One From the Heart

After a freak accident left a friend’s legs paralyzed, former paraplegic Ken Coleman decided to use his own legs for her benefit.

That explains why a polio victim who himself was paralyzed for nearly five years will pedal off Sunday on a cross-country bicycle ride designed to raise money for Carol Yellam, who uses a wheelchair.

Doctors had warned him that he would never have any feeling in his legs. So Coleman, 70, of Hermosa Beach, says he can feel for Yellam.

“I know the frustration from not being able to get around, not being able to get your wheelchair over curbs or through doors or into buildings. It was difficult for me to adapt,” he said.

“I know what she’s going through. I know it sounds crazy, but I can feel her nonfeeling.”

Until the October 1995 accident, the 46-year-old Yellam had worked for 15 years as a cleaning woman for Coleman and other families living along Hermosa Beach’s 19th Street.

Yellam was visiting her ailing mother in Rehoboth, Mass., on Oct. 28 when she decided to stop at a local Lion’s Club yard sale near her mother’s home. As she leaned over to examine some antique glassware, a rotted oak tree in the vacant lot next door toppled without warning.

The tree’s falling branches severed her spinal cord and severely damaged the nerves in her right arm.

Since then, Coleman and his neighbors have helped Yellam by pressuring her reluctant insurance company into paying for medical treatment and by contributing on their own to her living expenses.

But there is no more money in her soon-to-end insurance coverage for physical therapy or adequate attendant care--things Coleman and her other friends are convinced she needs.

Although Yellam’s injury is permanent, there are similarities to his own paralysis, according to Coleman.

Like Yellam, he was an active person. In fact, as a 22-year-old he had hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney with a friend the summer weekend in 1948 that he became achy and sick.

There was a polio outbreak in Los Angeles at the time and doctors immediately recognized the symptoms. Coleman was hospitalized and placed in an iron lung for four months, paralyzed from the waist down.

“They said I’d never walk, that I’d live in a wheelchair the rest of my life. I was devastated,” he said.

But Coleman’s father, a hospital administrator, signed him up for a rigorous experimental therapy program that gradually returned the use of his legs. Coleman--who studied hospital management at UCLA in a wheelchair--eventually went on to a career in convalescent home administration.

Although his legs had atrophied slightly, Coleman took up bike riding as a hobby when he retired. Since then, he and his wife, Ruthe, have taken bicycle trips in several parts of the United States.

The transcontinental jaunt starting Sunday will last 48 days and cover 3,200 miles through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The excursion is being organized by a Washington state company that is charging its 45 riders $3,200 each.

Coleman is paying that fee himself. But he has sent out hundreds of letters urging friends and acquaintances to sign up as sponsors for $200 each. The tax-deductible donations are being handled by a nonprofit organization for spinal cord injury victims called RVL SCORE International, 1659 Gramercy, Suite 188, Torrance, CA 90501.

Coleman will be the only rider in the group trying to raise funds for Yellam, and his goal is $60,000, he said. Members of local Lions Clubs along the bike route are also being encouraged to help, he said.

Yellam will follow Coleman’s daily progress on a map at her rented Hermosa Beach cottage. She said her friends’ help since the accident has been a lifesaver.

Still struggling with her own injury, she was further shaken by the recent death of her mother. Because of her condition, she could not travel east for the funeral.

But she is not surprised at Coleman’s unusual travel plans.

“He’s always been really outgoing and caring,” Yellam said.

“And I know what he’s gone through. He’s had some of the same experiences I’m having.”