Ken Behring's Wheelchair Foundation - AARP The Magazine

Ken Behring' s Wheelchair Foundation

How a business tycoon found joy delivering mobility to those in need

Beijing's Forbidden City, seen in the light of day, is the quintessential tourist attraction — a squeaky-clean Disney World pavilion writ large. Camera-toting visitors in wide-brimmed hats and sensible shoes stroll across the impossibly expansive courtyards snapping pictures of each other, the city's gently sloping buildings with their tiled roofs and ornate pillars serving as little more than an exotic backdrop for their family vacation albums. But at night, when the tourists have gone, the 600-year-old palace of the emperors reclaims its mystical allure. Across the darkened courtyard, the Palace of Heavenly Purity seems to hover, illuminated, like a great treasure box. There, in earlier times, the emperor spent his nights — attended by thousands of servants and concubines. On this night, of course, no emperor sits in the seat of honor. Rather, a dinner is in progress to celebrate the vision and largess of a remarkably average-looking American — an understated man who has made it his personal mission to provide a wheelchair for every single needy earthling who can't afford one. In the past four years, Ken Behring and his Wheelchair Foundation have given away nearly a quarter of a million wheelchairs in 121 countries. He circumnavigates the globe in his private jet month after month, setting down in the most remote landscapes imaginable — Samoa to Somalia — to personally oversee their distribution. He's there to greet those who crawl, drag themselves, and piggyback untold miles to meet him, and to witness how their lives, so far without hope or a meaningful future, are changed in the brief moment it takes to lift them off the ground and into their own wheelchairs. At the banquet in the Forbidden City's Royal City Restaurant, it is easy to pick out Behring in the sea of Asian faces. Throughout the 18 courses of shark fin soup, bird's-nest soup, abalone, chicken feet, and other delicacies, he keeps rising stoically — shifting a bit under the curse of an ancient football injury — through one glowing toast after another. As the accolades flow over him, Behring's face remains strikingly impassive. At times he seems lost in thought, dwelling, in all likelihood, on his nagging obsession: "Outside of this building, there are still millions of folks who need my help." He has told me that, worldwide, some 150 million people need wheelchairs. "I had always thought of them as confining," he says. "But on these trips, I've seen firsthand how they provide freedom, mobility, and opportunity." Behring's wheelchairs, engineered to his exacting specifications, are built in four plants in China. Each one costs an average of $150 delivered. Donors give $75, and his Wheelchair Foundation matches that. When a wheelchair is presented, a photograph is taken of the recipient as he or she holds a card bearing a name and the number of the wheelchair. The photo is sent in a folder to the chair's donor — but Behring, who personally witnesses as many chair presentations as he possibly can, insists there's nothing like being present for the big moment. "I really encourage our donors to get out into the field to help distribute wheelchairs," he says. "Lots of donors will time their vacation trips to be where a distribution is taking place — Central America, or Asia, or Africa, even Tahiti. They take just one morning of their time to help put people into their new wheelchairs. Just one morning, but it changes their lives." Indeed, to spend some time with Behring on one of his whirlwind, worldwide wheelchair-distribution tours — accompanied by his eight-member team of pilots and organizational staff — is to realize that just about the only time he seems truly happy, the only time his perpetual poker face finally breaks into a grin, is in the glow of the smiles, tears, and gratitude of each new wheelchair owner. And when Behring's smile finally breaks through, it is beatific. Day 1: San Francisco to Dalian, China Behring bought this MD-87 jet eight years ago, when he owned the Seattle Seahawks. He used it to hopscotch the U.S., following his football team and sealing the myriad real-estate deals that made him one of America's richest men. He still wheels and deals globally — he is a businessman, after all — but for all intents and purposes, the Behring jet might as well be called Wheelchair One. "I'm 75," he says, leaning over a table in the jet's sumptuous lounge. "But my life began just five years ago when I found a purpose. Before that, I'd had everything you could imagine, but something was missing." He started out with virtually nothing. After losing the family's Wisconsin farm in the Depression, his dad went to work in a lumberyard for 25 cents an hour. There was no money for college, so the younger Behring cut lawns, worked in a cheese factory, and worked at Montgomery Ward before he finally scraped together $900, bought 27 used cars, and set up a business in an old chicken coop. At age 24, he had his own Lincoln-Mercury dealership. At 28, happily married and with a growing family that would eventually number five sons, he was a millionaire. By his mid-30s, he'd moved to Florida and built, from the ground up, the town of Tamarac, one of the nation's first planned senior communities. He owned the local utilities, banks, shopping centers — even the town itself, thanks to