My dad had a
wooden leg.
The Oklahoma
teenager was trying to jump a freight train in Tucumcari, New Mexico in the
Depression when he slipped or missed the handhold on the boxcar's open door.
The big steel
wheels sliced off his right leg between the ankle and the knee and his little
finger on the right hand. Somehow he lived, not bleeding to death, not dying
from the pain. I guess you could say he
suffered the rest of his life for that moment, though he didn't talk about it
much . . . I never asked him.
I remember him
talking about coming home "to
die" and about "feeling sorry for himself," until someone chewed
him out and got him "back on his feet again." He hobbled on crutches for awhile and then
eventually got a wooden leg.
It must have been
quite a shock emotionally, because a few months earlier, he had been "Iron
Man Clark" on the Comanche Indian football team. Short at five foot nine, he was husky,
thick-chested. He played tackle. You
didn't get by him on that scrimmage line.
And now, well now
he was a "cripple."
But once he
learned to walk again, the wooden leg didn't slow him down.
The family was
poor, as were most in Oklahoma those days, but despite the leg, he went to
college to study his first love . . . art. They said he learned to draw before
he learned to walk. If you see his early
work and sketches from art school, you'd believe it.
Dad specialized in portraits, later at landscapes. He never completed a degree--probably running
out of money, or perhaps just being too interested in art to finish the other
requirements.
He headed west again and earned a bachelor's living in Albuquerque and
Santa Fe, Taos, Carlsbad, in bars, hotel lobbies and nightclubs across the
state. There he'd do "quick sketches" of whoever would pay, and some
who wouldn't. But 50 cents for a sketch
would buy beans and gravy and more in those years and Dad was doing what he
liked . . . drawing and traveling and meeting people and talking and living
free in "God's Country."
When the War
started, instead of going off to fight the enemy like his brothers did in the
Pacific, he stayed at home . . . although he tried to enlist. The Army didn't want a "cripple." Perhaps the wooden leg saved his life. But he
did his part, getting a job with Consolidated and North American Aircraft in
Fort Worth, doing some of the drafting on the big B-24 Liberator bombers and
the sleek P-51 Mustang fighters, aircraft that helped win the war.
And the cripple
also drew a portrait of famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle with a background
war scene. That portrait sold a million
dollars of War Bonds in Dallas in 1944, and Ernie Pyle autographed the portrait
for the "crippled" artist. The
portrait was given to Pyle and ended up in the correspondent's Albuquerque
home, where his wife eventually burned it.
Years later,
Clark and his family moved back to New Mexico where he could draw and paint
landscapes in his leisure time.
His wooden leg
became the brunt of jokes, which he enjoyed.
Even though he was a cripple, he went deer hunting in the New Mexico
mountains with some archer friends one year. Someone wrote a humorous poem that
if Clark didn't kill the deer with his arrows, he could beat it to death with
his wooden leg. He laughed. We all did.
And the joke was
on the others too. Like the big dog that
tried to bite his leg one day when he was riding to work on his motorbike.
"You should have seen his expression," Dad laughed.
Most people didn't know about his leg. But every once in awhile when the
wooden leg started acting up or a blister on the stump would form because of a
slipped stump sock, he'd have to go to work or to church on crutches, his right
trouser leg pinned up. People would stare in horror, thinking that something
horrible had happened.
It had, a long
time ago, but Dad had learned to live with it and if he was a cripple, it
didn't affect the way he lived much.
He was a talented
landscape and portrait artist with a keen eye for details, color and realism .
. . that was his love, that and the big blue skies and rolling vistas and
rugged mesas and mountains of New Mexico.
Everywhere he went there was beauty to be captured by his paints, his
pencils.
That was before
they had invented the use of the words "handicapped" or “disabled.” Dad was neither handicapped
nor disabled He was so nervous that he
had to hold his hand still as he painted, but he was not handicapped. Certainly
not disabled. He was a cripple, physically, but he worked around it and most
people never knew.
There's no
disgrace in being a "cripple" or in the word itself. I look at Dad's paintings and art work every
day in my home and my office and see no disgrace, and rarely think of the
wooden leg. "Cripple" may not
be a pleasant word--it is jarring, perhaps painfully accurate--but it describes
nothing disgraceful.
You see, Dad had
a wooden leg. He was a
"cripple." So what?
