Lives II
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.. Gene Tchida
.. Larry Bryant
.. Syd Jacobs
.. Lou Carello
.. Fred Rosene
.. Nancy Becker Kennedy

Gene Tchida
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The Special Services for Disabled Students
program at the University of Arizona (see preceding
section for description) is coordinated by Gene Tchida,
a C4,5 quadriplegic with the best possible reason for
being helpful. He came so close to spending his life in a
nursing home, was so victimized by primitive care, was
so uninformed of his real abilities and expectations and
was so deprived of opportunity that he desperately
wants to be sure that these things never happen again.
Ever. To anyone.

Gene was in an auto accident in 1956, when he was
16. Here’s his “rehabilitation” history, which should be
read with the understanding that his accident predates
the advent of rehabilitation as it is known today.

General hospitalization in Globe, Arizona. Tongs
and traction immediately applied. Moved to Good
Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, which then offered
only general hospital care but at least had a Stryker
Frame. (Good Sam’s SCI Center, established later, is
now a symbol for enlightened rehabilitation.)
Transferred to a Crippled Children’s Hospital which
was custodial, not remedial. “It had the look of an old
people’s home with young people in it. There I was, 16
years old and looking at something pretty bleak.”
Indeed, it was very bleak. He couldn’t feed himself.
He’d never heard of hand splints. He was pushed
wherever he went, because electric wheelchairs weren’t
part of what the hospital offered. There *was* one
therapist who knew enough about the fledgling subject
of rehabilitation to get him released to family care at
home after six months.

His family was supportive, took care of his
attendant needs and encouraged him to finish high
school on a home-bound program, which he did. That
completed the goals he had set for himself before the
accident. He’d toyed with the idea of joining the Navy,
had never considered college, nobody in his family had
ever gone on to higher education, and he had no idea
what to do next.

Friends and parents suggested trying college. He
made an appointment to see the assistant dean of a
nearby junior college, but the dean’s office was
completely inaccessible. “That was a frightening
experience. How was I going to school when I couldn’t
even get in the door?” That experience spun him into
seven years of “semi-vegetation,” as Gene puts it. A lot
of reading, a lot of television and a lot of frustration. A
lot of killing time.

Gene’s older sister, always concerned, started
asking around the State Department of Vocational
Rehabilitation. After a psychological assessment, he
qualified for three months of intensive occupational and
physical therapy at Rancho los Amigos Hospital in
Downey, California. Gene credits his sister and Rancho
with turning his life around.

Rancho: After eight years, Gene was, for the first
time, exposed to real rehabilitation. After eight years,
he was, for the first time, outfitted with hand splints
and an electric wheelchair. After eight years, he could
go somewhere without asking.

“I saw rehabilitation, and I saw many young people
my age, some younger, some older, who had similar
situations. It opened all kinds of doors. I could see that
there were areas that I could move out into. There was
a sense of identity, a sense of importance, and the
relationships that developed started to show that I was
normal on the inside whereas there was some physical
loss on the outside. That was really eye-opening for
me.”

The rest of it went quickly. He enrolled at Arizona
State University at Tempe that summer as a 25 year old
freshman, and graduated in psychology. Got his
master’s at the University of Arizona in Rehabilitation
Counseling. Worked into the Special Services program
during its infancy. In 1972, he married Linda: “I’ve been
married now six years. Ten or twelve years ago,
marriage was, to me, a completely foreign idea. I quite
candidly did not think that a person who was a
quadriplegic got married. I think it demonstrates as
much as anything my lack of understanding of what
was achievable, given a person’s will and desire and
motivation and willingness to take chances. Today, I
think it’s a very natural state of affairs for me.”

How would he compare his own satisfaction now
with, say, his satisfaction in 1959?

“Night and day. Literally. Then, I couldn’t see
anything. I couldn’t see the next day, the day after that.
I had no feeling for future, for goals. Now, I feel that
I’m really limited only in the sense that I limit myself.”

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How does he feel about severely disabled people
adding the difficulties of schooling to the existing
difficulties of disability?

“I don’t look for guarantees. I look for chances.
And I think that’s what I would like to ensure —that
individuals get a chance. It may be a chance to fail, but
at least it’s a chance.”

So Gene seems to have experienced the ultimate
satisfaction — having narrowly escaped life imprisonment
in semi-vegetation, he has forged a life which
gives him and others the opportunity he was almost
denied.

