My father stood in my kitchen asking to borrow $1,000, his rough, weathered hands shaking with embarrassment. Before he could even explain why he needed it, my wife looked across the room and said flatly, « Tell him to get another job. We’re not a bank. » I gave Dad the money anyway. Three days later, the hospital called.My father is Wendell Marsh.

He is seventy-one years old and he is not the kind of man who asks anybody for anything.

For thirty-four years he worked construction. He started at eighteen on a site where they still mixed by hand, and he came off the tools at fifty-two because his shoulders had finished, and then he did four more years of smaller jobs because he could not sit still.