Both his parents work in a bakery. They divorce when he is still young… See more

 

At age six, his appendix bursts. Infection spreads through his body and he slips into a coma.

Doctors operate on him again and again. He spends nearly a full year in the hospital and doesn't come home until May 1948.

By the time he's eight, he still can't read.

He falls so far behind at school that he starts skipping class entirely. A neighbor named Marie tutors him twice a week, year after year, until he almost catches up.

Then in 1953, at thirteen, he gets sick again. This time it's tuberculosis. He's sent to a sanatorium. He stays there for two years.

Here's what makes it worse: while he's locked away fighting for his life, other kids his age are finishing school and starting jobs. He's stuck in a bed, watching two more years of his childhood disappear.

But something happens inside that sanatorium nobody expects.

Staff hand instruments to the sick children to keep them moving. Richard gets a wooden mallet. He starts tapping it against the cabinet beside his bed, over and over, until it becomes a habit he can't shake.

He leaves the sanatorium in 1955, barely able to read or write. He takes a job delivering for British Rail, then works as a ferry barman, then becomes a trainee joiner. On his very first day at that job, he injures his finger.

That's when his stepfather, Harry, buys him something that changes everything: a real drum kit.

In 1957, he starts his own skiffle band. Two years later he joins Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, one of Liverpool's top local acts.

In August 1962, a struggling band called the Beatles asks him to replace their drummer. He says yes.

Within two years, that band is the most famous group on the planet.

The boy who couldn't read at eight, who lost years of his childhood to hospital beds, grows up to play drums on "With a Little Help from My Friends" and "Yellow Submarine." He writes "Octopus's Garden" himself.

He goes on to earn ten Grammy Awards, an Oscar, two inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and a knighthood in 2018.

Today the world knows him as Sir Ringo Starr.

But before any of that, he was just a boy in a hospital bed, tapping a wooden mallet against a cabinet, with no idea that rhythm would save his life.

Sometimes the thing that breaks you is the thing that builds you.