Lives IV
========

.. West Brownlow
.. Mark Johnson
.. Richard Elrod
.. John Breasted
.. Andy Lopez
.. Lyn Dickey
.. Imogene Dickey
.. Bob Felker

West Brownlow
-------------

For years, some friends and I had a good deal at a
swimming pool at the University of Colorado. It was
called a kayaking course for the disabled. I was the
token gimp, and my many “instructors” and I got to use
the pool to run gates or practice Eskimo rolls or just
horse around.

Then one day, this guy with a *real* fast
wheelchair —you know, no brakes, no armrests,
cambered wheels, nine-position axle, tiny casters,
damped forks, spoilers —well this guy showed up with a
borrowed boat, put a piece of packing foam in the
bottom of the cockpit, braced his back against what
looked like the side of an orange crate, and announced
that he was ready to learn to kayak. His injury looked
high to me, perhaps T2, perhaps too high for a sport
which demands so much of the upper body. West didn’t
know or care. Now, he’s a pretty fair kayaker. And he’s
not T2. He’s C7,8.

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Here’s West, about four days away from wheelchair
or van, on the San Juan River. He got there by kayak.

After two years at the University of Vermont and
two years of active duty in the Navy, what West wanted
to do was ski. He became a Racer Service
Representative for a prestigious ski manufacturer, did
some coaching on the side, and, in 1973, broke his neck
skiing at Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. He was 27.

He spent 10 days in Concord, New Hampshire,
where he feels he got good care. They did a
laminectomy, and he credits the resultant relief of
pressure for turning what is orthopedically a C5,6,7
fracture into C7,8 function. He has good hands, good
arms and minor dysfunction in his wrists. His doctor in
Concord knew of Craig, and did a masterful job of
convincing both West and his insurance company that
that was the place to be.

For West, it was. “Immediately after my accident, I
entered wheelchair sports. Then in the winter, I was
exposed to basketball and I started doing that.”

West has become a wheelchair jock. In the world
of wheelchair sports, he is a prime contender in
whatever he enters.

“Wheelchair sports, for me, have been a Godsend.
Sports are a big part of my life, competitive and
recreational. Track and field events, basketball, archery,
swimming, tennis, kayaking, scuba diving, sailing,
flying, soaring ... as the years progress, I’ve been
searching out sports which don’t require that everyone
be in a chair, because we live in an integrated world
and I enjoy it that way.”

One of his more integrated efforts took place last
April when West, :ref:`Syd Jacobs`, :ref:`Hank Atkinson` and I joined
several AB’s for a five 
day trip down the San Juan River in Utah. The river
was unseasonably high, the water viciously cold and the
whole prospect of extended camping, 80 miles of
seemingly treacherous rapids, and the logistics of
coordinating four bowel programs caused visible
apprehension amongst the new boaters. West: “I was,
and this is an understatement, terrified.” The trip went
well, and both West and Hank have since repeated the
trip. Without the terror.

On the first trip, when West was presented with his
wheelchair after a few days without it, he did wheelies
and spins for about five minutes, just like a happy
puppy rolling in sand. He *likes* his wheelchair. He was
*glad* to see it. For me, the greatest part of a river trip is
that I get to leave my chair behind, sometimes for
weeks at a time. If I could physically do it, I’d kick
mine to death at least once a day just on general
principles. Not West: “This (chair) is a part of my body.
I feel very friendly towards my chair. I like to keep it
running at least as well as a Swiss watch. If it’s not
running good, it feels bad. I wouldn’t want to be
walking around with a limp if I could fix it just like
*that*, and you can do that to your chair.”

What about modifications to the chair for sports?

“I would compare them to different types of shoes or
boots —track shoes, hiking boots, running shoes,
whatever. You have to set up your chair for the event.
For basketball, marathons, everyday use, you set it up
differently. It’s a revolution, and I’m glad it happened
because it has opened all kinds of doors for what you
can do with your chair.”

Basics:

- Movable axles, normally to get the center
  of gravity forward. This shortens the
  wheelbase, so the chair pivots faster. Long
  distance pushers want to lengthen their
  wheelbase.
  
- Cambered wheels. The wheels are wider
  apart at the ground than they are at the
  top. This provides lateral stability and a
  built-in tendency to turn.
  
- Various casters. Small, hard rubber casters
  for basketball and other hard surfaces,
  larger pneumatics for fast outdoor rolling
  on all fours.
  
- A Pandora’s Box of adjustments, including
  seat and back height, sealed bearings,
  instantly removable wheels, small diameter
  handrims, spiders, no-flutter caster forks
  and dozens more.

One of West’s modifications is for the twenty-six-plus
mile marathon. He’s run several, including the
Boston Marathon (he won his class, pushing in the
rain), and uses a chair with an extended wheelbase and
steering handles on the casters. For the downhill
segments, he wears thick leather pads on the insides of
his elbows. These are his brakes, since his hands are
down stabilizing the casters. We filmed him on the Peak
to Peak Marathon in Colorado, which wanders between
7,000 to 9,500 feet in elevation. “It *is* hard work.
There’s a *lot* of uphill on this course, a lot more than I
had realized. Sometimes you don’t even coast with each
push. A big thing about the uphills is that it has
removed every slightest ounce of guilt that I ever felt in
going past people (AB’s) on the downhill. I used to feel
guilty about that.”

