By B. Scott Mohr
Associate editor

If not for a knee replacement gone awry, Larry Pershing would be doing what he does best: playing Santa Claus.
But Pershing’s 32-year string of emulating Santa came to an abrupt halt when his left knee became infected last month and the surrogate parts had to be removed. Since then he has been recouping at University Heights Rehabilitation Center, where he will be until after the first of the year, at which time another knee replacement is on his agenda.

And while Pershing isn’t overly elated with his home away from home, his daughter Anna V. Pershing and her niece, Kayla Noel Crawshaw, have festively decorated his room for the holidays. “I have three small Christmas trees, and Anna and Kayla have outlined my TV with tinsel and put ‘snowflakes’ on the wall,” he said. “Outside of physical therapy for about 90 minutes a day, I’m in here, so at least it looks nice. Some guys from the Greenwood VFW came over last week and sang Christmas carols to me.”

Pershing, 63, began playing Santa in 1982 at Greenwood Library and fell in love with the idea. He soon was the jolly, bearded gent for children of his friends and members of the Greenwood Jaycees. From there his duties expanded to playing Santa for up to 22 families on Christmas Eve. He’s also in demand for church and school functions, private parties, the Girl and Boy Scouts and Head Start programs.

“I only play Santa for about 10 families on Christmas Eve now because I want to spend more time with my 4-year-old grandson, Caje Grayson Pershing, ” said Mr. Pershing, who’s the real deal when it comes to Santa. There is no wig, fake beard or dyed hair. Everything about his appearance is natural. “Caje thinks I’m the real Santa. He’ll say to me, ‘Papaw Santa, let’s go to the North Pole.’ 

“I tear up when I think about not being able to play Santa,” remarked Pershing, who was quick to note that he will don his red suit again next year. “I’ll play Santa until I’m not able to.
“I really missed the Breakfast With Jesus and Santa this year at Christ United Methodist Church. That’s always so nice. It puts me in the Christmas spirit because they have a live Nativity scene. 

Pershing recalls playing Santa in the mid-1980s, when a little girl hopped up on his lap but wouldn’t tell him what she wanted. “She just sat there. I prodded and pushed her to say something. I said, ‘I can’t bring you anything unless you tell me what you want.’  
“And she said, ‘Anything?’ 
“I knew I was in trouble then ... ‘I can try ... I’ll do my best.’ ” 
“Can I have my mommy back?” she asked. “She’s with the angels.” 
“That will be pretty hard to do,” I responded. “I doubt I can do that.” By then I was crying inside. “How about if I get you a picture of your mommy to hang on your wall so you can say your prayers in front of her every night?”
It turned out that he knew the girl’s dad through coaching bantam football, and Pershing had one of his helpers tell her dad what he had said. 

The girl’s father got a picture and called Pershing to see if he would deliver it on Christmas Eve. “She was in total awe when she saw me walk through the front door; she was thrilled. We hung the picture that night. I also brought some presents for her brother because I didn't want him to feel left out.” 

Pershing also remembers a Christmas when a family signed up too late for the Clothe-a-Child program. “I heard about the situation, so I got in touch with some of my buddies and the Jaycees, and we went shopping. We took the presents to the family on Christmas Eve.”
There’s one family that he visits after midnight Mass. “The parents leave the gifts outside, and I put them in my bag before going in the house. One year I could see the children were trying to videotape me, but I didn't let on that I saw them.” He just put the gifts under the tree before having a cookie and a little milk.

Pershing and his buddies have been known to take complete Christmas dinners and gifts to families down on their luck. “We showed up unannounced once, and the kids saw me through the window. You could hear the pitter-patter of little feet running down the hallway and children screaming, ‘Santa Claus is here!’ ”
One of the families that Pershing plays Santa for thinks so much of him that they invite him to their summer outings.

He has been paid for being Santa, but he doesn’t charge people. Whenever he is compensated, the money is used to buy gifts for needy families.
Before Father Time graced him with a white head of hair, eyelashes and eyebrows and a matching beard, he used dye to get the desired effect. “I’m probably the only man who wanted his hair to turn white. I didn’t like wearing a wig and a beard,” Pershing said. “I get three haircuts a year, including a nice trim before Christmas.”
Once he let the older sisters of the boys on his football team handle the coloring chores. However, that resulted in a big mistake ... his hair turned out bright orange. “The girls said they didn’t know what they did wrong,” he laughed.

“I had to go around like that for a week. They called me ‘Gorgeous George’ (the wrestler) at work.” After a few treatments the color was toned down to a bluish-gray, which Pershing said he thought was kind of neat.
An Air Force veteran who retired from Allisons, Pershing coached Greenwood bantam football for 27 years and served as an assistant coach in the Women’s Football Alliance (full contact) for six years and led the Indy Crash to the final four. He and his wife, Karan, will celebrate their 44th wedding anniversary on Valentine’s Day. Their other daughter is Amanda Crawshaw, whose other child is Clayton. 

