His Is a Spirit That Still Stands Tall : Baseball: As he battles pneumonia, former Dodger great Roy Campanella proves why he remains an MVP--most valuable person.

The story of Roy Campanella, one that begins with the legs and ends in the heart, is most visible in the hands.

He is paralyzed from the neck down, but Campanella will shake your hand. Next time you see him at a Dodger game, just ask him. He will be staring at the field and talking as if any minute he will be summoned out of that wheelchair to pinch-hit, but don’t be afraid. The children aren’t.

“They will walk up to him, and some of them will be squeamish, but then he will stick out his hand, and their eyes will shine,” said Campanella’s son, John. “He can’t close his hands, but he’ll stick them out there anyway.”

For the last 12 years in Los Angeles, the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame catcher has been going places most thought he would never fit, smiling when could have been cursing, touching although he cannot feel. Although he has fulfilled many roles for the Dodgers, when asked about his title, club officials can only come up with one: Inspiration.

Recently, however, Campanella has needed inspiration. Since Dec. 30, he has been in the intensive care ward of Northridge Medical Center in a battle for his life. There was pneumonia, then heart failure, then kidney failure, then, early last week, a successful gallbladder operation.

That surgery seemed to turn the fight in his favor. Although he is still attached to tubes, and a respirator is nearby, he has whispered to close friends that he is feeling better than ever. For the first time in two months, his wife, Roxie, is talking about when he can leave the hospital. It now seems certain that he can return to normal life.

Normal, that is, for him. Campanella’s 32 years in a wheelchair, particularly since he moved here from New York in 1978, have been based on a different sort of standard.

He is unusual for quadriplegics, who, at the time of Campanella’s neck-breaking auto injury, had a life span of 10 years. He is unusual for baseball stars, whose greatest impact on the world is usually between the foul lines.

He is also unusual for heroes. He cannot run, jump or feed himself without a metal device. He needs help to merely get out of bed.

But when Campanella, 68, speaks, in a voice light and breezy as if it were walking, people stare in silence. Sometimes, they are moved to tears. And always, afterward, they stand and cheer.

“I’ve never seen a man make people feel that way,” said Jo Anne Kennon, president of Dodgers’ 65 Roses Club, a cystic fibrosis fund-raising group of which Campanella is the spiritual leader. “Grown people, having dinner . . . and you can hear a pin drop.”

According to Roxie Campanella, her husband is not strong enough to be interviewed, so his is a story that must be told in the words of others.

There are words from Roxie Campanella as she pushes the food across her plate in the gloomy basement hospital cafeteria during yet another eight-hour vigil. And words from son John and daughter Joni Campanella Roan, both of whom spend so much time with him, you would never know he wasn’t their natural father.

There are words of Dodger first baseman/outfielder Franklin Stubbs after another of his one-hour drives, each way, four times a week, to visit Campanella in the hospital. And words of former Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe, who still calls Campanella “roomie,” even though they haven’t slept in the same room for 33 years.

After much urging, Roxie Campanella allowed this story to be told in those words, and others, under one condition.

“Tell everybody that Roy is still fighting,” she said. “If nothing else, I think he wants people to know that.”

It was in the early morning when Roy Campanella’s previous life ended. Shortly after 1:30 a.m on Jan. 28, 1958, the the two-time National League most valuable player and regular Brooklyn Dodger catcher lost control of a rented 1957 Chevrolet sedan on a patch of ice on an S-curve in a Long Island, N.Y., road.

The car bounced off a telephone pole and turned over. Campanella was thrown underneath the dashboard and suffered a broken fifth vertebra. At 36, he had lost practical use of his body below the shoulders.

“That seems like a lifetime ago,” Newcombe said. “The way Roy has had to struggle, maybe two or three lifetimes ago.”

It is also early in the morning when Campanella’s new life begins. He must awaken around dawn, or he can’t catch up with the day.

“Roy just had one request--he didn’t want us to schedule him for any appearances before noon,” said Bill Shumard, the Dodgers’ former director of community services. “Because of the time it takes him to get out of bed and bathe and do everything that we take for granted, he can’t be ready until then.”

Awaiting him might be a speech at a high school. Or an appearance at Roy Campanella Park. Or a Westwood Shrine dinner. Or Spirit of America function. All are events calling for someone who can urge people to do things they never thought possible.

But also awaiting him might be 24 hours of staring at the ceiling. If his attendant does not arrive to lift him out of bed, nothing is possible.

