Vets Bring Old Hospital to Life for Students

It was intended as a history lesson, the meeting between two World War II soldiers and a class of students at Van Nuys’ Mulholland Middle School last week. But what the eighth-graders got from the wheelchair-bound vets was, instead, a lesson in life.

Veterans Pat Grissom and Stanley DenAdel had come to the school to talk about the time they spent in the late 1940s recovering from combat injuries in the military hospital that once rose on the site now occupied by Mulholland Middle School.

That hospital, Birmingham General, was built by the Army in 1943 on 112 acres of Petit Ranch farmland in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. During its heyday, it treated thousands of injured GIs, brought in from military installations around the country. When the hospital was shut down in 1950, many patients--Grissom and DenAdel among them--used their GI benefits to settle here.

Eventually, the abandoned hospital became military surplus. Most of its buildings were torn down during the Valley’s postwar population boom and replaced with a complex of schools, which now includes Birmingham High, Valley Alternative Magnet and Mulholland Middle schools. The hospital’s chapel, pool and an old gymnasium are all that remain, playing host to a generation of schoolchildren who know little of the site’s past.

For Grissom and DenAdel, now in their 70s, the Thursday visit was a homecoming of sorts. Neither had been back to the grounds since being wheeled out of the hospital nearly 50 years ago.

And for the students in Valerie Masters’ history class, it was a chance to rely on what teachers call “primary sources” in their semester-long research project into the history of the old Army hospital.

Already they had pored over maps and read old newspapers. They had written letters and watched old movies. But this would be the first time they would hear firsthand what the hospital was like, and from men the students realized were little older than themselves when they were shipped off to war.

The students stared in rapt silence as the two elderly men told their stories. You could almost see them mentally trying on the soldiers’ shoes.

Imagine, being 20 years old and one week from discharge when your unit, fighting in Germany, meets machine-gun fire. A bullet tears through your spine, and you wake up days later in a military hospital with no feeling in your legs.

Imagine being too scared to ask doctors whether you’ll ever walk again, and too ashamed and depressed to face parents who sent a strapping young son off to war, and got a paraplegic in return.

It didn’t take long for the children’s queries--earnest and personal--to begin:

How did it feel to know that you’d never walk again? Did the other patients look down on you, feel sorry for you? Do people stare when you’re at a restaurant? Does being paralyzed mean you can’t have kids or drive a car? How do you get used to the idea of being in a wheelchair for the rest of your life?

And so the men put aside their recollections of hospital life and patiently answered each question, putting a human face on what to many of these children had been abstractions on valor and victory.

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The thousands of soldiers paralyzed in combat during World War II represented the first test of new medical treatments that would save the lives of people with spinal cord injuries. Birmingham Hospital became the military’s largest, most advanced center for the treatment of paralyzed vets.

“We were the first large group with spinal cord injuries to survive,” DenAdel told the students. And so they bore the brunt not just of adapting to their own disabilities, but of convincing society that it must now adapt to them.

There were no wheelchair ramps or curb cutaways to help the young men navigate city streets. If they got the nerve to load their wheelchairs into a buddy’s car and try for a night on the town, they were often turned away by nightclubs and restaurants, for fear their heavy chairs would block the aisles. They could get neither jobs nor driver’s licenses, and many went stir-crazy trapped in their hospital rooms.

“There were some that just couldn’t cope with the barriers, and they spent the rest of their life in institutions,” Grissom recalled.

But others fought back, and tried to build new lives that resembled their old.

The Birmingham vets organized the country’s first wheelchair basketball team, and took to the road to play exhibitions. That spawned wheelchair teams in bowling, archery and other sports, and those displays of athletic prowess helped rebuild the soldiers’ self-esteem.

As they struggled to make accommodations, they also forced changes.

Wheelchair manufacturers were pushed to redesign the chairs, to make them lighter and more portable. Auto makers began offering cars with hand controls; indeed, so many soldiers spent their GI benefits on the earliest version--made by Oldsmobile--that the Balboa Boulevard parking lot alongside the hospital became known as Oldsmobile Row.

“In fact,” DenAdel told the group, his voice rising, “if it hadn’t been for . . . a lot of young vets who’d been severely disabled and had to use wheelchairs for the rest of our lives, a lot of what has happened to help people with disabilities wouldn’t have. We had to convince the public we belonged.”

A few seats away, a teenage girl in the audience nodded in agreement. She was not looking at DenAdel though. She was looking straight ahead, at a young man who faced her, his hands moving rapidly, in cadence with the speakers. He was more than her interpreter. He was her ears in much the same way DenAdel’s wheelchair was his legs.

And she was here, in this class with hearing students, in part because veterans like Grissom and DenAdel convinced the public they belonged.

Columnist Scott Harris is on vacation. Times staff writer Sandy Banks will write occasional columns during his absence.