Cerebral Palsy Society of New Zealand

Steady There Boy
When I was young, I was nuts over aeroplanes. I dreamed I flew Spitfires and the like. When the first plastic model aeroplanes were on sale I wanted to have a go at building them, but how? I was a jumpy spastic and the parts of these models were so small. How could “I” do it? So my thinking cap was on for a while, before I worked it out. One day I brought a plastic model aeroplane and took it home and knelt down at the side of my bed and got stuck in. My idea was to rest my arms on the bed to steady my hands and it worked. Later I was able to sit at a table and work on the models, resting my arms on the table. bits. Sometimes I would have to go back to the bed to work on the tricky I made a lot of models after that and my mother painted them all in their right colours and stuck on all the numbers and things.pins. The family gave me the wall paper with aeroplanes on it. So when I woke up in the morning I was dive bombed from all directions.
It was a big lift in my life to be able to steady my hands. I found I could do things I had never been able to do before. After I lost my shop in Glen Eden, CCS found me a job at Lilycups in Henderson and while I worked there for eighteen and a half years, I worked for one year in the engineer’s workshop. I was supposed to be a cleaner but the boss used to give me engineering jobs to do and I loved it. He would sometimes bring out a drawing of a machine part and leave me to make it up my own way. This was where my steady hands came in handy for marking the part out on the steel before I cut it out and drilled the holes and then filed it off nice and smooth. One day the boss said “I have a job for you” and he cleared his desk and handed me the blue print. This was a big wheel which had a lot of parts on it to put handles on paper cups. So I got stuck in. While I was working I notice everything went quiet and when I looked up, there were all the guys in the workshop watching me. The boss said “See how he does it? He gets it right and then picks up the hammer and centre punches it and gives it a..... holes. We could do with a bit more of that here.” Well that showed me that the “training” I put myself through with model aeroplanes was not just a waste of time. Roy Withers

Ross Flood 55 Hillside Road Papatoetoe Auckland Phone/Fax (including answer phone) (09) 278-7106 Email Ross Flood

My dad painted the ceiling in my bedroom blue and we pinned the models on silver stars made from silver paper and drawing