This course has a seven mile downhill stretch. “The
policeman told us afterward that he couldn’t keep up
with us after about 45 miles per hour on the curves.
The first time, I was terrified. After you’ve learned that
your equipment can handle the conditions, you can
really get flying. It reminds me of downhill skiing, in
your picking of the line, and the speed, and the
position— you're in a tuck and your face is about a foot
and a half above the pavement. No, I’ve never crashed.
(Knocks on table.) I have gotten air.”

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Actually, West isn’t all hardcore: “One marathon,
some kids were doing dressage alongside the course. I
stopped for a couple of minutes to watch, because I
love horses and love kids too. I figured, what’s two
minutes out of three or four hours? You might not have
the opportunity again. And taking advantage of
opportunities as they present themselves is very
important to me. There’s not always another chance.”

What else does he do? “Despite appearances, I do
a little bit of work in investments and real estate.” He
gives demonstrations at school assemblies, exposing
kids to wheelchair sports. He is extremely sensitive to
AB’s who automatically think wheelers are deranged or
sick, and wants to present a positive image. “I feel it is
my responsibility to educate the public. I feel that
everyone in a chair is an ambassador.”

Parting shot: “People seem to feel they always have
to discuss their problems, disability, this kind of thing.
And life is going on around us. (He gestures toward a
wooded meadow.) You know, there’s thistles growing
here, there’s trees, there’s fun things to do. I mean,
*things are happening*. Grass is growing. And we’re all
living life.”

Mark Johnson
------------

I first saw Mark at the 1979 NSCIF Convention.
He was speaking from the floor, so all I could see was a
frizzy head of hair and all I could hear was the most
down home North Carolina accent imaginable. That’s
what I need for this film, I thought, I need a good ol’
country boy. So I tracked him down and asked if he’d
loan me his accent. He would, he did, and he’s about as
down home as the President.

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At the end of his sophomore year in college, Mark
went diving instead of studying for his English exam.
He distinguished himself, in the rarified world of diving
injuries, by breaking his neck without hitting anything
harder than water. He ran down the face of a rock
quarry and did a shallow surface dive: “I just kind of
coasted through the water and noticed I couldn’t move.
Apparently I didn’t hit anything.” C5,6. 1971. 19 years
old.

He spent two months in general hospitalization,
three months at the Charlotte Rehabilitation Hospital,
five months with his family and returned to school.
DVR paid his, books, tuition and transportation. Later,
they financed his van lift and controls so he’d be able to
transport himself to work independently. Considering
how frustrated others have been by DVR, I wanted to
know how Mark had been so lucky.

“What I found out is how to play the VR game.
And the VR game was to smile, be happy and lay down
your plans to ’em. I'd just say, this is what I want to
do. Here. Because by then, I started seeing it as a
service I was entitled to. Heck, go out and break your
neck, why not use it?”

Perhaps life does begin with spinal cord injury.

“That’s a good concept, really. It helped me realize
that there were certain priorities in life. It’s a shame you
have to be knocked down and kicked a few times to
realize that, but I used to take stuff for granted. You
know, I wanted to be taller, bigger, faster, stronger,
smarter — you want those things, and all of a sudden
you realize *I'd like to be able to tie my shoes. I'd like to
be able to clean my own fingernails*. That kind of stuff
starts to take priority.”

How about relationships with other people?

Before his accident: “I was always shy. I had
trouble initiating relationships. I had more sisters than I
knew what to do with.”

After his accident: “I’d say, Is a person just
interested in me because I’m this horrible handicapped
person? Are they interested in having more than just a
verbal relationship? And so I got to playing games with
myself. I'd say, Oh, they wouldn’t be interested in me
physically. Ultimately I said, What’s the worst thing
that can happen to you, Mark? Rejection, or not even
trying to get your needs met?

“It took close to five years to finally realize that I
wanted to get my needs met. I verbalized a lot of
things: You know I’m paralyzed, you know I don’t have
much sensation, or if you don’t know this, I’m gonna
tell you. And I’m gonna show you. And I’m gonna
reach out and touch you and I’m gonna hold you
because that’s something I need to do and I want to do.
And it’s worked.”

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Mark came away from school with a bachelor’s in
psychology, a master’s in education, guidance and
counseling, and a lot more confidence. He applied for a
number of jobs and was offered several.

“Then the hospital (in Charlotte) said Listen, we
need somebody to do community stuff. And I asked,
Do you see me doing this? Do you see me being able to
do this? And they kept answering Yes. And what the
position entailed was individual, group and family
counseling, in-service education, staff consultation,
community relations, goin’ to talk to groups about
attitudes, doin’ all that kind of stuff, and I said, Hey,
this is unreal. So they called me up, said Do you want
the position? I said Yes. They said Do you want to
know how much you'll make? I said No, it doesn’t
make any difference to me. I’ll take it. So I took it.

“The last three years, everything I’ve done, it just
seemed like the perfect time to do it. Everything fell
into place. I woke up in the morning, went and did it,
and I said, Whoa, that worked out alright. Let’s try
this. And then I just kept doin it.”

Mark is aware of the opportunity and the need to
be a role model, both for the disabled and the able
bodied. An exemplary gimp. A quadriplegic
ombudsman: “I’d send people on errands back in the
beginning years. Hey listen, there’s a curb there and I’m
not gonna be able to get up it. Well now, if it’s a flight
of steps and there’s something in that building I need or
want, I’ll go there and approach the general public and
say, Hey listen, can you assist me up through here? The
visibility of it all— people say How did you get up here,
and I say, I had about four people carry me up this
flight of steps. It automatically sinks into ’em.”