As we leave his office together, he talks
enthusiastically of the new house he and Linda are
building. As we pass the receptionist, she asks him a
question in sign language. He answers, apparently using
substitute signs to offset his lack of manual dexterity.
For me, this is humbling and heartwarming. If Gene
Tchida, who definitely does not have the good hands,
has time to tackle sign language because some of the
students his office serves are hearing-impaired, then the
rest of us can surely summon the wherewithal to rejoin
this world of magnified opportunity with joy and
abundant energy, simply because people like Gene have
*made* it possible. For anyone.

Larry Bryant
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Larry Bryant works in the belly of a bureaucracy
and is proud of it. He wears the uniform —three piece
suit, polka dot tie, patent leather shoes and a gold
watch chain. There are a couple of apparent anomalies:
quiet articulation, decisiveness, directness and sensitivity
are not qualities that I always expect to find in
bureaucrats; and then there’s the gold earring...

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Larry’s been through a lot of changes. He comes
from an educated, fairly affluent family in Atlanta.
There are many executives in the family, several
holding PhD’s, and he was expected to fall into the
same mold. Predictably, he rebelled. He learned how to
make a zip gun at the age of 12, spent a lot of time on
the streets in and out of trouble, participated in civil
rights efforts and generally avoided anything that
smacked of the establishment.

In 1961, he moved to Los Angeles to see if he
could mellow out a little. He was diving into the ocean
from a 20-foot cliff with some friends, misjudged a
wave and began a new life as a C4-6 quadriplegic. He
was 16.

Since that time, Larry did his rehab, finished high
school, got two undergraduate degrees, earned a
master’s in rehabilitation counseling, counseled
emotionally retarded adults, participated in Project
Hope, which was an effort to keep delinquent kids out
of jail, moved to the Los Angeles Mayor’s office, which
was beginning to bring the handicapped into civil
service jobs and now is a deputy compliance officer
with Affirmative Action for Los Angeles County. It’s a
responsible job with expanding opportunities, and he
likes it.

I wanted to know about some of the missing
details, such as his rehab at Rancho los Amigos.

“Man, I spent *two years* at Rancho. I really didn’t
want to leave, you know. I became so dependent on
people doing things for me that it was difficult to leave,
to get back out there. Two years of that just about did
me in.”

He did succeed in finishing his last two years of
high school while at Rancho, but feels they should have
kicked him out earlier, an opinion no doubt shared by
Rancho. They, like Larry, have changed since 1961.
Here’s some hindsight:

“Things are going to be only as bad as you make
them. You can sit in that hospital room and vegetate
the rest of your life. You can deal with nurses, with
doctors, with other patients who are just there to create
their own little world —but whatever you accept is
because *you* make the choice to accept it. Therefore, if
you want something good to happen, you can make it
happen. The things that I wanted and the things that
have happened to me are basically because I made them
happen, not because I was any Superman. I believed
they could happen.”

But what if I’m not really bright, I never wanted to
finish high school, I’ve got no career objectives and now
I’m a quad?

“Hey, I didn’t believe I was bright. I didn’t believe
that the State Department of Rehab would send me out
of state to go to school, I didn’t believe that there was a
welfare system that would support me. There were a lot
of things I didn’t know, but I started to ask questions
and, in some cases, to make people come up with an
answer for me. You know, you can search and search
and search sometimes, and look in the wrong place. But
you’ve gotta make things happen for you, you’ve gotta
believe that there are things out there for you.”

This conviction didn’t arrive in one flash of insight.
He started with correspondence school: “I did about a
year and a half, then realized that I didn’t have to sit in
a back room and type this correspondence work. I
could actually go to a campus and mingle with the
other kids. And I did and it was great.”

Larry picked up an AA in business, a BA in
experimental psychology, then traveled to the University
of Arizona in Tucson for his master’s in Rehabilitation
Counseling. How was it?

“Fan-tastic. That year that I went away to Arizona
was probably the best year that I’ve ever had. It allowed
me to not just be on my own again, but to think freely.
That was the best time I ever had, aside from what I’m
doing now with the young lady I’m with.”

