Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

After losing the use of his arms due to Polio at age 13, Larry Becker learned to use his feet, and occasionally his mouth,  in the place of hands, skills he has used through out his career. Advances in technology, such as computers with voice recognition software, have made his work academic work easier.  

Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Confined to an iron lung, Larry Becker poses for a Christmas card with his brother an sister.  

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Larry Becker cringed every time he recalled the headline: "Polio Boy gets Ph.D."

A photograph accompanied the 1965 story in his hometown newspaper, a picture that still makes the 68-year-old philosophy professor recoil. In it, he's staring at the floor, his arms hanging lifeless. A pencil is clutched between his toes.

For decades, Becker hid the clippings his mother had collected -- photographs, mostly, with headlines ranging from "Larry Becker's Feat with Feet" to "Paralyzed lad proves he can do 'anything'."

Being a poster child for the March of Dimes was painful enough the first time around; he didn't need to relive it.

Disability wasn't germane to his academic pursuits, which included decades of teaching at Hollins University, an endowed professorship at the College of William and Mary and dozens of books, articles and fellowships.

The fact that he wrote with his feet or traveled with the help of an aide merited not a single footnote in his body of work.

But the big brain and the broken body are beginning, finally, to mesh. It's an uneasy alliance that has put Becker front and center of the very issue he sought for decades to distance himself from: disability rights.

Begrudging poster child

He was a 13-year-old who frequented the streets of Hastings, Neb. He delivered newspapers from his bike and sold Popsicles from a three-wheeled pedal cart.

Becker was heading home for lunch one August morning in 1952 when his legs suddenly gave out. He walked the cart home and took to his bed.

It was the height of the polio scare, and Becker had drawn the short straw: He would never play tennis, throw a newspaper on a porch or use his arms again.

Exactly 27 days later, the Hastings Daily Tribune featured a photo of Becker -- supine in an iron lung, with a mirror reflecting his face back to the camera -- as a way to raise money for a new hospital wing for polio patients.

He barely managed a smile in the photo, he would later recall, because he was so ill he couldn't breathe on his own -- and he didn't like the idea of his buddy, Keith, taking over his paper route.

Becker remained in the hospital for two and a half years, 13 months of it in an iron lung. The March of Dimes paid more than $20,000 for his care. His minister father had to pay only for his first three weeks in the hospital -- a bill that still swallowed half his annual salary.

With his sweet face and cheerful demeanor, Becker was a natural poster child for the cause. Thus began a spate of fundraising publicity:

Becker in his iron lung surrounded by a baseball team that had raised money in his name; Becker, nearly naked and embarrassed beyond belief, working with his physical therapist in a water tank.

"I did it begrudgingly," he recalled of the publicity shots. "My parents were quite severe in saying that we owed the March of Dimes this."

His rehabilitation included stays at the Franklin D. Roosevelt-founded Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation in Georgia, where he learned how to use his feet to type 20 words a minute and, before he became a professor, how to create overhead-projector transparencies.

"The way we were rehabilitated was the way FDR was: Get yourself back as far as you can physically, and then just get on with your life," Becker recalled.

Undercover disability

Over the next several decades, Becker rarely volunteered anything about polio or his medical history -- even to close friends. On the first day of a new class, he simply warned students that he might enlist their help in passing out papers because he couldn't use his arms.

Before the Americans with Disabilities Act era, it never occurred to him to ask Hollins officials to make the campus more accessible for him. He was too busy thinking and writing about stoicism, ethics and property rights -- including a book on the latter that is still used in law school classes today.

His wife, Charlotte, fashioned reading boards with mouth sticks so he could turn the pages of his books using his mouth. A college librarian at Hollins, she used her own coffee breaks to escort him to the bathroom and devised a sewing technique so he could grasp a pencil and manipulate a computer mouse in his sock feet.

"The fact that I am so compromised physically has compromised her life, too," Becker wrote in a magazine for polio survivors. "But she ... manages to make trimming my beard seem comparable to mowing the lawn: boring, intermittently oppressive, but ultimately routine."

'A delicate line'

For three decades, Becker walked short distances haltingly. He used a respirator to sleep at night. In 1984, about the time Post-Polio Syndrome became widely known, his muscles became further compromised, and he has ridden a foot-controlled electric wheelchair ever since.

