Good morning, it’s Wednesday, September 2. Expect temps in the low 80s and another day of reprieve from the humidity. Take an early evening walk, you earned it.
1. How wheelchair basketball got invented on Victory Boulevard.
Los Angeles is a city of basketball meccas. There are the iconic Venice Beach courts, which bustle with streetball legends and weekend warriors. The ethereal Angels Gate Park basketball court in San Pedro, where a heavy marine layer can make a pickup game look downright heavenly. And not one but two world-famous arenas — The “Fabulous” Forum and the Center Formerly Known As Staples — whose locker room floors are soaked in champagne from Lakers championship celebrations.
But there is another, lesser-known slice of hallowed basketball history in Los Angeles. Last month, Mayor Karen Bass drove out to a nondescript gymnasium at Birmingham Community Charter High School and announced that the intersection of Victory Boulevard and Balboa Boulevard in the heart of the San Fernando Valley would hereafter be known as “Wheelchair Basketball Square.” Few people in Los Angeles took notice, but others, including citizens of faraway nations like Germany, cheered. “Los Angeles holds a unique place in the history of wheelchair basketball,” explained Ulf Mehrens, the German president of the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation.
Before Birmingham Community Charter was a school, it was the Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital. And it was here that many men who had lost the use of their legs were sent from the battlefields of World War II. Thanks to medical breakthroughs like penicillin, they had survived injuries that had killed veterans of previous wars. But now they faced a new challenge: How were they going to build their lives in a society not designed for wheelchair users?
Shortly after the war ended, Bob Rynearson, then a 25-year-old UCLA graduate with degrees in business affairs and physical education, was hired by the VA. He had an idea.
