Robert Ledger Burton Founder and Chairman of the Board
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Robert Ledger Burton - The Story

My father was abandoned by his father and abused by his step-father who ultimately convinced his mother to send him away to reform school as an incorrigible. My dad was rescued and adopted by his grandfather, but never lost his sense of being abandoned and abused. His young adulthood was spent feeling wild, out of control, and on a hunt for his father, figuratively and literally.

His family tree was incomplete internally and he plowed through his life: joined the military, escaped to the fantasy of Hollywood, and eventually ran afoul of the law ending up in an Oklahoma federal penitentiary. After his release he returned to his home town, met and married my mother, but continued feeling something was missing.

Just as important as understanding there could have been negative chemistry in a kid’s past, is to understand there probably has been positive as well. As my dad approached fatherhood with his new family, his rescue by his grandfather allowed him to find the metaphorical father within himself so he could be a father to me.

Growing up and as a young man, I remember how my dad seemed to always be looking just ahead of what was in front of him. He had a family, a job, a life, but was still wounded by the absence of his dad, and he continued to look for the answer that would fill that emptiness – some sign of his father.

When I was working at the Ferris School for Boys and starting to figure this field out, we took a family vacation out to California; my dad had gotten yet another address for his father. At fifty-six, my father finally met his father, face to face. They talked in the front yard of his father’s home. He never invited us in or offered us any hospitality.

In the course of that conversation I saw the need to find this man quenched in my dad. The drive that had propelled him through most of his life was satisfied and he understood, in that moment, that his biological father did not hold the answers.

It is common in the drama of our lives, when we are emotionally wounded to be sure that someone else has the answer, if we could find them, and if they would explain their choices. From broken marriages to absent parents, our first inclination is to look to the person who has hurt us, to help us understand. Often we burden ourselves with the responsibility for that hurt – especially children.

For my dad, he had spent his life looking for his father to explain why he had suffered. When he finally found him, he discovered that his father didn’t have the answer. There was no magic resolution that made everything whole. Instead my father learned to tell his story, and how the answer had always been within him.

My drive to do this work – to help kids find the “father” they never had, to find the answers inside them that will unlock their futures, to heal their wounds – comes in no small part to my father’s history and the profound impact his coming to terms with it had on me.

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