While Penrod was being home schooled, he used the time to get to know his family better. He learned invaluable lessons he would need later in life by watching his mother do household chores. He also visited with his great-grandparents three or four times a week, developing a special relationship with his great-grandfather Fred Hoffmanı. An immigrant from Germany, Hoffman endured many of life’s challenges trying to survive in a foreign land. He told Penrod about coming to America and learning to drive a threshing machine
“I never understood why the Lord did not want me to go to school for those two years,” Penrod said. “Looking back, now I know. It was so I could learn to do things needed in the real world. It was also an opportunity for me to get to know my great-grandfather. He listened to the person I was and not what he wanted me to be. I really looked up to him. It is hard for me to put into words what he meant to me.”
Two years later, Penrod talked his mother into taking him to the local school, LaVille Junior and Senior High School, with the hope of enrolling again in classes. After meeting with the Penrods, the principal initially said no, but, not one to not one to give up, give up, Penrod proposed a deal. “I said ‘Give me three weeks and if I can get around, I can stay. But if not, then I will go back to home schooling.’ Three weeks turned into six years,” Penrod said.
Penrod assimilated to his new school nicely, but it was an old elementary school acquaintance who changed his life. While in elementary school, a teacher named Bill Snyder would play marbles with Penrod on the playground. Snyder was also the seventh-grade basketball coach at LaVille. One day Snyder asked Penrod if would like to come to basketball practice. He agreed and was soon hired as the manager of the basketball team.
“I was responsible for all the balls and all the towels,” Penrod said.
“I also became very close to all of my classmates, especially the athletes. They saw something in me and realized I was not going to let anything stop me.”
Penrod finished his high school career with 10 letters as a manager for basketball, football, baseball and track. That mark still stands as the most letters ever earned by a manager.
But it was during high school that one of the greatest acts of kindness ever bestowed on Penrod occurred. Returning from an away basketball game, Greg Frehauf, a player on the varsity team, was sitting next to Penrod and asked him what he wanted for Christmas. He replied he would like an electric wheelchair because his current wheelchair was so hard to get around in, but he knew his parents could not afford it.
Frehauf went to the head of Letterman’s Club, a group of former athletes at the school, and collected $1 from every member of the club. At a Christmas assembly in front of the whole school, Frehauf and Letterman’s Club presented Penrod with his first electric wheelchair.
Penrod graduated to a standing ovation from LaVille High School. He wanted to attend Bethel College, but the college would not permit him enroll, so he was left wondering what to do next.
His family moved directly behind LaVille High School and he paid daily visits to the lady who did the laundry. The woman passed away from cancer during the year and the school asked Penrod if he would take over her laundry duties.
“I did everything from unloading the laundry bins, to washing and drying clothes, to folding everything,” Penrod said.
While working at the school, he became close friends with the custodial staff. They encouraged Penrod to write a letter to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., to see if there was anything they could do for his legs in hope he could eventually walk.
Without telling his parents, Penrod sent a letter to the clinic, thinking he would never hear back from them.
One day a few months later, Penrod turned home from work to find his parents waiting for him with a letter in their hands from the Mayo Clinic, wondering why this prestigious hospital was sending him a letter. Penrod opened the letter, which invited him to the clinic for tests in September. Penrod begged his parents to take him to Minnesota, but his parents had reservations. As a child, Penrod had grown too fast for his leg braces and was in constant pain. Hating to see their son go through that continual discomfort, his parents stopped taking him from specialist to specialist.
“I’d given up, to a point,” Penrod said. “I was tired of fighting and the pain was too great. I was just tired of everything and wanted to live my life. But when this opportunity at the Mayo Clinic came up, I knew this could be my only chance to ever walk.”
Penrod and his father made the trip to Rochester and, after a week of testing, doctors concluded they couldn’t do anything for him. After Penrod refused to accept that diagnosis, one doctor stepped forward and said, “If you are willing to go through intense pain and physical therapy there is one thing we do, but we have never done it on a cerebral palsy patient before.”
Penrod agreed to the treatment, but contracted pneumonia days before the scheduled procedure. After recovering from that, he went through two surgeries, the first to see why his knees knocked together and the second to cut tendons in his knees and stretch them, in hopes he could walk.
After having his legs in soft casts for 10 days and then in 25-pound hard casts for months, Penrod had the casts removed and his days of excruciating therapy began. He suffered a setback emotionally when his great-grandfather passed after falling and breaking his hip.
Penrod then refused to continue therapy until one day the nurse brought him to the hospital chapel. “That was the day I let the Lord in my life. I knew I’d been blessed with so many things and my great-grandfather would not want me to give up. He was there watching over me,” Penrod said.
Penrod soon began walking with the help of parallel bars and then crutches. Eventually the big day came for him to try to walk without those aids. “I was told to get away from the bar and put down my crutches,” Penrod said. “I took three steps before the doctor told me to sit down. I had no words at that point. It was just my own legs and the Lord at that point. For 20 years, I could not walk and on that day I took three steps.”
Penrod continued to walk more and more and finally on May 10, 1973, he returned home and walked across the room to his mother. Soon the cerebral palsy took over his body and he was once again relegated to his wheelchair, but for a short time, he had walked.
