When Ginny Judson met Dick Thornburgh at the 1963 wedding of a college classmate in Pittsburgh, she knew instantly he was the one for her. “I found out he was a man of full disclosure,” she says. “On our second date – before he’d even kissed me – he took me to his house and showed me his three little boys asleep in their beds.”
Their mother (also named Ginny) had been killed in a car accident three years earlier when the children were 3, 2, and 4 months old. Peter, the baby, had sustained a serious brain injury in the crash.
Ginny and Dick were married just six months after they met. At the time, he was a 31 -year-old lawyer starting a career that would lead to such top-echelon posts as governor of Pennsylvania, U.S. attorney general, and undersecretary general of the United Nations. “One of his most attractive qualities was that he was a wonderful father,” Ginny says now. “He even asked if our wedding could be postponed a week so he could be with his son David on his fifth birthday.”
Ginny gave up her job as a grade-school teacher to become the boys’ second mother (she hates the word stepmother) but got more than she’d bargained for: “I was a naive twenty-three-year-old; I cried a lot during those first few months because I felt so inadequate. Peter was almost four and couldn’t walk or talk – a large section of his skull had been removed to prevent additional …