He Wants You to See Beyond the Chair

Flashing a boyish smile from behind his desk, John Box admits to being something of a rebel.

Rather than ask for help, he once decided to go down a flight of stairs in his wheelchair on his own--toppling down them end-over-end. He once brandished a squirt gun at the mall--aiming it at those he thought stared too long.

Today, Box, 32, isn’t armed with a water pistol. And he wants people to stare.

His Anaheim-based wheelchair manufacturing company, Colours by Permobil, has launched a controversial national ad campaign, and he invites everyone to take a good, long look. The ads deal with sensuality, philosophy, politics and birth--topics atypical in the marketing of wheelchairs.

The campaign features people such as Crista Adamson, a neurobiologist from New Jersey. She’s photographed from the side, skinny legs and all, looking down pensively at her bare, pregnant belly as it pokes out from her wheelchair.

And people such as second-year dental student Nicole Parsons of San Francisco, who is wearing a negligee and leans seductively out of her tipped-back wheelchair. Across the top of the page is the word “sensuality” in bold, red lettering.

Box says his marketing strategy--considered revolutionary by some and repulsive by others--is designed not simply to shock.

He says he hopes the directness of the ads will command more than a passing glance at those in wheelchairs and an acceptance of who they are beyond their disabilities.

Box says yes, he is in the business of selling wheelchairs. But he also has a personal commitment to dispelling stereotypes.

“The majority of the advertising either has the person with the hospital gown in the big, chrome wheelchair, or the athlete holding the trophy over his head,” he says. “There are people in these chairs, and they’re all different.”

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The walls in the Colours showroom are covered with murals and graffiti. Box figures it’s a good place for his customers to express their frustrations and humor. There is an image of a hulk in a wheelchair breaking through a wall and slogans such as “Don’t hold the door!” The showroom takes on an especially relaxed mood on Fridays, the day Box sets aside to do free wheelchair repairs for those who need them.

One of his first customers was Jose “Shorty” Zetino, 24, of Los Angeles, for whom Box designed a custom chair. Most wheelchairs were too large for Zetino, whose dwarfism has pressured his spine.

“John is really the most wonderful person,” Zetino says. “He cares about his clients. My chair’s important; I mean, that’s my feet right there. Without my chair, I can’t go anywhere.”

Colours, which became a division of the Swedish wheelchair manufacturer Permobil Inc. less than two years ago, sells about 1,000 chairs a year. Chairs range from $1,800 to $2,800 and come in vivid colors such as candy red and bright blue. The seven models, include a suspension chair with shock absorbers and chairs designed for playing tennis, basketball and rugby. Others are designed for easy mobility in day-to-day life; each is custom-fitted to the user.

“We’re small, but we really like our customers and like to feel that they’re comfortable here,” Box says.

Box, his wife, Mary, and a staff of 10 run the company, in a row of offices near the Pond of Anaheim.

Box has been a wheelchair user since a motorcycle accident at 17 left him a paraplegic. It was about five years ago that he built his first wheelchair: It was for himself.

A mixture of frustration, determination and his talent as a machinist led him to build it. He had driven four hours to order a new wheelchair from a manufacturer and not been treated well when he got there. “They said, ‘We have no time for you.’ I was mad,” he recalls.

Using ordered materials and some from his machine shop, Box made a chair that was much lighter and had more mobility than his old one.

Box had taken welding and metallurgical science classes at Fullerton Junior College, later changing his major to business finance. In 1988, he and his brother started their own company, West Coast Precision, specializing in aerospace measurement work.

After his success building his own chair, he began developing the prototype for the Eclipse, the first wheelchair developed by the company he formed in 1992, Colours in Motion.

“We struggled our first year; the costs were too high,” he says. “But I got out of the aerospace business just in time.”

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The first round of photographs in the People of Colours ad campaign was published a few months ago in New Mobility, Sports N’Spokes and other disability trade magazines.

They immediately generated the diverse reaction that Box and Norwegian-born photographer Martin Bibow sought when they collaborated on the concept.

After the ads appeared, Box and Bibow received everything from kind words and warm handshakes to outraged phone calls and hostile letters from able-bodied people as well as wheelchair consumers.

“I was horrified,” wrote one woman of the “Sensuality” ad. “Depicting disabled women as helpless, overly sexualized objects only serves to perpetuate the myth that people with disabilities are undeserving of respect and incapable of living fulfilling lives. It is inexcusable to objectify any person in a manner such as this.”

Asked another letter: “What the hell is she selling?”

The ad is a hot subject in disability chat rooms on the Internet as well as in the magazines where they appeared.

Parsons, whose image is the focus of the debate, says that the photograph has nothing to do with exploitation and that she doesn’t want to be looked upon as a victim by anyone.

“It took a long time to learn to accept myself, to love myself and to love my body,” says Parsons, 26, who was paralyzed in a high school auto accident in Sonoma County. “I don’t feel victimized at all. With Americans, sexuality is so taboo. If you look at Europe, bodies are accepted in every magazine, and why shouldn’t they be? Bodies are beautiful--in any form.”

Colours featured 20-year-old Alycia Busciglio sitting next to her chair in the “Life” ad. Busciglio, who works five to six days a week as a waitress at Chevy’s Mexican restaurant in Anaheim Hills, says all the photographs in the campaign explore reality.

“I think all this helps the way everyone looks at people in wheelchairs,” says Busciglio, who had just finished a long day working at a wheelchair tennis camp in south Orange County.

“There’s a stereotype that handicapped people aren’t supposed to be sexy or active or whatever,” she says. “If people see more people doing things like this, I think it’s great.”

