"Oh, my dear, you know the other day I met a girl who only has one leg." They usually begin in some such manner. "I don't know her really, of course, but I asked her to come to tea so that you two can meet. You're certain to be great friends. You have so much in common."

In some respects this is just as adept socially as tossing off a party to which only persons who have had their appendices removed are invited. It's true the appendix-bereft would have quite a bit to say to each other. "My Doctor says ..." "... never saw a worse case in my life." "Under anesthetic two hours ..." "... what I suffered." "You should see my scar..."

Appendicitis may be an excellent ice-breaker but it's only worth a one-night stand as a feature attraction. It's not a sound basis on which to build a beautiful friendship. The same is true of amputations. Accident like appendicitis is no respector of personalities. There is no assurance at all that just any two amputees who collide at a cocktail party will promptly become boon buddies, after their exchange of surgical detail. I don't recommend such a criterion for picking intimates. It's better to plod along in the old-fashioned way, depending upon personal rapport and common interests to determine permanent friendships, and take the handicaps where they happen to fall.

However, I still recommend welcoming every opportunity to meet others with similar handicaps. Sometimes cordial enduring amity does develop from these encounters. And although occasionally just the opposite is true - you run smack into torpor - it's still worth the chance. Invariably the preliminaries, at least, are entertaining: the swapping of life stories, the inevi-table arguments: artificial-leg users vs. crutch addicts, the discussions of walking gear and techniques. Very often casually encountered members of the clan have made great contribution to my comfort by their suggestions - and I hope, vice versa.

I met the first of "my own kind" - another one-legged girl - when I was about twelve. A week before this meeting, a rancher friend of Father's drove in from the country and called at our house. He told us that some of his Kansas kin were coming out to California on a visit. "The little girl's about your age," he explained to me, "and she's 'that way,' too." Mother looked slightly pained. "You two kiddies ought to hit it off just fine," he said.

A date was set for me to spend a whole day at the ranch. This would have been thrilling enough in itself, but combined with the anticipation of meeting a one-legged "kiddy" from Kansas, my excitement simply couldn't be cooped.

Forthrightly, I even warned my best friend, Barbara Bradley, that the chances were she couldn't be my best friend much longer. Her days of such honor were numbered, as she could well understand herself. This single-cylinder Kansan and I were just bound to become bosom chums immediately.

The day I went to the country, my hair was tightly braided in pigtails and then pinned around my head, and my face was scrubbed to a shine. I wore blue denim overalls, all fresh and clean, and a blue shirt. This was my favorite costume, and it had been purchased for just such occasions. Ranch life was always rough on my clothes since I liked to slide on hay, ride astride the sweaty backs of plow horses, cuddle up to piglets and other barnyard young, and generally make a dirty mess of myself.

When I arrived I met the little Kansan. She turned out to be two years older than I was. she was fourteen, but even if we'd both been two-legged and were the same age, we'd have been a world apart in interests. As it was we had nothing in common but a couple of feet in Heaven, and they probably were dancing on gold pavements at opposite ends of the town.

She had lived on a middle-western farm most of her life, but it was I who resembled the farmerette. She was dressed in dainty sprigged muslin with a white slipper and stocking, and her hair was curled. I felt completely gauche in her presence.

She was very nice to me, however. She inquired politely about my accident and told me about hers. She had dashed out in the street, with no thought of life or limb, in pursuit of an endangered kitten and had been run down by an automobile. This made her extremely heroic and put me at a disadvantage. All I'd done, after all, was disobey my mother by borrowing an ill-fated bicycle. Also, every year or so she had to go back to the hospital in Kansas City and have an operation. The bone in her stump continued to grow and required periodic pruning. For some reason that I do not understand but for which I am grateful to an able small-town surgeon, I have never had this recurrent trouble, common to many children whose amputations occurred early in life. This periodic drama in the Kansan's life also made me feel inferior by contrast. "I had two stitches in my head," I bragged in my own defense, "when I fell out of a tree." I knew it wasn't much.

More tedious, she wanted me to sit in a chair while she performed at the piano. She executed (by slow torture) a number called "Memories." Since my sister played the same ditty day and night at home, this wasn't exactly exciting to me who laid no claim to the appreciation of either music or romance. We finally went outside where we sat sedately under a tree and ate grapes. I amused myself by seeing how many I could stuff in my mouth at once, and the pretty little Kansan amused herself by watching the road - for the neighbor boys, I suspect.

