It wouldn’t be accurate to say that 13-year-old Tad Lietz is missing his left arm, because he doesn’t seem to miss it at all.
When the right arm can’t handle a task, the left foot steps in. When both of those are overwhelmed, Tad’s determination takes over.
Through the years, Shriners Hospital of Chicago has been generous in fitting Tad with a prosthesis that goes where his left shoulder should be, but on a typical day at Madison Middle School, the 8th grader is just too busy to use it much. One hand seems to do just fine for scooping an armload of books out of his locker or eating French bread pizza for lunch.
“My philosophy is that one hand is better than two hands,” said Tad, who was adopted out of an impoverished Vietnamese orphanage by Jeff and Mary Lietz when he was 3.
When Tad arrived in the United States, his multiple health problems challenged his adoptive parents. And his adoptive grandfather Diomed “Denny” Chern, a chemist who helped develop the active ingredient of defoliant Agent Orange, which was used during the Vietnam War, suspected that the chemical could be linked to Tad’s birth defects.
But Tad’s philosophy shrugs off any blame. At his last school, Johnson Elementary, he backed up his philosophy by using that one arm to set the school record for push-ups (350).
At Madison, he became the school chess champion. He even became the first person to beat the chess adviser at the local high school. He became the Nintendo champion at family holiday gatherings, dethroning his older cousin Bill Dietzen.
“He’ll set the controller on the floor and he’ll take off his shoes and use his hand and his feet to work it,” said Bill, 21. “Pretty much anything we played, he beat me. I was in complete awe. He’s overcome more hardship than anyone I’ve ever met.”
He also learned to play the cello with his right hand on the frets and his left foot holding the bow. Oh, he plays the tuba too.
It’s when he’s playing the cello that Tad’s missing arm becomes the most obvious. On stage at Lawrence University’s Memorial Chapel with the college-sponsored youth orchestra, all the string musicians–except one–have their left hand on the neck of their instrument. All are dressed in white shirts, black slacks or skirts and dress shoes–except one, who has removed his left shoe and sock.
“He and his father mentioned that he did video games with his foot,” said Olive Bopp, Tad’s cello instructor. “So I took my sock off and he took his off trying to figure out how to hold the bow. From then on, he’s just been a delight to teach. It’s been most rewarding. I even found out a lot of things about myself. He’s helped me build self-esteem, being sure that what I did counts.”
Tad’s confidence and self-assurance stop short of cockiness. Tad’s aunt Joyce Dietzen credits Tad’s parents for that.
“He would not have the opportunity to have a big head-Jeff and Mary wouldn’t allow it,” Joyce Dietzen said. “That’s just not the way they are.”
Tad said there’s nothing much to brag about, especially because he still hasn’t achieved the two goals that matter most to him: “One is to play my cello for a Packers game and the second is to play with Yo-Yo Ma.”
After that, he said, he can concentrate on career goals such as working for the FBI or the CIA.
This is not to say that Tad is the perfect child. He can get a little bossy with his younger brother, Michael, 8, a Korean adoptee.
At home one day in November, it was almost time to leave for an orchestra concert, and Tad wanted everything to be perfect. So Tad decided to parent Michael. “Michael, stop playing with the Koosh ball,” he lectured. “Did you brush your teeth yet?”
A day later, as the family arrived for Tad’s appearance at a Cub Scout meeting in the neighboring town of Neenah, Wis., Tad realized he had remembered the cello but forgotten the bow, even after his mother had asked him if he had packed it. Mary dashed out the door while Tad started his speech. She returned a half-hour later to find her son still regaling the audience. It is the kind of trip she has made too many times, she said.
“That is so Tad to forget his bow,” she said, sighing.
But Tad was not always so glib and self-assured. To see him racing through the halls at Madison at a breakneck pace, greeting students and teachers with equal enthusiasm, you would never know the journey he has made physically and emotionally.
Jeff Ackman, assistant chief of staff at Shriners Hospital in Chicago, remembers his first appointments with Tad.
“He didn’t know the language very well,” Ackman said. “He was quiet and shy and reserved. He didn’t really look you in the eye.”
Although Ackman has seen Tad make physical strides, he said the biggest changes have been on the inside.
“Psychologically, he’s just flourished,” he said. “He has wonderful parents who devote a lot of love, time and attention to him, and he has just responded completely and amazingly. He plays soccer, he plays cello, he goes to dances. Now he’s very vocal and expresses his opinions and is a tremendously outgoing young man.”
Bopp, his cello teacher, puts it simply: “He has a heart like a lion.”
That heart has served Tad well since he came to the United States. Jeff and Mary Lietz, childless for 15 years, saw just two photographs of Tad before he arrived at Milwaukee’s Mitchell Airport a decade ago.
They had wanted to adopt a special-needs child, so they knew that Tad had just one arm. But they did not know much else, and the child who entered their lives on that day needed help just to survive.
Tad weighed 16 pounds. His malnourishment left him unable to walk. His eyes wandered because the muscles were too weak to keep his vision focused, and the condition would require several surgeries to correct.
Constant ear infections had ruptured his eardrums repeatedly, a condition that also would put him in the operating room (to this day, the young cellist wears hearing aids).
Then there was the emotional adjustment to being thrust into a different culture, and Tad screamed and beat on himself continually in the initial weeks in Wisconsin.
Hanging on to a dream
“We were naive in a way,” Mary Lietz said. “We didn’t want this pipe dream of adopting this child to come to an end.”