Recreation: Mark is classified IA, which means he’s
competing against the most severely disabled athletes,
and he does it in the dash, slalom, obstacle course, shot,
discus and javelin. He likes competing against people
with similar motor function because it creates a fair
field. He swims, plays table tennis, bowls, plays billiards
and practices with the basketball team. The point is that
recreation brings him a lot of personal satisfaction, and
the *way* in which he recreates is unimportant.

Hot tip: “You gotta learn to laugh, you gotta learn
to verbalize and you gotta be patient. Because it’s goin’
to take time, definitely goin’ to take time. But it’s all
worth it.”

How long did it take you?

“It’s still goin’, and it’s been eight years.”

Richard J. Elrod
----------------

Cook County, Illinois, is enormous. It has 920
square miles, including Chicago, and five and a half
million people.

In 1970, and again in 1974 and 1978, the people of
Cook County elected Richard J. Elrod as their Sheriff.
He is, and was before his first elective term, a C4,5,6
quadriparetic.

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I was nervous about this interview from the start. I
knew that Sheriff Elrod had been injured in a civil
rights demonstration in 1969, kicked by a hippie or a
yippie in fact, so I thought that he might spot my rather
obvious sixties sensibilities and hold them against me.
When I found out that the interview would take place
in the Richard J. Daley Building, I thought he might
simply hold me forever. When I was told to drive into a
basement security area and meet a deputy for escort, I
very nearly bolted. As I wheeled past the guard at the
elevator, past the guard at the outer door, past four
secretaries lined up one after another, past a
plainclothesman at the inner door (who turned out to
be the Sheriff's son), I was truly miserable. Having
penetrated to the heart of the beast, I wanted badly to
go home.

The first nice surprise was being admitted
immediately. I’d always thought that making people
wait was an accepted sign of professionalism in
government. The second nice surprise was that very
highly placed cops can be friendly, warm and
responsive. Sheriff Elrod quickly confessed that he had
no idea who we were or what we wanted, offered to
help us in any way he could and proceeded to give
generously of his time and talents.

It turns out that, in the sixties, Sheriff Elrod went
to a lot more demonstrations than I did. As Chief City
Prosecutor and Legal Advisor to the Chicago Police
Department, he went to them all. When the
Weathermen triggered the Days of Rage in 1969, he was
on the job as usual. He tried to stop a fleeing man and
ended up with a crushed C5 vertebra.

After five months at a general hospital and seven
months in the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, he
regained useful but incomplete function of all four
limbs. He seldom uses a wheelchair, doesn’t use braces
or splints and is ambulatory with one cane and one
modified Canadian crutch. As he sits behind his desk in
an upholstered swivel chair, the only clues to his
disability are a crutch on the floor and somewhat
deliberate hand motions. Mostly, he looks like any
executive anywhere.

At the time of his accident, he was already slated
to run for the Sheriff's office. What’s remarkable is
that, in spite of 10 months of hospitalization, he stayed
on course. He campaigned from the hospital and won
the Democratic primary nomination. As election politics
warmed up, he put in full days of therapy at RIC, then
spoke almost every night at a dinner, fraternal club or
other gathering. It was part of his rehabilitation
process. He first won election as Sheriff in November,
1970.

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In addition to staggering law enforcement
responsibilities, the Sheriff's office employs 4,000 people
and dispenses an annual budget of about seventy
million dollars. Has his injury limited his effectiveness?

“The Office of Sheriff is a very demanding one, but
it’s basically an administrative office. If you pick proper
department heads and proper administrators, you can
set the policy, you can see to it that you’re operating
within the parameters of your budget and you can go
out and see the people as often as possible. I must make
three or four speeches a week. It’s a large county, and I
believe that as much as I can be out, I am out.

“I spend 10 to 12 hours a day in the office, in
addition to being out. I think that having had this
injury, and being handicapped, actually helps me run a
better office because I can put in more time. I don’t
have the diversionary aspect of wanting to go out and
play golf, or handball, or touch football or skiing. This
is my job and this is what I’ve devoted my time to for
the last 10 years.”

John Breasted
-------------

He’s a journalist, and looks the part. Chinos,
checkered shirt, loosely knotted striped tie, pockets full
of pens and pads, and a constant conflict over whether
to smoke a pipe or a cigar, neither one of which stays
lit.

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When he was 19, in 1967, John had a skiing
accident. He collided with a tree, the tree won, and he
is now a T8,9 para living in Hartford, Connecticut.
Somehow, by coincidence, by plain bad luck, by
professional malfeasance, by his own indulgence and
that of others, by getting caught in institutions more
oriented to sickness than to health, by a lot of lousy
advice or by a combination of all or none of the above,
John got pretty messed up after his accident. More, and
for longer, than most of us.

He’s fiercely intelligent, almost the proof that
brains are a liability in this SCI business. Whatever
happened to him is clearly not a result of a lack of
moral fiber or determination, because he has met, face
to face, the most fearsome demons that any of us
encounters in life. He is brutally honest about his
experience, not because he likes talking about it, but
because he knows that a lot of others are just as
depressed as he was. He has reviewed this profile and
has agonized over authorizing its publication. His
permission is a courageous and generous effort to help.

After six weeks of stabilization at a general
hospital in Denver, he flew to New York to be closer to
his family. “I was at (a New York rehabilitation center),
initially, for nine months. Then I went back for three
more months within a few weeks.”

Complications?

“No, I was scared of the outside world. I had no
physical reason to go back. The attending physician felt
it was appropriate to take me back just as a kind of
shelter.”

