No Ramps. Just Stairs. No Way In.

In 1970, Ken Kunken was a junior at Cornell University, studying engineering and playing lightweight football. A single tackle during a kickoff play broke his neck, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down. He spent the next nine months and twenty days in hospitals and rehabilitation centers. The Rusk Institute’s career guidance for someone with his level of injury: sell magazine subscriptions over the telephone. Ken couldn’t even dial a rotary phone. That pamphlet became the fuel.

What happened next is one of the most quietly staggering stories you’ll hear. Ken returned to Cornell—a campus with no ramps, no curb cuts, no accessibility—being pulled up and bounced down nearly 100 steps on his first day back. He earned his engineering degree, then two master’s degrees from Cornell and Columbia, then a Juris Doctor from Hofstra Law. He mailed over 200 resumes and was rejected by everyone. He was the first quadriplegic to graduate from Cornell, the first to earn a graduate degree there, and the first to serve as an assistant district attorney on Long Island. He practiced law for more than 40 years. The DA’s office later named its annual award for outstanding prosecutors after him.

Then there’s the personal side. In his fifties, more than 30 years after his injury, Ken married Anna—the woman who had originally been hired as his personal care attendant. She proposed. And it was her idea to try for children through in vitro fertilization. On January 24th, 2005, Ken watched from his wheelchair as triplets—Joey, Jimmy, and Timmy—entered the world. The Two Truths and a Lie segment lands with a twist: the story everyone assumed was the lie turned out to be the most complicated truth of all. In 2023, Ken published his memoir, “I Dream of Things That Never Were: The Ken Kunken Story.”