Gerald “Junie” Ford was boiling mad. Those meddling twins were at it again. The two girls, Marian and Alice Steketee, had rounded up the neighborhood kids and brought them to play in his backyard. In his yard, with his cherry tree! He was outnumbered. The twins were twice his age. But he stormed up and yelled at them anyway.

This wasn’t Junie’s first argument with other children, and it wouldn’t be his last. In fact, he had the worst temper of any kid in his neighborhood.

And anger wasn’t his only problem. Around the time he turned seven, Junie developed a terrible stutter. He could form the beginnings of words, but he couldn’t say the endings. He began to lose confidence, and that made him even angrier.

Junie’s mother tried everything to keep her son from throwing temper tantrums. She would punish him by twisting his ear or sending him to his room. But nothing seemed to work.

One day, after an especially bad fit, Junie’s mom took him aside and gave him a poem by an English writer named Rudyard Kipling. “Read this,” she said. “It will help you control that temper of yours.” Junie eyed the paper suspiciously. The poem was called “If,” and it began with these words:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…

Hmmm, it sounded like a personal message to Junie. He kept reading:

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too…

Junie realized that his mother was trying to tell him something. The best people keep calm when bad things happened. They didn’t lose their cool. It made sense.

From that day forward, whenever Junie got upset, his mother would have him repeat the poem—the whole text, from beginning to end—until he calmed down. After repeating it many, many times, he eventually took the poem’s message to heart. Soon, his fits of fury ended.

As for his stuttering, that seemed to disappear on its own—and Junie was much older before he understood why. The reason had to do with penmanship. See, Junie Ford was left-handed, a quality that today we don’t find unusual. (About one in ten people are natuarally left-handed.)

But back in the 1920s, teachers would try to turn “lefties” into “righties” by forbidding left-handed kids from writing with their dominant (left) hand. Junie’s teachers forced him to copy long passages of text with his right hand. The work was frustrating and may have fueled a lot of his outbursts. Coincidentally, he started stuttering around the same time as he was learning to write.

Today, many scientists believe that writing with the “wrong” hand flips a switch in the brain that triggers a speech impediment. Once you flip the switch back, over time the problem corrects itself. As soon as Junie’s teachers allowed him to write with his left hand, his speech improved. The stutter vanished and his confidence returned.

The angriest boy in the world went on to become one of the best-liked kids in his high school. He was a straight-A student, an eagle scout, and a star football player. In college, he graduated near the top of his class.

According to those who knew him best, there’s one thing Gerald Ford never did as president: he never lost his cool. He’d stopped getting angry a long time ago.