Larry is quick to credit :ref:`Gene Tchida`
and his department for much of the good times.
“They helped me get an attendant before I got there,
find an apartment; they were really nice people. There
were 360 handicapped students on campus and they had
everything for us. As much recreation as any other
student took part in. You did everything anybody else
did. You were slowed down but you weren’t really
limited.”

He didn’t date much at U of A, not because he
didn’t want to, but because he did a two year master’s
program in one year. That was a pretty demanding
goal, and he’s very proud of its accomplishment. But no
time for dates.

That, too, has changed. He’s getting married very
soon, loves to talk about Esther, his fiancee, about
what they do now and what they’ll do later. And
about how it used to be:

“I used to sit back in the hospital room and dream
about going on dates, taking a young lady out
somewhere, and it never seemed to be a realistic thing
to happen to me. I used to think that I would never be
able to have any kind of relationship with anyone. But
it has happened. As I became more confident in myself,
understanding what goes on around me as well as in a
relationship, it just seems that it was a natural thing
that I would someday find somebody who was like me,
who liked the same things I liked, who accepted me as
an individual and only looked at me secondarily as an
individual who is disabled. And it can be the same way
for anybody.”

There’s a stiff entrance exam getting into Larry’s
office. It’s in the Los Angeles County Administration
Building, a structure which makes the Pentagon look as
complex as a gazebo. After the guard station, there’s an
underground maze of parking levels and ramps designed
by a storm sewer engineer, and elevators which can take
you where you want to go only if you take the correct
elevators in the correct sequence. The office is on the
seventh floor, looks out over the city, and rattles
constantly from the throbbing of the helicopters that
hover about like mosquitoes. Or maybe the earthquake
is finally upon us. I feel paranoid in these places.

Larry, on the other hand, looks very much at
home. He *is* a little surprised to be here: “It was just
not in my program to be sitting here with a three piece
suit — with an earring in my ear, sure —but being here
and dealing with other three piece suit types.

“I came on as the County’s expert for the
handicapped. This was right after the Rehab Act was
enacted. Basically my function is to oversee grievance
procedures for individuals and to protect and safeguard
the rights of the handicapped for the County. That
includes advising the Board of Supervisors, advising the
Affirmative Action Officer and the Board on
handicapped legislation, on rights, accessibility, regional
accommodation, that sort of thing. Sometimes I feel
like the expert. Sometimes (groans) I don’t know.”

He feels that his office does a good job, but is
hindered by limited budget and staff. “We get things
done, but not in the volume and quality, sometimes,
that we’d like to get them done.” It’s easy to see why:
21 employees are providing services to 65,000
handicapped people in the County.

Are there handicapped people out there who don’t
know how to find help?

“I’m really surprised, but there are people out there
who not only don’t know we’re here, but that there’s a
new law that protects them. I’m really surprised about
the people who don’t know about the Rehab Act, just
have no idea.

“There are youngsters who are in hospitals now
who don’t realize that there are many things out there
for them. Not just accessible curbs or jobs, but attitudes
of people are now changing. So the disabled person is
now beginning to realize that he can function on any
level, on the same kinds of levels that everyone else
functions on.

“When I was in the hospital, nobody told me that I
was able to go to school, that I was able to get out in
life and deal with individuals, that I was able to travel.
I had no one come to me and say Larry, you can lead
as normal a life, whatever that means, as anyone else
can. All you’ve gotta do is just go for it.”

Larry’s been asked to do some public service
television announcements aimed at getting disabled kids
into Scouting. They want him to wear a Boy Scout
uniform on camera. Would that embarrass him? “Are
you kidding? No, I love it. Getting handicapped kids
into Scouting? I *love* it.”

Syd Jacobs
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In 1974, a doctor friend asked me to drop in on a
new patient of his who had broken her back in a
mountaineering accident in the Cascade Range of
Washington state. She had taken a fast slide down a
snow slope and hit a rock. Her name was Syd Jacobs,
she was 20 years old, she had a T6,7 break, looked kind
of peaked and was pretty bummed out by the accident
because she felt she’d done everything right and had her
head in the right place just before the quick stop. What
struck me was that her annoyance was over her
performance, not her luck. The other thing that struck
me as unusual was that, a few days after her accident,
she was making plans about where and how she wanted
to live and about what she wanted to do in life.