“I’d been a guy who’d been living a very selfish existence,” Jeff Lietz said, “and here we’re going to bring a child into the home that’s going to challenge our relationship at its core.”
The only way Tad would sleep was for Mary to hold him as she lay on the couch.
“This went on for weeks,” Jeff said. “But it strengthened our marriage instead of tearing it apart.”
And Jeff, who said bonding with people came slowly to him because of a dysfunctional upbringing of his own, surprised himself by warming up quickly to his new son.
“We were playing one time in the kitchen, and he fell on the floor and cut his mouth,” Jeff said. “He was covered in blood, and I just cuddled him on the floor. I think I realized right then and there that this little guy was growing on me.”
Jeff, an engineer, got to work to give Tad a fighting chance. He modified a baby walker so the 3-year-old could become mobile. He redid the high chair, too, because Tad’s malnourishment left him unable to sit up without help.
“He’d just flop over and slide off the seat,” said Jeff, who added large foam blocks to prop Tad up and leg harnesses to keep him from slipping. “I suggested a full-body Velcro suit, but Mary didn’t like that,” he joked.
A determined advocate
“We were always doing adaptive things for him, and eventually I would start asking Tad, `What do you think will work?'” Jeff added.
Mary became Tad’s advocate in the schools, blocking a report from an early-intervention program that would have labeled her son as mentally handicapped.
“I got real upset,” Mary said. “I told them, `This label has to come off this report. We haven’t heard that from any doctors. And until I hear it from somebody with M.D. behind their name, it doesn’t go on his school records.'”
Mary questioned whether she had done the right thing. Chern, Mary’s father, assured her that Tad was mentally sharp.
He had been watching Tad, he said. He would watch Tad play with a Fisher-Price school bus. Tad would line up the little Fisher-Price people and make them file onto the bus and take their seats. Tad would make the bus driver turn back and forth and sing, “The wheels on the bus go round and round.” Then Tad would make the bus pull up at the school and unload.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with his mind,” Chern told his daughter as he watched Tad play. “You just have to unlock it.”
The link to Agent Orange
Chern knew something of the struggles that immigrants, young and old, faced. His parents had fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, and Chern spoke flawless Russian as well as English. But Chern couldn’t help but focus on Tad’s struggles as the result of being born with one arm.
Tad had no medical records from Vietnam, but the lingering horrors of Agent Orange, one of more than a dozen sprays used to defoliate Vietnam’s jungle during the Vietnam War, include second-generation birth defects, and Chern suspected that was the reason Tad didn’t have a left arm.
After Tad’s first cello concert, the family gathered at the home of Grandpa Denny and Grandma Mary. It’s a day Mary Lietz won’t forget. She sat at the kitchen table with her mom and dad, recounting the day’s events.
“Dad just kept looking at Tad, and he just got up and walked out of the room and he came back with this paper,” Mary said. “There was something real clouded about his face.”
He set the paper down in front of Mary, and asked her if she knew what it was.
“It looks like a patent,” she said, “but don’t ask me what it’s for.”
Chern read his daughter a long list of chemical names.
“Well, Dad, that doesn’t mean anything to me,” Mary said.
“You probably know it by another name,” Chern said. “You know what this is.”
“What do I know it as?” Mary asked.
“It’s the active ingredient in Agent Orange,” Chern replied.
Sad irony
In the 1960s, Chern and his supervisor were awarded a number of patents on chemicals they had invented. Among them were herbicides. But Chern didn’t know at the time that this chemical would be used during the Vietnam War. It was a sad irony for the chemist, a decorated veteran of World War II and an active member of the local VFW.
Mary Lietz remembers the regret in her dad’s voice that night.
“He said, `This has always bothered me ever since you adopted Tad,'” Mary said. “`It bothers me to think that something that I worked on and put so much of myself into might be responsible in some way for what happened to him and why he was born the way he is.'”
Chern died two years ago after suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease linked to Agent Orange. But his Lietz grandsons, Tad and Michael, keep the memory of their “Papa” alive.
Michael took his grandfather’s death very hard, Mary Lietz said, because she and the boys would often go out for breakfast with her parents. The Cherns also would go camping with their daughter and family. And while Denny Chern was a quiet, reserved man, he would take on Tad in games of Super Mario.
“He would always go off the cliff,” Tad recalled with a laugh.
A useful life
In a special environmental program called “Trees of Tomorrow,” Tad has adopted Chern’s favorite poem, “The Watermill,” as his own, reciting it two years in a row. It is a poem about seizing the day, with a haunting refrain about human mortality: “The mill will never grind with the water that is past.”
“It’s important to me,” Tad said, “because it goes with my own saying, `Make your life useful.’ Because you don’t know how long you’re going to live–that’s what the poem is pretty much about. I’ve seen my grandpa’s death.”
Later that day, in English class, Tad wasn’t thinking about poetry. But perhaps thoughts of his grandfather weren’t far away. While other 8th graders used their free time to read novels, Tad pored over a 3-inch-thick, highly technical book on chemical engineering.
Later that day he visited Riverside Cemetery–Michael had been wanting to come to place a flag on Papa’s grave in honor of Veterans Day.
In 1999, three weeks after Denny Chern died and three days before Memorial Day, Tad had a similar visit he needed to make.
Mary was driving Tad to music practice, and he asked her if they could stop by Riverside. He wouldn’t tell her why. So Mary drove into the cemetery and pulled the car over. Tad got out his cello and a small stool.
Then, as Tad’s mother and brother looked on, the notes of “The Star Spangled Banner” rose in the spring air to the pines and oaks framing Denny Chern’s grave.
