It's Leo!

Saturday, June 14, 2003

By MIKE DANIELS
Courier-Post Staff
MEDFORD

Leo Lazaropoulos won't ride a motorized scooter through his school's hallways. Leo rationalizes it this way - why should he be better than the other kids and not go on foot?

So despite the fact that he suffers from a rare genetic disorder that slows his walk and speech and makes writing difficult, 14-year-old Leo walks to classes just like the rest of his eighth-grade classmates at Medford Memorial School.

Leo might not want to think of himself as better than his peers but he is different.

After all, how many of his classmates have managed to turn other people's castoffs into cash, then donate the money toward research to find a cure for a rare disease?

Today, Leo and his family are hosting a charity yard sale, expected to offer some 2,500 items donated by friends and neighbors.

The event, in its fourth year, will benefit research into Friedreich's Ataxia, an illness that strikes just one in 50,000 people.

"People give beautiful things," said Leo's mother, Krissa Lazaropoulos, noting donations were solicited through more than 1,000 notices to Leo's schoolmates. "Some people give a bag. Others donate a truckload."

Leo, who holds his annual sale on two consecutive Saturdays, raised $450 at a similar event last week. His highest total was $4,500 two years ago.

"His grandparents were moving that year and closing a business," says Leo's mother. "They donated a lot. We sold a mink coat that year - and a unicycle."

Leo, short for Leonidas, shares his name with an ancient Spartan leader who defeated massive armies with just a few hundred troops. Leo Lazaropoulos also has fought long odds since he was diagnosed with Friedreich's Ataxia in 1999.

The inherited disorder causes progressive damage to the nervous system, eroding a patient's fine motor skills over time.

Many with the disease are confined to a wheelchair within 20 years of being diagnosed.

The disorder also causes various forms of heart disease, the most common cause of death for Friedreich's Ataxia patients.  Most who have the disease die in their 20s or 30s.

But all that sounds depressing, and Leo Lazaropoulos is anything but. His smile is big and contagious.

While Leo spends some time playing video games, more often his mom can find him plowing through a book or playing with either the family dog, Plato, or the six chickens they keep as pets.

Leo is also an avid fisherman, with three of his biggest catches mounted on the wall of his room.

Although proud of his fishing trophies, Leo usually doesn't like to keep what he catches.

"I don't like the idea of them suffocating (in the cooler)," Leo says. "Usually we keep them against my will."

He's also quite a cook, according to his mother. His specialty is a raisin cake he taught himself how to make from a cookbook. He finds humor in this, too.

"Usually Greeks don't cook anything that's not impaled and on the fire," Leo says.

Leo, who is to attend Shawnee High School in the fall, wants to go to college, probably to take up a science major. He loves biology and envisions himself as a zoologist some day. He's also considered owning a pet store.

His father, an architect and engineer born in Greece, chuckles at that idea.

"I don't know if he could own a shop. He'd never sell any of the animals," Peter Lazaropoulos says.

Leo says the toughest thing about having Friedreich's Ataxia is that he can't run like he used to. But like everything else, Leo makes up for his lost ability, especially when he's playing with his brothers Tasso, 12, and Michael, 10.

"I can't catch them, so I throw stuff at them."

Krissa Lazaropoulos says her son has never let his disease stop him from doing what he wants, whether it's walking the halls at school, or snorkeling when the family visits Greece every other summer.

"He's never complained once. Never said, `Why me? This stinks,' " Krissa says. "He always sees the better half of things."