Chapter One

My early history was probably much like your early history. No fortune teller could have guessed my future.

My mom, Virginia Richardson Reid, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was raised by her widowed mother, Mabel. She attended and graduated from Bethany College in West Virginia. She was told she had the highest IQ of any of Bethany's freshmen. She majored in journalism.

My father, John Bryan Reid, grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and Miami Beach, Florida. He was an athletic boy - a runner, wrestler, and boxer. In 1934, at the age of fifteen, he contracted polio. His muscles wasted and he was wheelchair-bound because his leg muscles were not able to support his body. His weight fell to less than 100 pounds. His family and he were told that he should "take it easy" because he was going to be "a cripple" for life. Somehow he came to believe that he could rebuild his body through weight lifting and band stretching and he threw himself into a grueling, painful regime of exercise, exercise, exercise - all from his wheelchair. My father built himself up to being an actual poster boy for the magazine Strength & Health. By 1940, he claimed to have been considered one of the strongest men in America. He put himself through correspondence school to become a certified public accountant and later wrote a pamphlet for other aspiring CPAs - "What Every Young Accountant Should Know."

My mother was a green-eyed beauty and a bit on the anxious side. My father was tall, dark, and handsome with a great sense of humor. My parents met in Washington, DC, where my father worked in th