I come from a family of plodders.
My father, Arthur Houlihan, was one of eight kids who grew up above a saloon on Chicago’s South Side. His father, an Irish immigrant, worked as a laborer for the street railway before marrying my grandmother, who inherited the saloon from her uncle.
Five of my father’s siblings received college degrees. He went to the Armour Institute – now the Illinois Institute of Technology — for two years, where…
