But there is one thing above all that galls Sharon Ross: toilets she cannot get to.

That's why Wednesday, when the 65-year-old retired teacher challenged five prominent Brigham City business and government leaders to spend two hours in a chair, she required them to use public bathrooms.

The results were not pretty.

Postmaster David Ellis rolled straight into the handicapped stall at Smith's Food & Drug Center - the most accessible of any of the downtown stores - then found it impossible to get from the chair to the commode.

When Ellis tried shopping, he could not reach the shrimp on the freezer's top shelf or the pears in the produce section.

Tiffany Sorensen, Smith's assistant manager, found her stint in a chair no less vexing. The bathroom at Bert's Cafe & Grill was upstairs and thus off limits. She could not even get over the thresholds and into a flower shop and several other stores as she searched for a restroom.

"I could have just sat and bawled," Sorensen said.

Steve Vincent, vice president and manager of Mountain West Bank, almost tipped over several times, and he found the LDS Tabernacle ramp so steep he could not open the door and not roll backward. "That is an impossibility for any human being alone."

The horror stories made Ross smile.

A beaming blue-eyed woman who probably would flit like a winged fairy if she had use of her legs, Ross has cajoled people three times into taking part in her wheelchair challenge, sprinkling every conversation with the endearment "sweetie pie."

The first time was more than two decades ago in Cedar City.

She also put prominent folks in wheelchairs in Roosevelt, near the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation where she and her husband, Wes Ross, spent 20 years teaching elementary school before retiring and moving to Brigham City two years ago.

They are the parents of two grown children and 17 foster children.

Chelsea and Kali Christensen, two neighborhood teens who have "adopted" the Rosses as their grandparents, showed up Wednesday for Ross' project.

"She never lets anything get to her," Chelsea said. "If you're ever with Grandma, it's hard to be mad or sad."

Ross, a member of the Governor's Council for People with Disabilities, wants people - especially those in a position to do something about it - to be more aware of the difficulties faced by wheelchair users.

When participants in her wheelchair challenge suffer, she knows they get the point.

On Wednesday, she also enlisted young people from the Lincoln Center Boys' and Girls' Club to help those in the wheelchairs and to take rides themselves.

"No one knows one day to the next if they'll be forced to use a wheelchair," said Ross, who was born with cerebral palsy due to a doctor's negligence and has never had use of her legs. As a child in California and Arizona, her classmates would carry her everywhere.

"I'm not mad at anybody because of my disability," she said. "I just want people to know that life isn't over. You can be as happy as you want to be in a wheelchair."

kmoulton@sltrib.com