For the next month or so, True Stories Well Told is featuring writers who have shared their work at First Monday, First Person, my “salon” for memoir writers held at the Pinney Branch Library in Madison.

By Loriann Knapton

Something had gone terribly wrong. Life was never meant to be like this. It did not look, I’m sure, like anything my mother envisioned when she signed on as Mrs. Lauris Ring in 1954. But the evidence was all around us, beginning with the very large Hoyer lift, standing menacingly in the living room next to my dad’s reclining chair. The Hoyer was made up of steel tubes and looked a bit like a torture device. The bottom of the hoist was U shaped and on wheels. The attached support pole from which jutted a longer horizontal steel beam about 4 inches in diameter, was fitted with a steel ring to support separate S hooks attached to 4-inch-wide packing straps. Designed in early 1950s by Ted Hoyer of Oshkosh Wisconsin after a car accident paralyzed him at age 16, the Hoyer lift allowed my mom to move my dad by placing the wide webbed straps underneath his bottom and back and then hooking the straps to the steel ring on the top bar of the lift before the pumping the manual hydraulic handle to transfer dad from the wheelchair to a bed or recliner. A separate lift was mounted on the roof of our Nash Rambler to move dad from the wheelchair to the front passenger’s seat if we needed to go somewhere. These lifts, along with a hospital bed, with a hand crank at the end to lower and raise the head or foot, and a portable commode, remodeled and repurposed from an oak captain’s chair, were standard furniture at 320 Oneida Street. Each piece standing as a testament of the circumstances of our life.

My dad suffered from multiple sclerosis. As a very young child I didn’t have any idea what this meant. I wasn’t aware that our one child household was a rarity, especially in the post war baby boom of the 1960s, or that our family was any different from anyone else’s. The fact that my dad sat in a wheelchair during the day and slept alone in a hospital bed in the back bedroom at night didn’t seem strange or unusual to me at all. Apart from the assorted medical supplies and the occasional wish for a sibling or two to take my side in neighborhood squabbles, my perception was that this was a perfectly normal way to grow up. I began to realize our family life was different than most when at six years old I was taught how to operate the Hoyer lift we had in our house (although not the one on the top of the car.), so I could transfer my dad from bed to chair or chair to bed if my mom was at work. Using my new skills to my best advantage, I remember giving “Hoyer” rides to the neighborhood kids when they came over to play, which I think my parents tolerated in efforts to make our house, with all the strange and mysterious stuff my dad needed for his daily cares, less frightening for my friends.

With Dad unable to work, my mother had to work full time to support our family. This meant I was often called into service as a nursing assistant, helping Mom with Dad’s daily cares as much as my age could manage. My duties were varied, starting from around age six. One task I remember well even as a young child, four to five years old maybe, was when I was called into service to empty Dad’s portable catheter bag which was attached by straps just above his right knee. Normally a larger bag hung from a hook on the side of his bed or chair, but we use the smaller leg bag when we had visitors, or needed to be away from the house, to provide him with mobility and some sense of dignity. The leg bag held about a quart of urine and a short flexible hose was attached at the bottom of the bag with a small metal clamp which was tightened around the tube to prevent the contents from spilling out. To empty it, I would remove the clamp and let the contents empty into a white plastic urinal then replace the clamp before emptying the urinal into in the nearest toilet (or sometimes on the ground depending on where we were). The process needed to be repeated every 4 hours or so and was up to me to check it if Mom were busy or at happened to be at work. I became quite expert at managing this, but woe was me on the few occasions when I forgot to reattach that clamp!

After my dad was diagnosed with MS my mother worked full-time nights at our local hospital as a pediatric nurse. She would go to work at 11 pm, work until 7am, and then come home to make breakfast, get Dad up and ready for the day and send me off to kindergarten before heading to bed for two or three hours of sleep, setting her alarm to go off every hour or so to check on him and to make sure she was up when I came home from school at noon. Sometimes she would lie down after supper for an hour or two before heading off to work again. Even at my young age I realized life at our house was extremely difficult for my mom. I know now it was probably very frustrating for my dad, especially during a time when the man of the house was the expected breadwinner. But despite the indominable enemy called MS, my parents were optimistic. Instead of focusing on the “what if’s”, “how’s”, and “Why’s” of their situation they did their best to live their lives without complaint, laughed more than they cried, and found joy in the smallest victories.

