Schaumburg man all about the Legos

David Schmidt loves his Legos.

Schmidt, who spends his days at Countryside Association, a vocational training center in Palatine for people with disabilities, spends his evenings assembling and disassembling gigantic Lego creations.

His first exposure came about 20 years ago.

"We bought a little tiny set," recalled his mom, Trudy Etienne of Schaumburg.

Now, "I call him the Lego man," she said.

Etienne has bought him kits that cost $300 to $500 and have as many as 6,000 pieces and instruction books that can run hundreds of pages.

"He has patience you wouldn't believe," she says.

Because there isn't room for all his kits in assembled form, Schmidt will take them apart and put them together again, working his way through his collection.

Highlights include the 5,922 piece Taj Mahal, the 3,428 piece Eiffel Tower, the 5,197 piece Star Wars Millenium Falcon and the 3,803 piece Death Star.

Schmidt doesn't say much about his building skills, but he does grin mischievously as he shows off photos of his work.

His mom says he sorts all the pieces into separate containers and counts to make sure he has all the parts he needs of each type. Sometimes, his mom has to write to get missing pieces.

David has been attending Countryside since graduating in 1986 from Kirk School in Palatine. He suffers from mild retardation, cerebral palsy and grand mal seizures.

Known there as "Smitty," he works on packaging and collating items for contracts the workshop has with companies such as ITW and Abbott Laboratories. "If they need accuracy, they county on him," Etienne says.

Kathy Deka, on-site director at Countryside, says after seeing one of his Lego creations about a year ago, the center had David bring in his collection to show for a time in a display case.

The skills he needs in his work and his hobby are similar, she says, but people at Countryside were impressed at the scale of his Lego works in size and complexity.

She describes David as a model employee who comes to work, but who also likes to tease his co-workers. "He's a little sneak," she says, making it clear she means it in a nice way.

The association, which serves 180 people in Palatine and also has a center in Waukegan, hasn't received most of the $2 million is it owed by the state for services provided since last November, putting a big hole in its $5 million annual budget, she says.

But David is doing what he can to help out, collecting aluminum cans and donating the money he gets for them to the center, Deka says.

"He's an inspiration to us all," she says.