Even before his first discharge: “I can remember
valuing the protection of the hospital more and more as
the date of discharge drew near. I learned afterward
that there are a lot of people who went through the
same thing. They were very afraid to leave. Some of
them were scared out of their minds with it.” And
John’s timing was off—he got hit hard by a broken
love affair just before he left the hospital.

“One of the things that’s most disturbing to males
when they get hurt is the relationship with women —
intimate love relationships, erotic relationships — and it
certainly was to me. As a 19 year old who’d never had
intercourse, it was very disturbing to wake up numb
below the waist. I felt very cheated. And then to have
the first woman that I slept with be someone I met after
I was a paraplegic and then have her jilt me...”

He learned to drive, went to live with his sister in
Manhattan and went part-time to Columbia. The
University was inaccessible, the courses too technical for
someone more in tune with his emotions than his
intellect, and “It was too much to bite off, too abrupt a
transition and scary as hell living in an apartment. Plus
everything was so scary about Manhattan.” And the
experience with his first woman nagged a little too
much. Hence the headlong flight back to the rehab
center.

The center couldn’t do very much. They’re in the
rehabilitation business there, and psychiatric care for
the severely depressed is something else. John’s doctor
referred him to a psychiatrist “who runs this *crazy*
operation in Pennsylvania. I spent seven months there,
in residence in a house that my parents rented at great
expense, and supposedly the shrink’s supposed to come
in and see you every day. And this is the way he,
successfully I gather, several decades ago treated real
far-out schizophrenic cases. Well, he’s trying to apply it
to just plain ol’ depressed people like me. At that point,
I was *so* depressed —after a while you’re just willing to
try anything and you kind of let people push you into
things because you're trying to get other people to
make decisions for you. That turned out to be
disastrous.”

The famous psychiatrist quickly delegated his
duties to a junior psychologist, the place was a
battlefield of petty jealousies and haggling, and life
there was not serene. “I got increasingly desperate there.
I attempted suicide. At that point, they didn’t want
anything further to do with me because they weren’t
equipped to handle overtly suicidal behavior. I mean,
they just dumped me on my parents and my sister. They
called up and said, You come down and get this kid.
We can’t handle him.

“I went through over a year of really severe
depression after losing that girlfriend in November of
’67, before I was able to function as a paraplegic in any
kind of meaningful way in the outside world.”

Was there a turning point?

“I would say it was another hospitalization. My
parents didn’t know what to do with me, and they
called a neighbor of ours who’s a registered nurse with
her head screwed on right. And she said that they
seemed to have a good psychiatric service at Yale-New
Haven Hospital and why didn’t they call them up? That
was a good move. Yale-New Haven turned out to be a
place that helped me out a lot, and I was able to pull
out of my depression there.”

He spent four months at Yale-New Haven. Then
the turning point wasn’t some sort of cataclysmic
awakening?

“It was not an event or any one relationship. It was
a day by day re-emergence into the world through many
relationships and the support of the treatment program.
I was able to come back home by late May, on passes,
and then in June for good, to live at home and work as
a laboratory assistant. I enjoyed the work enormously.

It’s really gratifying, once you do emerge from the
period of depression and uncertainty and feeling, How
am I going to make it in a world which I used to hike
and walk and run in? Once you start feeling powerful
and competent in that world, as a disabled person, it’s a
great thing.”

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Quickie 10 years: He returned to college in 1970,
enjoyed it and graduated in 1972. Spent two years in
medical school, lost another girl friend, had trouble
with both his bladder and school and took a leave of
absence. He “floundered” (his word) around Hartford
for a couple of years. “In between leaving medical
school and starting working for a newspaper three years
ago, I worked for an insurance company part-time and
did a lot of volunteer work for the medical school. And
I bounced in and out of two psychiatric admissions.”
Why the admissions? Bad times. It’s been a long road.
“During the second hospitalization, I started working at
journalism again, something I'd always done in high
school and college and everywhere, but I started to
think about doing it as a central activity.”

What does he do now? “I’m not a salaried reporter.
Never have been. I’m now working as a freelancer for a
neighborhood paper. I did work for two years for
another paper, a weekly called the *Newington Town
Crier*. I was really full-time there for a year, but my
official status was as a freelancer.”

Can you make it as a freelancer?

“No. I can’t now. Very few people can. I’m fortunate
to be subsidized by my family while I’m still doing it.
The Social Security people called up and wanted to
know what I was earning.” When he told them he
earned about $30 a week for 30 hours work, they said
to forget it.

Is he a gimp rights activist? Well, after a fashion:
“An issue that’s important to me, as a 12 year
paraplegic now, is violence. Of all kinds. I think that
prevention of violence is a great way of preventing
disability. Disabled people should be concerned about
preventing war, as well as tooting in the legislature for
the rights of the disabled. I don’t think people who just
concentrate on ramping curbs and getting better
veterans’ benefits are being socially responsible in
limiting their political activities to that kind of thing.
Another thing I feel is important in preventing
disability —and I think that freshly injured people could
and should be aware of it because they could go out to
help prevent it from happening to other people —is that
we need to teach people how to assess risk and how to
go up close to injury but stay safely this side of it. The
automobile is the third thing. Prevention of disability
through automobile accidents is, in the US, statistically
more important than either war or sports. I’d like to see
disability prevented on all three fronts.”