According to his family, this is Campanella’s biggest problem, the thing that can actually take away his smile and lower his voice. He never dreamed it would be so hard to find someone to take care of him.

“Maybe you can put this in your paper like an advertisement,” Roxie said. “We need a nice, stable attendant. The job pays well, you travel with Roy, you may only have to work 2-3 hours a day, which pays the same as 10 hours a day. I don’t know what it is with young people today, but we just can’t find anybody reliable.”

Having gone through as many as six attendants a year, the Campanella family can recite a litany of horrors. Attendants showing up three hours late because they forgot. A careless attendant smashing Campanella’s wheelchair into a curb, knocking him to the ground and breaking both of his legs, which nobody realized had happened until Campanella began perspiring.

Attendants who dress sloppily and talk loose and give the impression that this man they are caring for is sick. That’s a bad word in the Campanella household, sick.

“Roy is not sick--he is paralyzed, but not sick,” Roxie Campanella said. “There is a big difference. A big part of a cure is realizing that.”

And so Campanella, with a date book full of activities planned, occasionally must spend an entire day in bed, perhaps even missing a beloved Dodger game in the evening.

“If only I could get him out of bed, everything would be fine,” Roxie said. “I can put him down, but I can’t pick him up. So we are at the mercy of other people. And he hates that.”

Often, John Campanella will walk out in the middle of his job as a teacher and drive 25 minutes to his father’s house to help him. Once up, Campanella attacks the day like he used to attack the New York Giants.

He insists on picking out his clothes, right down to the shined shoes. He will not leave the house until his pant legs are exactly right and his feet are positioned properly. When he arrives at his destination, he will meticulously inspect himself again.

“I remember looking at him in the parking lot, sitting beside his van, making sure everything looked just right before coming inside,” Shumard said. “He has to be immaculate.”

Said Roxie Campanella: “He believes if you aren’t sick, you shouldn’t look sick.”

While his speeches can touch on everything from quadriplegic rehabilitation to Charlie Dressen, there are two constants.

First, he always receives a standing ovation.

“Remember, these are people who have never seen him play, and they still stand,” Shumard said. “It’s amazing.”

Second, by the time the speech is 15 minutes old, the audience forgets he is paralyzed.

Videotapes of speeches he has given in Vero Beach, Fla, to members of Dodger fantasy baseball camps reveal striking animation. Campanella waves his arms. He moves his head, laughs heartily and soon it is as if that wheelchair is nothing more than a rocking chair. And how people listen.

“I know Roy made plenty of people happy while playing ball,” Roxie Campanella said. “But since that accident, I believe he has saved some lives.”

John Campanella talks of the time a despondent paralyzed man phoned Campanella from Africa. They talked for two hours, and Campanella later received a letter from the man thanking him for beginning his recovery.

Then there was the woman in France who sent her paralyzed husband to the United States to meet with Campanella.

“Roy rolled in this guy’s hospital room all smiling and happy looking, and you could see the change in the guy right there,” Roxie Campanella said.

In New York once, a newly paralyzed boy struck up a friendship with Campanella when both were hospitalized. Campanella later took the boy to his house and showed him how a paralyzed man can live, from the bedroom to the bathroom.

“Children love my father,” said his daughter, Joni Campanella Roan. “Probably because he loves children. He sees something in them that he can reach.”

After his appearances, Campanella will sometimes visit the Dodger offices. He treats it as if it’s another day at work, although for him it never is.

“Sometimes it was hard to operate his electrical chair to move through some of the tight spaces,” Shumard said. “Just to get into my office, he had to maneuver himself forward and backward three or four times. But he always insisted on doing it himself.”

There are other parts of Dodger Stadium that interest Campanella more. Since joining the Dodgers in Los Angeles at the request of owner Peter O’Malley, Campanella has rarely missed a game. Although attendance was not part of his agreement with the team, perhaps nowhere does he have more impact than he does sitting above home plate, a living link to the team’s heritage.

“If any one man is symbolic of the Dodgers, and the spirit of this organization, it is Campy,” said Fred Claire, the Dodgers’ vice president. “His presence touches everyone associated with the team. You see him at the games, and he’s not just here, he’s part of everything. He’s in the clubhouse, he is on the club level, he’s everywhere.

“And I have never seen a game where he has left early. Never.”

