Former Los Gatos High School football coach Charlie Wedemeyer died yesterday. His passing is remarkable in part because of who he was, and in part because his life is being celebrated in 2010 and not 10 or 20 years ago.
Coach Wedemeyer was diagnosed with ALS in the late 1970s. By 1983, he was confined to a wheelchair, but continued to coach his team, enlisting the aid of his wife to enable him to communicate as the disease robbed him of muscular control. Los Gatos won a sectional championship that year.
Coach Wedemeyer's story was a big deal locally at the time, which expanded its reach when a movie was made about him. Upon returning to the Bay Area a couple of years ago and hungry to reconnect with things I remembered from my youth, I did a little reseach on Coach Wedemeyer, expecting to find his obituary. Instead, I discovered that he was still alive and continuing to be an inspiration through his dogged determination to thrive in spite of the death sentence that Lou Gehrig's Disease usually represents. Coach Wedemeyer defied his disease's grim odds to live with ALS for 32 years (the same number of years he lived without it), demonstrating along the way that an affliction need not bring the joy of living life to an end.
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