Charlotte Becker drives him to and from campus, where he serves as a fellow and part-time professor in his semiretirement. Together, they have figured out some rules for living, sans the use of Larry Becker's arms:

If you have a beard, strangers are less likely to feel awkward and tend to speak directly to you -- rather than just to your wife.

If your wife holds your hand, acquaintances are less likely to automatically extend their hand to shake yours -- only to be embarrassed when they remember: You can't move your arms.

Nod politely when a well-meaning stranger says: "You're such an inspiration" -- even though you hate like hell that you had to lose the use of your arms to inspire.

"It's a delicate line to tread," Charlotte Becker said.

"Forgive the dark humor, but I've always thought of him as an 'undercover crip,' " she added. "He didn't want to be recognized as a cripple, he wanted to be recognized for his mind."

Becker acknowledged his discomfort with the subject in a 1988 essay, describing "the absurdity of my walking around, arms dangling, breathing like a frog, acting like 1952 was a very good year."

Reciprocity

Dealing with Post-Polio Syndrome forced him to address the issue of his disability head-on.

In the '90s, with his respiratory problems worsening, he finally reached out to Post-Polio Health International, an education and advocacy group, for advice. PPHI introduced him to new research on nighttime ventilation and made recommendations that he says saved his life.

Reluctantly, Becker resurrected his poster-child role.

Around the 50th anniversary of the Salk polio vaccine, he decided to combine his philosophy expertise with disability rights, becoming active with PPHI. He also became a consultant to the National Institutes of Health on issues including medical rehabilitation research, ethics and traumatic brain injury -- now thought to be the "signature injury" of veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

"This is a kind of reciprocity," said Becker, who wrote a book called "Reciprocity" in the '80s. Now the board president of PPHI, he speaks at conferences, moderates panels and writes articles about the disease. He wants to give back to groups that have helped him over the years -- but this time by doing it with his knowledge, not photo ops.

As PPHI Executive Director Joan Headley describes it: "We all work hard to be a person, like any other person. Not that you want to be a superhero, but you want to be more than just your polio.

"That is, you want to say: We are still here, and we have this history and these lessons that should not be forgotten."

Modern-day concerns

"You had polio? I thought they cured that."

If Becker had $10 for every time he has heard that comment, "I could sponsor a vaccination program in a village in some hard-to-reach part of the world," he wrote in a recent essay.

There are 770,000 polio survivors still living in the United States, according to PPHI, and there are still sporadic outbreaks reported in Third World countries, including one in Nigeria last week.

Also worrisome to Becker: The long-term functional rehabilitation that made it possible for polio survivors to live a normal life span is not accessible to most non-polio patients today -- especially those recovering from spinal-cord injuries, stroke and traumatic brain injuries.

Becker has witnessed such short-shrift rehab in the projects he has monitored for the NIH. He has heard it in news reports about injured veterans. And he has seen it in crowded physical and occupational therapy units in Roanoke, "where therapists are required by the limitations of insurance coverage to try to compress their outpatient work into a few weeks of sporadic visits."

Helen Butler, director of Brain Injury Services of Southwest Virginia, has witnessed it, too. "Communities across Virginia are going to be seeing more veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with brain injuries," she said.

The Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center puts the number of soldiers who have suffered traumatic brain injuries in the current conflicts at 2,310.

In May, the Department of Defense's Task Force on Mental Health issued an urgent warning that military health organizations might not have sufficient money or staff to deal with increasing numbers of combat veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. About a third of combat veterans suffer from one or both.

Roadside blasts can cause brain swelling and neuron damage that mirror shaken-baby syndrome, Butler said. "It's hard to tease apart the symptoms of PTSD and brain injury, and in some cases it takes a long time for these vets to even figure out they have a brain injury," she added.

Medicine has gotten so much better at saving people's lives -- from the child who spends five minutes at the bottom of the swimming pool to the Iraq war veteran whose body armor kept his heart beating but couldn't keep his brain from scrambling.

The philosopher in Larry Becker wants people to keep asking this question: "If you're going to make the investment in saving people's lives, isn't it inconsistent not to try to save the agent [or productive potential] in the life?"

After putting polio at the periphery for decades, Becker doesn't relish becoming a poster child again.

He's willing to do it, though, to make sure the lessons learned from the epidemic aren't forgotten -- even if it means reliving them himself.

On the Net: post-polio.org