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He could just do so many things it didn’t seem like he was blind.”
    Dan Broderick, one of Tom’s sons, says his father worked out a system to take care of most of the household chores, including assembling an elaborate stereo system, washing and waxing the car, and changing the storm windows. He refused to succumb to his blindness. He even refused to let Eileen get disability license plates for the family car when they became available. “What’s a handicap?” he’d say. “I don’t have a handicap.”
    But then Tom isn’t much for cars. Since he can’t drive himself, he likes to walk, and his family was expected to do the same. Katy remembers, “We walked everywhere. He hated getting rides. He thought it was a waste.”
    During his introduction to the world of the blind at the rehabilitation center in Connecticut, Broderick and his friends formed an informal organization to help each other adjust to their new realities. It became the Blinded Veterans Association, and Broderick decided that he should share the lessons of his new life with other veterans who were struggling with their blindness. He began making trips to Chicago-area rehabilitation programs, counseling sightless veterans on the career possibilities in insurance, mortgage sales, and car financing—the hot financial service fields as America exploded out of the cities and into the suburbs.
    â€œI’d tell them about my own struggle—how I was young when I became blind and I knew how they felt. I brought some of them down to my office so they could see the braille machine and what was possible. I don’t feel any special bond with other blind organizations or blind people, but I wanted to help veterans. You have to do it. It was no big deal, really.”
    Tom’s son Dan remembers that, during Vietnam, the nearby Veterans Administration office would send over young men who’d lost their sight in that war. “When you first saw them you thought you were at a wake—some of them were suicidal, with their eyes blown out. Mom would go out and get a case of beer, and they’d sit on the porch with my dad and listen to the White Sox game. Then he’d navigate ’em around our house to show them what we had—five bedrooms, a big house. By the end of the night they’d be back on the porch, drinking beer but laughing now.”
    Another son, Scott: “You know how everyone says their dad is the best. Well, do you know how many people I’ve heard that from about
my
dad? Friends, neighbors, clients. Every kid thinks it, but to hear it from other people is so gratifying. He never let his disability get in the way of anything.”
    Tom Broderick in so many ways embodies the best qualities of his generation. He was so eager to get involved in the war he enlisted in two branches of the service. He was gravely wounded, but once he got over the initial understandable anger, he set out to be the best husband, father, businessman, and citizen he could be—sight or no sight. He didn’t grow bitter and dependent on others. He didn’t blame the world for his condition.
    A common lament of the World War II generation is the absence today of personal responsibility. Broderick remembers listening to an NPR broadcast and hearing an account of how two boys found a loaded gun in one of their homes. The visiting boy accidentally shot his friend. The victim’s father was on the radio, talking about suing the gun manufacturer. That got to Tom Broderick. “So,” he said, “here’s this man talking about suing and he’s not accepting responsibility for having a loaded gun in the house.”
    Tom knows something about personal responsibility. He’s been forced to live as a blind man for more than fifty years, and when asked about the moment when the lights were literally shot out of his eyes, he says only, “It was my fault for getting too high