Even before I'd mastered crutches, I was restlessly eager for the day that I'd trot smartly down the street on an artificial leg. Enterprising companies which dealt in mechanical kickers, from Minneapolis to San Francisco, apparently had alert spies in the field, or more probably, they subscribed to clipping bureaus that gave them immediate notice of accidents resulting in amputations. Anyway. before I was well out from under the anesthetic, I was deluged with literature that described some miraculous wares. The family censored my incoming mail to protect me from this advertising matter. However, much of it arrived in plain envelopes and the nurses occasionally slipped up and delivered it to me. Contrary to parental expectation that this material might upset me, it was like most contraband reading and I reveled in it.
I hadn't been home from the hospital very long before slightly limping salesmen began calling on Father. It is customary for artificial limb companies to employ men who can make practical and personal demonstrations.
My parents, like me, had no idea in mind except to get me onto an artificial leg as promptly as possible. It was our complete expectation that I would go through life with two legs--one detachable. Crutches were only a temporary substitute to keep me ambulatory while I waited impatiently for over a year. on the advice of my surgeon. before being fitted.
This delay was undoubtedly unfortunate. It was responsible in great part, I am sure, for the fact that I habitually walk on crutches today. During that year my yellow pine sticks became almost anatomical. For all practical purposes they were as good as grafted under my arms.
However well I walked on crutches, I was still convinced that I would do much better on a leg. I was fretful to get going. Father studied all the brochures carefully, interviewed the salesmen, and solicited impartial advice wherever he could get any. There was only one artificial-leg user in our town, a recently handicapped woman of about fifty-five. Mother and Father called on her but she was not introduced to me because my parents were afraid her ineptitude would discourage me.
I read all the success stories in the advertising pamphlets and gazed with awed admiration on the cuts of legless wonders who endorsed the various appliances. My choice was a concern which claimed as one of their happy customers a cowboy, a one-legger, photographed with two guns attached to his belt. I somehow dreamed up the notion that the guns came, like premiums, with all purchases. It war an appealing misconception and sold me completely on that company.
Father, however, was not as romantically inclined. I grew very impatient with his deliberation. He finally selected an excellent small firm in Oakland, California, to fashion my first prosthesis. They were reliable; their product was sound--even if they couldn't claim any gun-lugging clients. Moreover, Oakland was the most conveniently located city for me to go for fittings. It was only a scant hundred miles away.
A very easy-stepping representative from the company called on us to make preliminary arrangements. He not only was minus a leg-- he was minus two. My eyes bulged when he rolled up his trousers and displayed his artificial limbs. No gentleman had ever rolled up his trouser legs in our parlor before. Much more fascinating than his exhibitionism, however, was the fact that he had his socks held up, not with garters, but with thumbtacks. The pleasant picture immediately crossed my mind--me, sitting in the midst of an admiring circle, pounding nails into my leg while my horrified audience waited breathlessly for me to bleed.
The salesman was very much on his timber toes. He was jovial and lively. He even rakishly grabbed my startled sister and waltzed her around the room to some vocal "tum-te-tahs" that were vaguely Straussish.
If this remarkable sprite could cavort so impressively on two artificial legs. what couldn't I do with only one? I visualized myself on a flying trapeze--a member of the Russian Ballet with a fancy professional name like Marca Markavitz disguised as a brave drummer boy marching off to the wars-- a cow-girl with the coveted two guns....
The salesman didn't call my attention to his sites of amputation. He had both his natural knees. Regrettably, the great advantage of a surviving knee is usually skimmed over lightly or ignored when artificial limbs are being advertised or when morale is being lifted by its bootstraps.
A great wave of slick stories has pounded the public recently in which disabled soldiers bounce out of their beds, strap on artificial legs, and promptly dance off with pretty nurses. In one such stirring piece of amazing fiction, I recall a wounded veteran, with some trying complexes and a new wooden leg, who was lured onto the dance floor by a very swish female morale-lifter. She was a magnificent pin-up type, graceful and svelte, and she danced like a veritable Pavlova. She not only affected a miraculous cure of the poor boy's complexes, she practically put blood and bones in his wooden leg. A few days later, the susceptible soldier, cheek to cheek with this Song-of-Bernadette healer, was also tripping the light fantastic like a gilded playboy from a follies extravaganza. Only then did this deceitful slick dish break down shyly, under the influence of moonlight, and confess that she too had an artificial leg. The soldier nearly died of the shock--and even I, who wasn't there and just read the story, threw up!
Lots of people dance on artificial legs and dance well. but the smoothest of these talented unipeds invariably are those who still retain a God-given knee. Whether the authors assigned to whip up these fantasies exaggerate from well-intentioned motive or from ignorance or from both, I don't know. It is much more blasting to morale, however, to discover, only after bitter experience, how superior a real knee is to a mechanical one. In my opinion, it would help rather than hurt morale to point this out.
I reread the story of the one-legged blonde operator-- no limper she! I pointed out each word with my index finger and sounded it phonetically--to see if ever once the author hinted as to the site of this remarkable girl's amputation. I would have come close to adoring that glamorous heroine--and on feminine principle I'm against glamourous women--if she'd announced with forthright candor, "I've still got my knee, you know, and I'm so astonishingly adept that I don't have so much as a distinguished limp."
Also, I sometimes toss fretfully through the black night speculating about the Yank. He was supposedly terrifically redblooded American. Didn't he look at her legs? Maybe he had a hollow head as well as a hollow leg. The author didn't say.
But to return to our parlor demonstrator, he took me out on the lawn and kicked a football way down the street. "That's what you'll be doing one of these days," he assured me. He got much more kick out of his leg, however, than I ever did out of mine.
