ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, December 22, 1996              TAG: 9612230024
SECTION: VIRGINIA                 PAGE: B-1  EDITION: METRO 
SERIES: Whatever happened to ...? A look back at 1996 
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER

JOE-JOE UNDAUNTED BY LOSS OF FOOT

BUT THE LOSS of his grandfather hit him much harder.

Joe-Joe Eller no longer has a right foot. But that hasn't slowed the 3-year-old a bit.

In August, he was injured after he ran into the path of his father's riding lawn mower. Joe-Joe's father didn't see the boy and backed over him, severing his right foot and severely cutting his left leg.

Four months later, Joe-Joe sits in front of his television set, pulling his prosthesis on and off his right leg. Once it's on, he bounds about the room - jumping from the sofa, running into the kitchen, hopping up the stairs, even stopping on the steps to have a bit of a temper tantrum.

"He doesn't let it stop him," said his mother, Jennifer Eller.

For the Ellers, 1996 has been both blessed and tinged with grief.

Joe-Joe survived the accident, thanks in part to his grandfather's quick thinking. Woodrow Bryant kept his grandson's foot wrapped tightly in a towel and raised the leg above the boy's heart to stop the bleeding.

But by the time Joe-Joe came home from his two-week stay in the hospital, the man who saved his life was nearing death.

Bryant died of cancer in November. Jennifer Eller had not expected her father to live long; he was ailing from a precariously positioned stomach aneurysm. She discovered he had cancer only three weeks before he died.

The death hit hard. Joe-Joe refused to leave his grandfather's room at the Ellers' house after the funeral, she said.

"It's been hard," Jennifer Eller said. "It doesn't really feel like Christmas to me."

But then her 5-year-old daughter, Amanda Thompson, speaks up and asks when the family is going to put up the tree. The girl shows off the pile of Christmas ornaments she has cut from red and green construction paper at school.

Then Joe-Joe yells at his sister to move; she's blocking the television set. And the two siblings begin to resemble many others as their verbal sparring abruptly ends when Amanda moves.

"Him being alive, seeing him walk again," was the greatest joy of the year, Jennifer Eller said. "I mean, he put [the prosthesis] on and he was gone."

The Ellers had worried about how they were going to pay for Joe-Joe's medical bills. But several people answered their initial call for help: Someone donated a wheelchair, and a local corporation gave Joe-Joe a $500 savings bond. His first prosthesis was donated; as Joe-Joe grows, they will be paid for through a state-run medical program, Jennifer Eller said.

For Bruce Eller, who was driving the lawn mower the day of the accident, the only Christmas gift he wants is what he has right now.

Joe-Joe "always wants to wrestle and carry on," he said. "Playing with him and keeping him close to me does more than anything."

LENGTH: Medium:   60 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. Joe-Joe Eller dances around his 
          kitchen showing off his mobility. He lost his right foot in a 
          lawnmower accident in August. color.