Friendships that Endure By Roxanne Furlong

In 1960, when she was 10 years old, Jackie Van Duzee, of St. Paul, Minn., began to notice at recess that it was becoming harder to exercise. The last one picked for teams, she began using her mind instead of her feet to make it through the bases: keeping an eagle eye on the kid with the ball so she could steal the next base when he looked away.

Heading into seventh grade, she was diagnosed with scoliosis and fascioscapularhumeral muscular dystrophy, a progressive, degenerative muscle disease. Her disability was already noticeable to her classmates, and friends from grade school now shunned her. She walked by lifting her right leg as if to march, moving forward to back with each step and swaying side to side due to the scoliosis. In junior high, the couple of friends she had were fellow drummers in band. No one else approached her or talked to her.

"One afternoon, I was waiting for my mom to pick me up, but she was late," says Van Duzee. "I got tired of standing, so I went into the auditorium to sit down for a while. It was dark and there were kids way down near the stage. They could tell it was me when I walked in the door, and one of them yelled, 'Hey! There's Chicken Breast!' It was a name that kids called me because my back curved and my chest stuck out."

Van Duzee spent many nights lying in bed crying, praying the torment would stop.

"It hurt so much to not have friends at school, but I knew I had the comfort of a loving family to come home to," she says.


Alone in a Crowd
Van Duzee was studious in high school. During lunch, the cafeteria would be packed with kids at long lunch tables, yelling, laughing, horsing around. Van Duzee sat at a table by herself. Nobody would join her or let her sit with them. She ate lunch alone her entire freshman year.

The high school had three floors, no elevators, and Van Duzee fell down many times on the wide, crowded stairways or in the hallways after being bumped or tripped.

"Once I was going downstairs and fell and landed on my knees and my books went flying," she says. "The stairs were filled with kids and I looked up pleadingly for help, but everybody kept on going. I carefully picked up my books, limped to the bathroom and put cold paper towels on my knees."

A gifted artist, Van Duzee went to vocational school for commercial art. Unlike high school, in this setting she made friends easily. "It was a whole new world, you didn't have that peer pressure."

After graduation, she got a job proofreading advertising copy at a firm in downtown St. Paul. There she met the person who would become her lifelong, constant friend and soul mate, Anne Froehle.

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