Craftsman of the Road

By Charles Krauthammer

When you break your neck and sever your spine, leaving your legs and hands paralyzed, you don't expect to drive a car. Of course, driving isn't your first concern. There are more elementary needs, like getting across a room or lifting a fork or signing your name.

I know. After a year of post-accident muscle retraining, exercise and long practice, I got the hang of the easy stuff. But one thing I was sure of: I was 22 and I'd never drive again.

And for six years, I didn't. It made life a little bit complicated. Those were years when I was a medical student and resident doctor. Not driving meant that I had to live within wheelchair distance of the hospitals where I was training. And that meant going to sleep every night to the sweet sound of sirens pulling up to my friendly neighborhood emergency room.

It was not the worst fate in the world, but I had always loved to drive, and my few attempts to do so in rehab--driving a Buick with my fearless instructor, Giri Sipajlo, down New York City's F.D.R. Drive--proved unsatisfactory. I kept bumping other cars. Not very hard and not very seriously, but often enough. I gave up.

Then, five years later, I met Les Schofield. I'd heard from Giri, his hair still raised from our road adventures (to unwind, he climbs mountains in Nepal), that a company in Springfield, Mass., was making a new kind of car I should check out. The next morning--I'd waited long enough--my wife and I drove the 80 miles down the Mass. Pike from Boston. We found Schofield, a powerfully built man with a kind, open face and prodigious hands, working on his invention, a prototype as yet driven only by him.

It had started out life as a normal Dodge van. He had lowered the floor, torn out the driver's seat, steering wheel, brake and gas pedals, and substituted his two magical, Copernican creations: on the right, a long, horizontal column coming out of the dashboard, ending with a small steering wheel that turned with no resistance, as seamlessly as a radio dial; and on the left, a more delicate lever--pull in for brake, push out for gas. With each effortless motion came a whooshing sound as the vacuum pump he'd devised moved the brake or accelerator.

"Where's the seat?" I asked.

"You drive from the wheelchair."

"Me?"

He tested my biceps, which had survived my injury fairly intact. "You."

It is 20 years and 180,000 driving miles later, and last month Schofield delivered to me the third of his creations. The first was a big, boxy Ford van that he built for me a couple of months after our first meeting, and after I'd spent half a dozen Sundays driving with him in the prototype through the streets of Springfield, testing out his technology and my reflexes. The noble beast, now retired, still stands in my driveway.

The second, a 1990 Dodge Caravan, a wonder of miniaturization--all the stuff of a full-size van hidden under the hood of a minivan--arrived when our son turned six. It turned me into a soccer dad, ferrying him and countless of his friends to school and Little League and all the other appointed rounds of the busy childhood of suburbia (for me, a wondrous place filled with not the wail of ER sirens but the music of kids' bicycle horns).

But the third, the one Schofield delivered last month, is his masterpiece, his Sistine Chapel: a sleek Windstar with miniaturized steering wheel, vacuum gas and brake lever, and a single panel of buttons that allows effortless control of all the car's functions (doors, windows, radio, heat, lights)--a triumph of lean and cool understatement.

As is Schofield. He's filled out a bit over these 20 years, but cool and understated, self-composed and self-effacing he remains. His composure, rooted in the knowledge that in the end he can create and fix and solve anything, endows him with, as Mark Twain once put it, the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces. On shakedown cruises, as unexpected problems pop up, his demeanor never changes: no cocky dismissal, no agonized doubts. He just quietly makes mental notes of the glitches and returns the next day with a fix.

Craftsmanship has its rewards. In this field, unfortunately, they include neither money nor renown. The market is too small, the costs too high. The Springfield company Schofield worked for failed in the mid-'80s. His second outfit went under a few months after he built my Caravan. Which is why he built the latest car, his summa, on his own in his garage. Like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak--except that they had a whole community of computer enthusiasts to draw energy from. Schofield works alone.

It took him 18 months. The lone craftsman spent the first four just thinking. Drawing, sketching, inventing. Form to function. How, for example, to operate a turn signal when both your hands are already occupied and your legs are just along for the ride? (Answer: panel mounted near left elbow.) What parts are needed and exactly how can they all fit, entirely hidden, in a vehicle never designed for half these esoteric functions?

After designing most of the parts, he then produced them, borrowing his friend Steve Ruffy's machine shop at night. He then layered them into the vehicle. The result is a marvel of economy and precision. It had to be. There is as little margin for error in Schofield's creations as in the space program (and nearly as many backup systems). Indeed, had he been born in another time and place he might have been building space shuttles. The wiring--357 separate, beautifully hidden lines feeding the remote controls--are like the sinews of a space station, not only for economy of design but for reliability. I've driven his machines more than 180,000 miles, and the unique Schofield controls--vacuum gas and brake, horizontal zero-effort steering--have never failed me.

What does he do now? He talks of retiring with his devoted wife Clare to Virginia or the Carolinas. But at 62, that would be a crime. Schofield is not just that rarity in modern life, a craftsman. He is perhaps the most brilliant designer ever of sophisticated driving devices for the disabled. And more than that. He is a man who sets people free.