I spent a miserable day, and when I got home was greeted by Mother with the startled words, "My goodness, you're clean! Didn't you have a good time?"

I called up Barbara Bradley right away and assured her she was still my stanchest comrade. "Why, that girl is just like my sister Bernice," I said. "I couldn't have anyone like that for my best friend."

It was a profound discovery I made that day - that one-leggedness may occur anywhere. It was like blue eyes or brown hair. It had nothing to do with congeniality. The idea startled me, since I somehow had labored under the illusion that all one-legged girls would be exactly like me; braces on the teeth, freckles on the nose and all.

I have met a great many crippled people since then and some of them have developed into real friends. Even the most casual contacts, however, have been rewarding. One-leggedness is a common ground on which individuals of vast difference in background can meet and communicate. I have had fascinating conversations with handicapped persons whose lives were so divergent from my own that in the normal course of a two-legged life, I never even would have crossed their pathways.

A jolly drunk who sold newspapers on a city corner and who happened to wear a peg leg, gave me a full, though perhaps slightly alcohol-flavored, account of himself one day while I waited for a bus. Similarly, I've learned all about the private lives of a taxi driver, an ex-policeman, a sculptor, a factory worker out on parole from a woman's reformatory, a little one-armed Negro orphan, a Japanese fruit peddler, an architect, etc., etc. We speak to each other. We flaunt our fraternity badges. Whatever our limping walks in life we are all people of parts - missing. We stand on common ground. We may remain transients; we usually do. We meet; we pass on; but we enrich each other in the passing.

There are two classes of amputees that I make particular effort to meet. Others I merely take as they come. I always try to acquaint myself with newcomers to the freemasonry, and recently maimed. Then I am probably as obnoxious as a first grader-who has learned to spell "cat" and lords it over his little brother who is still in kindergarten. I pass out advice with the assurance of an established seer. However, I know from experience the value of a veterans suggestions to the recruit. I regard my knowledge as inherited wealth that I am obliged to preserve, increase, and pass on to the next generation. Often I correspond with the recently handicapped in an effort to give encouragement during the inevitable anguish that precedes adjustment to the new way of life.

In addition to the recently handicapped, from the grossest commercial motive, I am always on the prowl for females of the species who have missing left legs and who wear a size 5 1/2 B shoe. Here is a solid foundation on which to construct sodality. We exchange our odd shoes.

Ruth Rubin, an enterprising woman in St. Louis, a trained nurse, has as her imaginative and helpful hobby, a shoe exchange. She encourages one-leggers to write in their shoe sizes and mates up feet all over the country. My foster foot, for instance, lives in Burbank, California. The enterprise operates on the principle of a shoe for a shoe.

This exchange proved especially useful to me during shoe rationing. Unipeds are inclined to be more destructive to footwear than ordinary people, since their entire weight rests in one shoe. Moreover, to maintain their balance, amputees tend to grab the earth harder with their single foot. With the limited number of shoe coupons provided, I would have been a scuffy-toed derelict if it hadn't been for the shoe exchange which kept me in slick footwear for the duration. My contributions similarly kept someone else well shod. The pleasant economy of such a scheme is obvious.

There are other organizations that cater to the disabled. Most of these are founded on the premise that the handicapped need each other. They do - especially during their period of adjustment. Many of these fraternities publish little magazines that circulate among the handicapped and publicize the stories of the members. Such publications are Outwitting Handicaps, the Spot-Lite, Courage, etc. They carry also an advertising section devoted to artificial legs and arms, stump socks, Ampu-Balm, wheel chairs, and other equipment for amputees. Most of these organizations exact a small membership fee or contribution which pays for the magazine and frequently for a variety of other helpful services: employment advice, advice on prosthesis, providing correspondence companions for hospitalized patients, etc.

A few of the organizations are completely free, the service being the friendly contribution of some humanitarian hobbyist. For instance, a Hollywood man, Mr. Stuart Noble, although not handicapped himself, entertains great compassion and understanding for the disabled. For many years he has been interested in assisting amputees. He organized a club called The Good Friends, and he has devoted a great deal of time and money to assisting the handicapped in making happy adjustments to life - helping them find friends and employment, etc.

Edward Hungerford of New York, handicapped himself, collects crutch users who strike his fancy all over the country, and in a less formal way does the same thing for his collection that Mr. Noble does.