An array of personalities and statements mark the first People of Colours photographs, including the “Politics” ad, which Box says ignited threats from the Ku Klux Klan when a door-sized poster of the ad was displayed at the Medtrade show in Atlanta last November.

It pictures San Francisco radio journalist Kiilu Nyasha wearing a T-shirt in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a death-row inmate convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer.

Another ad includes street philosopher Ekulalelit Saq with the message “Down but not out. Slowed but not stopped. Bent but not broken.”

Under an “Attitude” heading is wheelchair hockey player Doug Champa of Placentia, who holds a hockey stick and sports a competitive scowl along with a muscular, tattooed upper body.

Behind the camera is Bibow, who is also director of marketing for Miramar Communications in Malibu. Bibow is photographing additions to the Colours campaign that he vows “will be no less controversial.”

He says he delights in the thought-provoking debate but says the models themselves make their own statements, while “forcing people to confront their prejudices.”

Bibow, 38, says he has a great deal of respect for Box for standing by the campaign’s message and the creative freedom he allowed with the photographs.

“John is the only person in this business, I think, who would let me do this,” he says. “He has a commitment to the disabled community that really means something . . . he’s a gutsy person.”

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The accident 14 years ago that caused his paralysis is not something Box dwells on. Being able-bodied is only a temporary condition, he says, “for everyone.”

Box, who was born in Garden Grove, was a student at Villa Park High School at the time. He was interested in girls, sports and machines--including the bright yellow Volkswagen he was customizing into a “monster bug,” complete with 36-inch wheels.

He says he was “a little crazy at times” but basically levelheaded.

“It was my friend’s birthday; he was turning 16 years old,” Box recalls. “It was a beautiful day; the sun was shining . . . we were gonna go cruise.”

Before they left for their motorcycle trip to the coast, Box let his friend talk him into something that probably saved his life.

“I didn’t want to wear my helmet, but my friend wouldn’t let me leave without it. He said, ‘I’m not going until you put it on,’ ” he recalls. “I wore it. I saw it after, cracked in half.”

Box remembers the car changing lanes in front of him, clipping his motorcycle and sending him sliding across the pavement at 60 mph and under a parked truck. His bike followed, slamming into his body a split-second later.

Box was told later that he “died” once on the operating table and once in the intensive care unit at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach.

“I had a severed aorta, a punctured lung. . . . My organs were in a knot,” he says. “The doctors basically told my parents that I wouldn’t make it.”

Following an operation to remove blood that began clotting on his spinal cord, Box was told of his condition--he was paralyzed from the chest down.

“My first thought was ‘I’m a vegetable; I’m useless,’ ” he recalls.

But the doctor told Box something he still remembers.

“He said, ‘Look at this as a mountain. You can climb this mountain; you’re just starting at the bottom.”

Physically, scaling that mountain has been difficult--especially during the four months of rehabilitation at Fullerton’s St. Jude Medical Center that followed his initial hospitalization.

It was there, after seeing a man in a disabilities video negotiate a flight of stairs on his own that Box decided to give it try. “The nurse thought I was trying to kill myself. . . . I just wanted to see if I could do it.”

But Box says emotional obstacles can be the hardest to conquer.

“The physical barriers come easily, but dating and the girl thing was tough. . . . That kind of pain was much harder than any physical pain,” he says.

At first Box was angry and frustrated, wheeling around in a bulky chair to places such as the Orange Mall, where he sat sourly squirting people with a water pistol.

“It actually made me feel a little better,” he says with a laugh.

But Box says the turning point came for him the day he got tired of looking at his prized yellow Volkswagen collecting rain in the driveway.

It was jacked up so high that he could barely see the driver’s seat.

“It was my first challenge,” he says. “I just had to get in it.”

Hanging onto the side, he pulled his weight all the way up and into the cab. The “monster bug” had become his mountain.

After that, he began trying new things, playing sports and getting out. He remains a sports enthusiast--his company sponsors nearly 40 wheelchair athletes--and is an avid tennis and hockey player.

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Box met at work the woman who would become his wife. She was filling in for her sister, who was his secretary.

“I think I knew from the start that I wanted to marry him,” says Mary Box, 30. “He has a pretty cool personality, and he’s cute. . . . He made me laugh.”

Before they married, she says, her friends voiced concerns about her marrying a man who uses a wheelchair.

“They would ask me questions like ‘Are you going to have to help him into the car? Are you going to have to take care of him all the time and stuff?’ ” she says. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding! Obviously you haven’t met John.’ Now that they know him, they don’t see him that way at all.”

She says the People of Colours campaign is fueled by the wheelchair users they have gotten to know through the business.

“A lot of our friends in chairs have kids and do a lot of things,” she says. “We’re trying to show that being in a chair is not the end of the world.”

Reactions to the photos in the ad campaign have been sharply divided, but few have been able to look at the pregnant image of quadriplegic Adamson without one.

“When I first saw it, I said, ‘Wow,’ ” John Box says. “It’s pretty powerful.”

Adamson, who broke her neck in a Santa Monica surfing accident 10 years ago, says the more reaction the ad generated, the more satisfied she was with her decision to pose partially nude. She and husband Douglas are now the proud parents of Kelsey, 6 months.

“The more I saw the photos, the more comfortable I became,” she says. “I liked the concept and what it was showing people, the extremes of people who are disabled. The comments that were negative made me even happier I did it.”

Which is the life-affirming spirit Box wants to champion.

“Some wheelchair companies give something back by donating to spinal research,” Box says. “I like to think that we give back in a lot of ways, but mainly through education.”

The lesson he hopes will continue to surface: People who use wheelchairs for mobility lead productive, happy and fulfilling lives and have every right to be known as the individuals they are.