I next saw her in 1976, in Colorado, and it was
clear that she had accomplished a lot of goals in a
hurry. She had also become the first wheelchair jock I
was to meet — light chair, no arm rests, one foot
nonchalantly hooked over the web strap between her
footrest supports and oozing vitality. She gave me my
first inkling that I wasn’t cutting the raciest possible
image in my chair.

Our next encounter was in Seattle, in 1978, and her
world had expanded once again. She had just landed a
job in a field she felt was perfect for her and which still
gave her time off to train for her other life, about which
more later. She still looked speedy and her health lit up
her surroundings.

And now, in Boulder for a visit in 1979, she has
some things to say.

First, you should know that Syd was a competitive
swimmer before her accident, which may or may not
explain her dreams. They started in the hospital before
she was even up in a chair.

“I had a lot of dreams about swimming. I would
get in the water at one end of the pool and I'd be
crippled, and I’d swim to the other end and I’d be able
to get out and walk. As soon as I got up I started
swimming, and I really liked it. I preferred swimming to
lifting weights and pushing my chair around.”

“I got involved in wheelchair sports right away,
and that really was a big influence because I met a lot
of people that had been in wheelchairs for a long time
and they helped me make a big adjustment — just
watching people that were physically fit and could get
around. That really helped.”

“I’ve been all over the country: Arizona, Virginia,
New York, Kentucky, Colorado, everywhere; and in the
world I’ve been to Brazil, England, Canada and
Mexico; all competing for wheelchair sports. (She’s
hoping to compete in swimming, perhaps in basketball,
in the Netherlands in 1980.) That takes care of the
competitive side of my life. I also like scuba diving and
snorkeling, kayaking, sledding, skiing on a pulk,
camping ...” Syd gets around.

It didn’t all happen at once. Syd lived with her
parents in Colorado for a few months, which was hard
for her just because she had already been out and on
her own. But: “Even before I got out of the hospital,
my whole objective was to go back to Washington state,
so the first opportunity I had I went up to see my
friends for a week, and that’s when I decided I was
definitely going back. So six months later, I moved
back to Washington.”

The first thing Syd did back in Seattle was to finish
off her BA in Communications, competing in
wheelchair sports at the same time. Her vocational
interests were a mixed bag: media communications on
the one hand and environmental education on the
other. Her new job may be a chance to do both.

She works for the National Park Service’s Visitor
Information Service, which acts as a regional clearing
house for outdoor recreation information. Next summer
holds the promise of working at Rainier National Park
as an interpretation trainee, an opportunity Syd values
because it gets her back in the mountains and because
she feels the job may eventually lead to producing
brochures and films.

The most remarkable thing about her job is that a
large government agency was flexible enough to give
her time off for training and competition. “That was
one of the stipulations when I took the job, that I was
going to get time off when I wanted it. At least for the
first year that I worked there. But they were *looking* for
a disabled person in that job.”

How did she find the job? Through Handicapped
Referral, an agency funded by CETA (Comprehensive
Employment Training Act).

Syd dates actively and feels she’s too restless to
settle down. Her most recent relationship ended when
the man “decided I was too self-confident for him. He
was afraid I was going to dominate his life, I guess. No
one’s ever told me that before. (Laughs) I don’t think
being a gimp had anything to do with it.”

About her chair: “The only time I really feel
embarrassed about being in a wheelchair is when I act
like a klutz. I think it’s a matter of self-confidence. If I
feel confident and I can get around like anyone else, it
doesn’t bother me a bit. Say, if I try to jump a curb and
I miss, and all these people come rushing to the aid of
the poor cripple on the street —that’s when I get
embarrassed.

“If people are going to have a good perception of
people in wheelchairs and disabled people in general,
it’s up to us to make that perception good. And that’s
by being pleasant and teaching people what we can and
can’t do, instead of acting like we have a chip on our
shoulder. If someone opens a door for me, fine. I’ll say
thank you. But I'll still open doors for other people too.

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“I try to understand when people are trying to be
helpful. If I'm pushing up a hill, got a rhythm going, I
find it really aggravating when someone comes up
behind me and just starts pushing me. It would be
really easy to snap at them. I don’t need your help! But
I think it’s really important to try to understand them. I
think most people are pretty well-meaning, but you just
have to be gentle with them —let ’em *know*.”

Syd lets 'em know; she was with a basketball team
on a plane to Edmonton when a steward referred to the
team as wheelchair *patients*. Her response was outraged
but still educational: “*We’re not patients. We’re
wheelchair athletes, do you mind?*” She chuckles, and
says she’s very seldom that nasty.

