‘Celebrating Being Alive’

As California’s Mother of the Year, Barbara Hoche stands for the kinds of family virtues and community values that many feel have declined during the last half of this century.

What makes Hoche remarkable is that she hasn’t been able to stand at all for those 50 years.

Hoche was a 20-year-old college student in 1947 when she was run over by a driverless car careening down a Hollywood hill and left paralyzed from the waist down.

But it was motherhood that pushed Hoche and her wheelchair into the forefront of the campaign for accessible public restrooms and sidewalk curb cuts in Los Angeles.

Hoche, of Woodland Hills, will compete against representatives from 49 other states for the national Mother of the Year title April 28 in Atlanta.

News of her selection as state winner earlier this month stunned Hoche--who last year threw herself a party to mark her 50th anniversary in a wheelchair.

“I was celebrating being alive,” explained Hoche, 71. “I consider myself fortunate.”

Hoche was leaving a Los Angeles City College sorority meeting the night a nine-passenger Packard automobile rolled from its parking place atop a hill in the 1000 block of Sanborn Avenue and struck her.

An account of the freak accident mentioning the young woman’s “possible internal injuries” was published two days later by The Times beneath a photograph of her being comforted by her mother.

Hoche said she was concerned that she might never have children after learning her paralysis was permanent. Those fears ended in 1957 when she married aerospace engineer Herbert Hoche and became the mother of his 3-year-old daughter. After that, she gave birth to two other daughters.

The girls quickly widened Hoche’s world. Soon she was their room mother and a PTA officer at school. She volunteered to lead their Brownie troops and Blue Bird groups and worked as a Sunday school teacher.

At a time when many disabled people simply stayed home, Hoche found herself driving her girls all over town in a specially equipped, hand-controlled car. She could be seen bouncing along dusty nature trails at Scout camps in her wheelchair. She escorted the girls to movies, struggling into theater seats at cinemas not yet equipped for moviegoers in wheelchairs.

“I guess growing up we subconsciously realized she was in a wheelchair, but she was just a normal mom to us,” explained daughter Cathleen Reiher, now a 38-year-old computer software engineer who lives in Brentwood.

Daughter Carolyn Cohen, now 44 and an acupuncturist in Malibu, agreed: “That’s what’s beautiful about it. The disability never kept her or the family from doing anything. It was an incredibly normal life.”

Keeping on the go kept Hoche aware of the difficulties faced by those in wheelchairs, however. In the early 1970s, she led an effort at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood to build a “Freedom Walk”--ramps that allowed those in wheelchairs to move easily into the sanctuary.

After that, she was named by then-Mayor Tom Bradley to a city committee that helped implement modifications such as corner curb cuts and building access improvements for the handicapped. Soon she found herself being invited to join the boards of several charity and social service groups. During the 1984 Olympics, she volunteered as a translator (she speaks Bulgarian) for athletes and officials.

That work paid an unexpected dividend late last year when Margaret Thompson, a Hollywood Hills resident, nominated Hoche for Mother of the Year.

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Thompson, a longtime friend, was impressed with Hoche’s 50th-anniversary wheelchair party. And she recalled Hoche’s accomplishment in getting the church ramps installed. “I even use them now. Sometimes I’m too stiff for steps,” Thompson said.

Hoche’s work was remembered by others who sent letters of endorsement to American Mothers Inc., which has picked honorees since 1933.

Mayor Richard Riordan wrote one. So did former Olympics organizer Peter Ueberroth. Former Hollywood minister Lloyd John Ogilvie, now chaplain of the U.S. Senate, wrote one, and so did others, ranging from a Cal State Northridge dean and the pastor of the Bel-Air Presbyterian Church, to the president of the Woodland Hills Chamber of Commerce.

“I was shocked when I read all she’s done,” said Joyce Van Schaack, a Tarzana resident who heads California’s Mother of the Year competition. “She’s always been out front pushing. That’s the kind of mother we need.”

She was certainly the kind her children needed, according to daughter Diane Bockwoldt.

“When we were little, she would lay us across her lap and off she’d go through the house,” said Bockwoldt, now a 36-year-old mother of two who also lives in Woodland Hills.

“When we were older she’d take us shopping, and if we got tired, we’d sit on her footrests and she’d scoot across the mall.”

In those early days, Hoche also took time to answer questions from other young children who had never seen anyone in a wheelchair. And she always had hugs for her girls’ friends, Bockwoldt said.

“I got comments all the time from friends saying they wished they had a mother like mine.”