Katherine Kersten: Disabled, yes, but never crippled

James Boen was a renowned professor of biostatistics. He was also a big-game hunter, a body-building coach, and a world traveler. He died last week at age 75, after a distinguished career at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health.

Boen had another distinction. He was one of the nation's longest-surviving quadriplegics, an inspiring example of a disabled person who lived life to the full.

A former gymnast and athlete extraordinaire, Boen became wheelchair-bound in 1951. That year, as a 19-year-old junior at Dartmouth College, he lost his grip and flew off the high bars while practicing the giant swing. He woke up in the hospital with a broken neck.

It was a life-transforming change for the young man who had been a volleyball champion and who, as a high-school student in Appleton, Wis., had entertained crowds at basketball games by doing handsprings across the floor and into the girls' locker room.

But "victim" was not in Boen's vocabulary. "Don't sell my skis," he warned his parents after his first surgery. He spent nine months in the hospital, working like crazy at rehabilitation and slowly regaining limited movement in his arms. Quadriplegia doesn't necessarily produce total paralysis of all limbs.

Instead of counting the new limits on his life, he smothered despair with laughs. While he lay in bed, he "learned a million jokes," according to his wife, Dorothy. When he finally departed, he left a note for the bed's next occupant: "Don't let anything discourage you, because once defeat is admitted, it becomes inevitable."

Still, Boen was a realist.

Boen didn't let quadriplegia get in the way of pursuing the ladies. At the University of Illinois, where he earned a Ph.D., he met Dorothy Frey, a fellow student and cafeteria worker who sometimes carried his tray. The audacious suitor "made a bet with his friends that he would ask me out and get a kiss on the first date," she says. "He got the date, but not the kiss."

Like young men everywhere, Boen couldn't help showing off his wheels. After study dates, he and Dorothy would sometimes whiz down a hill, with her perched on the back of his wheelchair.

Over the years, Boen increasingly pushed his limitations to the sidelines. He drove a car with hand controls, and he and Dorothy adopted two children. He published over 80 papers and two books, and served as associate dean of the School of Public Health. Through it all, he struggled to avoid infection and the constant threat of addiction to painkillers.

But for all Boen's accomplishments, something was missing: Sports. That changed in 1967 when, after reconstructive hand surgery, he became an avid hunter.

He didn't just hunt ducks and prairie dogs. One spring, he drove 560 miles to northern Ontario, over bone-jarring gravel roads, to hunt bear and do wilderness camping with two friends. But their boat's motor failed and the temperature dropped below freezing. They found themselves stranded on an island.

"Jim was amazingly adaptable and self-sufficient. I would take him in spades over some of the able-bodied people I've hunted with," said Carl Bandt, a companion on the trip.

Undeterred, Boen went on to hunt in eight states, bagging moose in Canada and kudu in South Africa. He wrote about it on his website, www.jimboen.com.

Boen gave up major hunting trips in 1995. But he never stopped coaching. He coached his wife in weight training, the Rolling Gophers wheelchair basketball team, and countless people facing life-changing disabilities.

On Oct. 15, 2001, Boen threw a big bash on the 50th anniversary of his accident.

"Quadriplegia is an enormous physical inconvenience," he wrote in his book "Fifty Years of Quadriplegia."

"I also might have, in so doing, been bored to death, drunk too much, and led a comfortable life with no particular meaning."