These days, according to Dole's wife, Elizabeth, he works it in somewhat the same way with a rowing machine in their apartment.īut nothing could make the arm strong and useful again. That backward pull was one movement the arm could manage.
Hauling that weight around, trying to lift it, must have strengthened the arm a little, because Reisig said Dole returned two or three times and had him add about a half-pound each time.ĭole also worked the arm by the hour at an exerciser attached to the outside of the family's garage and equipped with a handle and a spring. It fit from his wrist to his elbow and weighed about 6 pounds. Reisig made him a cuff of lead with hinges and a lock. "I would like to do the things I want to do." "I would like to be a whole person again," he told Reisig.
He went to his old teammate, Adolph Reisig, who was running an auto body shop. He was going to get his strength back, was going to regain the use of the pitiful right arm, was going to play basketball again.
If "I'll take them, Sergeant," was one of the most decisive utterances of his life, his mother's "Can't never could do anything" was another.Īt first, Dole carried "Can" to unrealistic lengths. The part of the former Dole that did return to its old self, and beyond that point, was his determination to do the best he could with himself. "I didn't know whether we were going to get him into the store or not." "He swallowed a couple of times," his sister said. It took several people to get him into the car, Norma Jean Steele remembers, and when they helped him get out downtown, eager to go into Dawson's for the memories in the old place, a man stopped him, looked him over and said, "It might have been better if you'd been finished off over there."ĭole replied, "If I'd have felt like that, I'd be gone by now." But the remark had hit him hard. His experience the first time he was able to go downtown didn't help. He had Norma Jean put on a recording - probably Frank Sinatra's - of "You'll Never Walk Alone" and play it over and over: Somebody gave Dole a little record player. That was before the Doles extensively remodeled the house, moving the entrance from the west to the north and adding a big fireplace. As he improved, he spent long periods on leave in Russell, sleeping in what had been his parents' bedroom on the northwest corner of the house, with an entry through French doors from the front porch. Gradually Bob Dole learned to walk, to dress himself and to make more and more use of his left hand and arm.
Doran Dole may have been stingy with praise and ultra-particular about the way chores were done, but nobody, least of all his famous son, has said he lacked feeling for the sick or for his own children.
His father took the train from Russell to Battle Creek to spend Christmas with him - standing up most of the way, Dole says in his book, because the train was full of servicemen. That time, it was streptomycin, then an experimental drug, that pulled him out of a perilously high fever. From November 1945 onward, Dole spent much of his time at Percy Jones Army Medical Center in Battle Creek, Mich., surviving another crisis that started with blood clots in his lungs.