Born on a farm in Garden city, Missouri, Ewing Marion Kauffman moved to Kansas City with his family when he was eight years old. A critical event in his life occurred several years later when Kauffman was diagnosed with a leakage of the heart. His prescription was one year of complete bed rest; he was not even allowed to sit up Kauffman’s mother, a college graduate, came up with a solution to keep the active 11-year-old boy lying in bed reading. According to Kauffman, he “sure read! Because nothing else would do, I read as many as 40 to 50 books every month. When you read that much, you read anything. So I read the biographies of all the presidents, the frontiersmen, and I read the bible twice and that’s pretty rough reading.”