News flash: Syd didn’t get her summer job as a
trainee at Rainier. She got something better, working as
a naturalist at Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National
Park and also as a researcher preparing a report on the
accessibility of the park. Her daily duties include
leading three 45-minute nature walks over decidedly
hilly terrain, jaunts which have doubtless caused more
than a few tourists to reassess their own physical
prowess.

Lou Carello
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Lou lives on a quiet street in Fountain Valley,
California. The house is neat, pleasant, unpretentious.
He wants to know what we’re up to before he’ll talk,
but he’s friendly. After he decides we’re OK, he’s very
friendly.

Lou’s cultural background is Italian. He’s proud of
it and it shows in his voice and mannerisms. He has
intense eyes, a boxer’s quick moves and animated,
mobile features. An actor’s face.

He is an actor. “I was in *The Roy Campanella
Story* about two or three years ago, I had a very large
part in *Coming Home, Heroes*, I did a *Barnaby Jones*,
I’ve done a *Paper Chase*, I was in a TV movie called
*Some Kind of Miracle* and I was part of a handicapped
movie called *A Different Approach*. There’s a
possibility of a movie in Boulder, Colorado, a very
good part in that one, and the possibility of a TV series
which would be based a lot on my life.”

And before that? “I didn’t graduate from high
school. Got thrown out of school a couple of times,
went to a reform school. I went through a system
where they were more interested in disciplining me
than teaching me.”

The Marine Corps got Lou off the streets and
provided him with some of his first positive and
reinforcing experiences. They also sent him to Vietnam,
where he was shot. He’s a T9, with a lot of useful
return. As a guess, he’s functionally about L4.

We continue our conversation at the local Nautilus
Gym where Lou works out regularly. He likes what it
does to his body and mind. He’d do a set of exercises,
then talk. If he sounds breathless at times, he is.

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What about after his rehabilitation? “I’m a former
junkie. I wanted to work with narcotics addicts, but
society says if you don’t have a piece of paper, you’re
not qualified. And unfortunately, they wouldn’t take my
real life experience.”

Then he got married. “I had the very fortunate
thing of finding a woman I really loved about three and
a half years ago. It’s kind of turned my life around.
Things are going right for me, you know?”

How did the acting career happen? “I was at the
VA Hospital one day, pushing down the hallway, and
some guy says How'd you like to be in a movie? Why
not? So I went down to his room and this guy gave me
a piece of paper, I read a few words and they put it on
tape, and about three months later I got a card in the
mail telling me to go to Howard Johnson’s up in
Hollywood. I’m always up for a little action, nothing to
lose, so I go up there. And they hired me right on the
spot. And that’s how I got into it. Nothing spectacular
and no big plans to be a movie star. Just happened.”

Was working in *Coming Home* a satisfying
experience for you? “It was a satisfying experience
because of the way the director, Hal Ashby, handled it.
The way he let it be done is that every day we would go
there, a scene was rewritten. We’d go for it as to how
we thought the scene might be done; not Hollywood
style, but true style. And it made a big difference. A lot
of the dialog was ad-libbed. The opening scene at the
pool table was like, OK guys, we’re here, start talking
about anything you want to pertaining to Vietnam. And
we were able to do it.”

Lou sometimes feels discriminated against within
the film industry, especially when walking people get
handicapped roles he feels he’s qualified for: “I think
what it is is that the public is not enough educated
about people who are handicapped. The industry, being
such a competitive industry, the man who’s directing
cannot take the risk of having someone give a poor
performance because his livelihood depends on it too.
But there’s people like Hal Ashby or Jane Fonda, guys
like Henry Winkler, Jon Voight; there’s enough of ’em
out there that if you keep plugging you’re gonna get
your breaks and eventually you’re gonna be there.”

Lou’s interest in educating the public is not only
professional. He serves on the Governor’s Committee
for the Hiring of the Handicapped, on the Executive
Committee of the Wheelchair Basketball Association,
and has a favorite vehicle of expression, which is
through kids. He’s a Little League baseball coach, and
just became an assistant coach for a Junior All
American Football League team.