Inside the house again, he took all my measurements. He traced the shape of my surviving leg as a pattern for my new model. He gave Mother instructions for binding my stump with elasticized bandage--an uncomfortable but apparently necessary procedure for shrinking it to fit the socket of a prosthesis. Father agreed to take me to Oakland for a two-week stay when the appliance neared completion so that the final fitting would be exactly right, and so that I could learn from experts the technique of walking.
Father drove us to Berkeley, where Mother, Bernice, and I were to be the guests of some old friends. Father returned home to keep things going at the office and fill the kitchen sink with dirty dishes.
Every day Mother and I took a trolley ride to the leg makers in Oakland. It was a fascinating place. Every employee, from the owner down to the lowliest chore boy, wore some sort of a prosthesis. This situation has been common to every orthopedic appliance concern I have visited throughout my lifetime.
When Bernice went with us, she and I played an engrossing game while waiting in the reception room. Whenever anyone--employee or customer--walked through, we tried to beat each other calling the handicaps. "No legs"--"One leg"--"One arm"--we whispered. It was a variation on "Beaver"; twenty points for a legless woman; ten points for a legless man, etc.
My new limb was made of well-seasoned English willow, a material that has apparently proved very successful. Every leg I have ever purchased from a variety of makers, was contrived of that same wood.
I had presented a right shoe to the manufacturers so that they could build the new foot to size and adjust the ankle mechanism to heel height, but we forgot all about stockings. I habitually wore half socks, and I felt somewhat crestfallen and old-fashioned when Mother dashed out and bought me the long, ribbed white cotton stockings necessary to conceal my new steel joints. My first leg didn't have a hip-control belt. This efficient device was not yet invented and also, I had no consequential hips at the age of ten. I wore a rather complicated overthe-shoulders harness onto which the appliance was fastened by snap hooks.
From the beginning I managed quite well. Every day I paraded up and down a back room at the shop, supporting myself on the hand rods of a walking lane which had a mirror at one end so that I could watch myself. I wasn't particularly impressed. I was surprised that I limped. A very kindly one-legged man who also had a thigh amputation, supervised me. I tended to throw my leg stiffly offside, avoiding the complication of the knee. Patiently, he taught me to maintain proper posture and how to swing the leg to facilitate the knee motion.
I was finally permitted to wear the leg back to Berkeley, although I used my crutches as safety props on the trip, and we went by taxi rather than trolley. Although everyone was delighted with my aptitude and progress, we were advised to remain in Berkeley a few more days to be certain that no hip or groin pain developed to indicate an improper fit.
For practice, every morning I walked round and round the dining-room table, an excellent training place since the table edge served as an emergency support. Every afternoon Bernice and I went out for a little walk. If I grew tired, she put an arm around me as an auxiliary aid on the way home. It became easier every day, and our expeditions were daily farther afield. I figured with unwarranted optimism that it was only a matter of time before the leg would begin running with me.
One afternoon we were on our usual stroll through the university campus when an "unusual" California rain began to fall. We were in danger of being drenched, and since my leg hadn't yet started to run our progress was slow and laborious. In hurrying, I slipped precariously on the pavement. The new knee was cutting perverse capers.
My sister had on a new and very becoming pink challis dress. Bernice was fifteen and very pretty and consequently thought constantly about her appearance "My dress will be ruined!" she yowled.
"I'll tell you what!" I was inspired. "I'll take off the leg and hop home." I was an old hand--or rather an old foot--at hopping.
Providentially, the streets were pretty well deserted since sensible pedestrians had all sought shelter. Against her better judgment, Bernice, who was a strict conformist, agreed. I hid behind some bushes, lifted up my dress, and unhooked my hindrance. Shades of a good sadistic ax murder--Bernice then slung the very realistic stockinged and shoed leg over her shoulder! She glanced furtively in all directions, and we started home as briskly as the somewhat unusual circumstances permitted.
We must have presented a startling picture. Certainly the staring astonished policeman at our first street crossing looked as if he'd just had a run-in with a ghost.
Not by design, I am sure, but by sheer confusion, he chose his perfect lines. "What's coming off around here?" he demanded gruffly.
Bernice, in her acute embarrassment, promptly dropped her encumbrance. It was her first guilty encounter with The Law.
The policeman leaned down and warily touched the leg before picking it up. "Thank the Holy Mother -it's wood!" he said. His breath smelled somewhat peculiar, which may have had some bearing on his next and, to us, incomprehensible speech. "Cold day, you know. Been trying to keep warm--but no matter. This break off or something?"
Bernice explained fully and apologetically while her pink dress wilted in the rain.
The policeman propped my leg against a wall and put us under a store awning. He then talked into one of those fascinating boxed phones attached to a light post. In a few minutes a black Maria pulled up at the curb. Bernice and I were chauffeured home at the city's expense.
Not being a shy little mite, even caught out with my leg off, I suggested to the driver that it would be nice if he blew his siren and also made a little better time.
"O.K., kid," he agreed cheerfully. "This don't happen every day on my beat. I expect you could call it an emergency."
With satisfactory fanfare, we sped through the quiet Berkeley streets. "Isn't it lucky I took off my leg?" I whispered to Bernice. "I always wanted to ride in a police car. Let's try in Oakland tomorrow, shall we?"
"Oh, Louise!" my sister gasped. "I'm going to tell Mama on you. You are a very wicked little girl."
For this, I suppose, there was no really sound argument. Since that day, I've never ridden behind a siren. Nevertheless, there's my formula for turning the trick. And like any ethical scientist, I hereby present it to the world.