Possibilities Unlimited

In the dying days of 1944, men maimed and crippled by World War II were already being discharged from U.S. service hospitals and returned to civilian life; a war-loan poster bloomed in the land, showing a soldier with empty sleeve holding a little girl in his good arm.

Walking down Cleveland's busy Euclid Avenue, Salesman George Kruger saw the poster and was moved to anger, not pity. Says Kruger: "That well-meaning poster destroyed a lot of dignity. It was asking for sympathy--one thing an amputee gets and doesn't want." Kruger knew what he was talking about; at 13 he had lost his right arm in a mine accident. The poster crystallized his determination to form a self-help organization for amputees.

In January 1945, Kruger called the first meeting of "Possibilities Unlimited," dedicated to the principle of dispensing with public sympathy and showing how well amputees can get on without it. Now the organization has 532 members in Cleveland (200 of them veterans) and some 1,500 more throughout the U.S. Possibilities Unlimited has employed some of the techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous. When it hears of someone who has just had an amputation, it sends a member to visit him in the hospital, and offer practical advice; so far as possible the visitor is chosen to match the patient in age, general background and type of operation.

Last week the organization held its third industrial forum in Cleveland's Hotel Hollenden. Fifty amputees staged a dinner show for 150 personnel directors, industrial doctors and nurses, to demonstrate the skills handicapped men & women can master. In a sample scene a wife with one arm expertly ran a sewing machine, and teased her husband, also one-armed, into helping her fix the house for a bridge party; he deftly whisked a vacuum cleaner around the room, then hung a strip of new wallpaper. Then, in a business scene, a stenographer with one leg operated office equipment; her one-legged boss interviewed salesmen who demonstrated golf and fishing equipment to him. Kruger, no longer an active officer in the organization, beamingly got into the act to show off his one-armed golf game, neatly stroked a cotton ball off the stage and into a drinking glass.

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