Celebrating New Legs to Stand On : UCLA Prosthesis Lab Replaces Man’s Homemade Feet

Like everyone else, Philip Penna has bought shoes off and on for most of his life. His feet he makes.

Finally, at age 76 and after 59 years of walking on two feet that he had fashioned himself, he now has his first pair of professionally made artificial legs.

“While I was fitting Philip, in the lab at the same time was a 60-year-old man who had lost both legs to diabetes and was being measured for his first prostheses,” Albert Rappoport said.

Spirits Pick Up

Rappoport, a prosthetist-orthotist associated with UCLA, said the man was sitting there, feeling depressed. “Philip told him he could do anything he wanted to, as long as he put his mind to it. Philip was still wearing his homemade replacements, and he broke into a dance to dramatize what he meant. You could see the other fellow’s spirits pick up.”

They had become, in a sense, stepbrothers.

“I had come with my family to Texas from Mexico when I was a teen-ager,” Penna recalled at his El Sereno apartment. “I was going from town to town trying to find work.

“While trying to hop a freight in Sealy, I slipped and the wheels crushed my legs.”

It happened in the train yard. Workers carried him to a hospital about five blocks away, where surgeons amputated both legs about 10 inches below the knee.

“I had lost a lot of blood. That night a man I had never before met came to my bedside and told me he would stay with me the entire night because the doctors had said I might not be alive in the morning.

“I shrugged and said OK. My uncle was a priest, and I knew God would help me. In the morning I was still alive. The man at my bed left.”

Alive yes, but left lying in bed at home, a youth with a future bleak at best.

“The accident was my fault, and I got only $300 from the railroad. That wasn’t anywhere near enough money to be fitted for artificial limbs.”

Restricted to his bed, the patient did some planning. He would design and make his own feet.

He sent a buddy to a roofing yard for tin, to a lumber yard for wood, to an auto yard for a tire, to a second-hand shop for discarded carpeting.

Taking these, fastening it all together with ordinary bolts, he created user-friendly artificial legs. The rubber provided a half-inch cushion beneath the soles and heels, the carpeting was stuffed in against his residual limbs.

He sewed together arms from old sweaters in order to create cosmetic socks, which he held in place with rubber bands. He found that everything fitted nicely into a pair of common store shoes, size nine.

‘Hurt at First to Walk’

“The new feet were heavy. It hurt at first to walk,” he said. “But the important thing was that I could.”

And not only be able just to get around, but to get a job shelling pecans. Saving carefully, he was able subsequently to open a grocery store in San Antonio. Upon moving to Los Angeles 40 years ago, he made money buying run-down houses, repairing them, and selling them at a profit. He later became a welder.

Through it all--about every five years--his artificial limbs either wore out, broke or the fit changed, and he had to make a new pair. This he did without giving it a second thought, his only changes being to switch from tin to aluminum and from wood to a heavy plastic.

Nobody could ever accuse him of being a sneak. His homemade legs weighed about nine pounds each, and he clomped along with a step that was anything but dainty.

“Maybe I limped a little, but I never had to use crutches or a cane,” he boasted.

He rode a motorcycle. He climbed roofs when they needed repairing. He was married for 10 years, which gave him ample opportunity to go dancing, which he has always loved.

“Here, watch this!” he exclaimed to a visitor in the living room of his apartment, turning up the hi-fi.

As ragtime blared out in the room, Penna took to stomping on the floor, clapping his hands in rhythm. Zorba on homemade legs.

But that was before the renaissance last week. Today, fittingly, is Penna’s birthday. It isn’t often that the best gift you receive is something taken away. But two examples of just that are gathering dust in a corner of his home.

The transition got under way late last year when the phone rang in the Westwood office of Rappoport. He is on the staff of the Prosthetic-Orthotic Laboratory in the UCLA Rehabilitation Center.

During the course of a year the lab’s experts see more than 2,000 patients--from infants to centenarians--most of them walking out with new braces, legs or arms.

“This particular caller said he had seen something on TV about people being able to play tennis and jog with artificial legs, because they were so lightweight,” Rappoport recalled. “He told me about what he had put up with all his life, and wondered if we could do anything.”

“There was the possibility that a man so set in his ways wouldn’t be able to change, but I felt it was worth the challenge.”

One motivation for Penna was that he has had heart bypass surgery, is on his fourth pacemaker, and felt that the newer feet would be less of a strain. All his life, he thought he wouldn’t be able to afford the cost, but now he learned the $6,808 bill would be covered by Medicare/Medi-Cal.

At the laboratory, plaster impressions were taken. After a cast was formed, the patient’s skin was read to determine areas of pressure. Next--this time wearing an actual prosthesis fabricated by technician Kenneth Neal--came what is known as a dynamic alignment, which takes into account an individual’s natural anatomical gait.

“Sometimes there is a need for additional alignment,” Rappoport explained. “In Penna’s case, he walks with a heavy stance, so we had to create extra firm heel cushions.”

The new legs (mostly Fiberglas attached to feet of high-density foam) provided at the UCLA Rehabilitation Center weigh only three pounds each. This means a total of 12 pounds less that he will have to drag to and from the grocery store or while tending the garden behind his apartment or at senior-citizen dances.

So elated was he the day he got his new mobility that, to the accompaniment of radio music, he took a spin on the lab floor with Colleen Hall, who teaches in the building.

He moved easily, like someone who had just taken off a few pounds.