"I take some of the scariness out of the word, quadriplegic..."
- Jim Troesh  1956 -- 2011

Jim Troesh, a C-3/4 quadriplegic who worked as an actor and writer in the vineyards of Hollywood for 30-some years, died peacefully last Saturday night in Los Angeles. Injured from falling off a roof as a teenager, he had the outlandish idea that, despite his extreme immobility, he could come to Hollywood and make it. What kind of an idiot would take a course of life where the odds were like a million to one of succeeding? A kind of idiot like Jim Troesh, that's who – a man of enormous self-confidence, blind determination, and a sheer love of making people laugh.

Jim was an electronics nut in junior high school and after his accident, realizing it's hard to solder with no hands, he started looking around for something else to do. An English teacher told him he was a good writer and even offered to transcribe Jim's writing for class. Jim soon got tired of being misquoted and learned to write with a mouth stick. Then he noticed that the guys in drama and speech attracted many more girls than his pals dismantling TVs. Especially if they could pop jokes, something Jim could do in his sleep.  And his destiny was set.

Jim's big break came in 1984 when Michael Landon cast him as Scotty Wilson, a college football star paralyzed in a car accident, in the hit series, "Highway to Heaven." He ended up doing seven episodes of the show and even writing one. Do you know how many quads, Jim aside, appeared on network TV in 1984? None. Jim claimed to be the first quad with both a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) card and a Writers Guild (WGA) card. No one has ever contested this claim. Along with Geri Jewell ("Facts of Life") and one or two others, Jim was out there making waves long before performers with disabilities even thought they had a chance in Hollywood. There are now approximately 1700 self-defined actors with disabilities in SAG. Jim showed them the way.

View Jim's list of credits on IMDb.

Jim went on to play occasional guest roles in TV series and films. Along the way he met Bryan Cranston, an actor/director who hit it big as the dad in "Malcolm in the Middle" and then hit it mega-big – three lead actor Emmys in a row – as Walter White, Sr, the chemistry teacher turned crystal meth maker in the AMC hit series, "Breaking Bad."  Bryan became one of Jim's biggest fans and later appeared with him in Jim's pilot, "Hollywood Quad," produced by, written by, and starring Jim. To get some sense of Jim's boundless wit, and his ability to play off anyone in the room, check out this interview they did together for "Hollywood Quad."

What Jim brought to the disability equation was an irreverent, disarming sense of the absurd. He learned early on that, in his condition, it was easier to make people laugh than cry, and when they were laughing, they no longer saw him as some pathetic soul who couldn't cut his own meat. He had many, many bad days, many trips to the ER, many disappointments, both personal and professional, but his instinct was always to revert to a nervy aside to put everyone at ease, including himself.

In the culminating scene of "Hollywood Quad" – which you can see at Jim's website – Bryan Cranston as a network executive listens to Jim pitch his pilot, starring himself. The network guy is so dense and so utterly insensitive to the quad in front of him that he ends up tossing grapes to his open mouth to see he can get one in. It is the kind of hysterical/humiliating moment that Jim Troesh relished.  As the guy having grapes thrown at him, he doesn't come off as pathetic. He comes off as a thoroughly human everyman caught in a bad situation. Not a bad description of Jim's whole life.

Humor kept Jim Troesh alive for forty years. He found the greatest survival tool of them all and used it to delight the world. I'm really glad I got to know him.

Read more about Jim at JimTroesh.com.

© 2011 Allen Rucker |