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Revved-up mower gives girl ‘freedom’

Photos: Girl with cerebal palsy gets new wheels

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Logan Ewen, 14, takes her new custom Cub Cadet lawnmower for a drive around the front yard of her Trenton home Wednesday, Aug. 26.

Staff photo by Pat Auckerman Logan Ewen, 14, takes her new custom Cub Cadet lawnmower for a drive around the front yard of her Trenton home Wednesday, Aug. 26.

By Rick McCrabb, Columnist Updated 6:58 AM Thursday, August 27, 2009

TRENTON — Chicks dig hot rods.

After Jane McKee wheeled her 14-year-old daughter, Logan Ewen through the house and into the garage, Logan spotted her mower.

“Gosh,” she said with a smile. “I love it.”

Not your normal mower, like the one your father curses every Saturday morning when he’d rather be riding a golf cart and driving a Titleist.

But it’s a customized purple and silver twin V, 16-horsepower Cub Cadet, complete with a seat belt, fake exhaust pipes and intake valves.

This mower has more accessories than Elizabeth Taylor.

On the back, it reads “Logan,” as if there’s even a question who owns — and drives — the mower in this family.

“I like to drive,” said Logan, an eighth-grader at Edgewood Middle School who was born six weeks premature. Her oxygen was cut off because her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck.

Several weeks ago, McKee, a bus driver in the Edgewood City School District, talked to Tim Taylor, a bus driver and owner of Taylor’s Performance in Monroe, about getting her daughter, who has cerebral palsy, a go-cart or other motorized vehicle.

This summer, following complicated ankle surgery, walking was uncomfortable for Logan. So a wheelchair became her best friend — and her worst enemy.

Taylor had a used mower — it was supposed to compete in a lawn mower demolition derby — stored in the back of his shed. His crew at Taylor’s converted it into a hot rod, named it “Bad to the Bone.”

The mower was presented to Logan on Saturday, Aug. 22, her 14th birthday.

When asked what the mower affords Logan, her mother said through tears: “Freedom.”

Later, she added: “This just shows how wonderful people are. Those guys are, well, amazing, men.”

When told that, Tim Taylor said: “It was a really cool thing to do. It was the right thing to do. We were tickled to death to do it for her.”

Ironically, when Logan was born, doctors said she’d never walk, talk, use the bathroom or “nothing,” her mother said. They should have seen her racing across the grass.

“She just wants to be like everybody else,” her mother said.

Earlier, as tears streamed down her mother’s face, Logan wheeled into the kitchen, and a few minutes later, handed her mother a paper towel.

“You make me cry,” she told her daughter.

“I’m very blessed,” said McKee, who has two sons Cole Ewen, 18, a 2009 Edgewood High School graduate, and Troy Watson, 8, a third-grader at Bloomfield Elementary School.

She made eye contact with Logan. “Very blessed.”

Contact this

columnist

at (513) 705-2842 or rmccrabb@coxohio.com.

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