Cave City vet builds wheelchair ramp for fellow vet
SEARCY — About three weeks ago, James Mundorff saw on Facebook that a veteran in Searcy needed a wheelchair ramp for his house.
“I contacted the [Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association’s] chapter commander’s wife and asked her where the veteran’s address was,” Mundorff said. “She told me that a church was going to go by and give him an estimate on the materials [for the ramp], so I thought I had missed the opportunity.”
The ramp is for Bill Morton, the public-relations officer for the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association 7-8. When the church had proposed building the ramp, Morton would have had to pay for the materials, so Mundorff volunteered to build the ramp for Morton and provide the materials.
“I’ve built many of these things before, and I knew what I was doing,” Mundorff said. “I went to Home Depot that night and got the materials needed, and the next morning, I was sitting at his house at 9 a.m.”
Mundorff, who lives in Cave City, is a support member of the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association. He said it took him and fellow veteran Robert Lawson the whole day to build the wheelchair ramp because of the rain, but Mundorff said it would have taken longer if he hadn’t had Lawson’s help.
“I went back a second day and put hand rails on it for Bill,” Mundorff said. “He had so much trouble and difficulty getting down the stairs. He needs the ramp now, not when somebody could get around to it.”
Mundorff has been a member of the association since last March. He served in the United States Army from January 1976 to August 1982 after graduating from high school in Texas. However, he did not see any combat, so he is considered a support member for the association.
“I think that is just what support means, to help and support our vets any way possible that we can — that’s the way I took it and feel about it,” he said. “I was honored to help Bill.”
Mundorff said he joined the Army to see the world but never got to leave the states.
“I was not in a combat situation, and I only served stateside, never went overseas,” he said. “The Vietnam War had just ended, and all the branches were recruiting.
“Their biggest sale pitch was to join the military and see the world, and they stuck me in the middle of the United States in Kansas and left me there.”
Mundorff said he kept asking to go anywhere overseas, but it never happened, so after six years, he earned an honorable discharge from the Army.
“The military was good to me, and I got a college education out of it,” he said. “It was a good decision in my life to join.”
After he left the Army, Mundorff moved to Jacksonville and lived there for about 10 years. He then lived and worked in Florida for another 10 to 12 years before moving back to Arkansas. He has lived in Cave City for a little more than a decade.
“I had a hard time in Florida,” he said. “The housing market deteriorated. We built houses down there too fast, with not enough buyers, and it all collapsed — I lost quite a bit.”
He said he moved back to Arkansas after seeing a job opening on the internet.
“I’ve been working for this one company ever since,” he said.
Mundorff said he decided to join the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association because he believes it has the same ideology that he shares.
“I like everybody,” he said. “They are all kind, polite and nice. I can’t be a full patch, because I am not a combat vet, but I am honored to be a supporter.”
He said he wanted to help Morton with the ramp because “veterans aren’t getting the help they need.”
“I don’t know where the problem is because I haven’t been with it long enough to locate the problem,” Mundorff said. “I don’t know if veterans don’t know who to ask or if there are just not enough people to actually go out and do the tasks.
“I don’t know where the problem is, so I just try to do what I can. Hopefully, it will make a difference. Maybe someone will see [me helping vets], and they will say, ‘I can do it, too.’”