I’m just settling in the office from Pat’s Unseminar 3. I thought I would check my email before writing a post about my weekend. My good friend Marshall Calvert in Las Vegas sent me and email about this father and son’s story. Make sure you watch the video it brought a tear to my eye.

This love story began in Winchester , Mass. , 43 years ago, when Rick Was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him Brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

When Rick was nine months old the doctors told Dick and his wife, Judy “He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life;” … “Put him in an Institution.”

But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the Engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. “No way,” Dick says he was told. “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”

“Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a Lot was going on in his brain.
Rick was rigged up with a computer that allowed Him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his Head, Rick was finally able to communicate.

Rick’s first words? “Go Bruins!”… And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the School organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad, I want to do that.”

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran More than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says. “I was sore For two weeks.”

That day changed Rick’s life….. “Dad,” he typed,… “when we were running, It felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”…….And that sentence changed Dick’s life…forever.