ALAN HITSKY ASSOCIATE EDITOR
PHOTOS BY DANIEL LIPPITT

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Jeffrey Stone is buoyant about life.

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inter officially ended
for Fay and Stuart
Stone on Feb. 7.
That was the day the
Birmingham Groves
High School swim team
began "tapering" for this
week's league champi-
onships and halted week-
day morning practices.
For the Stones, Feb. 7
marked an end to the 4:30 a.m. wake-
up call that has been ringing through
their house since
late November as 16-
year-old freshman
freestyler and butter-
flyer Jeffrey Stone
gets up for morning
practice.
Jeff, who was born
with Down syndrome,
has been swimming
since the age of 2. His
grandfather, Reuben
Isaacs, taught him
how to swim "and
blow bubbles" in the
Isaacs' back-yard pool.
Jeff has done a lot
of swimming in the 14
years since he began
blowing bubbles. He
has won ribbons at
the county level and gold medals at the
state level in Special Olympics. He has
swum on teams at the Jewish Com-
munity Center, the Sports Club, Birm-
ingham Berkshire Middle School and
in the special Hall of Fame Games

sponsored by the Michigan Jewish
Sports Hall of Fame.
Birmingham Groves has been a
high-school swimming power in Michi-
gan, and two practices totaling 41/2
hours a day are grueling. While Jeff is
far from being a star on the team, his
times have improved. He generally
swims the 50-yard freestyle in exhibi-
tion heats and on one of Groves' 200
freestyle relays, and he has lowered his
best time to 33 seconds.
As grueling as the practices are his
parents' driving sched-
ules. Jeff gets up at
4:30 a.m. — "My
mother tickles and
kisses me out of bed"
—gets dressed, brush-
es his teeth, eats
breakfast, brushes his
teeth again and is in
the car by 5 a.m. with
his dad to make the
30-minute drive to
Groves for 5:30 a.m.
swim practice.
While Jeff is swim-
ming, Stuart Stone
returns home for an-
other half-hour of
sleep before heading
off to work as director
of design for an ex-
hibit and display company.
Fay, meanwhile, prepares for her
day as a third-grade teacher at Detroit's
Clark Elementary near Grosse Pointe
— a 60-minute drive from their West
Bloomfield home.

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