Disability, Blogging, and the DNC

Mark Siegel passes along news of his friend Kelsey Neumann, who will be blogging from the Convention next week as a delegate. Kelsey uses a wheelchair, and Mark's predicting "plenty of photo ops with party bigwigs." Many of you will have read Harriet McBryde Johnson's chapter on attending the DNC as a delegate in 1996; Kelsey Neumann's reports continue the genre, and we can only hope she'll find improvements in accessibility (and just basic comprehension).

July 3: Nancy Mairs (b. 1943)

[Image: Cover of Nancy Mairs' collection of essays titled Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled (Beacon Press 1996), featuring a close-up of a woman's belly with her hands clasped across it, a detail from Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus"]

"You know, if things are flashing by you, you don't have time to contemplate them and cherish them, you don't know that you're not doing it. And that's part of the reason why I refer to people that other people may refer to as able-bodied, as non-disabled. Because they lack disability. They have a whole element in their lives that they lack. And I have that element in my life. Because I wasn't born disabled, I also have grounds for comparison. I started my life as a non-disabled person, and I know my losses very sharply -- very painfully -- but I also know my gains."

--Nancy Mairs, from the 2005 PBS documentary project "& Thou Shalt Honor," about marriage, aging, and carework

RIP: Jim Hayes (1949-2008)

A whole generation of people who started disabled student services and campus wheelchair sports teams is passing away. I caught this obituary from over the weekend. Jim Hayes was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1949. He injured his spinal cord in a diving accident on his 18th birthday. Hayes went on to be student body president at his junior college, then president of the Handicapped Student Association at the University of Texas-Arlington. After his graduated in 1974, he took a job on the Arlington campus, launching the Office for Students with Disabilities. Later, he was the ADA compliance coordinator on campus.

Jim Hayes also had a lifelong passion for sports. He started wheelchair basketball and wheelchair tennis programs at UTA. In 2000 he became full-time coach of the Moving Mavs --who won seven National Wheelchair Basketball titles under Hayes' direction. Hayes was a wheelchair road racer himself; he won a gold medal at the 1984 Paralympics, and he volunteered at the National Veterans Wheelchair Games. In 2004, one of his former students, Randy Snow, became the first wheelchair athlete inducted into the Olympic Hall of Fame. UTA students or alumni have represented their home nations in every Paralympics Summer Games since 1984. As a result of Jim Hayes' work, the UTA sports program was one of the first in the US to give full athletic scholarships to physically-disabled students.

Hayes died Friday, at the age of 58.

May 11: Stanley Elkin (1930-1995)

[Image description: Stanley Elkin, head-and-shoulders view, he's wearing glasses and has a close-cropped white beard and curly hair; he's smiling slightly]

There is no way in the world I could ever take revenge on the disease that has disabled me. It just seems to me that disease, because it flirts with death, is a rather important subject to write about.

--Stanley Elkin

American writer Stanley Elkin was born on this date in 1930, in New York City. Elkin was a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1972, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS); from the mid-1970s, he used a wheelchair or a walker.

Elkin's experience as a disabled person was reflected in his critically-acclaimed fiction, which had long tended towards dark comic observations, inventive language, and complicated plots centered on deeply flawed characters. Ben Flesh, the main character in The Franchiser (1976), has MS too; in Magic Kingdom (1985), the plot follows a group of terminally ill children who are treated to a Disney World vacation by a wish-granting charity. The children resent being made into pitiful spectacles by the charity's publicity, and wish only to be left alone together to share as peers. The novella "Her Sense of Timing" (1993) is about Professor Schiff, a political geographer with MS, who uses a wheelchair, and must prepare and host a party without the expected help of his wife. In 1993, Harper's Magazine published "Out of One's Tree: My Bout with Temporary Insanity," in which Elkin describes a two-week, prednisone-induced psychosis he experienced from prescription medication for his MS.

Stanley Elkin died in 1995, from complications following heart surgery. His papers are at Washington University in St. Louis.

Wheelchair tipping?!?!

In not one, but two, countries, intentionally tipping someone's wheelchair has come up in the news lately. What's the deal? In the London Times in January, Rod Liddle suggested in an opinion piece that

"Next time you see a young person in a wheelchair, tip it over and drag the occupant to the nearest job centre, lecturing him or her all the while on the dignity of labour."

Because the only reason a young person would use a wheelchair is to avoid employment, right? (Liddle has a long record of horrid statements about disability, but this one explicitly incites violence against disabled people, an escalation on his part.)

