Happy 80th Birthday, Bill.

Today’s entry was written by Mindy Reed, of The Author’s Assistant. It was submitted for inclusion in Tim Russert’s upcoming book on fathers. No word yet on if it will end up in print there.

Truthfully, I could not write a better tribute to a true survivor. Even post-polio syndrome does not stop the man we have come to think of as our own “Energizer Bunny.”

He wasn’t supposed to walk. When polio struck him at fifteen, his family sent him to a sanitarium in Haverstraw, where many afflicted teens spent their summer days in iron lungs. My aunt once told me that at night he would practice walking between the beds of his hospital room. Dad walked with an odd gait – one leg plump and hairy, the other skinny and shiny.

He wasn’t supposed to live. His father had died of heart disease at sixty-five. He was so gray when he walked me down the aisle twenty years ago that my in-laws were concerned for this man they had only just met. When he finally went in for his stress test the doctors would not let him leave the hospital. My sisters and I are now planning his eightieth birthday party.

Dad taught us that “everything happens for the best.” It has been his constant philosophy for the fifty years I have known him. And at all those stages in my life when I doubted the simplicity of these words, they have always proven to be true.

He was the chairman of the Republican Party in Guilford, CT, but when his daughters reached voting age he encouraged us to register as Democrats. He wanted us to be independent, free thinkers and look at things from different points of view. And when he and my mother came home from the theater praising Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, I took him at his word and twenty years later came home with my own black fiancé
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Dad was an official member of our Girl Scout troop; he taught me how to pitch a tent, how to plant a garden and shared with me his love of football. He took me to my first professional football game: The Jets (with Joe Namath) versus the Giants (with Fran Tarkington) at the Yale Bowl. Years later, as a computer company executive, that knowledge of football would help me gain the respect of my male colleagues. Dad was the first feminist I knew.

Dad does not walk now – he is wheelchair bound, but as independent as ever. He drives a hand-operated van. He learned to play bridge at seventy and plays three to four times a week. He is a regular community college student taking courses in current events. He is the head of his local Post Polio group.

As Dad’s body deteriorates, his spirit continues to flourish. He believes those months in the hospital allowed him to get out of his Brooklyn ghetto, meet diverse groups of people, learn how to cope with adversity, and realize that everything does happen for the best.