Dream Has Name, No Home : Man Visualizes Camp for Wheelchair Athletes

As dreams go, Bob Eastland’s vision of a year-round sports camp for wheelchair athletes is about as ambitious as they come.

Picture 85-plus acres of Orange County real estate. Then imagine a swimming pool, tennis courts, a bowling alley, rifle and archery ranges, horseback-riding trails and a lake for fishing.

The dream even has a name--Camp Whe Cha Pines.

“Whe Cha stands for wheelchair,” Eastland explains. And Pines? “We plan to have a lot of pine trees,” he says with a grin.

Eastland, 49, is program director of the Boys Club of Buena Park, which offers wheelchair hockey, basketball and several other sports for disabled youngsters every Monday night. The club in Buena Park, however, is one of the few places in Orange County providing regular, ongoing sports activities for wheelchair athletes.

And that’s the problem as Eastland sees it.

“They really don’t have a place to go,” Eastland said. “We want to take these kids and put them into something just like able-bodied kids. We want to get them off the sidelines and out on the field.”

So far, Eastland’s dream of a year-round sports camp for wheelchair athletes of all ages is only a set of blueprints and a scale model stored at his home in Anaheim.

The stumbling block--and a decidedly major hurdle to overcome--has been finding someone to donate land for the camp. There have been discussions with several landowners in the county over the years, Eastland said, but nothing has materialized.

But Eastland, who has been working on his camp project in his spare time for 16 years, remains optimistic.

“Right now it’s an $11-million project, excluding the land,” he said. “Once we get the land and publicize that we need help, I’m sure people will come and help. I don’t know how they could turn away.”

The idea for the camp dates back to 1970, when Eastland took a group of disabled kids to a regular children’s camp. Because the camp wasn’t designed for the handicapped, he said, the children faced numerous obstacles--from getting in and out of the cabins and swimming pool to getting their wheelchairs under the dining room tables.

“After seeing what they had to go through at the camp,” Eastland recalled, “I said these kids need a place of their own.”

Eastland, however, envisions Camp Whe Cha Pines as being more than just a sports camp and training facility for wheelchair athletes.

“It’s going to be a respite care center for parents to drop off their children for an hour or so, or on the weekend, so they can get away by themselves,” he said. “The kids will have something to do and be safe, and it won’t cost them a fortune.”

Although there are several residential summer camps for the handicapped in Southern California, Eastland said they require reservations, are usually crowded and cost about four times as much as camps for able-bodied children.

(The two major wheelchair-accessible summer camps are operated by the Crippled Children’s Society of Southern California in Malibu and Crestline. The cost is $420 for each of the 10-day sessions for physically and developmentally disabled children and adults. Applications are taken in January and February, and there usually is a waiting list, according to Mark Gray, director of the Malibu camp.)

Plans No Daily Charge

Eastland said there would be no charge to use the Camp Whe Cha Pines facilities on a daily basis, although a nominal fee would be charged for overnight stays. He said it hasn’t been determined how much that would be.

“We’d like to have it on a donation or sliding-scale basis, but it will be reasonable,” he said, adding that the camp, which would be supported primarily by private donations, also could provide jobs for the handicapped, ranging from group leaders to kitchen help.

Camp Whe Cha Pines, which Eastland said has been incorporated for tax-exempt status, holds an annual fund-raiser at Cerritos College called the Handicapped Youth Tournament. The camp also received a share of proceeds from the recent community-sponsored benefit Run for the Roses 5- and 10-K race at Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley. (Proceeds also went to high school athletic programs in Fountain Valley.) So far, Eastland said, about $40,000 has been raised for the camp, most of which has been used to pay for the architectural plans and the scale model.

Because Eastland’s camp project has received virtually no publicity, most officials of organizations that help the disabled in Orange County say they have not heard of Camp Whe Cha Pines. But the idea of a year-round sports camp for wheelchair athletes in Orange County was uniformly met with enthusiasm by those contacted by The Times.

“I think it’s an outstanding idea,” said Brad Parks, president of the Tustin-based National Foundation of Wheelchair Tennis. “There aren’t enough programs for wheelchair-bound youngsters.”

Opportunities Limited

Parks, 29, who has been in a wheelchair since he had a skiing accident at 18, recalled that before his accident “I played Little League baseball and kids were in soccer programs, but these things just aren’t that readily available for kids in chairs. They just don’t get an opportunity to do it at all.”

The National Foundation of Wheelchair Tennis sponsors a popular five-day wheelchair day camp for youngsters during Easter vacation each year at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, and the foundation plans to start a twice-a-week wheelchair sports program this summer at two Orange County locations.

But, Parks emphasized, “throughout the United States, it’s rare to have anything for kids in chairs to play unless they do it on their own. As far as organized programs, there really isn’t much on the local level.”

Parks’ enthusiasm for the camp program is shared by Tonya Gallego, director of program services for the Orange County regional office of the Easter Seals Society, which provides services for physically and developmentally disabled children and adults.

“It sounds like a wonderful idea,” she said. “The kids are out there and the adults are out there, but there aren’t enough programs to go around.”

