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by Joy Darrow Baim Chicago Tribune, Sunday, March 26, 1967 ![]() ![]() I meet my friend Don. He can hardly say hello, be is laughing so hard. He is not the only one convulsed with mirth at the sight of me these days. Friends, relatives, and co-workers double up with chuckles when I make the scene and then proceed to engage in verbal thrusts and parries on the subject of sliding. ![]() ![]() Had a good time? Breaking a leg? Of course It's funny. Because it was obtained "on the slopes" while engaging in a sport that Invites catastrophes and casts. So any respell for one's newly disabled limb [there are approximately 80,000 skiers each year who suffer these bad breaks] seems destined to be lost in instant hilarity. It seems to be a seasonable — tho unreasonable — ailment that strikes all nonskiers between December and April. One saving factor, however, can be found by those who travel with a ski group, as this writer did—the Jack and Jill club. For then there are 38 guaranteed sympaticos, all of whom appreciate the loss of two days on the slopes, four months in a cast, and the considerable loss to one's dignity suffered while wailing in unesthetic repose for the ski patrol toboggan. [When they tote you from the scene of your spill, they cover you from nose to toe with a tarpaulin so that no other skiers can see the appreciable damage wrought by a miplaced ski.] When traveling with a ski club, there are daily' medical bulletins passed among the members during the various apres-ski activities. "Don wrenched his knee; that was all. The next day: "Ray had to have five above his eye." ![]() ![]() So what started out as an enthusiastic introduction of a midwest skier to the glories of the western mountains turned into a more sedentary adventure: a lifelong skier's first encounter with five pounds of plaster on her leg. But the hospital in Aspen proved to be almost worth all the guffaws. It is no one-day outpatient clinic like at Boyne mountain, where broken skiers are zipped in and out with all the efficiency of a checkout counter at the supermarket. The Aspen hospital, sitting idyllically at the foot of the mountains, has sun-tanned nurses, doctors in turtle-neck ski sweaters, and a hobbling clientele more concerned about getting a tan than about their five newly purpled toes. ![]() ![]() Even more interesting is the fact that more females than males break their limbs on the slopes, usually the left leg. (Something to do with being right-handed and subsequently weak on the left downhill ski as well as the reputed frailty of females.] ![]() ![]() "This hospital is more like a country club," said one enthusiastic skier-doctor, whose only problem was how to find enoigh time to ski during his busy season which, not surprisingly, coincides with the high accident rate season. ![]() ![]() And when going off duty, she changed gear right at the hospital to save time for the slopes, thus considerably increasing the misery quotient of the patients. Part of the sport for the one of five doctors who sets about five legs each day during the ski rush, is "being able to help where I'm really needed." He says that he could have specialized in the problems of the Aunt Tillies of the world, but decided instead to "be where the action in orthopedics was." He seems to have made a wise decision. ![]() ![]() Midwest skiers, who are usually most adept at side-slipping down corrugated ice, doing snowplows in slush, and parallel turns on frozen grass, are confused at first by the soft resistance of snow to turns. So it is perhaps, after the ski jackets come off in the heat of the day and the electric socks stay packed in suitcases, they do become a little reckless and take to the snow-coated hills with too much gusto. ![]() ![]() But the west measured up to the almost impossible expectations of this skier used to Michigan's and Wisconsin's timid slopes. ![]() ![]() And, most crucial, how to keep on laughing back. Mrs. Baim is now back at her desk at The Tribune, altho her doctor says that it will be four months before that cast can come off. ![]() In 1967 the marriage was in a stage of terminal disintegration when Steve Pratt, a 21-year-old part-time public school teacher, spotted her at a party. "She was wearing a white lacy dress, and she had this long blond hair, and she was dancing—on one leg, the other one in a cast. I was immediately smitten. She seemed to have this complete command of life, this boundless energy. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life." Born in 1935, she was thirty-two when she broke her leg skiing in 1967. Joy Darrow Baim sadly passed away in 1996 at the far too young age of 62. |