Album

Wake Up Running

ADHD as a child, David Egee suffered through many years of reading and writing impairment. "I was ADHD before the expression became a household word.” Egee overcame his learning handicap to become the Director of the American Hospital in Beirut at the age of 35, dealing with such Middle Eastern luminaries as Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi. Later, he established hospitals throughout the Middle East, just before the region exploded. In the 1980s, he worked for Hospital Corp. of America (HCA) in England, setting up nursing homes. When HCA bowed out of Britain, he founded his own nursing home company. From there, he went on to create and own a string of nursing homes in England, finally selling out at age of 68 and retiring with enough money to take care of his family and live comfortably for the rest of his life. "I was raised in Newtown, CT, a small, idyllic New England rural farming community 60 miles from New York City. In the 1950s, Newtown was evolving into a residential and light industry area for middle and upper-middle class people starting new families. There were just enough rich upper class New Yorkers creating “second homes” to give the town an air of exclusivity. It was a Saturday Evening Post magazine-cover community with all the Norman Rockwell characters you can imagine, a far cry from the infamous Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting event that took place there in 2012, 76 years after I was born. "By my 3rd year in school, I began to realize that I was not the smartest student in the class. John Verdery, the headmaster of the Wooster School described my deficiency in his book, Partial Recall: The Afterthoughts of a Schoolmaster, 'David was the dumbest student we ever had at the school.’ This refrain was echoed throughout my educational career. Fortunately, Verdery believed in me as a person and acted as one of my mentors. “Later on, I consoled myself in the belief that you don’t need to be too intelligent to be educated, and you don't have to be educated to be successful. You just have to work h

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