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How about human relationships now? “I felt until
1976 that life wouldn’t be very tolerable for me without
that kind of crazy version of erotic love that we’re
taught is supposedly standard for everybody. I’ve gone
through a big change in my attitudes towards that.” He
finds now that he can spread his friendships more
diffusely, to more people, and feel comfortable with
warm and affectionate relationships with many people
from many parts of his life. Old friends, new friends,
school friends, work friends, neighborhood regulars (of
which he’s one), and, especially, the Quaker Friends
Meeting. He joined the Quakers two years ago and likes
what it has done for his life.

John talks a lot about the support he gets from his
neighborhood community, both physical and emotional.
“You get to *see* your neighbors here, there’s a lot of
face to face contact and you develop rapport with them
right away. I can go right out the front door and I can
see neighbors, have conversations with them, feel
supported and go back and not feel isolated.”

Does he feel that it’s important to make himself
highly visible in the neighborhood? “I guess it is, just by
definition, or I wouldn’t be doing it. I don’t do it
consciously, to get out and be seen. I go out because I
want to go out. But it sure is important to me, as a side
effect, more than as a goal, to be seen as someone
who’s out rather than someone who’s closeted away to
be pitied. But there was a long time there years ago,
where it would be hard to say which was the
motivation. It was hard to do at the time. Yeah. Very
scary.”

Andy Lopez
----------

Andy Lopez was a 17 year old into bikes and
speed, a whiz kid with very winning ways at the local
motocross and dirt tracks. He spent every warm
weekend either racing or out riding with his buddies,
usually on the maze of motorcycle trails the Forest
Service maintains though the Rampart Range. To
Andy, dirt riding was a passion, a way of life. It was
what you did every Sunday.

It still is. Since his auto accident in 1975 (T4,5),
Andy still haunts the foothills, sand washes and back
roads with his biking friends. He does it in a dune
buggy.

I always thought a dune buggy was some kind of
lumbering all-terrain vehicle, or a crawling lunar
module, or maybe a cute little minicar with a fringed
canopy and built-in coeds.

Here’s a dune buggy.

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It’s a Honda Odyssey, hand controlled, available
from stock in any large city. Andy wasn’t entirely
satisfied with the factory model, so he shipped the
engine off to California for a Honda-approved custom
hot rodding job. When it came back, it was a pretty
mean machine. It’s extremely fast.

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“You have to go fast. That’s something in me, I’ve
always had in me. I got this dune buggy and I want to
go faster and faster and faster! It blows some of my
friends’ minds.”

I asked Bob, one of Andy’s dirt friends, if Andy
slowed him down: “Him? He keeps a pace that I have
to keep up with.” He went on to tell me that all Andy’s
friends had tried driving the buggy, but nobody was
good enough at it to make it perform. It’s not like
putting training wheels on a motorcycle; it’s a skill unto
itself because all the weight is on the rear wheels and
there’s no effective way to steer except with engine
power. Andy’s got the touch and it does blow minds.

He’s also rolled it. He wears a complete racer’s
chest harness and ties his legs in, so he wasn’t hurt. Is it
dangerous? “Yeah, I suppose so. Everything’s
dangerous.”

I noticed that Andy used a thin cushion on the
bucket seat, and asked about weight shifts and the
possibility of pressure sores when bouncing along a
rough track at 60 miles per hour. I was informed that
since the machine has no suspension and is air-borne
most of the time, it *is* a weight shifter. Oh.

“There’s a certain feeling about being in the dirt.
There’s no law, no stop, no go. Just do your own thing,
which I’m into.”

Dirt rider outlaw? Not entirely. Since his accident,
Andy has completed his GED and two semesters of
college. He goes to school two days a week and works
at Craig Hospital the other three.

“I’m working with data research and interviewing
patients, finding out what they’re paying pre-admission
to Craig, what hospitals they’ve been at, then we do
follow-up on them when they come back to Craig.”

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He’s good at his job. People obviously feel at ease
with him, and he seems like anything except a social
worker. That’s a compliment.

A few one-liners:

- The wheelchair: “My biking friends *love* my
  chair.” (They tear it up playing with it.)
  
- Rehabilitation: “You learn something every
  day. Something’s hard, you keep doing it
  and it gets easier.”
  
- Hot Tip: “Stay active, don’t stay at home,
  just keep moving.”

Speedy Andy Lopez, dirt bike outlaw, moving
target, was last seen vrooming off toward a master’s
degree in sociology.

Lyn Dickey
----------

How’s this for a resume?

“When I first came back to the state in 1974, I
went to work for the Powder River Resources Council,
just a group of ranchers in the northern part of the
state trying to keep the coal development in that part of
the country under control. I did that (read, she *ran*
that) for three years, then I took a short summer job
doing some water research for Senator Malcolm
Wallop, who had just been elected from Wyoming at
that time. And from there I came down to Cheyenne
and went to work for Governor Herschler as the
director of his Energy Conservation Office, did that for
a year and a half, and now I’m working as his
legislative liaison. And as soon as I’m through with this
session (of the legislature), I’m planning to hit the road
and just travel for a few months.”

She forgot to mention that the governor also
appointed her to the Environmental Quality Council,
which oversees all the state’s environmental laws. Not
bad for a hometown kid from Buffalo, Wyoming.

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Back to 1966, when Lyn was 17. She was in a car
wreck which left her a T8 para and her mother a quad.
When I made the mandatory comment that some
people had all the luck, she conceded that it was a
major experience for the entire family.

Lyn was pretty beat up, so she cooked up a few
projects to pass the time while she was recuperating.
She finished her junior year of high school by sending
recorded tapes back to her teachers in Buffalo. She also
launched a political career.

