For Little People, convention allows them to meet and share

Seventeen-year-old Jake Spruance is freckled and tanned from long days on the beach, his legs and arms muscled from wrestling workouts.

Good looks and athletic prowess aside, it's usually his height that draws the attention of strangers: He's 4 feet-8 inches tall, a condition of the dwarfism he was diagnosed with shortly after birth.

The Virginia Beach teen has put up with people videotaping him on the sly while he's standing at a bus stop, sneaking photographs of him when he's busing tables at a local restaurant, even rubbing his head.

Today, though, he'll stand tall among his own when the Little People of America kicks off a three-day regional conference in Virginia Beach.

Conventions of the nonprofit organization are sweet relief for people with dwarfism and their families. They provide a world where being unable to reach the water fountain is no big deal, where top shelves go unused, where eye-to-eye conversations are more common than the neck-straining variety.

In fact, Jake is taller than many of the other teens with achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism and the type he has.

"When I go to a convention, I feel like a giant, like I'm standing out," he said. "It's like the opposite of everywhere else."

The Little People of America, with a national membership of around 5,000, was founded about 50 years ago by Billy Barty.

The actor died in 2000 at the age of 76, but his words still resonate for members:

"Most of us with dwarfism prefer to be described as 'little people.' And please, put the emphasis on the word 'people.' We did not spring from the pages of a storybook or emerge from an enchanted forest. We are not magical beings and we are not monsters. We are parents and sons and daughters. We are doctors and lawyers and Realtors and teachers. We dream, cry, laugh, shout, fall in love and make mistakes. We are no different from you."

His words take on more weight in these times of genetic testing.

The genes for the most common types of dwarfism were discovered in the mid-1990s, but pregnant women aren't routinely screened for the condition. Still, some LPA members question whether fast-growing genetic knowledge could one day lead to more terminations of such pregnancies.

Many want the public to know that, while challenging, being short isn't something to screen out of the world.

The regional convention, which is expected to draw 150 people from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia, will include health screenings for some participants.

Leta Krieger, mother to 3-year-old David Krieger III of Virginia Beach, has already gathered her son's X-rays for review.

Like Jake, David has achondroplasia. The condition occurs in 1 in 26,000 to 1 in 40,000 births and is characterized by a normal trunk, slightly enlarged head and shortened arms and legs.

David has brown hair, blue eyes, dimpled cheeks. At 31 inches tall, he tears around his Virginia Beach house wearing blue camouflage shorts and a T-shirt that says "Heavy Petal."

Leta and her husband, David Krieger Jr., found out their son had the condition about a week before he was born. Leta was bigger and more uncomfortable than she had been with her first child, so an ultrasound was done. The baby's shortened limbs tipped off the doctor.

"We did what they tell you not to do," her husband said. "We got on the Internet."

There, they found a long list of medical conditions that they began to wrestle with when David was born a week later.

Smaller airways, for example, put the baby at risk for sleep apnea, so they monitored him closely to make sure he didn't stop breathing at night. Smaller ear canals meant more ear infections, and surgeries to insert tubes in his ears.

At 18 months, David had surgery for spinal stenosis, a condition in which the bony covering of the spinal cord is too small for the cord, which can cause numbness in the legs.

Now that he's up and running around, his legs are beginning to bow, another common affliction among those with achondroplasia.

The various ailments cross many special ties: Neurology. Orthopedics. Pulmonology. Ear, nose and throat.

"You have to be your own manager," Leta Krieger said. "You have to take it all and pull it together."

Fortunately, though, David has done well medically, and he's a happy child with an outgoing personality. "He owns whatever room he walks in," his mother said.

She has noticed, though, that "Little D" does draw the attention of strangers in public.

"It's because he's cute," his father said.

"Maybe," she said.

His parents still haven't had "the talk" with David about his condition because he's too young to understand.

Addressing topics like that is one of the reasons Leta Krieger wanted to open a local LPA chapter. When she tried, she discovered one had been formed years ago but had stopped meeting. So she and another parent in North Carolina decided to restart it.

Kim Hall, 43, attended the first meeting of the revived Colonial chapter in August 2007.

It was her first Little People of America gathering.

The Virginia Beach woman is 3 feet 10 inches tall, with layered hair that sweeps back in a feathered fashion from her face, and a quick and engaging smile.

