President Obama meets with disabled camper at NASCAR event

From The Gaston Gazette in N.C.:

Most kids would be happy just to meet one United States president.

The way Hank Grissom’s karma is going, he can probably start looking forward to meeting his third.

Grissom (pictured), a 13-year-old from McAdenville, had the chance to fish with President George W. Bush four years ago at Victory Junction Gang Camp in Randleman. On Wednesday, he rubbed elbows with the commander in chief in a more formal environment, meeting President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C.

“Being in the White House, it made me a little more anxious, but I wasn’t nervous when I met him,” said Grissom, a rising eighth-grader at Cramerton Middle School . “I was prepared and I was ready.”

Grissom was one of several people to make the trip as representatives of the Victory Junction Gang Camp, an operation founded in 2004 by NASCAR driver Kyle Petty and his wife, Patti, to help children with chronic medical conditions or serious illnesses. They were there as part of a White House ceremony to honor three-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson and stock car racing in general.

Other special guests included several of NASCAR’s past champions and top drivers, such as Tony Stewart and Juan Pablo Montoya, and wounded soldiers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

Grissom, the son of Robert and Donna Grissom, was born with spina bifida, a developmental birth defect caused by the incomplete closure of the spinal cord. It has affected his ability to walk, but has not infringed on his intelligence or his great personality, say those who know him.

After arriving at the White House, Grissom was ushered into the China Room, which holds pieces of china given to several U.S. presidents going back as far as Andrew Jackson.

Obama soon entered and came down the line, shaking everyone’s hand and talking with Grissom for several minutes.

Grissom knows the president has a full plate of weighty issues to deal with these days, from health care reform to the economy. But the most powerful man in the world didn’t show it.

“I’m sure he was in a hurry,” said Grissom. “But he didn’t act like that. He acted like he had all the time in the world.”

When Grissom shakes anyone’s hand, he makes a point of looking them in the eye. He said the president does the same.

“He seemed like he was happy to meet me,” he said.

Grissom and his family were in Charlotte during a rally for Obama just before his election in November. At one point, a staffer invited Grissom to come onstage, and he later obtained a photo that showed him standing behind the president.

He brought that picture to the White House on Wednesday to jog the president’s memory.

“(President Obama) pointed to it and said, ‘That guy in the middle looks like me,’” said Grissom. “And I said, ‘And that guy over your left shoulder looks like me.’”

Grissom said what will stick with him the most about the visit is the opportunity to be an ambassador for the Victory Junction camp, where he hopes to one day become a camp counselor.

“That camp has done so much for me,” he said. “I’m honored that they wanted me to go.”

He said he won’t turn down another opportunity to meet Obama in the future.

“But I’m happy to meet him just once,” he said.