Meet Judy Squier, ‘the old lady with no legs’

Every author welcomes a newspaper interview followed by an article about your book in the local paper. But your knees knock as you wait to see how you look in the photo and how your are portrayed by the reporter. I give this article 5 stars. Journalist Kathleen hit the nail on the head in capturing the real me.

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Meet Judy Squier, ‘the old lady with no legs’
By Kathleen Alaks of the Daily Courier

Judy Squier pulls no punches when she talks about herself.
“I’m the old lady with no legs,” she says with a wide grin.
Born with several birth defects that left her with a webbed left hand and two undeveloped legs with no thighs or knees and a total of five toes, Squier, now 65, is quick to point out that, despite her disability, she’s not all that different from anyone else.

“I deal with self, shame, failure, inferiority, that whole emotional package,” she says. “But everyone goes through that. I’m missing legs, but other people are missing what? Financial security, emotional stability, good health, good relationships? We’re all broken in some way.”

Squier addresses that idea in her book, “His Majesty in Brokenness,” subtitled “Finding God’s Masterpiece in Your Missing Piece.”

Judy's Book: "His Majesty in Brokenness"

​Not an autobiography in the traditional sense, the book is divided into 30 short stories about different aspects of Squier’s life.

“They are stories of how God showed up in a broken person’s life,” she says.

The second child of a pastor and his wife, Squier grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, Ill. She was 10 when she had corrective surgery and was fitted for artificial limbs.

“The Shriners did all the surgeries and prosthetics,” she says. “I walked on artificial legs from the time I was 10 until I was 60. I was ambulatory and walked with a cane and the legs came off at night.”

At 13, she started giving speeches about walking with artificial legs to church groups and other organizations. At 16 she learned to drive a car with hand controls.

She graduated from the University of Illinois with a master’s degree in speech pathology and worked in that field for 10 years.

She and husband, David Squier, raised three daughters in the San Francisco Bay area and moved to Grants Pass four years ago.

“I have a husband who, I don’t think, even knows that I don’t have any legs,” she says with a laugh. “He’s always been more interested in who a person is on the inside than on the outside.”

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Judy Squier in Front of her Home in Oregon

In their retirement, Judy and David have traveled to Romania, Thailand and Brazil.

“When I finally realized that it’s not about me, we started going on mission trips,” Judy says. “We delivered wheelchairs to third world countries, encouraged parents with disabled children.”

Squier bases that encouragement, in part, on the spiritual perspective on disability she finds in Psalms 139, which says that God oversees what goes on in a mother’s womb.

“For a person born broken, that passage says that it’s not an accident but a purpose, a higher design,” Squier says. “That’s the bulwark, the foundation of being me.”

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“His Majesty in Brokenness” sells for $10 at Evangel stores in Grants Pass and Medford and through Amazon.

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​Reach reporter Kathleen Alaks
​at 541-474-3815 or [email protected]