Diane Sawyer was perfect.
She was one of the smartest kids in school. She was voted America's Junior Miss. She excelled in ballet, tap dancing, piano, voice, classical guitar, acting, fencing and horseback riding and was editor of the yearbook.
Diane was so perfect growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, that when she blossomed into a stunning teen, boys were so afraid of her - and she ended up without even a date for her senior prom.
But that was a far cry from the worst thing to ever happen to her. Diane, born in 1945, almost didn't survive kindergarten - she was nearly killed in a car crash!
"Diane, a friend and I were being driven to school when a truck ran us off the road" recalled Diane Duffy, a childhood pal. "The car hit a fence, and one of the posts crashed through the back window. It pinned the three of us in the back seat - and came within an inch of decapitating us!"
It seemed Diane was living a charmed life. But as her mother Jean revealed, Diane always thought she was living in the shadow of her stunning older sister, Linda.
"When she was young, Diane was always worried she couldn't do something as well as her sister, who is three years older", said Jean. "Diane was a little clumsy at times, but Linda had the graceful movements of a ballet dancer." "Things were always easier for her sister, but Diane kept at something until she succeeded."
"When Diane was in third grade, we discovered that she was so nearsighted she couldn't even see the blackboard, But until then she'd fooled everybody into thinking she had perfect sight - because she had memorized the eye chart they tested the students with!"
"She thought she would be a failure if she couldn't read the letters on the chart. From then on, Diane wore glasses. But she didn't like them. She took them off when she wasn't reading - and she'd bump into things."
And old friend, Janis Hennessey recalled, "Diane was such a good swimmer when she was 8 that the instructor of our swimming class chose her to swim across the middle of the pool as an example to the rest of us."
"But when she got to the middle of the pool, the strap broke on the top half of her little two-piece bathing suit, and it went to the bottom of the pool. Diane wouldn't come out without it! The instructor had to dive in and get it!"
When Diane was 15, her older sister was first runner-up in the national Junior Miss competition. And two years later Diane finally emerged from her sister's shadow by winning the title herself.
Yet even that triumph had its shortcomings - back at Seneca High School in Louisville, the boys were intimidated by the super-smart, beautiful girl. No one asked her to the senior prom - and she ended up spending that evening at the movies with a girlfriend.
Added her mom, "Diane was just a very sensitive girl. Just after she had learned how to drive when she was 16, a rabbit hoped into the road right in front of her car.
"She swerved the car to miss it, but a back tire killed it. Diane was horribly upset. She stopped the car and went back to see if the rabbit was still alive. She was going to run it to a vet. But she saw it was dead."
"She carried it to a wooded area beside the road and buried it with some kind words. She told me she just couldn't leave it on the road for someone else to run over it again." "She cried for days over that tragedy in her young life. She was such a warm, loving girl."
Diane graduated from Wellesley College and broke into broadcasting in 1972 when she became a TV weather girl and reporter in Louisville. From there she rode a rocket to success, becoming a White House press assistant, helping Richard Nixon write his memoirs - and finally joining CBS in 1978.