Not walking, flying

Think you have a cool Halloween costume? Here’s guessing it doesn’t blow smoke. Not literally, anyway.

As “awesome” as Hunter Powers feels about his custom-made costume, though, most kids don’t have to trick-or-treat in a wheelchair.

“My mom just goes up to the door and gets the candy,” says Hunter, 15, of every Halloween he can ever remember.

For Powers, born with spina bifida — a birth defect in which there is an incomplete closing of the backbone and membranes around the spinal cord — Saturday night probably will be no different than previous years. Most front doors, after all, don’t have wheelchair ramps leading to them.

Hunter, who is paralyzed below the waist, probably will turn more than a few heads with his “quinjet” costume — a replica from his favorite TV show, “Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” He’ll be out with his mother, Ginger Kanwischer, and younger brothers Roman, 8, and Dylan, 5, and whoever else tags along in their Bethel area neighborhood.

“Ryan said when his kids go (trick-or-treating), the people come to them,” says Kanwischer, who has a blended family of eight children with husband Calvin Kanwischer, including three foster kids.

Ryan would be Ryan Weimer, the reason Hunter received this “Magic Wheelchair” at no cost to his family.

Magic Wheelchair is a Keizer-based nonprofit group started last year by Weimer, 36, and his wife, Lana, who live in that Marion County town. Ryan Weimer built a pirate ship around his 3-year-old son Keaton’s wheelchair for Halloween in 2008.

Now 10, Keaton is one of three children born to the Weimers with spinal muscular atrophy, a form of muscular dystrophy. A daughter, Addison, died of complications from the disease a week before her third birthday in 2011.

Ryan and Lana have no disabilities but are carriers of a recessive gene that gives their children a 25 percent chance of being born with spinal muscular atrophy, or SMA, Ryan Weimer says. The couple have had five children, including a stillborn son, Eston, in 2012. Nine-month-old son Thatcher is the only one born completely healthy so far. Three-year-old son Bryce also has SMA.

After years of building what he calls “epic costumes” around his kids’ wheelchairs, Weimer felt the need to share.

Speaking from his cellphone in Times Square in New York City on Thursday, a day after he and Keaton appeared on “The Meredith Vieira Show,” telling the talk show host about Magic Wheelchair and showing her Weimer’s latest creation, a jaw-dropping version of the “Indominus Rex” dinosaur from this year’s “Jurassic World” movie, Weimer says he got an idea last year: “We need to do this for other families.”

So, Weimer, a registered nurse who works at the state’s McLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn, launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to build Keaton’s “Toothless” — a flying dragon from the “How to Train Your Dragon” animated film series — costume and to incorporate as a nonprofit organization.

That brought in $6,500. But to build costumes for other children in wheelchairs, the Weimers needed more.

They launched another Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, this time raising $25,000. That was enough to pay for materials and other expenses for costumes — an average of $3,000 per build — for eight children (six in Oregon; two in Georgia) with the help of volunteers.

Families submit one- to three-minute videos to apply for a costume.

And Hunter Powers was the first of the eight accepted to get his costume, receiving it on Oct. 23, two days before his 15th birthday, when the volunteer who led the building project for Hunter’s costume, Jeff Watamura, a high school art teacher from Visalia, Calif., drove 12 hours to deliver it in person.

“It was probably one of the most rewarding and humbling experiences of my life,” says Watamura, who built Hunter’s costume over the course of a couple of months with students in his after-school “Monster Making” group.

Although Hunter knew what he was getting — because he specifically asked Weimer for it when he and his mother met him at a May party in Salem, thrown by another nonprofit group that helps disabled kids — Weimer and Watamura still surprised him last week.

They dressed him in the black suit and tie (similar to the one worn by his hero, “S.H.I.E.L.D.” agent Ryan Coulson, from the TV show) that Watamura and two assistants brought from California, then blindfolded him and carried him out of his house. “Awesome!” Hunter exclaimed, on seeing his steel-gray, battery-powered quinjet, complete with remote-controlled fog machine underneath, thus the “smoke” blowing out of the foam-made exhaust pipes.

Volunteers are the key for building more wheelchair costumes in the future, Weimer says.

He got a lot of help in building his son’s extraordinary “Toothless” costume by watching a video tutorial he found on the website of the Stan Winston School of Character Arts in Sylmar, Calif.

The school is named for the Oscar-winning special makeup effects creator best known for his work on the “Terminator” and “Jurassic Park” movie series. His son, Matt Winston, opened the school in 2008, the year his father died.

He and co-founder Erich Litoff have become involved in helping find volunteers for Magic Wheelchair, Weimer says.

That’s how Watamura found Magic Wheelchair, on the Sam Winston school Facebook page.

The Stan Winston school is also how the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology in Lawrenceville, Ga., got involved, and why volunteers there made two wheelchair costumes for Georgia kids this Halloween.

“I like that I get to be included, and the costumes look really, really epic,” Keaton Weimer said on “The Meredith Vieira Show” on Wednesday, as the audience laughed and applauded.

All Hunter — who on Thursday got a “Happy Halloween” video tribute from the entire cast of “Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” — knows is how his costume makes him feel: “Really happy. Really, really happy.”