Moving across the Atlantic, the idea is already being put into practice--by one deputy sheriff in Hillsborough Co., Florida. Brian Sterner, a quad, was stopped on a traffic violation on 29 January and taken to the station for booking. Deputy Charlotte Marshall Jones didn't believe he was really paralyzed, so she dumped his wheelchair forwards, and he (surprise!) fell to the ground. The incident was caught on the office surveillance camera (video here, but be warned--it's distressing to see), and she has been suspended without pay. Brian Sterner, it turns out, is the former director of the Florida Spinal Cord Injury Resource Center, based in Tampa. He plays wheelchair rugby with the Tampa Generals, and he's working on a PhD.

So, to recap, some young people use wheelchairs AND work AND drive. And throwing someone to the ground is a dangerously stupid way to prove anything.

February 11: Florynce Kennedy (1916-2000)

[Image description: older woman in a wheelchair, wearing a bright-orange head wrap, in front of a blue house and green bower, with her middle finger raised; found here.]

"I'm just a loud-mouthed middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing and a lot of people think I'm crazy. Maybe you do too, but I never stop to wonder why I'm not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren't like me."

Florynce Kennedy was born on this date in 1916, in Kansas City, Missouri. One of the first African-American women to graduate from Columbia Law School, Kennedy went on to help found the National Organization of Women, the Feminist Party, the Women's Political Caucus, and the National Black Feminist Organization.

She used a wheelchair for many years, after several strokes and two heart attacks.

The "Enabling Spaces" Curriculum, and "Access to Admissions"

Last summer I [Mike Dorn] had the pleasure of working with a group of Philadelphia high school students calling themselves Project Beta. They were participating in an afterschool enrichment program calls bITS, funded by the National Science Foundation and hosted by Temple University's Information Technology and Society Research Group. While exploring high end Web 2.0 applications, students were challenged to derive insights from the fields of science, technology and mathematics to solve problems that were familiar to them in their everyday lives. Carol Marfisi and I provided the topical introduction to the themes that students would be exploring during the week-long model, "Towards Enabling Spaces?" Project Beta's explorations of the Temple University campus from the perspective of a person using a wheelchair produced the hilarious film entitled "Access of Admissions," since posted to YouTube and Temple University's site on CampusVid.

I am so impressed by the work of Geography and Urban Studies graduate student Langston Clement and the entire Project Beta team.



I hope you enjoy it, and are inspired to undertake similar explorations of your university campus! Feel free to contact us through the email link to the left, and we will put you in touch with the right people. Of course, you won't be able to duplicate that irresistable Philly soul sound!

November 8: Happy 16th Birthday, Aaron Fotheringham!

I don’t think of it as practice, I think of it as a fun way to live my life.

YouTube sensation and extreme wheelchair sports star Aaron Fotheringham is turning 16 this Thursday--somehow. As a mom, I'm just glad to see him wearing his helmet in all his "Hardcore Sitting" videos, like this one from summer 2006, billed as his execution of the world's first wheelchair backflip:

Unnecessary Roughness

Do we really need this? At left, a print ad for the 2006 Canadian Wheelchair Rugby Championship. (Visual description: black lettering on the face of what appears to be a seriously play-worn wheelchair-rugby wheel, reading "TO PLAY WHEELCHAIR RUGBY YOU HAVE TO BE PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED AND MENTALLY INSANE.")

The other two ads in the campaign were okay, but this one plays into the cliched idea that being "mentally insane" is all about being heedless of danger, spectacularly self-destructive, and ... entertaining to watch? Busting cliches about one disability group by reinforcing cliches about another disability group just isn't helpful, in the bigger picture.

A Mother's Day image

Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs 1920-1990 is a new online archive of digitized newspaper photographs, maintained by UCLA Library Special Collections. It's a rich and searchable collection. The following photo stood out for me, as a fine image to share on Mother's Day in the US:
According to the caption at the website, this is Magdalena Wodke, a member of the Totally Confident Disabled Drill Team, with her son on her lap, on a track at Northridge in 1984. It's an LA Times photo from August 1984. What was that team again? The Totally Confident Drill Team was part of Operation Confidence, an independent-living and vocational training project begun in 1980 at Widney High School in Los Angeles. The TC Drill Team performed at the Summer Olympics in 1984, which is when this photo was taken. I can't find more about Magdalena Wodke, or her son (who would be about 23 now).

Congratulations to Tsuchida and Soejima!

The 111th Boston Marathon (the world's oldest annual marathon--they like to point that out) almost didn't run on Monday--Boston was in the path of a big nor'easter that dumped a lot of snow and rain on the whole region. But organizers decided at 4am race day that it should go forward, and it did.

