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that doesn’t mean I have to carry on in the same tradition. That certainly doesn’t mean I couldn’t change. And I would change—quite a few years down the road. Today, I don’t dwell on the negative stuff. I hardly even think of it. In fact, if I weren’t sitting here writing a book about my life, I might not have brought it up at all. But I want you to get the whole picture. I want you to see that my upbringing wasn’t perfect. I didn’t have special advantages. I was raised like a lot of other kids in my generation, and I know there were lots of other kids that were raised under entirely different circumstances as well. Circumstances that I can’t even imagine.
    What I’m driving at here is that where we start in life doesn’t define who we will become. If it did, that would pretty much mean we’d never have any kind of progress or evolution in the world, and of course, that’s not the case. The only way to move forward is to take what you need from your upbringing. Learn from it—the good and the bad—and apply it to the life you want to lead. When you need a little something to lean on, think back on the good stuff and be thankful for all of that good stuff you had, whatever that good stuff may have been.
    What sticks with me the most from those early years, especially as I get older, is knowing how hard my parents worked and how dedicated they were to taking care of this family they created. When I focus on that, all of those other goofy thoughts disappear.

    Long before I came into the picture, back when my dad was just a kid, the Ruettigers were landowners. My grandparents at one time had more than two hundred head of cattle and enough land for them all to roam on before Joliet grew into a more industrialized town after World War II. Taking care of the farm, the land, and those cattle involved all of the kids as soon as they had the strength to help out, and I’d imagine that’s where my dad’s old-fashioned bootstrap work ethic began.
    If the Ruettigers had held on to those cattle and all that land, my upbringing might have been very different. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. In a single year, some sort of disease swept through the entire herd, killing every last one of those animals, and when my grandparents couldn’t get a loan to replace the herd, the whole operation went belly up. They lost their livelihood. Lost their land. Lost everything.
    Thinking of all that, it’s easier for me to understand why my dad was who he was.
    My father was always covered in grease. He loved fixing things and building things in that Greatest Generation–era, bull-in-a-china-shop mentality of “just get it done.” It didn’t matter if it was pretty. It just had to work. And it seemed like he could make anything work, from a rusty old lawnmower to our first electric washing machine to the big old Plymouth Fury station wagon with balding tires that managed to cart our entire family around through most of my childhood.
    As hard as my father worked, he could never afford a new car with so many mouths to feed. So he brought home junkers and hand-me-downs and kept ’em running on spare parts and duct tape. But we never went without a vehicle.
    It’s kind of funny now to think about fourteen kids fitting into a single station wagon. Nobody wore seat belts in those days, of course, so we’d pile into the way-back and squeeze ourselves in wherever we could find a spot. It must have looked like a clown car at the circus when the Ruettigers pulled into the church parking lot on Sundays: kid, after kid, after kid, after kid, all piling out of that Plymouth!
    Of course, what kid wants his family to be looked at like a bunch of clowns? I’m not sure how old I was the first time I overheard a snide comment about how many kids my parents had. There were times when a co-worker or some old-timer from town would say something directly