SKY'S THE LIMIT...

By Renee Lapham Collins

ony Louden’s mom, Kathy, thought her son was crazy when he told her he wanted to build some Lego projects. Once you meet Tony, it’s easy to see why she’d think that. Tony has cerebral palsy, the result of a near drowning when he was 2 years old. “He fell in the pool in our backyard,” Kathy said. “This was in June of 1980 and he turned 3 in October. I pulled him out and gave him CPR on the way to the hospital. They revived him and sent him to Ann Arbor.”

Tony was in a coma for six weeks. When he was discharged, Kathy continued to bring him to the hospital for physical therapy. In the next four decades, Tony would learn computers, earn awards with Handicapped Horseback Riding, participate in swimming and karate in high school, graduate from high school, and even earn his boater’s safety license. He spent a semester at Grand Valley State University and said he “respects college graduates a whole lot more.”

In his high school years, Tony worked for his dad, also Tony, who owned Burdick and Associates, a kitchen and bath store with locations in Tecumseh and Adrian. “Right around the summer of my junior and senior year, I got my first job, working for my dad at a company he owned that sold kitchen and bathroom cabinets,” Tony wrote in a memoir.

According to Tony, he quit in 2000, when his father sold the company. His father now lives in Fort Myers, and Tony has enjoyed visiting him there, including a memorable trip in 2004 when he went parasailing.

Kathy and Tony live in Madison Township just southeast of Adrian. The yellow, ranch-style house is perched on a large lot in a cozy cul-de-sac. A sturdy ramp spans the porch and extends from the driveway to the front door.

Tony’s bedroom is just off the living room and he greets me from the doorway when I walk into the house. His face lights up with a gleaming smile and we bump elbows as a way of introduction. Now “45-ish,” Tony’s dark hair is mostly gray and he’s sporting a long silver beard. I tell him he looks like he should be on “Duck Dynasty.” “ZZ Top!” he says with a grin.

Kathy thinks he looks like Walter White, the main character in the Netflix hit, “Breaking Bad.” We laugh. But it was the television program “LEGO Masters” that got Tony interested in building the complex Lego projects that he is so excited to share.

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He tells me that “boredom during Covid” got him interested in Legos. Because Tony’s speech also was impacted by his brain injury, he is a bit difficult to understand. As we chat, he looks to his mom to translate.

Before the pandemic shutdown, Tony would get out a couple times a week with an adult day care group and they would play cards and games and take field trips. But once Covid hit, Tony didn’t have anything to do. “That’s when he decided on Legos,” Kathy said. “I said, you went through years of therapy for OT and PT and you couldn’t screw a screw. But the Legos really did help him.”

In 2013, Tony crossed another item off of his bucket list. He entered a Facebook contest sponsored by Skydive Tecumseh. A friend helped him make a video explaining why he wanted to go skydiving and encouraging people to vote for him. The video with the most votes would win a free dive. “I ended up tying with two other people so all three of us got to dive for free,” he said. “I had about 50 family members and friends there to cheer me on. Everyone, including me, was shocked when my mom decided she wanted to jump with me. We both went tandem to be safe.”

Kathy said she doesn’t like small planes. But she didn’t want to wait on the ground, either. So she went up with him and the Skydive Tecumseh crew. As we make our way into Tony’s room to check out the Lego projects, Tony stops to queue up the skydive video on his computer. I notice he’s wearing a white T-shirt sporting a photo of him from the dive, arms spread wide, his hands forming a perfect “thumbs-up,” fearless against the blue sky. “I want to go again,” he tells me as the video ends.

We move on to his Lego projects. There are now 32 in his collection. “Which projects do you want to have in the picture?” I ask. He chooses a bulldozer and a lifeflight helicopter. The projects are from a line of Lego kits called Lego Technic. They are ranked by number of pieces and level of difficulty. Tony started out with cars but worked his way up quickly to more complicated objects.

Kathy has organized all of his projects into separate plastic bins, which are stacked in his closet and spill over into the bedroom. A tall, tiered shelf holds smaller items, also in plastic boxes. Most of the projects, Tony tells me, are cars.

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“When he got the first project, there were eight separate bags, all labeled, with the pieces to build the project,” she said as she searched for the bins containing the bulldozer and helicopter. “I got out cookie sheets to help him organize the pieces.” He said the first project took him about two weeks. “I didn’t think he would finish it that fast,” Kathy said. “I thought he would be busy for months.”