ROCKVILLE CENTRE, NY — The life-altering events would have been too difficult for many people to adjust to. Ken Kunken, though, found his calling in life while discovering how to navigate the setbacks.
Kunken was a football player at Cornell University when the unthinkable happened on Oct. 31, 1970.
He suffered a severed spinal cord leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. It took nine months in the hospital and extensive rehabilitation to bring a glimmer of normalcy back.
His positive outlook didn’t happen immediately as “each day was a challenge,” Kunken told Patch. “I’d wake up each day and try to tell myself, ‘Don’t be super-depressed today.”
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Needless to say, it was easier said than done for Kunken, who grew up in Oceanside and has called Rockville Centre home for decades.
“I DREAM OF THINGS THAT NEVER WERE”
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“Everything reminds me of my limitations,” he said. “If my nose runs, I need somebody to wipe it. If I have an itch, I can’t scratch it.”
His perspective on life as someone paralyzed, though, changed when he returned to Cornell.
“You didn’t see a quadriplegic on a college campus, at least I didn’t,” he said.
Making it even harder for the wheelchair-bound Kunken, the school had no ramps, just steps to the buildings. He needed someone to assist with movement around the hilly Cornell campus.
“My dorm had 10 steps in front of it,” Kunken recalled, in the years before the Americans with Disabilities Act became law.
Kunken would complete his degree work at Cornell. Columbia University followed and a Juris Doctorate from Hofstra University more than a decade after the accident.
“I Dream of Things That Never Were”: The Ken Kunken Story is the moving memoir of a man’s desolation and despair that he overcame as a career prosecutor with the Nassau County DA’s office.
“You didn’t hear about many high quadriplegics, meaning very limited movement in their arms, going to law school and very few of them, if any, becoming trial attorneys,” he said. “I didn’t hear about anybody before I did it.”
Kunken opened up about the life he lost in an instant and the new track that he conditioned himself into. While the book is more than 440 pages, it was actually trimmed by 40 percent. But he said there would not be a follow-up with the missing chapters.
“I started writing it on April 17, 1971. I was still in the rehab center at Rusk Institute in New York City.”
A friend of his aunt, Al Megin, who did writing for plays and magazines, suggested that he put his thoughts down as a therapeutic and helpful tool for others. Kunken would dictate his memories to Meglin weekly for more than a year.
“I didn’t see or hear a lot of role models that I could look to and say, ‘There’s more you can do with your life.’”
PUTTING LIFE’S CHALLENGES TO PAPER
Eventually, Kunken would start typing his own words. Not an easy task for someone paralyzed from the neck down.
“I sit by an IBM Selectric Typewriter because they didn’t have laptop computers back then. I had these special splints and it was real slow,” he recalled.
Each session was brief, as writer’s block would stretch for years.
As Kunken and Anna, his wife of 20 years, had triplets 18 years ago, he felt it was time to renew efforts to complete the book, “so my boys could later look at it and learn more about my story,” he said.
The couple worked together with “draft after draft,” in assembling the narrative.
“I came to this country not so long ago [from Poland],” Anna Kunken said. “So my English, it’s not perfect. Writing — it’s worse.”
“So it was a challenge for both of us,” he said.
As the Kunkens molded his words, Anna told her husband to detail as much about his personal ordeal as possible.
“You’ve got to talk more about your feelings,” she told him.
The idea of completing the book without his soulmate’s constant guidance: “No way. Not a chance.”
When Kunken details first discovering his inability to move, he brings you with him to feel what he’s going through.
“That’s so good to hear,” he acknowledged my reaction to that book’s passage.
“You have no idea how much it took to pull the stuff out of the guy,” Anna Kunken said. “It was excruciating, but hopefully it was worth it.”
Still, Kunken worried that being so open could deter readers and family members.
“It’s painful stuff,” he said. “I was debating whether I should really go into this kind of detail, whether it may be too difficult for some people to continue after reading about the initial injury.”
Long before the memoir was published, Kunken understood why he was a role model.
“I’ve had people tell me that, which is nice to hear,” he said. “That was not my intent going back to school. I basically wanted to still do something with my life, make an impact, and it didn’t occur to me that some of this hasn’t been done before.”
IVY LEAGUE TO ASSISTANT DA
He would gain an undergraduate engineering degree and a Master of Arts in counseling and student personnel administration at Cornell. A Master of Education at Columbia University would follow, with a focus on psychological counseling.
“I had three Ivy League degrees,” Kunken said. “No one would hire me. Everybody felt I was just too disabled.”
One employer stepped up — a company in Albertson that focused on people with disabilities. He learned a lot during the two-year experience, “but I was still thinking about law in the back of my mind.”
Encouraged by his brother, who was a defense attorney, Kunken applied to Hofstra University School of Law. While attending, he got a summer internship at the Nassau DA’s office.
“This just seemed so right for me,” he recalled. “I was fascinated by it.”
With his recent part-time work, Kunken has amassed more than 40 years there. By the time he retired from full-time employment as an assistant district attorney, Kunken was one of the deputy bureau chiefs.
His disability, though, was hardly an asset in navigating the courthouse spaces in Mineola.
“I go to court and I can’t fit through the swinging doors to get to the prosecutor’s table,” Kunken said. “Additional obstacles were places in front of me that I never would have anticipated.”
As the title states, it’s one of the “things that never were.” But more so, he would face that on a personal level with triplet sons, now freshmen in college, including one attending the senior Kunken’s alma mater, Cornell, 50 years after his graduation.
“I never would have even dreamt something like this could happen and come true,” he said.
What he also got from his wife and children (and friends) are support and encouragement.
“They basically were acting as my arms and legs all these years,” Kunken said.
“MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN”
Anna met Ken as his aide, initially assisting him on weekends. It all started when he placed a help-wanted advertisement in a Polish newspaper.
“Anna answered it, and lucky for me, things progressed from interviewing Anna to sitting here talking about our triplets being in college.”
After two-and-a-half years working with Kunken, the dynamic between the employer and employee officially changed when they became engaged. Even before that, Anna moved to live-in aide seven days a week.
“The first moment when she walked in the door,” Kunken said there was an immediate connection to marry Anna. “I’m not thinking of marriage [initially],” Kunken said. “I was just thinking I want to see more and more of Anna. Fortunately, she felt the same way,”
But concern about hiring an aide came first. Kunken needed a woman to be tall enough to lift him in and out of the wheelchair.
“184 centimeters,” she told him on that first phone call.
Knowing that’s almost 6-foot-1, “I had to meet her,” Kunken thought. “Plus, she sounded incredible.”
Upon meeting her, “I knew,” he admitted.
Anna knew there was something there, even if romance wasn’t in the air yet.
“It didn’t matter if I got the job, I had to come back and talk more to this guy,” she said. “I was just curious. I never met somebody like this.”
The courting began innocently enough — as though they were in high school.
“How am I supposed to come up with some kind of excuse to talk to him? Maybe on the phone, maybe show up,” she said. “I need to find some way to stay in touch with him.”
Ken is proud to point out that their relationship fits the old adage, “opposites attract.” He is Jewish; Anna is Catholic. She’s 19 years his junior and was born and raised in Poland, while “I spent almost my entire life on Long Island,” Ken said.
At the dinner table, Anna is a vegetarian, while “I love to eat meat,” he said.
Anna is also physically fit, running up to 10 miles daily, and “I’m almost totally paralyzed, yet it seemed like a match made in heaven,” he said.
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