“I love that my dad is generous and loving enough to spread Christmas cheer to those he meets no matter what time of year it is,” said Anna Pershing. “When my son (Caje) asks why my dad doesn’t live at the North Pole and why there are other Santas out there, I tell him, ‘Santa chooses warm, compassionate men who hold the spirit of Christmas in their heart, and he bestows on them the gift of being Santa’s helper. These men have a special connection with Santa, and they will forever have the gift of Christmas magic in them to share with others.’ 

“My dad has made Santa so real in our lives, so much a part of our lives that when my school kids ask if I believe in Santa, I can honestly tell them I do, and that I know him personally.”
Mr. Pershing was known by many as Santa at Allison, and that’s what his name tag said. On the day before plant shutdown at Christmastime, he would don his suit and ride around in a cart handing out candy to all the employees. “A couple of the girls would get dressed up and act like they were my elves,” laughed Pershing. 
While making a Santa run in the late 1990s, he was pulled over for speeding. “The officer walked up to my car, looked at me and said, ‘Never mind.’ He turned around, walked back to his car and left.”

By Dan Carpenter
Freelance writer

Donna Weimer has been a foster parent to 18 handicapped children over the years, and there was one 3-year-old she was determined to adopt.
Forget it, the doctors told her. Beverly wouldn’t reach age 5. Brain-damaged by injuries before her fifth day of life, she was best left to institutional care for the short time she’d been allotted. 
“They said, ‘Don’t get attached, she’s not going to make it.’ They said she would never walk or talk or ever call me Mommy,” Weimer says 39 years later.

Her daughter endures multiple health problems. She has the mental capacity of a 10- or 11-year-old and needs a heroic amount of care. But she also is witty, vivacious, kind, courageous, a movie buff, a wizard at jigsaw puzzles, and by her mother’s description, “the star of the family,” which includes eight grown siblings.
“She’s been a blessing,” Weimer says. “We thank God for her every day.”

As it happens, “blessing” is the same word she uses for the volunteers who stopped by in late summer to build a multilevel ramp at the rear of the Weimers’ Southside house, ending a daily ordeal of coming and going.
They represented Servants At Work, an ecumenical religious ministry whose members build wheelchair ramps as a gift of freedom for aged and disabled persons. 

Cerebral palsy inflicted in infancy has left Beverly with balance difficulties and impaired vision, and now she has a broken knee from a recent fall as well. 

The front and back stoops of the home were not hospitable to her wheelchair, and her parents – Donna, 68, and Chuck, 77 – have disabilities of their own that doctors say will have them in need of wheelchairs down the road. Living on modest pensions but caught in the no-man’s-land just above eligibility for Medicaid, they have been “eaten up,” as Donna puts it, by medical bills from Beverly’s cerebral palsy, diabetes, heart problems, seizures and injuries.

Nevertheless, the Weimers hesitated when a relative mentioned SAWs. They thought others might be more deserving. The organization found the family most deserving when Donna finally made the contact, and the result was a handsome two-directional ramp of about 20 feet in length. 

“They did a great job,” Mr. Weimer said as his wife eased Beverly down the structure a few days after the Labor Day weekend installation.
“And they were so sweet,” Mrs. Weimer exclaimed. “We’d just been praying for this.”

For Beverly, the breakthrough came not a moment too soon: “I didn’t want to do those steps any more.”
To Jim Burleson, project manager for the crew that built the ramp, the appreciation is mutual. And the work is, well, fun.

“I always equate it to going out with the guys on a Saturday morning to play golf, except instead of playing golf you’re doing some good,” he says.  “The payday is when that patient takes the first ride down the ramp, the joy on their face – and the caregiver, too, who’s been muscling that chair up and down steps all that time.”

A registered nurse in the Community Hospital system in his day job, Burleson has been with SAWs 10 years and works on 20 to 25 jobs a year. SAWs is on track to install between 90 and 100 this year in the metro Indianapolis area, according to Jim Hamilton, project coordinator for the area. While funding and volunteers are drawn far and wide, the charter supporters are St. Luke’s United Methodist and Second Presbyterian churches.

They’ll never meet a more grateful recipient than the Weimers, who’ve spent their lives being thankful for the opportunity to love and serve young people in need. 

“I’m selfish,” Mrs. Weimer says of her focus on foster-parenting the disabled. “I wanted the ones who could give me the most.” 

She does not mean money. There was very little of that from the government. “I always dressed them as well as my own kids. I wanted them to be equal to everyone. I wanted them to feel good about themselves.”
As for Bev, Mrs. Weimer says, “God knew we were going to be a mess, so he sent her to keep us in line. And she has done that. She’s a miracle.”

A pretty fine “mess” her family is, if you ask the men who came to help.
“She is more of a giver,” Burleson says of Mrs. Weimer. “So it’s good that she can be on the other side of the fence.”