“I just want to be one of the crowd” by Fred Yahn
Gannett News Service, 1973

Ithaca, N.Y. – As Ken Kunken lay in a hospital bed for 10 months, first at Arnot-Ogden Hospital in Elmira and then in Oceanside, L.I., and the Rusk Institute in New York City, graduating from Cornell University was a distant pinnacle.
“It was so tough, during those long hours in the hospital.” He recalls.
“And the first semester back at Cornell, two years ago, was the hardest.”
Kunken, 23, who was paralyzed from the neck down following a freak lightweight football collision here in October 1970, was graduated last month from Cornell University.
The industrial engineering student received his bachelor’s diploma just as 3,000 fellow classmates received theirs, as one of the crowd. /full article/