Quite the opposite. On one recent Mother’s Day, Campanella took his family to the game and made them sit for two hours while watching it rain.

“He would not leave until he was certain the game would be rained out,” Joni Campanella Roan said. “So we just sat there.”

Although he gets involved in the games--”He analyzes the strategy just like he was managing,” Newcombe said--Campanella also spends time with the fans. And there are always fans, enough that he keeps a thick pack of autographed postcards in a pouch on the side of his chair.

“He will talk baseball with anyone, at any time,” Newcombe said. “Sometimes I think the Dodgers are what keeps him going.”

After the games he sometimes visits the clubhouse, where he is particularly close with catcher Mike Scioscia and Stubbs, neither of whom was born at the time of Campanella’s accident.

“Campy has always been there to give me the push that I need,” said Stubbs, who has repaid Campanella with a blood donation as well as with his hospital visits.

“When I am feeling down, he comes downstairs and lets me know that God gave me the ability to play and, no matter how bad things get, the pitcher still has to throw the ball across the plate.

“In other words, I’ve always got a chance.”

Campanella touches more players during annual visits to spring training, where he stays in a specially equipped Dodgertown room and spends his time around the batting cage talking to young catchers.

“It is so reassuring to see Roy down at camp, to see him pass along the knowledge and experience of past Dodgers, to see him act as that link,” Claire said. “His presence is invaluable.”

Said John: “It is unreal to me to see how Pop is nearly as much as a part of the team as a player--and from a wheelchair. Everybody talks about how Pop hasn’t quit. Well, the Dodgers haven’t quit on him either.”

Sometimes Campanella will even look like a Dodger again, if he can find any old Brooklyn jerseys that he has not donated to charities such as the 65 Roses Club. Occasionally on old-timers’ day, he will put on the jersey and cap, with his pressed suit pants and shined shoes, and wheel onto the field. Like everything with him, it’s not as easy as it looks.

“It was really hard to get him down the steps and onto the field,” Shumard said. “But he wanted to do it and was willing to put up with it, so we did.”

One thing that upsets Campanella most about his recent illness, according to his wife, is the possibility that for the first time in many years he might miss spring training. Campanella has already missed his usual winter fantasy camp appearances, during which he manages one of the teams while sitting behind a protective screen.

Said camp director Guy Wellman in Vero Beach:

“When he showed up late for a workout, we always kidded him about having a flat tire. We missed that this year.”

It began when Campanella caught a cold late last year. His wife tried to help him cough one night, and couldn’t--so she rolled him into their van and rushed him to the hospital.

He has been there since. Some days have worse than others, but most every day had been bad because of the pneumonia.

“Ninety percent of his cure has been to keep his mind off himself,” Roxie Campanella said. “That’s hard to do when you’re in a hospital with pneumonia. He’s not supposed to have pneumonia.”

Forgetting about his condition was harder to do recently when he saw on television that actress Ava Gardner, 67, had died of pneumonia. And she was able-bodied.

“Seeing what happened to her, that scared him,” Roxie said. “He realized how serious this was.”

The seriousness has not been lost on his loved ones.

His family, which includes three children from his first marriage, will sometimes spend eight hours at his bedside, even though Campanella can only whisper through a tracheotomy tube or gesture with his eyebrows. Stubbs will sit with him and talk four hours worth of baseball. Dodger officials will line up and wait their turns in the hallway.

In every case, they say, Campanella will greet them with a smile.

“I walked in once and he was all attached to these tubes, and was feverish, and looked like he was feeling awful . . . but yet he winked and smiled at me,” said Dr. Herb Goldberg, Campanella’s plastic surgeon. “Imagine him, trying to make me feel good.”

That approach doesn’t always work. It is times like these when Campanella’s friends sometimes first realize the enormity of his courage.

“I went to see him right after he got sick,” Newcombe said. “A doctor was in there, adjusting a tube, and Roy is jumping every time the doctor adjusts it. I say, ‘Roomie, I know how you feel.’

“But then I think a minute, and I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know how you feel. Damn it, I can’t know how you feel. Nobody knows how you feel, you tough s.o.b.”

The world may never know how Roy Campanella has really felt. Unless a paralyzed superstar can title his book, “It’s Good To Be Alive,” and thirty years later still mean it.

Unless a person can really, dare we say it?

“Sure, you can say it,” John Campanella said.

“Pop has had a larger effect on the world in a wheelchair than he ever did behind the plate. Sure, you can say that.”