Judy Gleklen Kopff stood outside the Fisher House at Walter
Reed Army Medical Center on Christmas Eve 2004 and cried. She and her husband,
Gary, were scheduled to entertain wounded warriors and their children in the
Fisher House dining room. She’d been volunteering as a clown since 1996, but
this was her first experience entertaining the wounded, and she was scared. She
didn’t know how she’d deal with double and triple amputees.
She rang the doorbell, and as soon as she and Gary entered,
a three-year-old boy jumped off his father’s lap and ran to her, crying,
“Daddy! Daddy! It’s a clown!” He latched onto her leg and wouldn’t let go.
“I dried my tears as unobtrusively as possible and started
making balloon animals for children who were creating an ever-expanding line
leading to my husband and me,” Judy recalls. “At that moment, their parents
were not patients missing arms or legs or eyes. They were parents enjoying the
smiles and squeals of laughter of their children on Christmas Eve. We call
ourselves Giggle Therapists.”
“Clown Judy,” now 71, and “Clown Gary,” now 72, learned in
December 2004 about the Red Cross program at Walter Reed, underwent training and
have been Red Cross volunteers ever since. They entertained at the Walter Reed
Army Medical Center in Washington, DC until it closed in 2011 and then switched
to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD.
Judy spent her Federal government career as a civilian
working at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. After taking an early retirement at the age
of 49 in 1996, she went back to work for the Secretary in 2003 to work on
issues related to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Her final position as a chief of staff in an office dealing with
battlefield contractors ended in 2008. Her intense, high profile jobs didn’t
dampen her love of lightheartedness. It was at an office Christmas party in
2004 that she made her connection to Fisher House. Standing next to Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld’s wife, Judy mentioned that she volunteered as a clown but
didn’t have any place to entertain on Christmas. Mrs. Rumsfeld gave Judy the
name of the person in charge at Walter Reed’s Fisher House.
These days Judy and Gary find themselves comfortable in any
setting with wounded warriors and their families. For example, they’ve
entertained at the Military Advanced Training Center (MATC), where the severely
wounded go for intense physical and occupational therapy. At their first visit,
they cautiously approached the head nurse and asked if they could enter MATC and
interact with wounded warriors. The clowns received a thumbs up and entered
accompanied by the head nurse’s service dog, who seemed to be saying, “These
clowns are OK to be with you.”
The head nurse explained that this was the toughest physical
therapy for young warriors now fitted with new arms and/or new legs and working
hard for many hours at a time. Clown
Judy and Clown Gary were invited to distract the patients as they entered in
full clown regalia, while carefully watched by MATC staff and the head service
dog.
About four years ago, they were again at MATC and saw two
patients – both double amputees -- lying on their stomachs on cots next to one
another and working with physical therapists. Clown Gary thought one was asleep,
so he started to show the other one a card trick. The patient they thought had
been asleep turned and said, “Hey, I know that trick.” Gary then handed him the
deck of magic cards and was relieved and pleased to have the young USMC
corporal take over the magic demonstration for his band of brothers.
“We just watched,” Judy says. “We all were having fun, and
the head nurse’s goal was met because our antics distracted the severely
wounded patients for a few minutes from yet another long day learning how to
walk on new prosthetic legs or how to prepare to hold their young children with
new prosthetic arms.”
Gary walks the Walter Reed corridors “locked and loaded”
with his multicolored squirt gun, which cannot fool the wounded warriors who
know all too well the appearance of real guns.
He invites mayhem as he offers the use of his squirt gun to some
patients. As a highly decorated USMC General
was walking amidst injured Marines who were perhaps one-third his age, Clown
Gary mischievously whispered, “Anyone want to squirt the General?” One young
double amputee seized the opportunity.
“As the squirt gun did its worst, both men, as well as
nearby staff and other patients, all broke into loud laughter,” Judy recalls.
Gary says, “When I get such laughter, it makes me feel that my
mission is being accomplished. We don’t get paid in coin. We get paid in
laughs.”
Sometimes the laughter and smiles are mixed with tears. One
summer Judy and Gary were at a barbeque for wounded warriors and their families.
Gary was pumping up a balloon to shape into a dog for a young man in a
wheelchair; he wanted the balloon dog for his young son. It was a hot day, and
the balloon accidentally popped. The sound instantly took the young combat veteran
back to his memory of being severely wounded by an IED in Afghanistan. The
patient started to cry, as did Clown Gary. Impulsively, both men hugged each
other.
