Handicapped Athlete Keeps Life on the Roll

When she’s out dancing, Karin D. Baumohl, 23, usually looks for a dreamboat.

“I figure if I’m going to ask someone to dance, I might as well pick the cutest guy,” she said during an interview in her garage in Yorba Linda while preparing her wheelchair for a practice run down the street. “Sometimes people assume because I’m in a wheelchair, I don’t dance, but dancers today don’t hold hands anyway.”

Despite her handicap--she’s paralyzed from the chest down, the result of an auto accident three years ago--”life is very good for me,” said Baumohl, who is known as “The Gimp” to her friends.

“It’s an affectionate term,” she said.

Although she spent months in physical rehabilitation, “it only took me about a week to get my head in order to tackle the new life ahead,” she said.

Baumohl chose to rely on education and sports. She’s a senior studying computer science at Cal State Fullerton and is into wheelchair road racing. “I especially like racing when we’re combined with able-bodied runners, which gives us exposure so the public can see we’re athletes too,” Baumohl said. She is already nationally ranked in marathons and 10-kilometer racing and was recently named to the U.S. 1988 Para-Olympics wheelchair track team that will compete in Seoul.

Baumohl is busy looking for sponsors, since her racing wheelchair costs $2,000 and she has to pay her way to Korea.

“I’d go crazy if I didn’t have a sport to compete in,” said Baumohl, who practices daily and works part time as a computer operator. Besides road racing, she skis in a special sled, lifts weights, plays tennis, swims, river rafts, camps and coaches gymnastics.

“She’s the strongest person I have met in my life,” said her father, Charles Baumohl, a competitive weight-lifter who was driving the car when the accident occurred.

Before being disabled, Baumohl competed in gymnastics and was named most valuable player and all-county gymnast at her high school in Ramsey, N.J.

These days, she’s also taking self-defense lessons in the use of sticks. “We’re really vulnerable in our wheelchair,” she said. “This is a way to protect ourselves.”

Baumohl said she and her family moved to California because of the weather and the accessibility of so many facilities.

“That’s why the handicapped flock to this state,” she said, noting that her friends search out restaurants that have bathrooms for the handicapped.

“They call me when they find a new one for me to try,” she said.

Every so often, Jim Hamlett of Fullerton uses a quote from another publication in the newsletter he writes for Orange County Community Council Inc., an anti-poverty agency. This one, from Communication Briefings, deserves to be shared.

“The modern business meeting might be compared to a funeral, in the same sense that you have a gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable clothes and would rather be someplace else.

“A major difference is that most funerals have a definite purpose.”

“When I see a lifeguard coming,” said Richard Cropley, a retired Marine major who has run the hamburger stand next to T-Street Beach in San Clemente for 25 years, “I throw on a tuna burger. Those guys are health food people.”

He also serves veggie burgers.

But those who prefer Cropley’s standard hamburger flocked to his stand on a recent Saturday when he rolled back prices, selling the hamburgers for 35 cents apiece, instead of the usual $2. There were long lines all day.

“This place was a zoo,” he said. “I had no idea that so many people knew where we were.” It was Cropley’s way of saying thanks to customers who have remained loyal to him for so long. “But this was my last fling,” Cropley said. “It was fun but very tiring.”

One lifeguard said Cropley’s stand is like a truck stop--”only his draws lifeguards, surfers and sun worshipers.”

Last month Jeanette Burns of Santa Ana vowed in a letter to Pacific Bell: “You can hang me by my thumbs, I’ll never pay the $1.10.”

She was referring to the $1.10 the telephone company charged for dialing the Police Department for her. Burns said she couldn’t see in the dark to dial 911 after hearing someone trying to break into her mobile home at 1 a.m.

The telephone company just wrote back: “The charge for the emergency call has been taken off your account.”