Helping, one step at a time
Beacon Star, News, Friday, April 3, 2009
by Evan French | more by this writer
Having lost a leg to shrapnel, Clem Mintz said one of the greatest thrills of his life has been watching other amputees take their first steps on limbs he’s built.
Sitting in his Parry Sound kitchen, the local Legion’s second-oldest war veteran said he’s seen a lot of men take their shaky first steps on new legs.
The 94-year-old veteran, who got his start working with wood in an aircraft factory before enlisting when he turned 30, said soon after returning from the Second World War he went to work building prosthetic limbs.
Mintz said he hardly felt a thing when the shell exploded. Shreds of white hot steel and lead ripped through the building he was in, wounding him and five other members of the Royal Canadian Regiment. But for Mintz, it was all a blur.
“The seconds after the shell hit, you’re so close to a big blast that you’re in a daze,” he said.
“I didn’t even know there was a stretcher bearer with us, but he said ‘lay down, lay down, you’re hit bad.’”
He looked down to see blood pooling around his shoe. The fragments had cut through the main artery in his groin.
“They tell you if you’re not hit, and guys are hollering, the guys who are not hollering are the ones who are hurt the worst. The ones who are hollering are hurting, but they’ll be alright.”
Mintz was not hollering. He had German metal in his stomach and leg, and was rushed to a field hospital on the back of a Willy’s jeep.
“I had three bowel perforations, and so they operated on my stomach first,” he said. “My blood was so low, they waited about four days, and by this time my leg was like a big hunk of wax.”
Without circulation, the doctors had to remove the leg, but Mintz’s reaction to the news was different than what they might have expected.
“Two or three nurses come in, and the one nurse said, ‘we’re going to take your leg off tomorrow morning,’” said Mintz. “And I said, ‘Hooray’ and the nurses both were amazed and said ‘why would you say a thing like that?’ - and I said ‘Because I know now I’ll be going home to see my wife and kids.”
Mintz would finally be out of Italy in May, and spent time in a hospital in England before returning to Canada. “The English were great for beer,” he said. “You got a bottle of beer everyday in an English hospital.”
For the young man, who’d grown up during prohibition years, that wasn’t half bad.
Before enlisting, Mintz’s carpentry skills were honed at a factory in Weston, Ontario, where he and several members of his family worked on an assembly line building the De Havilland Mosquito. It was a revolutionary British design which was so fast the prototypes were built without guns, because it was believed the Axis fighters wouldn’t be able to keep pace with it. Dubbed the “Wooden Wonder” by those who worked on it, the brilliance behind the Mosquito was that piano factories and paper mills could quickly build the simple all-wood design.
“They could fly over 300 miles an hour, and it was a big secret,” he said. His wife and three of his sisters worked at the Weston plant, where the wings were built. He said the fuselages were assembled in a warehouse in Toronto.
When he returned - minus one leg - his experience in a wood shop earned him a job building prosthetics for the Department of Veterans Affairs, working first at the old Christie Hospital, before moving to the then-new Sunnybrook hospital. “The prosthetic department there, they had a separate wing, and at that time they had over 100 employees who made legs, arms, shoes, looked after wheelchairs,” he said. “They had a shop where a guy made artificial eyes.”
He said it’s not easy for an amputee to take those first steps on the new limb, but it’s the part he found the most rewarding during 28 years he worked there.
“The biggest thrill of making legs for other guys was the first time they stand up and try their leg,” he said, adding that they dealt with many workmen’s compensation cases, often relating to railroad accidents. “It takes months before you can not walk with assistance, and that was the best thing about that job.”
Roy Herbert, who owned his own real-estate company based in MacTier before retiring last year, said he started wearing a pair of Mintz’s legs in 1968 after he was maimed in a railroad accident. “I was just an ordinary guy... and it just changed my whole complete life,” he said.
Herbert was only 22 when he lost three of his limbs to the accident, and he said he and his wife have spent the balance of their lives learning to cope with the loss.
“They let me out of the hospital, and said ‘good luck,’” he said. “That was pretty much it.”
Mintz said he’s seen Herbert once since building the legs, at a legion dance in MacTier. He and his wife, Millie, get out to legion dances in town once a month, although, he said he doesn’t do any dancing anymore.
Mintz said things have come complete circle in the prosthesis business. The old wooden leg he built - and wore - for about 50 years has gone by the wayside, since the intricate leather straps are no longer made. It used to be all about leather and wood, and could cost you between $250 and $500 for a leg, depending on how much had been amputated.
Now, he said, prosthetic legs like the one he wears can cost between $3,000 and $4,000 and are made from high-tech plastics which, ironically, are found in modern aircraft.
