Thank everyone for sharing, I wouldn't have thought of doing it myself had you not gotten the ball rolling.
My father was born in 1908 in a whistlestop town in East TN. His father was a horse and buggy doctor for whom his medical education (if you can call it that), marriage and fatherhood came late in life. He died of TB, probably contracted from one of his patients, in 1910 before penicillin. My father, as a three year old contracted something called Pott's Disease from unpasteurized milk. The disease, sometimes called bovine TB, only exists today in Neurology textbooks. He was totally paralyzed for 18 mos. His upper three vertebrae stopped growing, calcified and stayed fused to the base of his skull until his death at 86. My widowed Grandmother began teaching school and was only able to keep the children out of an orphanage because of the Masons who looked after them. My Grandfather was a Mason.
He finished school early, having learned to read while paralyzed, with the help of his brother and sister to turn the pages. He finished college as a 20 year old and headed out to Washington State U (four days by train) for a Masters degree in Bacteriology. It didn't occur to any of us until after his death that his study of Bacteriology was related to his father's death and his own condition. Over the next ten years, through the Depression, he continued his education, ending up at Columbia in NYC where was was encouraged to abandon the pursuit of a PhD and switch to medical school which he did. Along the way, he saw Babe Ruth hit a homerun. In the summer of 1939 he worked in a hospital Munich where he saw Hitler twice.
I'm not going into this detail to list his accomplishments or his overcoming, but rather to illustrate the kind of man he was. My 4 brothers and sisters and I never knew most of his story until very late in his life. We knew he looked different and that he couldn't turn his head, but we never thought of how he would have felt going through life like that. He simply never talked about it. He was not a man to expect praise or pity and few people would have more right to do so. That was a common characteristic of men of his age. My sibs and I began to appreciate this more and more as our Father and his pals began to fade and pass on.
Happy Father's day to you all!