“There’s no question that there’s a crying need for recreational services for the handicapped throughout Orange County,” agreed Joan Tellefsen, executive director of TASK (Team of Advocates for Special Kids), an Orange-based organization that, she said, “trains parents in their rights and responsibilities under the law that governs the education of their children.”

Tellefsen, however, expressed concern that the camp would be a “segregated site,” which would isolate disabled children from their “normal peers.”

“I feel if I were a parent (of a handicapped child), I would want my child to be as normal as possible, to be in the mainstream. That might mean that within a regular recreation program there would be accommodations made for my child,” she said. “We’re fighting so strongly against segregated sites for schools that the thing that immediately comes to mind is, would it be appropriate to develop a segregated site for recreation?”

Mainstreaming a Factor

Bob Cummings, deputy director of the Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled in Garden Grove, agreed, saying that while he does support the idea for a camp, “I’d like to see it opened up for everybody. That goes along with our philosophy of mainstreaming to break down some of these stereotypes.”

Eastland, however, remains adamant that Camp Whe Cha Pines should be solely for the handicapped.

“If you open it to everybody,” he said, “I feel we’ll be back to the way we are now. They (the able-bodied) will take over the facility, and we’ll be back where we started.

“The parents are concerned about mainstreaming, but they understand they (their children) have limitations. And the thing is, they’re not going to be able to join Little League or a basketball league.”

Lisa Hamilton of Garden Grove, 17, a Rancho Alamitos High School senior who has cerebral palsy and who has been playing wheelchair hockey, track and field and archery at the Buena Park Boys Club for four years, agrees with Eastland.

“Most of the mainstreaming is good, but it doesn’t really work with sports,” said Lisa. “How do you mainstream wheelchair basketball with regular basketball?”

Terry Rylski of Fountain Valley, whose son, Eddy, 16, has been in a wheelchair since suffering a stroke five years ago, said “mainstreaming has its place” at school and in social activities “but not at camp.”

“You can’t mix 40 typical children and two handicapped children,” she said. “At camp my son wants to be with people who want to do what he wants to do. He’s happier with some kids who have physical problems and understand his limitations. They’re also not afraid he’s going to break. I just want him to have fun, and he has more fun if he’s with more kids who understand him.”

Rylski enthusiastically supports the camp idea.

“My son was perfectly fine until five years ago, so he knows what it was like to play Little League and tackle football,” she said.

Plays Wheelchair Hockey

Eddy, a Fountain Valley High School student, has been playing wheelchair hockey at the Boys Club of Buena Park every Monday night for the past four years. And, Rylski said, “If they had this hockey in five locations, he’d go five nights a week. These kids have so much fun on a shoestring, it would be unbelievable what a camp would mean to them.”

With a laugh, she added that if Camp Whe Cha Pines were to become a reality, “Eddy would probably want to live there if it was the same atmosphere as at hockey.”

Rylski said she has known about Eastland’s dream of building Camp Whe Cha Pines “just about as long as I’ve known Bob.”

Like other parents of disabled children who play sports under Eastland’s direction at the Boys Club of Buena Park, Rylski can’t praise him enough.

“He’s so dedicated, without being sanctimonious,” she said. “The kids love him because he treats them like real kids. He really, really cares about them. He’s been working on this (the camp) for years on his own time. You can’t care more than that.

“I’m happy that Eddy didn’t give up on sports because he had to learn a new way to play them, and that’s because of Bob, too.”

“Bob is the greatest person with kids--he’s just one of those great people,” said Muriel Hamilton, Lisa’s mother and another big booster of the camp. “I think the idea for the camp is wonderful. I have always felt that society is for the perfect specimen, and those that have greater needs just get the crumbs.”

Eastland acknowledges that Camp Whe Cha Pines is a long-time dream in the making, but he isn’t discouraged by the lack of progress.

“We’ve been working slowly on it on a volunteer basis,” he said, noting that he and other volunteers simply haven’t been able to work on the project full time.

“But I made a commitment,” he said. “I told my wife I’m dropping all my other (after-work) activities and sticking with the camp for one solid year. Things are looking good, too, because I think we’ve teamed up with some people who want to see this go.”

Lifeboat Press, a Marina del Rey publishing company that recently published a book on sports devices for disabled athletes, has agreed to be a sponsor, he said.

Hopes for Affiliation

And Eastland, who is national chairman of wheelchair sports for the Amateur Athletic Union, said he is working on getting the camp affiliated with the AAU. Being affiliated with the nationally known organization, he believes, will help in soliciting financial support for Camp Whe Cha Pines.

At the AAU’s national convention in Chicago last fall, the nonprofit organization passed Eastland’s proposal for the AAU to sanction nationwide wheelchair sports, beginning initially with track and field, hockey and archery and later branching out to other sports, he said.

Summing up his work to expand wheelchair sports not only in Orange County but across the nation, Eastland said, “I’m just trying to help the people who are not being helped.”

And despite the hurdles he has yet to overcome, Eastland is convinced Camp Whe Cha Pines is not just a pipe dream.

“Oh, yeah, I think it’s going to go,” he said. “I’ve got confidence this is the year it’s going to happen.”