Long before “The Americans with Disabilities Act” required accommodations for disabled people, there were many places and many things that Dad’s wheelchair prevented us from doing. But during the summer of 1966, when I was eight years old, my dad announced we were taking a family trip 16 miles down the road to “Storybook Gardens”. The gardens were a grand place for a young child. A theme park where storybook characters came alive, where fiberglass roosters, dogs, and kittens from popular children’s books lined garden paths, and costumed college students dressed as story characters engaged visitors with impromptu dance routines among bright and colorful plywood backdrops. Pristine gardens of yellow marigolds, red geraniums, and purple petunias led the way to the house of the little kittens without their mittens, Humpty Dumpty’s wall, and Chicken Little’s farmyard, where one could watch her industriously gathering grain to make her family’s bread. Another section of the park was devoted to Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, the Three little Pig’s houses, and Jack in the Beanstalk’s mother’s garden. Even though at eight years old I was a couple of years older than most children visiting for the first time, Storybook Gardens was an exciting place for any child, and my dad was insistent that I get to see it. Looking back, I realize that he realized that our time together was limited. But back then the why’s didn’t matter. I was just excited to go.

To save money, on the day of the trip, Mom packed a lunch of bologna sandwiches, apples and cookies, along with a thermos of milk. My Grandma Ring drove in from Pardeeville to join us, the Hoyer lifted Dad into our tan Nash Rambler and the wheelchair was finagled carefully into the trunk. With Mom behind the wheel, Dad with his elbow out the window, and Grandma and me in the back seat, we chattered happily as we made the 35-mile drive to the Dells. Turning into the parking lot of the gardens I remember being mesmerized by the outside of the entrance decorated with colorful plywood silhouettes of storybook friends I knew and I could hardly contain my excitement as Mom parked the car. “Loriann, stop bouncing around and pipe down” she admonished me as she swung into a space near the back. “She’s OK Betty,” Dad interjected, “She’s just excited.” then to me, “Now honey girl, just hold on till we get inside, Little Red Riding Hood isn’t going anywhere.”

As excited as I was, it seemed like the rest of us waited forever while Mom got out of the car and headed to the front gate to purchase tickets, but she was only gone a few minutes before her head poked through the open window on the passenger’s side of the car and she announced to my dad that there was no way to get his wheelchair into the entrance tunnel leading into the park. I stopped jumping and sat in the back seat staring out the window while my parents discussed what to do. Mom wanted to turn around and go home thinking there was really no other option, but my father simply told her that we were there and we would stay, and that he didn’t mind at all sitting in the car in the parking lot with the windows open, watching the people come and go while the rest of us went inside. My mother was not one bit happy with this suggestion and started to protest, but my father stopped her. He would not be swayed. He had promised Storybook Gardens and I was going to Storybook Gardens and that was that!

So, my reluctant mother moved the car to a shady area of the parking before Mom and Grandma and I went through the gates to spend the day in Storybook Gardens without my dad, who was sitting in the car, elbow resting on the open window, chatting with any passerby that came his way. My mom frequently went out to the car to check on him throughout the day and at lunchtime we all went back to the car to eat our sandwiches together. I sat on the hood of the rambler on the passenger’s side, swinging my legs and chattering happily telling my father all about the morning’s adventures in storyland. He listened to me talk, never interrupting, elbow resting on the frame of the Rambler’s open window, slowly chewing an apple and smiling the entire time. Thank you, Dad.

©  2023 Loriann Knapton

Loriann Knapton recently retired from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction where she served as a child nutrition consultant and trainer. Although unpublished, she has been none the less a writer all of her life, starting with silly rhymes and short stories in grade school and moving on to countless poems, personal essays and eulogies for family members and friends.  In retirement she is delighted to finally have the time to work on completing a memoir of growing up on the “wrong side of the tracks” in the 1960s with a disabled dad.