The Wheelchair division winners were both Japanese: Masazumi Soejima for the men (pictured at left) and Wakako Tsuchida for the women. Both are past Paralympic medalists, and Tsuchida has competed not only in track-and-field events, but also in ice sledge speed racing at the Winter Paralympics. Oh, and she had a baby seven months ago....

But wait, there's more. The Boston Marathon has several divisions for disabled athletes. In the visually-impaired division, Americans Adrian Broca and Ivonne Mosquera had the top times. In the mobility-impaired division (in which competitors usually ambulate with prostheses, crutches, or braces), Paul Martin and Amy Palmiero-Winters (pictured at right, not at the Monday race) placed first and second.

Congratulations to all the athletes who participated!

Disability History Image: Newspaper vendor, 1896

Alice Austen (1866-1952) was a prolific amateur photographer of New York's Gilded Age. She made thousands of photographs, images of ships and automobiles, bootblacks and policemen, beachgoers and organ grinders, cyclists and postmen. The image above (click it to enlarge) is an Alice Austen photograph found in the New York Public Library's online galleries. It shows a woman selling newspapers on the streets of New York. She's bundled up, in a hat and coat and a long blanket covering her legs and feet; and she's in a wheelchair with very thin rear wheels, much like an old-style bicycle. Notice that the legs of the table in front of her have been raised up on bricks to fit her chair under it. In the background, there's a horse-drawn trolley, and behind that a bank building. Is she reading, or sleeping, with her cheek resting in her hand? According to the website, this photo was taken in 1896.

Much later in her life, photographer Alice Austen herself used a wheelchair, after arthritis affected her mobility. The image at right is Austen at the Staten Island Farm Colony, a public poorhouse where she lived, 1950-1951; the man in the photograph, Oliver Jensen (1914-2005), was a Life magazine staffer and small-press editor who helped rediscover Austen's glass-plate negatives in the Staten Island Historical Society. He published some of her photos and sold others to major magazines to raise money to get her out of the poorhouse and into a private nursing home for the last months of her life.

ADA Day 2006, East Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Times today featured photos from the Third Annual Wheelchair Wash in East Los Angeles, sponsored by Familia Unida and Blue Cross of California. Timed to coincide with the anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (July 29), the event featured a visit from the mayor of Los Angeles, free wheelchair cleaning, polishing, and tune-ups, live music, free haircuts and manicures.

Now in case those freebies sound too much like patronizing give-aways, well....they were more like an outreach, to get folks who might otherwise be reluctant to be out in their wheelchairs to come and get multi-lingual information about their rights and opportunities under the ADA. Familia Unida/Living with Multiple Sclerosis was founded by Irma Resendez in 1998, because she found (from her own experience with an MS diagnosis as a young mother of preschoolers) that there were not enough reliable, culturally-aware resources targeted at Spanish speakers. Now they also provide free referrals, advocacy, training, and other supports in Chinese too.

The photo above is from last year's FULWMS Wheelchair Wash--that's LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa taking a turn at polishing a chair for the cameras.

The Bain Collection

What's the Bain Collection, you may wonder...well, thanks to the Magpie, I now know that it's about 1600 images from a collection of 42,000 glass negatives, mostly American news photos from the early 20th century. Why is this so cool? Well, click on over to the search page. Don't bother typing in "disability" or "disabled"--those words won't bring up anything. But typing in "blind" or "cripple" will bring up loads of photographs, many of them taken at schools and rehabilitation or vocational training programs. Among the more striking images, there are deaf girls dancing, blind veterans learning to play checkers, one-legged races (where at least one competitor chose to run in full business attire), amputees boxing (a very posed shot, since both men are smiling), and General Daniel Sickles in his wicker wheelchair, shown here at right.

Who was he? I was wondering the same thing. Daniel Sickles (1819-1914) was a Union general in the Civil War. Before the war, he was a lawyer in New York City, and a US Congressman; in 1859, while he was a member of Congress, he killed his wife's lover, but was acquitted of the crime, in what is remembered as "the first use of the insanity defense in US history." Though he had no military experience, he was a successful recruiter for the Union Army, and was made a general in 1861. At the Battle of Gettysburg, he lost his leg to a cannonball injury. He had his shattered legbone preserved and donated to the Army Medical Museum, where he is rumored to have visited it annually.

After the war, using a wheelchair (or crutches), Sickles served in various government posts, including another term in Congress (1893-95), and a stint as US Minister to Spain (1869-1873). Sickles lived to the age of 94. The massive funeral procession of Daniel Sickles is also captured in photographs at the Bain Collection.