The most adequate and able of all the organizations, of course, is the National Society for Crippled Children and Adults, Inc. This society has forty-two well-organized official state affiliates, with some two thousand local chapters, and is based on the most intelligent and scientific approaches to the problems of the disabled. The magazine of this organization, The Crippled Child, features articles by recognized authorities on recovery methods, occupational therapy, rehabilitation, prosthesis, ete. This organization is financed by the annual national Easter-seal sales, by private subscription, and by state allotment of funds. A handicapped person in need of guidance of any sort would most wisely seek it here.

These organizations offer admirable encouragement and practical assistance to many disabled. In my opinion, their greatest service is to the newcomer to the clan, those who are groping "at the bottom of the worst" and who desperately need the fortification of others' experiences in recovery.

Once an amputee is well adjusted to life, there is of course no necessity for his seeking his associates among the similarly maimed. In fact, too prolonged an interest in a personal physical abnormality is likely to breed an unhealthy introversion or sentimentalism.

I have a uniped acquaintance who almost makes a profession of her handicap. I recognize this as a defense mechanism, but I don't condone it. She writes me long, six-page typewritten letters that are concerned from start to finish with her one-leggedness. She has been handicapped for many years. She is a contented wife, secure financially, equipped with a good mind, and in excellent health. I have gathered from her lengthy opera, however, that her one major interest in life is her physical abnormality. It's a strange perverted narcissism. If she would discuss some little feminine fripperies, flower arrangement, the breeding and care of canary birds, or methods for removing spots from fabrics - almost anything - I would continue writing to her. But I simply can't read six pages every two weeks devoted to her mental contortions over her long-buried extremity. It's like a widow conversationally digging up the remains of her twenty-year-deceased partner every time she gets you in a corner.

Not that my thoroughly one-legged friend is grim in her attitude. On the contrary, she makes a fetish of cheerfulness. Her handwriting practically beams at me. She has gained great spiritual strength from her suffering and she never forgets it or fails to remind me of her beautiful burning inner light. It embarrasses me acutely. You have spiritual strength or you don't have it - so what? It's as bad taste to mention it as it is to brag about ancestors or a bulky bank account. If it's there, spiritual strength, like good breeding, shows itself, also, like good breeding, it sickens and dies by the mere act of self-recognition and advertisement.

I know a young man who is blind and who graduated with honors from the same college from which I graduated without honors. He never mentioned his spiritual strength. He didn't mention his blindness either. He didn't have to, his blindness and his spiritual strength were equally obvious. This young man had been to a school for the blind. He associated with blind people long enough to adjust himself to the hardships of his life, but he didn't spend his time sitting around with the blind and discussing blindness. He had many enthusiastic interests and his friends, who were legion - the halt, the blind, or just plain standard merchandise - were those who shared his enthusiasms.

My philosophizing letter-writer also reminds me periodically of my obligation to her. "We have to stick together, we handicapped," she says. "The rest of the world doesn't understand us." I'll string along with the world; it understands me O.K.

It understands quite a few other one-legged people too. For instance, Herbert Marshall, the movie star - I wouldn't mind being on cozy terms with him. I think it might be absolutely lovely, but my interest isn't humanitarian. It has nothing to do with the fact that he wears an artificial leg and might need me to stick to him, poor thing, because the world doesn't understand him. Major Seversky has the world by the tail, too - and young Charles Bolte, the head of the new American Veterans Committee, swings along with the world even. though his right side-kicker is timber. One-legged Laurence Stallings, the playwright, has an amenable relationship with the world, too. And what of the lovely-voiced Connie Boswell? Does the world fail to understand her songs because of her lack of legs?

I have a very dear one-legged friend who is attractive and interesting, and during the first ten minutes of our acquaintance she told me the circumstances of her accident and I told her the circumstances of mine. We have been friends for twenty years but our congeniality is completely detached from our common handicap. We don't mention it for years on end.

In fact, the only time that we are at all conscious of our similar state is when we go out somewhere and face the public together. I must say that in the aggregate, a crew of crutch-users limping into a big hotel dining room or a theater together create a stir that I don't enjoy. This young woman and I were both dinner guests one evening of a man who also used crutches. We marched through a popular crowded Hollywood restaurant, to the accompaniment of a terrific buzz. We might as well have been the Barrymores having a family reunion, except that nobody wanted our autographs.

"One family, do you suppose? heard someone whisper. "All hurt in the same accident - and all lost a leg! Did you ever hear of such a thing in all your life!" "Maybe it's congenital - he passed it on to his two daughters..."

It's funny, sure - funny as a crutch, as the saying goes.