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ACA’s Roots
By Al Pike, CP  Next year the Amputee Coalition of America (ACA)
will be celebrating 15 years as the national organization for
amputees in the United States, but it was not the first.
Fifty years earlier (1939), Paul J. Campbell, St. Louis,
Missouri, established the Fraternity of the Wooden Leg. This
national amputee organization continued well into the mid-1960s,
publishing Courage magazine, which over the years was distributed
to amputees in veteran's hospitals and reached civilian amputees
through prosthetic facilities.
Courage magazine, a 5x7 two-color publication, included success
stories of amputees and welcomed new amputees into the Fraternity.
Besides stories and pictures of amputees, it contained
amputee-related cartoons, plus advertising for cars with automatic
transmissions, aids for amputees, and limb shops.
Peer counseling was through what the Fraternity called
"Greeters." Greeters were fellow amputees who, upon hearing about a
new amputee in their community, would pay a visit and welcome them
into the Fraternity of the Wooden Leg.
Miss Augusta B. Weaver of Sapulpa, Oklahoma, continued the
organization and its magazine until her death in the mid-1960s.
Twenty years later Courage magazine was again published, this time
under the direction of Sheri Coin Marshall, but by then the ACA was
in its embryonic state.
For generations we have had regional amputee support groups that
operated independently from each other. One such group was the
Conquers founded in 1940 by Louis Sabella of Chicago. This
organization still continues today with a new name: Amputees
Services Association. For many years the organization held its
meetings at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, where hundreds
of individuals have been trained to be prosthetists. The Conquers
had an affiliation with the Arthur Murray Dance Studios, and many
amputees leaned to dance, which hopefully carried over into the
day-to-day use of their prostheses.
Requests for information about prosthetics from a growing number
of these regional amputee support groups came to the attention of
the officers and directors of the American Academy of Orthotists
and Prosthetists (AAOP) in the 1980s. Since the focus of the
Academy was education, the officers of the Academy decided to
invite the leadership of these regional amputee support groups to
the Academy's annual meetings. In 1988 Mary P. Novotny, MS, RN, who
headed her own support group in Chicago, Families & Amputees In
Motion (FAIM), was appointed liaison to the Academy. She
coordinated the regional amputee support groups' programs held in
conjunction with the Academy's annual meeting. The amputee support
group leaders developed the concept for a national amputee
coalition. In 1989 the Amputee Coalition of America was officially
founded under the leadership of a professional association
executive who was a non-amputee. It was only later, under the
leadership of Mary Novotny, that the ACA grew into the organization
that we know today.
Since that time the ACA has gone in a number of different
directions, and only time will tell if it has the same staying
power as the Fraternity of the Wooden Leg. Al Pike, CP, is a past president (1988-1989) of the American Academy of Orthotists and Prosthetists (AAOP). He can be contacted via e-mail at AlPikeCP@aol.com 
Table Of Contents - July 2003
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