“Don’t worry,” the patient said to Gary. “We need to keep
going so I not only have a toy balloon for my son, but I can also move a step
closer to learning how NOT to react to loud noises now that I’m stateside.”
Judy and Gary understand smiling through tears. In the mid-1980s,
they tried to conceive five times through in vitro fertilization. Judy also underwent
four major surgeries to open her fallopian tubes, and then they turned to a
surrogate mother. She turned out to be a fraud.
“At that point, I decided no more. We’re not going to try
any more to have a baby. My experience of not being able to have children was
one of the most difficult, most painful experiences of my life,” Judy says.
Once the decision to stop trying to have children was made, Judy
stepped up her volunteering, whereas Gary turned to serving on the Board of
Outward Bound, where he first learned to mountain climb in his home state of
Colorado. His climbing took him to all
seven continents as he climbed some of their highest mountains, including the
Vinson Massif in the Antarctic in 1991 and Everest in 1992.
In 1996, Judy discovered clowning. She’s made balloon
creations and performed silly magic tricks for orphans and polio patients in
Vietnam, local pediatric cancer patients, DC firefighters and police,
elementary school children, and teenaged Maasai warriors in Kenya. She’s also entertained
nursing home residents, foster families, kids in homeless shelters, Johns
Hopkins Medical School students, the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, and at the Million Mom March. Gary has accompanied her since
his first venture to Walter Reed on Christmas Eve 2004.
“The joy in my heart when I see smiles on the faces of the
people I entertain confirms that all my efforts are worthwhile,” Judy wrote for
her upcoming Cornell University 50
th reunion book.
It’s not always joyful. Sometimes patients just want to
talk, and Judy and Gary listen. “Some of their stories are overwhelming, and I
sit and listen and cry,” Judy says.
Every so often their clowning can have big consequences. In
December, Judy volunteered as a clown at an Easter Seals dinner reception, and
a woman came up to her and told her that she had met her husband almost three
years ago because of Judy. Clown Judy had made a balloon flower for the woman’s
husband-to-be at the 2015 DOD Warrior Games in Quantico, VA (competitions for
wounded, ill, and injured service members and veterans). He had used the flower
to introduce himself to the woman, and now they’re married and have a baby.
“That made me cry,” Judy said, “but they were happy tears.”
It takes Judy three hours to transform herself into a clown.
First, it takes her 45 minutes to an hour to make a three-foot tall hat out of
balloons. Then she paints a big heart on each cheek, outlining in black
eyeliner and coloring in with red lipstick. She attaches purple, gold, pink and
black false eyelashes for the upper lashes and draws 10 long, black eyelashes
out of eyeliner underneath each eye. She puts on her costume of polka dot
bloomers, a red petticoat, a blouse emblazoned with clown decals, a puffy skirt
with USMC stripes on the sides and a satin vest embroidered with “CLOWN JUDY”
on the back. Finally, she places a red foam
ball on her nose and puts on a red wig.
Judy grew up a twin, the fourth of five children to Leo and
Honey Gleklen. She was born a triplet, but one sister died when she was just a
few months old. The family lived in Providence, RI, and Judy describes them as
“silly, happy and openly affectionate, where kisses and laughter were the
highlights of our daily lives.” The five children were always encouraged to help
less fortunate people and to make them smile, she says, planting the seed for
her becoming a clown many years later. They were encouraged to do volunteer
work, and she started at age 6, performing ballet recitals and singing with her
twin sister at nursing homes. She was also a Red Cross Candy Striper in high
school and did a variety of volunteer work as an undergraduate at Cornell
University. Judy’s mom was always active
in non-profit organizations, and she and her siblings continue that tradition.
Gary retired several years ago from his work as a financial
strategy consultant and expert witness in lawsuits helping unravel the mess
made by some of the largest banks in the US and Europe. He grew up in Denver with an older sister. His
mom was a devoted Red Cross volunteer, called a Gray Lady. His parents, Joseph and
Claire Kopff, stressed academics, and Gary went east to Yale College. After graduation, he studied at Cornell’s Graduate
School of Management, where he met Judy.
They married in Providence in 1969, after Judy finished graduate studies
in art history in New York City.
Today, Judy and Gary find fulfillment in the volunteer work
they do.
“It makes me feel good when I bring smiles to the faces of
children and ‘children-at-heart,’ as I call the adults,” Judy says. “Most
adults like to smile and like to feel good. And If I can make them and their
families feel good for a few minutes so that they can forget their pain, then
that’s a good thing.”
