Ulmer was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended Upper Moreland High School.

He received a master's degree in special education from the University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, where he was a student teacher.

[1] As a special education teacher, he taught students with autism, agenesis of the corpus callosum and traumatic brain injury.

[5] He crisscrossed the country interviewing disabled children to give them, as ABC News put it, "an opportunity to be seen and accepted."

[6] A partial transcript, as an example of an interview of a child by Ulmer, is included in the book Flying Starts for Unique Children[7] by author and special-needs teacher Adele Devine.