Today, out of the blue, my dad told us how he and my mom started dating. I always thought that after medical school my father had returned to his hometown and began to court my mom. I was mistaken.

During World War II, the husband of my mother's cousin was an officer at Fort Polk, Louisiana. There was a need for civilian office workers, so my mother left business school and went with her sisters to work at the base. She had been there a couple of years when she felt a pain in her arm while opening an office window. She had no idea at the time, but it was the onset of polio. The only hospital in the state that had a facility for those afflicted with polio was in New Orleans. At the time, it wasn't known exactly when a polio patient was no longer contagious. She was nineteen, had lost the use of one arm and partial use of one leg, and was restricted to a polio ward.

My father was an undergraduate when America entered the Second World War. The military was in need of physicians, so Army duty for my father was finishing college and going on to medical school as an Army Private. During his first year of medical school in New Orleans, his mother wrote to let him know that a girl from their tiny hometown was in a hospital in New Orleans with polio, and that her family wasn't allowed to visit her. Growing up in a Smallville sized town, my father knew the girl and her family, and set out to try to get in to the hospital to check on her. As a first year med student he had no access to the hospital, but he found an upper-classman that could get them both in.

So he put on the required mask and gown and visited the girl. Her parents were at the hospital, but weren't allowed to see her. Having someone from home there to check on her and to relay her progress to them meant everything. Being the guy that he is, he returned the next evening, and the next, and the next.

She never regained the use of her arm, but her legs came back almost 100%. She returned to her small hometown, where he followed to marry her. They had six sons and one daughter. The daughter was born while he was doing a tour during the Korean War as a medical officer on a hospital ship.

Now they have multiple children-in-laws, nineteen grandkids and the grand-spouses, plus ten great-grandkids and counting.

My grandfathers were business leaders in a small town, so I always assumed that my parents' marriage was a sort of a fix-up. I didn't know that it all began with my dad being a nice guy when my mom was in need of a friend. It makes me feel good to know that.

That is a great story! I am surprised that you are only finding out now. It is so romantic and sweet, you would think they would always be sharing it.

See if you can get them on film or video telling the story. It would really mean a lot.

So if not for Hitler, you wouldn't be here?

And polio.

Hitler and polio: Two things that the world is better off without, at least now that we already have Kurt.

Funny old world, ain't it.

Old people are weird.

My maternal grandfather was born in 1880, wouldn't say a word about growing up in the previous century.

My paternal grandfather never said a word about World War I, then in his final years we'd be sitting around the dinner table and he'd pop off about how much it sucked to take a troop ship across the Atlantic and about seeing trucks filled with bodies stacked like cordwood.

Thanks Grandpa.

I think that a lot of times, people that were adults during WW2 don't talk about what happened during that time. I'm really glad your dad shared that with you. He sounds like he's a good man.

Just goes to show that unexpected good things can come out of bad stuff. Thanks for the story, Kurt.

My grandfather didn't talk much about WW1 until his later years. He was a driver, driving a truck up and down the line with supplies. And he did get gassed. After he died we found a map that he had marked with all the places in France where he had been.
The interesting thing is that the depot that he was mustered to after getting drafted was Fort Hayes - which is just a long stones throw from where I live now. A friend took a picture of the station at Fort Hayes and Grampa thought that was the best. It is still there and has been restored even though the train doesn't stop anymore.

I find the opposite in my life-that people who lived during World War II (and grew up during the depression) talk about, and focus on it an awful lot.

Something to think about is that back in WWI, with the limited communications of the day, families had almost no information on these guys' whereabouts. The war ended, my grandfather recovered in a hospital in France, and then he just showed up one day at the family store. They had no idea that he'd been injured or that he was on his way home.

It's an amazing change to a time of e-mail and phone calls.

Freaked me out in Three Kings when Markie Mark called his wife back in the US on a cell phone.

Yes. I've got enough e-mails from my brother in his second deployment to Iraq saved to make a book. He should try doing that. It's a fascinating account of life in the service during wartime.

Not my experience. My grandparents hardly ever talked about it. Every now and then they'd mention how their parents had no money or something, a very brief tale, then drop it. Same with my great-uncles who fought in WW2. Never talked about it, even if pressed.

My wife's grandparents in particular, pretty much live in the past, in the 30s and 40s.

Trust Rob to have a different experience than anyone else.