Ride For Life: 50 year-old college student with ALS teaches about life

It's been quite a year in Helen Marie Booth's public-speaking class at Bristol Community College (BCC), in Fall River. Frank Gaskell has been a student. He's given speeches that have brought tears to the eyes of his classmates.

"There's a real dynamic with Frank in class," says Booth, my neighbor and friend. "He adds another dimension. He addresses the real problems of life." Gaskell is 50. He's been a crane operator, a mental-health worker, and a school custodian. He tried three times to make a serious career change and enter the nursing program at BCC. He was turned down three times.

So he became a man to listen to. He became a man who should settle into some shady campus grove and tell the students gathered round him how damn precious their education is.

Gaskell will graduate from the community college on June 1. His is a story that could probably be told only at a college like BCC where over the years so many people have come with often shaky academic credentials but a load of life's hard lessons. And they have found a place where they can learn about themselves, and discover abilities they never knew they had. Some move on to four-year schools. Some just move on to something better than what they used to have.

Frank Gaskell will simply take his diploma and cherish it. He won't show it to potential employers or admissions officers. He wants to be buried with it.

"It took me 50 years, but I accomplished something," he says.

He accomplished something, all right. He wheeled himself into classrooms, claimed an education, and taught people that there's just no future in feeling sorry for yourself.

He lives in an apartment in downtown Fall River. Personal-care assistants come in regularly to help him deal with the restrictions imposed by his amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) "Lou Gehrig's disease." The assistants help him maintain a measure of independence. But he worries that state-budget cuts could restrict or eliminate the assistants.

Melissa Giesta has told him not to worry.

"I'm a certified nursing assistant," she says. "I told him I'd go in and do it for nothing."

She is one of his fellow students in the public-speaking class. The students do small things for Gaskell. They lift his legs to reduce swelling. And they value the time spent with a man who insists on living as long as he can.

Gaskell says he has already lived beyond the five years that he was told would be his maximum life expectancy.

"I look at Frank and I know that in his position I wouldn't be able to do it," says Giesta. "I'd give up. But Frank doesn't give up."

It was about six years ago that he tripped as he was walking and stubbed his toe. He thought he had tripped and stubbed his toe and nothing more. But strange things kept happening. When he went out to run, he found he was hopping more than running to deal with whatever was going on with his body.

He went to neurologists, had MRIs, but there was no sure diagnosis. Then a chiropractor suggested he undergo a test that involves injecting needles into muscles. He did, and had other tests after that. They confirmed that he had ALS, a disease that will take away his muscle control and his speech, and eventually, inevitably, kill him.

One of the first things the disease claimed was his second marriage.

''She just couldn't handle it,'' says Gaskell of his second wife, with whom he broke up in 1997.

Then came his maintenance job with the Fall River School Department, which he loved but could no longer do. He had to retire.

''I felt sorry for myself for a couple of weeks,'' he says. ''Then I decided that I've already got 49 credits at BCC what am I doing sitting here?

''I can't do nursing, but I can still get a degree in general studies.''

SO HE went back to school, to BCC, where people are able to make a place for a man who wants to learn for the pure, sweet satisfaction of it.

Last semester, he was able to take a class with one of his three daughters, Jocelyn Gaskell, a fellow BCC student. It was on death and dying.

And then he signed up for Helen Marie Booth's public-speaking class.

''I figured I'd better get my speech out of the way while I can still talk,'' he says.

He sits in the classroom with Professor Booth and Melissa Giesta and Mike Skellinger, another young classmate, who says Gaskell inspires him.

''We all work part-time,'' says Skellinger. ''We come in with our own baggage. And you think about how tough you've got it, and then you see Frank, and it makes you think.''

Gaskell, says Booth, always speaks well past the minimum time required in her class. He opens up, she says, and speaks from the heart.

And on the day when the assignment was to give a ''Speech to Inform,'' Frank Gaskell spoke of the thing he knows too well: the disease he lives with every day. He told his friends in that classroom what the disease does to him, and what it means for him. Some of them cried.

On June 1, when he wheels across the stage to take his diploma, Gaskell will hear some of those friends going a little bit crazy in tribute to this wonderful thing he's done.

He will miss the college, he says, and the college will surely miss him. Each has clearly learned from the other.