Picture a scenic day at Florida's St. Pete Beach: the waves are calm, the breeze is cool and people splash about in the gulf. From afar you hear giggles of children and the cawing from seabirds. The perfect getaway, you might think.

Unless you're a wheelchair user.

"If I were in a wheelchair, I'd sure like to go to the beach," said Millard Gamble, who as a child survived polio without any significant disabilities. But his experience with the disease left him with compassion for people who can't make it over the long boardwalks to the beaches. "People with handicaps often need help but they don't always like asking for it."

Gamble, who owns a beachfront-cottage resort in Pass-a-Grille, has turned his empathy into action. He has purchased a beach-accessible wheelchair, which will soon be available for free use.

The new chair replaces one that fell apart last summer. That chair, which Gamble also had donated, had ferried disabled people from its pick-up spot at the Seaside Grille to the beach for seven years.

What initially inspired Gamble to buy the first chair was a wish of a paraplegic man who he occasionally spoke to on the boardwalk. The man longed not for a new car or a fine house, but to simply swim in the Gulf of Mexico. It was one of the purest dreams Gamble had ever come across.

St. Pete Beach Leisure Services director Michael Whelan says temporary handicap ramps are the extent to which many beach communities oblige wheelchair users. And unlike other Tampa Bay cities, St. Pete Beach doesn't have an association that advocates for people with disabilities, so they turn to private individuals to meet the need.

According to Census 2000 data, about a quarter of St. Pete Beach's residents have some type of disability.

Leisure Services chairman Jim Myers has advocated on several occasions for better accommodations for people with disabilities and praises Gamble for stepping up to the plate.

"I think a lot times we forget about people with disabilities," Myers said. "To me, that part of the community has always been overlooked."

The average aquatic chair starts at about $2,000, more than four times the cost of a regular wheelchair. The beach wheelchair features protruding balloon tires that make it look like a miniature dune buggy traveling across the sand. The chair allows users to enter shallow water so they can slide off into the water.

For Pam Chamberlain, 61, whose spine was crushed in an accident 38 years ago, the beach wheelchair took her to the water - and back in time.

"That was the first time I'd seen that side of the beach since I was 23 years old, because I couldn't get down there," she said describing her first trip in the city's first chair. "(For a long time), I just adjusted to the fact that I couldn't go to the beach."

The first chair was stored at the Seaside Grille in Pass-a-Grille where people could get access to it during concession stand hours. Manager Bernie Johnson said the chair was an asset that was not very well marketed, which is probably due to the lack of signage at Seaside Grille.

"It didn't get a whole lot of use, but it did get enough that it was worth having around," he said.

Alder Allensworth, who used to volunteer with Sailing Alternatives at St. Pete Beach, said she often used the chair to chauffeur out-of-town disabled visitors. It was a real treat for them, she said, since most had never been to the gulf beaches.

Maureen Winiecki and her husband, Dave, were visiting last summer from Manhattan, Ill., just after the old beach chair broke. Dave Winiecki, 59, whose legs had been amputated and was in the last months of his life, wanted to dip in the ocean one last time. So the couple drove to Treasure Island to use the beach wheelchair there, and Winiecki cried when he got to the water.

"The experience is kind of taken for granted by able-bodied people," said Maureen Winiecki, 58. "But for those who can't walk the water's edge, the experience means so much more."

Danny McCoy, 54, from Toronto, was one of those people who would use the chair whenever he came to St. Pete Beach to train for the Paralympics, an international competition for disabled athletes.

"For anybody who is in a wheelchair, you can't get to the beach," McCoy said. "So to be able to swim in the gulf is fantastic."

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