Guided by his father's hands

Rob Wunder Jr., 49, toted a clothes bag, knapsack, and laptop table while his son maneuvered his wheelchair into the Temple University dorm room.

"So this is it. This is where we squeeze in," Wunder said, wearing a "Root for Robbie" wristband, one he never takes off, from a community fund-raiser for his son.

With a stove, refrigerator, sink, desk, table, TV, and bed, the room is so tight that Wunder stores the air mattress he sleeps on each night in the shower stall. This room, a block east of Broad Street, is theirs - father and son - for the academic year. It has been that way since Robbie entered Temple as a freshman in 2008, a feat for both of them. Two years earlier, Robbie was left a quadriplegic after a diving accident.

Wunder left his job as a teacher of the handicapped and became his son's roommate and caretaker, earning him a national father-of-the-year honor in June.

He spends four days and nights a week with Rob III - Robbie to family - on Temple's North Philadelphia campus, even though it means he's away from his wife and 15-year-old daughter, Hailey, back at home in Cape May Court House.

But the Wunders are a family who complain little and have adjusted to a new normal, persisting with a loving fortitude that touches both strangers and friends.

"It's nothing anybody else wouldn't do for their kids," said Wunder, a former high school football coach built like a linebacker, with kind, sparkling blue eyes and an easy smile. "It's a big sacrifice for him to put up with me being here."

His son, 19, a husky 6-foot-3 with dark-rimmed glasses, a beard, and a mustache, chimed in: "I have to put up with him. He has to put up with me."

The Wunders say their son's determination and positive attitude have lifted them.

"Robbie has not complained one bit or felt sorry for himself or showed anger about his situation," his mother, Sue, wrote in a journal two months after the accident when she was living with him at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia. "I have to smile when people say how lucky he is to have me here by his side. . . . Ha! Has anyone figured out yet who's carrying who here?"

It was a hot July night three years ago when Rob, 16 and about to be a junior at Middle Township (N.J.) High School, went swimming with friends at a neighbor's pool.

He ran and dived head first, trying to clear the shallow end. But he slipped. His head crashed into the pool bottom. Still conscious, he couldn't move as he floated face down to the surface.

His girlfriend, who thought he had been knocked unconscious, turned him over. All he could do was talk.

"I knew pretty much instantly that I was paralyzed," Rob recalled. "I didn't know how bad it was, but I knew it was pretty bad."

His parents were at home watching TV when Rob's friends rushed in: Rob was hurt. He banged his head.

"I thought, 'Oh, we're going to have to go and get some stitches,' " Wunder recalled.

As he and his wife entered the yard, they saw their son in a neck brace on a stretcher, and their fears mounted.

He was airlifted to the Atlantic City Medical Center and later to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia for surgery. The report was dire: His C5 vertebra was crushed, and pieces of it had pierced the spinal cord.

The injury was irreversible, and the life of their son - an avid guitar player, surfer, and scuba diver who had just become certified on a trip with his father in the Bahamas - was changed forever.

The community rallied around the family: The Wunders had come home from the hospital to find the grass cut and food in the refrigerator. Several friends got local companies to donate supplies and helped build ramps and a roll-in shower for the house.

A month after the injury, the first benefit was held at the Windrift Hotel in Avalon, N.J., where Wunder once worked. "There was a half-hour wait to get into the place," Wunder recalled.

Students at Rob's school donated a dollar each for a "dress-down day" benefit. His grandmother and her friends sold a cookbook.

"Everybody's done so much," Wunder said. "That's why I can do what I do."

Over two months at the rehab hospital, Rob learned to cope with his limitations.

He could move his biceps, but not his triceps. He could hold a glass if someone put it in his hands and curled his fingers around it. He could lift his wrists and type using his knuckles, but he couldn't move his fingers.

"There are times when we cry," his mother wrote in a blog that kept friends and family apprised of her son's progress and revealed how her faith in God was helping her cope. "Usually very early morning when the break of dawn creeps through the heavy hospital curtains and whispers in our ears that there is yet another day of this ahead. It's when the world is still asleep and we wonder why we're here."

At home, Hailey started seventh grade without her mom there.

"Nothing will ever be the same," Hailey cried to her mother.

It was hard on Wunder, too, waiting for his wife and son to return. He bought his wife a ring that says "faith, love, hope" and gave it to her Oct. 10, 2006, the day she and Rob came home from the rehab. She wears it on one of her thumbs.

"It's a constant reminder of what we've been through and how we've gotten through so far," she wrote.

Rob returned to school after Thanksgiving and started thinking about his future. What would he do? Going to college seemed best.

"I'm not going to be a roofer or a construction worker like a lot of my friends," he said. "And I don't want to be on Social Security the rest of my life."

Wunder - a 1986 graduate of the university, following in the footsteps of his father and a grandfather - suggested Temple. The family began to look into it.

Colleges make their facilities accessible and offer learning accommodations, such as scribes for note-taking and more time on tests. But the university isn't responsible for providing personal-care assistants or nursing.

The family's insurance would cover a personal-care assistant for about 40 hours a week, Wunder said, but that assistant couldn't dispense medicine or deal with medical needs. The Wunders would have had to hire someone to augment the coverage.

Rob needs someone to turn him every few hours at night so he doesn't get pressure sores. He needs help showering, shaving, dressing, getting meals, and setting up his computer in class.

And there's the constant concern that he'll get dysreflexia, a condition in patients with spinal-cord injuries that can be life-threatening. The person gets an infection, or another ailment he can't feel, and his body can go into shock, sending his blood pressure up. It happened seriously to Rob twice last year at Temple; once he was rushed to an emergency room.