“I tape recorded a speech of all the reasons they
should elect me student body president, and they played
it at the assembly where all the other candidates gave
their speeches. Sympathy vote didn’t make it, though;
"I came in second.”

She spent the summer at Craig Hospital, and, come
autumn, was back at her old high school in Buffalo.

“The Johnson County High School has about
seven levels, with worlds of stairs among all the levels.
So all the football players in my class—they loved it —
there were contests to see who could get me up and
down the stairs the fastest. They would *run* up and
down the stairs, which is probably why I have not the
least qualms about being hauled up and down stairs by
much of anybody.”

She graduated, worked in a local bank that
summer and went to the University of Illinois. She
graduated as an English teacher, a profession she hasn’t
really exercised, and went through a second spinal
fusion and an aortic repair somewhere along the way.

Lyn’s first career decision was to get into some sort
of voluntary service, so she asked VISTA and the
Mennonite and Jesuit voluntary services. “The
Mennonites were the only ones who seemed to feel, like,
they’d never *had* anybody in a wheelchair before and
didn’t really know what I could *do*, but they figured
that if I wanted to try it, they’d take me. So I moved to
Wichita and worked for a year in a house full of other
volunteers.”

In addition to serving as receptionist, secretary and
fund-raiser to the voluntary service, she worked on a
few other interests:

- She taught adult education at night for the
  Wichita school system.
  
- She organized the Wichita chapter of
  Common Cause.
  
- She fought a nuclear power plant, and won.

The Mennonites may think twice about their next
gimp.

Her next decision was to move into citizen action,
so she paid Wyoming a visit before heading to
Washington, DC, which is where she figured citizens
went to get active. But fate, or whatever, delivered her
to a board meeting of the Powder River Basin
Resources Council, whose only staff person had just
quit.

“So I figured, why go to Washington DC? These
guys need some help. Convinced them that they should
hire me, and just fell right into it.” And so began the
five year saga of Wyoming’s *enfant terrible*. The rest is
*not* history, for I suspect that Lyn’s upcoming
sabbatical is simply the calm before the storm. In the
meantime, here are some glimpses of whatever it is that
makes her tick so dynamically:

Did the governor first appoint her because she was
a woman? “Doubtful.” Because she was a paraplegic? “I
don’t think he even *knew* it.” She goes on to say that
she thinks she was appointed because she was perceived
as being a “reasonable radical.” Huh?

Once Lyn had the Energy Conservation Office set
up, she grew restless with the job because it was
primarily educational and “because there were no real
political fights going on, and I miss the head-butting.”
So...

“I got the governor to hire me to be his legislative
liaison for the session. Plenty of fights here. And the
legislative session surely is a time when you’ve got
plenty of dates certain— you’ve got a battle that has a
time when it’s won or lost.”

Here’s what a legislative liaison person does: “See
that the bills he (the governor) wants to have passed are
moving through the process as best they can. Letting
him know where they are, letting him know who’s
taking what position on them, getting information to
the legislators at his request or at their request —
basically, just to track the legislation for him.”

But... “It has not been nearly as satisfying a job
for me as lobbying for Powder River, because there’s no
identifiable constituency. You just have the governor
and you have, theoretically, all the people in the state.”

She has an interesting sense of context. Here’s what
she feels about her accomplishments of the last five
years: “I have attempted to influence the political
history of the State of Wyoming, and I’ve probably had
an influence on it. I’ve spent the last five years of my
life basically trying to help keep some controls on the
growth of the mineral industry in the state, and yet for
all I know, it might have been far better if I hadn’t
done that. The best thing in the world for getting things
back to a degree of sanity in this country might very
well be to just continue the exploitation as fast as you
can and with as little thought as you can so that you
reach the critical point sooner and everybody can turn
around and head in the right direction. I think that
people who feel they are influencing things in the
direction they *seem* to be influencing them, they may
be right and they may not be right. It’s just a way to
spend your time. Really. Everybody has to do
*something*.

“I want to be sure I keep my grounding in the
things which I think are truly important, which have
nothing to do with energy or politics, but with just
living and sharing yourself with people and being
there.”

Lyn obviously knows a great deal about dealing
with people, but she’s not immune to the reactions of
others to her chair: “Everybody you run into, the first
thing they notice about you is that you’re in a
wheelchair. There are people who don’t get over
noticing that as being the most important part of you.
And these people —they’re simply people you’ll never
get to know. I think that’s true of most any individual.
Some people can’t get over the fact that you’re *bald*.”

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Her work requires her to do an astounding amount
of travel, which she loves. I asked her about practical
problems: “I think it’s downright handy to have a
catheter in you when you're spending a lot of time on
the road, because you can just pull over and hang your
bag out the door. Now on an airplane, it’s much more
difficult, it’s true. There’s no really acceptable way to
go to the bathroom in an airplane. When it becomes
necessary for me to, I simply pee in the throw-up bag
and ring for the stewardess. And none of them ever
seem to object, to tell the truth, but I find it somewhat
embarrassing.”

And about the Privilege of Paralysis: “A lot of
times you'll get asked to move to the front of the line so
you don’t have to wait, when obviously you’re better
equipped to sit in line than most of the people who are
standing up.” Cops are nice to her, and although she’s
been stopped numerous times, she’s never been given a
ticket. “I’ve always felt that the first cop that has the
guts to give me a ticket when I’m speeding, I'll be
forced to congratulate him for his courage.”

Update: Lyn, when last seen, had just been given a
ticket for speeding. She did not congratulate the
patrolman. She was leaving the next day to lobby for
Powder River in Washington, DC.

