Having grown up in Lexington, I wasn’t enamored with the idea of being at home to go to college, but it was what I could do,” Bell said. “Then once I started at UK, I began to realize that college is what you make of it.”
As a shining example of making a virtue of necessity, Bell enrolled as a history major at UK and nurtured a passion for German language and culture that led to a 26-year career in the CIA.
“I remember watching war movies as a kid, thinking, ‘I really want to understand what the Germans are saying,’” he said.
Gerhard Mayrwieser, a German teacher at Bell’s high school, was a native of Munich and sparked Bell’s curiosity