She was born in Michigan, into a family in which everyone else - her parents, her five older siblings, even her twin sister - was of ordinary height.

Her parents never made a big deal of her size. They wanted her to believe she could do anything her siblings could do.

"It was good, in a way," Hall said. Having a twin pushed her to keep up. "What she could do, I could too. Nothing stopped me."

But the absence of other little people in her life skewed her self-perception a little. As a child and teen, she knew she was short, of course, but she thought it was just a matter of degree.

It was as a high school student in Michigan that she first encountered other people with dwarfism - actors for Paramount Pictures whom she met through her involvement in the school's theater program.

"It scared me to death. All my life I didn't see myself as a little person. I didn't want to accept that was the way I looked, that that's what I was."

After high school, she moved to Florida with her mother. She met a man of normal height in the office supply store where she worked and eventually married him.

"He was the first man to show me some attention. I never thought I could do better. I thought, 'I'll never find anyone who will like me.' "

They were married for 18 years, but she left two years ago after a long period of marital problems.

"I didn't have much self-esteem. I never totally liked myself, because I didn't accept myself."

That started changing once she left, and for the first time, she's learning who she is. She now lives with her sister's family in Virginia Beach. She works as a licensing technician for Geico. She's also a dog trainer and volunteers with Virginia Beach Animal Control.

Her medical problems have been sporadic. When she was a senior in high school, she experienced some paralysis and spent months in the hospital, where her twin brought her homework. She recovered but later began to feel numbness and pain in her legs. In 2003, she had surgery for spinal stenosis to relieve that.

The condition led her to the LPA Web site, and then to news of the reactivated local chapter. After attending the one chapter meeting last year, she decided to go to the national LPA meeting in Detroit in June.

She learned about different adaptive devices, such as wooden dowel tools to get clothes off hangers. Unlike her first jarring meeting of little people as a teen, this time she found a sense of acceptance.

"It was enlightening. I met so many friends. Our medical issues, physical and mental, are so different from a normal person's."

It's a journey in acceptance that Jake Spruance began at an earlier age. His family went to conventions when he was a baby to learn about the medical issues. They started going again a few years ago, so Jake could meet other teens and adults. He gets excited just talking about the experience.

"There's a bunch of people just like you," he said one day recently as he sat on the porch of his Virginia Beach home. "All you need to know is their name, and you know everything else about them."

Besides the usual talk of teens, they share experiences about how they handle a condition that's so visually obvious.

Jake said he first began to understand he was different when he started school.

"I'm going to say it was... probably in first grade. I remember the other kids would look at me, and I couldn't figure out why. That's when I first figured it out."

Classmates outpaced him in height more and more every year.

In fifth grade, he carried a step stool with him to school so he could reach the water fountain and sinks.

"That was kind of cool. I was the only one with a stool, and it made me proud."

There were challenges, though, like not being able to play sports as well as other kids. He played soccer for a while, but said, "I hated running."

He also got tired of the stares. "People would always look at me, even adults. I was almost kind of scared sometimes."

Every time he took on a new and bigger school, he went through the looks again before the other students realized he was just a regular guy.

Eventually he learned to handle being different, and now, as a junior, he feels comfortable walking the halls of Cox High School.

He's found a sport that appeals to him - wrestling - and he's on the school team. "I can get down lower, and I have different techniques I can use. I'm not going to say I'm good, but I'm all right," he said good-naturedly.

Attending LPA conventions helped him develop what his mom calls "dwarf pride."

Now, instead of being embarrassed, he tries to educate others and answer questions from fellow students whose only exposure to his condition is the cable TV show "Little People, Big World," a documentary featuring a family that includes both little people and those of average height.

He tells them that the word "midget" is offensive and that the term "little people" is preferred by most.

He can tell them there are 200 types of dwarfism, that most little people are born to parents of average height, and that life span and intelligence are usually normal.

He has dated and e-mailed some girls he's met at LPA conventions, but it's tougher with average-height girls. "It's almost like they're scared they'll hurt your feelings."

Nevertheless, his wider experiences at school, at his job at the Surf Club and at conventions have given him a maturity that makes him comfortable in his own skin and his own body.

"When I'm around more people, even though I am getting looked at, I'm also teaching people about little people, and that's fun."

He lives the advice of the plastic orange bracelet he picked up at an LPA convention:

Stand tall.

Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com