Born in 1925, my father was a child of the Great Depression. For a time, his family lived in a house in Pennsylvania with a dirt floor. His father, an eighth-grade graduate who left school to help support the family after his own father died and who eventually made his living as a carpenter, worked for a while in an ice cream plant. One of the perks of the job was free ice cream, which Grandpa would bring home, but because he and my grandmother had no refrigerator, he would wake my dad and his older brother on his arrival home at 5 a.m. and have them eat the ice cream before it melted. That was their breakfast. After my father returned home from fighting the Germans in Italy, he went to college and then graduated from Philadelphia’s Temple University Medical School. That’s how America worked: You took the hits, …