Imogene Dickey
--------------

Buffalo, Wyoming, is a three-stoplight town on the
east flank of the Bighorn Range. It’s an old town with
wide, shady streets, gracious houses and the beginnings
of the energy boom starting to show around the edges.
It’s still the kind of place small town lovers love. We’ve
come to the home of Will and Imogene Dickey,
longtime residents. There’s a ramp in the back, a beat
up VW bus with a lift and a Chair-E-Yacht. This last is
a powered trike which will transport a wheelchair and
its occupant. It’s designed and manufactured in
Shoshoni, Wyoming, a town lots smaller than Buffalo.
And best of all, Lyn Dickey is here on a visit. Her
story precedes this one.

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As previously reported, the Dickey family won the
paralysis sweepstakes back in 1966 when a car wreck
left mother Imogene a C5,6 quad and daughter Lyn a
T8 para. Imogene was 42 then, with four children.
From her account, the accident was hilarious...

“We just did the old roll, three or four times, and
she and I ended up under the car. When the wrecker
from Gillette came out, finally, to lift the car off of us,
it just got the winch hooked up and was out of gas. I
always thought that was neat. The wrecker ran out of
gas.”

Were there any guilt feelings about the accident?
Lyn: “*Everyone* felt guilty. I always figured I was the
only one who felt guilty, because I was driving. I didn’t
find out ’til years later that Mom felt guilty ’cause she
decided on the route, Dad felt guilty ’cause he didn’t go,
and (brother) Dave felt guilty ’cause we were coming
down to see him. A friend felt guilty ’cause she had had
a dream the night before that we were gonna wreck,
and she didn’t tell us...”

Imogene: “But I tell you, the guy who took care of
that was Will (her husband). He said to *forget it!* You
don’t do anything but use up a lot of energy and make
people miserable, worrying about what you should have
done. There’s no way to go but up. And the more time
you spend dwelling on things that might have been,
the less productive life you’re ever gonna live. And Will
just got that across to Lyn and me both.”

Lyn: “I think it’s true that Dad was instrumental.
He always had taught us, and continued to teach us,
*Wherever you are right now, that’s where you are.
That’s what you deal with.*”

After seven weeks in a general hospital and five
months at a SCI unit, both were back home in Buffalo.
While Lyn was being run up and down the many stairs
of her high school by eager football players, her mother
was having a different experience.

Imogene’s first challenge was being mother to four
children, one of whom was a paraplegic. “The biggest
thing was frustration. Absolute frustration. In the
morning, when the kids would all get off to school, I’d
come to this kitchen door and see every conceivable
surface covered with something. I hate clutter. I have to
have a neat place to have a neat mind. So I got in the
habit of backing in so I couldn’t see it all. I could do it,
one thing at a time, but if I had to look at it all, I
couldn’t see how I could ever make any order of it. So I
just backed in.” (Maybe that’s how we should all
approach our injuries: *Back* into coping. One thing at a
time. The parts, taken singly, can be less than the whole
just as the whole can exceed the sum of the parts.)

Their doctor’s wife intuited that Imogene’s return
home might be a difficult time. “So she had this bunch
of gals, about 10 or 12 of them, and every day one or
two of them came in. Each morning. Not to work,
necessarily, but just so I’d be up and in here and talking
and living. And they did that for years. I feel like I have
the greatest bunch of people around in the world.

“You expect your family to rally around and be
what they should be, but your friends are the ones that
keep you going. They expect you to do things, and you
just don’t want to disappoint them. You don’t really
have any choice. You either roll over and play dead, or
you stay in the swim of things.”

Buffalo winters are cold and deep. How does she
deal with below-zero temperatures and all the snow?
“Everything I belong to, as much as I can, I ask them
to meet here in the winter. It works out well. So I have
Musical up here a lot, PEO, anything, any committee
I'm on, Republican Women’s Club meets here regularly,
and that’s great because that way I can stay active
without having to go out a lot in the winter time.”

How about your church? “It’s as important a
family to me as my own immediate family. I feel that a
church home and a church family is an absolutely
essential ingredient in my life. I feel a closeness to my
church.”

Lyn points out that this kind of support, from
friends, membership groups and church, would be less
available in a larger town. It’s an interesting trade-off.
So many of us have moved to the warm weather, the
flat terrain, the accessible architecture, or just to be
near a hospital or rehab center. Imogene has stayed on
in a small and remote mountain town with vicious
winters, steep terrain, few architectural amenities and
only the usual rural health care. Although she didn’t
say so in as many words, I think she’s decided that her
roots are worth more to her than her convenience. In
these mobile days of scattered friends and families, few
of us can find our roots, let alone treat them with love
and respect. There’s some nice values operative here.
Yet Imogene does admit that spending some time in
San Diego each year would go a long way toward
tempering the impact of Wyoming winters.

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Now that her four kids are out the door, and she
and Will are once again the chief boarders, she’s written
and published a cookbook, *Recipes and Cooking Hints
for Brides and Other Handicapped People*. The title
alone is worth the paltry price, and the recipes are
what you make of them. Literally. Here’s a gem from
the preface:

“I believe the shucking of false pride was one of the
most difficult things I had to accomplish. Finally I
accept that although I may not like it, one of my chief
responsibilities as a physically handicapped person is to
help able bodied people. Help them feel comfortable,
help them feel useful. I have long known that the only
truly happy people are those who are lovingly doing for
others. So I do all I can, but try to accept help
graciously for the things I can’t.”

