51Ƶ first wrote about Logan Lueking in 2003, when the then-East High School junior was named a recipient of the newspaper's Extra Effort Award for his academic achievement and dedication to community service.
He was 24 when he walked into his parents' home and calmly told them he was planning to have his right leg amputated.
It’s hard to sit in the back of a car or in a movie theater when you can’t bend your knee, he explained.
As he talked through the reasoning and the prosthesis options, his mother felt the same pangs of maternal worry she had felt two decades earlier, when she had to send her 4-year-old into surgery to have his foot amputated.
It was the same worry -- that strange mix of love and grief and longing -- that she felt when he was born and doctors told her he had a birth defect.
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Like all expectant parents, Gene and Nancy Lueking had planned out their baby’s life. If they had a boy, he’d be athletic like his dad. Play football, baseball, maybe even shoot some game-winning hoops.
But Logan Lueking, now 30, was born without working muscles in his right leg. One of the bones was missing, the others fused together. A fluke of nature, doctors told his mother.
“He wasn’t what we envisioned our son to be,” she said. “But there wasn’t time to dwell or hold onto grief. We’ve never looked back.”
Neither has Logan. There’s been no slowing down. No excuses.
Not since the days on the playground, climbing to the top of the jungle gym. Not since those winter afternoons in Colorado when he was 7 or 8, zooming down the slopes on one ski.
Not since those nights at East High School, waving his prosthetic above the crowd to cheer on the basketball team.
Not since the second amputation and the adjustment to the C-Leg – a metal prosthesis that goes up above where his knee used to be and has a computer chip that works to create more natural movements.
“I never felt like I was left out,” Logan said. “There was just never the option to be anything but positive and open.”
Before noting the practiced swing of his right hip or the occasional stutter, a person meeting Logan is drawn to his soft blue eyes, the shy smile that widens when he slips in a joke.
“He’s very lighthearted and humble,” his mother said. “He would never ever let someone host a pity party for him.”
Frankly there’s not much to pity, Logan said. He has led a normal life, hit all the milestones of independence.
“I’ve been pretty lucky,” he said. “I’m in a really good place now.”
Logan graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University with a degree in political science, landed an internship-turned-job as a program specialist at the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency, bought a home about a year ago.
His passion for government and for service started in middle school.
“What sixth-grader regularly watches 'The West Wing'?” asked his mom. “Logan did.”
Logan was a high school junior when the twin towers came down on Sept. 11, 2001. Watching news coverage of the terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan spurred his interest in homeland security and led him to his career at NEMA.
“It was this moment where I realized I had to look outside my own bubble and understand the workings of the world,” he said. “I needed to find a way to help.”
In his immaculate living room, Logan sits on a rocking videogame chair with his right leg outstretched, khaki pants covering the prosthetic.
He breezes over many of the medical details -- he doesn’t see the leg as the dominating piece of his story -- and steers the conversation toward his service, listing all the places he’s volunteered.
In high school, he taught computer skills to senior citizens and logged more than 300 hours at Saint Elizabeth Regional Medical Center.
Now he works with therapy dogs at Madonna Rehabilitation Center and does desk work at Clinic with a Heart.
“I can’t really tell you where that passion comes from,” he said. “I guess I just like to help others.”
That’s the only thing Logan knows for sure he wants in his future: a way to help others.
“I never want to close myself off to anything," he said. "I want to be open to whatever comes my way.”
Logan’s mother said she could talk for hours about that attitude, about what an inspiration Logan is. But really, it just boils down to staying positive, she said.
“He never sees anything as an obstacle," she said, "so how could anything be one?”