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Honoring wheelchair record holder
The Salem man has been recognized by Guinness World Records.
SALEM — William Borrelli, 83, used to be able to do one-armed chin-ups.
Old black-and-white photographs show him in sunny Los Angeles in the 1950s along with a group of young men. They are all wearing blue jeans and tight shirts that show off toned biceps most men will never have.
In some of the photos, other men were either sitting or standing.
Borrelli was always sitting.
Casual viewers wouldn’t know that he had been using a wheelchair since June 2, 1932.
Not that it or anything else ever stopped him, however.
On June 2, 1932, Borrelli, at age 7, was hit by a bus at a bus station in Salem.
“It was the last day of school. I went and got my report card,” he recalled.
He then went to the bus station to get a newspaper for his father and was struck.
At his home on Superior Avenue on Wednesday, he showed how his face was shoved into the engine.
“I was pretty much out of it,” he recalled. He went to Salem’s Central Clinic for five months.
He lost control of his legs, but he retained the ability to feel — and live a full life.
He had four children, worked as an auto mechanic who pulled himself around the insides of cars, hunted, fished, went to car races with the guys, worked at American Standard and ran a tavern. He had a special chair that could move up and down the bar.
“Once you develop a bitter attitude, no one wants to be around you,” Borrelli said.
And Borrelli has always been around people.
He wound up in Los Angeles when a friend in the moving business asked him to go for a ride. The friend put Borrelli in the cab and away they went. Then they got a return trip back all the way to New York City.
During another trip to Los Angeles, Borrelli was hanging out with the guys. They all got drafted for the Korean War. And while he couldn’t serve his country because of his condition, he found more friends.
Guinness World Records recently notified Borrelli he was certified as the person who had been in a wheelchair the longest. A son, Eric, had contacted the record keepers more than a year ago, and Guinness sent Borrelli a plaque. The tally was that Borrelli has been in wheelchair for 76 years and 173 days.
More importantly, he said, “I put bread on the table.”
He married his wife, Betty, on June 2, 1953. When asked why he would get married on the date of his accident, he just smiled and shrugged.
His children were all raised in the Catholic church and live in the Salem area.
Friends and family will gather from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday at the United Steelworkers Union Hall on Prospect Street to honor Borrelli.
“I pretty much filled my life up,” Borrelli said.
wilkinson@vindy.com