CHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer
Rob Wunder III and his father make their way back to their dormitory room at Temple University. Rob Jr. left his job as a teacher of the handicapped in Cape May County, where he'd worked 22 years, so he could stay with his son. His dedication earned him a national father-of-the-year honor in June.
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Guided by his father's hands
A S. Jersey man puts his life on hold to give his son a chance to earn a Temple degree.
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?"
'Faith, love, hope'
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.