Wunder had experience dealing with students with special needs. For 22 years, he had worked at Cape May County School for Special Services, teaching health and physical education to handicapped students. It was where he met his wife of 21 years, still a teacher there.

Weighing it all, the couple decided he would take Rob to school and stay awhile.

A week turned into two weeks, a month, a semester - and now he has signed on for four years. It has meant the Wunders have had to adjust to living on one income.

Temple allowed Wunder to live in the dorm for free. About six others have overnight personal assistants, but none are parents.

A friend gave Wunder the movie Back to School, in which Rodney Dangerfield enrolls at the same college as his horrified son. It wasn't all smooth for the Wunders.

"We had a hard time in the beginning because I was still being Dad," said Wunder, who nagged about homework. "One day Sue said to me, 'You know, you're really not supposed to be there.' "

Wunder backed off.

One day last month when it was time to head to class, Wunder noticed that one of Rob's feet was shaking. He reached out to put it on the chair rest.

"He gets muscle spasms sometimes," Wunder explained.

While Rob appreciates that his father stays close, he wishes he could be on his own.

"I don't like to go through campus with my laptop on my lap," Rob said.

On the way, he saw a friend in an outdoor food court opposite Paley Library. His friend made a fist and said hello by tapping Rob's fist.

Father and son navigated through crowded Anderson Hall to reach Rob's history class. Rob positioned his chair in the front of the room, and Wunder set up his laptop.

"See you," Wunder told his son as he turned to leave.

During class, Wunder usually walks around campus, runs errands, or reads. He had just finished Angels and Demons and plans to read I Am Potential, the story of a blind student in a wheelchair whose father pushed his chair while the student played trumpet in the University of Louisville marching band.

But on this morning, Wunder went back to the dorm room to unload fish, ziti, and other food that the two had brought back and a hydraulic lift that helps his son into the shower and into bed.

Then he sat on a bench off Berks Mall near the Bell Tower, waiting for Rob to finish class. Several other students in wheelchairs passed. About 70 of the 27,000 students on Temple's campus with serious physical disabilities also get support services.

In class, Rob pecked at the keyboard as his professor lectured. He didn't type a lot.

"I just take notes on whatever I think I won't remember," he said.

He prefers to type his own papers and notes because it helps him stay alert, but he needs some help.

Last year, a classmate took algebra notes on carbon paper and gave Rob a copy at the request of Temple's disability center. Another wrote out Rob's answers on tests.

And his father assisted him in a photo lab class.

Rob takes tests on his laptop and e-mails them to professors.

He's an average student, as he was before the accident. Last year, his grade point average was 2.76.

Bringing down his average a bit was a D in a class he'd thought he would ace. It was on disabilities. Rob and his dad still chuckle about it.

"You had to write a lot about yourself, and I'm not into writing about myself," Rob said.

Rob had planned to major in architecture, but then changed to film and media art. He rigged a remote on his camera so he can operate the shutter with his mouth.

"I just really like movies," he said, estimating that he watches 20 a week.

He'd like to make them someday. He admires French filmmaker Pascal Laugier and his fantasy horror films, Martyrs and Saint Ange.

Rob said he still hadn't accepted his injury.

"It still bothers me, drives me insane, but you can only let it bother you so much," he said. "I just don't act like I'm in a wheelchair."

He hasn't lost his humor.

Take his father's "Root for Robbie" wristband.

"Not my idea for a slogan," Rob said, wryly.

Since the injury, he hasn't been back in the water, but he said he would use the backyard pool if he got a floating chaise with armrests. His mom ordered one.

Rob and his father go home most weekends so he can hang out with friends in Cape May Court House and his father can see the rest of the family. They stay when Rob wants to go to a concert or a campus event with friends.

"If there's something to do, we stay," Wunder said.

As Father's Day approached this year, Sue Wunder wanted to do something special for her husband. She saw an ad for nominations for the National Father's Day Committee's "All-Star" Dad award.

She rifled off a 150-word nomination: "When people tell my husband what an awesome thing he is doing," she wrote, "I love his response: 'He's my son.' "

For nearly 70 years, the group has also honored famous fathers at a charity fund-raiser in New York City. John F. Kennedy and Douglas MacArthur have won. This year, George Stephanopoulos, Al Unser Sr., and Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski were among recipients.

In recent years, the organization has honored a "common" dad, and Wunder was the choice for 2009.

One by one, the famous fathers congratulated Wunder. Krzyzewski told him that the other recipients "finish second place" to him, and that he wished he was on Wunder's team, bringing the crowd of 800 to a standing ovation.

Ronald Wurtzburger of Peerless Clothing, another father of the year, shook Wunder's hand, and when he saw Wunder was wearing a Ralph Lauren suit - one of his - he handed him his business card and promised, "You guys will never pay for another suit again. When you want another suit, call me."

When they got home, there was a huge box on their porch from Scott Miller, director of Claiborne by John Bartlett, of New York. It was filled with about $5,000 in golf shirts, jeans, shorts, and other clothing for Wunder and his son.

Miller said he and others at his table at the awards banquet had been overwhelmed by the Wunders' story and wanted to help them offset costs.

"This man gave up his life for his son. Can you imagine doing that? Just shutting off your life and focusing on your kid?" Miller said.

Wunder sent a thank-you note that Miller keeps on his desk: "Like I said, it was not about me, but our family, friends, and community who have made all this possible. Your generosity is a perfect example of this."

Miller said he kept the note "to remind me of what other people don't have and what they're suffering with. It was a tragic accident that turned into something inspirational for everybody."

The Wunders aren't sure what will happen after Rob graduates from Temple.

"We kind of take it one day at a time," Wunder said, then added: "Grad school?"

To read Sue Wunder's blog on son Rob's journey, go to www. caringbridge.org/visit/robbiewunderEndText