The *Joy of Cooking* doesn’t have anything that
good in it.

Bob Felker
----------

In 1968, Bob was 20 years old. He had a high
school education, some additional technical and auto
mechanics training and a Louisiana accent thick enough
to cut. And after tangling unsuccessfully with a forklift,
he had a broken back. He’s a T10 para.

Bob would be described down south as a good ’ol
boy. He’s a wiry man, with deepset eyes that look at the
world with a twinkle from somewhere way back in his
head. I can never tell when he’s pulling my leg or being
serious, and I usually feel that he’s doing both at once.
His life is pretty good right now, but it took him a few
years of searching, after his accident, to find his new
self.

“The hardest thing was goin’ out into the real
world after I was hospitalized for 14 months. During
this time I never had any real interaction with the
outside world —I was so used to the hospital type of
setting and the other spinal cord injuries, other
wheelchairs around all the time. Goin’ out in public by
myself, goin’ to the grocery store, shopping, anything,
just bein’ able to cope with the general public — that’s
the roughest thing.

“I can handle it now. I just look at all the things I
got goin’ for me, and depression doesn’t stand much of
a chance of lastin’ very long.”

Bob was particularly self-conscious about his
wheelchair. He didn’t like it, and he figured strangers
didn’t like it either.

“I had to realize that if people do look at me, it’s
probably out of curiosity. I like to think that maybe
they’re *admirin’* me. They’re admirin’ the things that I
do. And I show off, pull a wheelie or somethin’, so they
can really admire me.

“Kids are neat. They’re really innocent and they’re
not afraid to ask questions. I remember one little kid
asked me one time why I was in a wheelbarrow, and I
thought it was funny and I explained it to him real
good, sure did.”

As his dealing with the public became more skillful,
he started working more energetically on personal
relationships. Sex was a problem, and he dealt with it.

“At first I didn’t think I was capable of *any* type of
sex, and I believed that if I couldn’t have sex exactly
the same way I did before I was injured, in the ‘normal’
way, then it wasn’t sex. Now I’ve learned different
techniques, different feelings, learned to recognize my
feelings ... my sex life now is better than it ever was, it
really is.

“Met this girl, she really kind of turned my head
around and made me realize what life was all about and
how interestin’ it could be and how good it could be.
For the last year or so, I’ve really been high.”

Bob now lives in a house by the foothills, shared
by two paraplegics. “Won’t be livin’ there too much
longer, hopefully, ’cause I’m going to be gettin’ married,
get me a *new* roommate.”

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Along with marriage, education is a high priority in
his life. “I came up here from Louisiana with schoolin’
in mind, and that’s what I’ve been doin’ the last two
years. Goin’ for my bachelor’s in human services and
planning to do graduate work in rehabilitation
counseling.”

What’s it like going back to school?

“It’s a bummer at first. After you been out so long,
and of course goin’ to school with kids a lot younger
than you is kind of a pain, too. But after the first
semester you’ve pretty well got it whipped. It’s fun, it
sure is.”

Bob may be on a winning streak, but he still needs
to live until he gets his degree. He does this by plying
his old trade, auto mechanics. He specializes in mobile
tune-up jobs, but works on any part of a car that needs
fixing. He’s earned a local reputation as a top notch
mechanic. Like many of us, he faces conflicts with the
Social Security system.

“Social Security is a real booger, it sure is. It
destroys your incentive to work. I make $264 a month
Social Security — that’s my total income —if I go to
work I stand a real chance of losin’ this income plus
losin’ my schoolin’. So I have to do this auto mechanics
on the side to supplement my income in order to live,
and I got to do it under the table.”

About his work? “I like it. I like to be able to say
that I can do it. It’s kind of an ego trip and it also gives
me a sense of self-worth. Lots of times an able bodied
person’ll come to me and ask for advice or for my
work. I may not be able to do some of the things he
can do, but I can do some things he can’t do. I get
enjoyment and fulfillment out of that. I like to see the
results of my work, like all mechanics, cause I *can* see
the results. I’m not goin’ to do it the rest of my life;
that’s why I’m goin’ to school. I’m tired of gettin’ my
hands dirty.”

Today, Bob has braces on and is draped over the
engine of my ’73 Ford. He’s just fixed a post-ignition
problem it was having. He stands up beside the car,
looks at his hands, and delivers his manifesto:

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“I'll get me a degree, get me a secretary. I’ll let
somebody else get their hands dirty. This stuff’s alright
for amateurs, but I’m goin’ to be *pro-fessional!*”

Here’s a story Bob told: “About two or three feet
high, the grass was, and I was sittin’ right in the middle
of it in my wheelchair fishin’, and somethin’ started
comin’ at me through the grass. And the way it was
movin’, it looked like a big old snake, it sure did. Tried
to turn around to get out of there, and when I did my
front wheels fell in a hole and I was stuck there and this
thing kept comin’ closer and closer —really gettin’ close.
When it was about 10 feet away, I was so scared that I
just made a superhuman effort and jerked my wheels
out of the hole and got turned around and pushed all
the way back to the road and this thing was following
me all the way. It came out of the grass and it was a
cotton pickin’ armadillo —big ’ol armadillo, as
harmless —it sure was. So I tried to chase *it* and I was
goin’ to *get* it and *eat* it. Sure was. But I couldn’t ketch
it, sure couldn’t.”

There’s a moral here somewhere about snakes in
the grass and things appearing scarier than they really
are, but Bob would be the last person to bludgeon us
with it...