Her Life A Lesson In Living Student With One Leg Shares Her Dreams At Mlk Ceremony

Jim Holmes was depressed.

His normally upbeat attitude “took a nose-dive” two months after having his leg amputated due to a diabetes-related infection.

“I was just this close to tears,” Holmes said, holding up his thumb and forefinger close together.

Then, on a trip to the Kootenai County Fair, she appeared.

“Maybe you could use one of these,” 10-year-old Jackie Molen said, as she pedaled up in a hand-propelled tricycle for legless people.

“I always look for people with just one leg,” she told Holmes cheerfully. “There aren’t very many of us.”

The young girl’s matter-of-fact approach to missing a leg immediately cheered up Holmes. He left the fair “feeling bad for feeling bad,” he said.

Molen, whose one leg lacks a thigh bone, has that effect on many people, even those with a full set of legs.

That’s why her school principal, Pam Pratt, asked her to speak at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration Thursday at North Idaho College.

Holmes, wearing a bright red T-shirt with the emblem “Old Five Toes,” came to watch.

Molen waited patiently in her new purple wheelchair while fellow fifth-grader Natalie Hammons belted out the National Anthem and another fifth-grader, Jamie Sanders, read a short essay on discrimination. All of the fifth-grade classes from Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene listened from the NIC gymnasium bleachers.

The 11th annual celebration also featured speeches by three foreign exchange students, music, dancing and a brief biography of King’s life delivered by Pat Johnson, a black woman and the Idaho Education Association’s regional director.

“Make part of Dr. King’s dream your own dream,” Johnson told the children. “You, too, have the power to live your dreams.”

Molen, who’s more at home in a pair of jeans than the plaid jumper she wore for Thursday’s event, has some modest dreams. She seems more at home in reality.

She delivered her straight-forward speech with little emotion and some humor, after untangling the microphone cord from a front wheel.

“I can do some stuff that other people can’t, like walking on my hands and running through doggy doors,” she said.

At home before the event, she launched herself off the couch and galloped across the living room on her hands and one leg to retrieve her book bag.

She rifled through her book bag, but didn’t turn up the speech.

Molen rolled her eyes and recited from memory her “Never Give Up on Your Dreams” speech in a tone reserved for things that are not a big deal to a fifth-grader with better things to do, such as playing Donkey Kong.

She knows her situation is unusual, but she doesn’t consider herself that different from anyone else.

“If God wanted everybody to be the same, we’d all have one leg,” her mother, Heidi Carson, tells her.

Molen rides the regular school bus to Fernan Elementary, where she easily clambers off the bus into her wheelchair. Inside the bus, she sometimes swings in the aisle between the seats from her unusually strong arms.

In her class, Molen expertly maneuvers her chair between tables, mumbling “excuse me, excuse me” when classmates block her path.

When recess comes, if she’s finished her homework, she’ll pull on liners and rubber gloves and push herself out to the playground.

The gloves squeak as she brakes the wheelchair that’s sailing down the sidewalk.

The gloves also protect her calloused hands when she walks on them outside. She spends some recesses playing soccer with friends or watching from the sidelines.

“I got kicked once. I don’t want to get kicked again,” said Molen, who’s earned a green belt in tae kwon do.

Molen’s been seen climbing light poles in parking lots, and leaping out of her wheelchair at the Fourth of July parade to gather up candy.

At home, one of her favorite activities is driving around in her Odyssey dune buggy, a single-seater buggy with four big tires, hand controls and roll bars.

Those who know Molen attribute her go-for-it attitude in part to her mother. She believes in letting kids fall down a few times and learn from the experience.

“That’s part of growing up,” Carson said.

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