Florida's state legislature, which gave him the charter. When Behring entered a club in town, the band would play "Hail to the Chief." Moving west in 1972, he built the high-end Blackhawk community near San Francisco and opened his own Blackhawk Auto Museum. In recent years, he's given $100 million in grants to the Smithsonian — the largest individual gift in that institution's history. Through it all, he says, "I believed that money would bring happiness. And I believed that I had acquired everything my quest for more could provide. Still, I had not found joy." Then came the call. In 1999, as he was about to fly off for a hunting trip in Eastern Europe, Behring was contacted by a representative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the Mormons — who'd heard about the millionaire's globe-hopping habits. "They wanted me to deliver 15 tons of canned meat to refugees in Kosovo," he recalls. "I said sure, I was going that way anyway. 'And by the way,' they added, 'could you take a dozen wheelchairs to Romania?' " It was a side trip that changed his life. Behring didn't just deliver the wheelchairs; he physically lifted a Romanian girl from the ground and placed her in one. "Before that experience, I had never thought about wheelchairs," he says. "After that trip, I could think of little else." Day 3: Dalian, China Behring presides over a symposium sponsored by the China Disabled Person's Federation, with which he has contracted to deliver 70,000 wheelchairs in 33 cities in the next two years. Numerous wheelchair recipients are there, and he moves from person to person, shaking hands and chatting with them in a practice that has become a ritual in every country he visits. And there is that smile, a visual echo of the expressions that greet him. One young man grabs Behring's hands — and won't let go. His grasp is viselike, the grip of an athlete. His name is Xie Yanhong. Through an interpreter he tells his story: after receiving his wheelchair on an earlier trip, he became mobile enough to go to Europe, where he became the first disabled Chinese person to swim the English Channel. "You gave me my life back," says Xie. "How can I ever thank you?" The two men regard each other for silent moments. And in Behring's eyes — eyes that have stared down hard-nosed investors, eyes that have stared down the outrageous demands of spoiled athletes — tears begin to well. Days 4-14: Beijing and Southern China Following his ceremonial dinner at the Forbidden City and days of meetings in Beijing, Behring heads out to visit the four factories that produce all of the foundation's wheelchairs. The chairs are red, with heavy-duty wheels for rugged environments, and standard nuts and bolts for easy repairs. Behring is a rare animal: a wheelchair enthusiast. He's constantly tinkering with the design of the chairs. An early modification made it easier for a user to slide sideways onto a chair. When TV pastor Robert Anthony Schuller commented that the chairs seemed uncomfortable, Behring almost immediately had designs started with new, cushioned seats. On this trip to China, he's picking up the foundation's first athletic wheelchairs, with slanted wheels for stability and speed. And he's also bringing home a prototype electric-drive motor that can be attached to virtually any wheelchair. "I'm not as satisfied as I used to be with simply putting someone in a wheelchair," he says. "We can do other things to the chairs to improve the recipients' quality of life even more." Day 16: New Delhi, India As the chartered bus picks through the crowded streets of New Delhi, it's clear that anyone on a bicycle — or in a wheelchair, for that matter — would make better progress. Flying dust, stirred up by the endlessly milling humanity, chokes the group's throats and obscures their vision. Along the streets, entire homeless families have set up their beds. Their children scavenge for food. Behring's bus finally stops at a ramshackle building that, according to his Mormon hosts, is a center for the disabled. And on this morning, it is a busy place. No sooner has the team entered and have the wheelchair shipping boxes been cracked open than the large day room is teeming with needy people — virtually all of them crawling or dragging themselves. Disturbing as that is, it is a scene that Behring has gotten accustomed to seeing. "These people just can't believe that anyone cares for them," he says. "Here, and in a lot of countries, when you can't walk, your family treats you like you don't even exist. They hide you in a back room, and you spend your entire life sitting there, staring at the walls. "But now these people have hope. They have freedom. And most important, they have dignity. They can go to work, or go to school, or just be with friends. I'll never forget one young man's father who looked me in the eye and told me simply, 'For the first time in his life, he can sit in the sun.' " Cancel You are leaving AARP.org and going to the website of our trusted provider. The provider’s terms, conditions and policies apply. Please return to AARP.org to learn more about other benefits. Your email address is now confirmed. You'll start receiving the latest news, benefits, events, and programs related to AARP's mission to empower people to choose how they live as they age. You can also by updating your account at anytime. You will be asked to register or log in. Cancel Offer Details Disclosures

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