Handicap Winner

"I lead an ordinary life doing ordinary things," said the short, sandy-haired woman waiting to be called as an honored guest to the platform in Washington's resplendent Departmental Auditorium last week. "I'm just doing what other people are doing." Dr. Anne Carlsen, 43, was right in a way. She just does "what other people are doing," but with a difference: she does it with no arms, and with artificial legs. The President's Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped could have found no more logical recipient for its annual trophy award to the "Handicapped American of the Year."

When Anne Carlsen was born in Grantsburg, Wis., she had only stubs of arms ending above the elbow, her right leg ended above the knee, and the left was malformed, ending in a clubfoot. Left motherless at four, Anne got tireless encouragement from her father, an elder sister and four brothers. On a coaster wagon she learned to take part in a modified version of baseball. At eight she was pronounced ready for school, but only after a psychologist had gone over her and solemnly pronounced her "educable." Anne raced through two grades a year.

Kids Are Kinder. There was time out for a long hospital siege, to straighten out the contractures in Anne's one knee. She went home able to walk, but only with a device so clumsy that she soon discarded it. When she was in high school, her left leg was amputated below the knee. Then, with artificial legs and crutches, Anne could really walk. But as she advanced to college (St. Paul's Luther Junior College and the University of Minnesota), Anne found it harder to win acceptance than it had been among young children, and harder still to get the training she wanted to make her self-supporting as a teacher.

After discouraging years of baby-sitting and of writing, which brought only rejection slips, Anne Carlsen got the break she longed for: a chance to teach at a special school for crippled children in Fargo, N. Dak. The children, she found, quickly adjusted to her multiple .handicaps, soon seemed not to notice them. Summer studies won her an M.A., and in 1949 Anne Carlsen got her Ph.D. in education from Minnesota. The next year Dr. Carlsen moved in as superintendent of the Crippled Children's School, which had moved to Jamestown. N. Dak.

Driving Is More Fun. There she lives alone in a two-room apartment over the school. The one thing she leaves to others is cooking. In the office she usually dictates letters, though she has learned to write--far more legibly than most people with normal hands--with a special pen hooked to her stump. Dr. Carlsen attends conventions all over the country, traveling easily by plane or train if it is too far to drive. But driving she loves, in a car with special controls, like those for handicapped veterans. "It's the only thing I'm proud of," she says. And since Dr. Carlsen got her license in 1954, she has safely driven 42,000 miles.

But when Vice President Richard Nixon presented the trophy last week, Dr. Carlsen had no hands to receive it. Nixon held it while, with good poise on her crutches, she made an apt acceptance speech.

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