"It happened in 1929," he told me with a smile. "I had gone out to cut a load of hickory
poles to stake the beans in my garden. I had loaded the poles on my Ford and started
back home. Suddenly one pole slipped under the car and jammed the steering
apparatus at the very moment I was making a sharp turn. The car shot over an
embankment and hurled me against a tree. My spine was hurt. My legs were paralysed.
"I was twenty-four when that happened, and I have never taken a step since."
Twenty-four years old, and sentenced to a wheel-chair for the rest of his life! I asked him
how he managed to take it so courageously, and he said: "I didn't." He said he raged
and rebelled. He fumed about his fate. But as the years dragged on, he found that his
rebellion wasn't getting him anything except bitterness. "I finally realised," he said, "that
other people were kind and courteous to me. So the least I could do was to be kind and
courteous to them."
I asked if he still felt, after all these years, that his accident had been a terrible
misfortune, and he promptly said: "No." He said: "I'm almost glad now that it happened."
He told me that after he got over the shock and resentment, he began to live in a
different world. He began to read and developed a love for good literature. In fourteen
years, he said, he had read at least fourteen hundred books; and those books had
opened up new horizons for him and made his life richer than he ever thought possible.
He began to listen to good music; and he is now thrilled by great symphonies that would
have bored him before. But the biggest change was that he had time to think. "For the
first time in my life," he said, "I was able to look at the world and get a real sense of
values. I began to realise that most of the things I had been striving for before weren't
worth-while at all."
As a result of his reading, he became interested in politics, studied public questions,
made speeches from his wheel-chair! He got to know people and people got to know
him. Today Ben Fortson-still in his wheel-chair-is Secretary of State for the State of
Georgia!
During the last thirty-five years, I have been conducting adult-education classes in New
York City, and I have discovered that one of the major regrets of many adults is that
they never went to college. They seem to think that not having a college education is a
great handicap. I know that this isn't necessarily true because I have known thousands
of successful men who never went beyond high school. So I often tell these students the
story of a man I knew who had never finished even grade school. He was brought up in
blighting poverty. When his father died, his father's friends had to chip in to pay for the
coffin in which he was buried. After his father's death, his mother worked in an umbrella
factory ten hours a day and then brought piecework home and worked until eleven
o'clock at night.
The boy brought up in these circumstances went in for amateur dramatics put on by a
club in his church. He got such a thrill out of acting that he decided to take up public
speaking. This led him into politics. By the time he reached thirty, he was elected to the
New York State legislature. But he was woefully unprepared for such a responsibility. In
fact, he told me that frankly he didn't know what it was all about. He studied the long,
complicated bills that he was supposed to vote on-but, as far as he was concerned,
those bills might as well have been written in the language of the Choctaw Indians. He
was worried and bewildered when he was made a member of the committee on forests
before he had ever set foot in a forest. He was worried and bewildered when he was
made a member of the State Banking Commission before he had ever had a bank
account. He himself told me that he was so discouraged that he would have resigned
from the legislature if he hadn't been ashamed to admit defeat to his mother. In despair,