“I love kids. They react naturally to what they feel
and what they see. And in communicating with them,
because I’m at the same eye level that they are, it’s not
Mr. Carello, it’s Lou. I’m their friend. I’m not this big
guy that’s comin’ down on ’em, I’m somebody they can
come up and put their arms around and hug and feel
good. The bond is just beautiful.

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“But the thing that’s really important is that by
being around me, the handicapped person, they’re
learning about handicapped people at such a young age
where they themselves, as they grow up, this will be
something they will already know and be able to deal
with, and they'll be able to pass the word along to their
friends. So it’s a way of getting the word out. Because a
guy’s in a wheelchair doesn’t mean he can’t coach us,
doesn’t mean he can’t teach us. He’s able to do all these
things.”

How has the injury changed your life? “I’ve become
a softer person. I give more. I’ve become more in touch
with my feelings. I’m more sensitive than I was before. I
have more caring for people. I wake up every morning
happy that I’m just waking up. And I’m sure that I
have a different perspective on life because of my
injury. So I live every day to the fullest that I can, and
I’m happy just being here.”

Is there sex after paralysis? “Sure there is. Sex, to
me, is for everybody —it all depends on how you do it.
There’s *love* after injury. I think that’s more important
than sex.”

Fred Rosene
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If software engineering can be said to have a
pinnacle, Fred Rosene is there. He’s been with General
Telephone and Electronics for 22 years, and can’t seem
to shake success.

“When I started there, I decided one thing I didn’t
want to be is a manager, and I’ve been a supervisor ever
since one year after I got there. I move to get away
from being a manager, and boom, no matter where I
go, I end up as a manager. So I’m sort of resigned to
becoming a manager.

“I’ve reached a point in my company that, whenever
new projects come up, if I want them I can have
them. A year and a half ago, I had four choices within
one week that spread all the way from going to Italy to
work, to going to Arizona to work, to working around
here. I have offers all the time, so I really have total
access to whatever I want to do within the
corporation.”

Sound like a grim commitment to the work ethic?
Read on.

Fred is the only paraplegic I know who was
injured on a toboggan. It happened in 1951, when he
was 19.

“I was sitting in the middle, because I thought that
was the safest, and I had my feet up around the guy in
front of me. We went down the hill, over a bump, and
that did it. I suddenly thought, Gee, this is what it feels
like to be paralyzed.”

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He had nine more months to think about it at a
Massachusetts hospital, where he experienced the
minimal rehab common of the day. Then he went back
to college. For a distinguished engineer, he took great
pains to avoid becoming one: “My father went to RPI,
and I did, and I didn’t like engineering. So I transferred
to Tufts and ended up in engineering and didn’t like
that either.” That was before his accident. Afterwards,
he transferred to MIT because it was more accessible —
there were two other wheelchair students there, which at
that time was unique —and got his bachelor’s and
master’s degrees in mathematics.

He still wasn’t ready to be a working engineer, and
in truth, I don’t really know when he actually did
become one. I do know that he became director of his
church youth program.

“We'd set up a drop-in program for kids who are
sort of dropping out of everything else. It was a group
of kids heavily involved in drugs and all sorts of
juvenile delinquency. What happened was that I was
able to relate to them because they had to help me as
well as me helping them. They had to help me down the
stairs and up the stairs, you know, and it kind of
worked out that it wasn’t just a one-way thing. Really, I
think I was better able to relate to them than if I’d been
able bodied and walking around.

“Somebody asked me to coach the church
basketball team. I didn’t know anything about
coaching, really, but for some reason I said Yes, read a
few books and I coached for 18 years. We ended up
with a room full of trophies and we always ended up in
the playoffs. We just had a good time. It was something
it turned out I could do pretty well.” It’s interesting to
note that one of Fred’s first players was Bruce Marquis,
ex-Executive Director of the National Spinal Cord
Injury Foundation. Bruce claims that Fred showed him
that wheelers were not only as good as other people,
but better. Hmm.

During this time, Fred had long since become an
engineer and project manager for GTE. He had also
gotten into the peace movement. Can you be an
engineer for a corporation with significant defense
contracts and be a peace-nik as well? Fred could. He
moved to a division of his company that had no
military ties, then led a group of adults and kids from
his church to Washington to participate in the Death
March and the Mass March which followed.

To fill the gaps in his spare time, Fred does such
things as serving on a city committee to help make the
city more accessible. For years, he’d avoided disability-related
projects because “I realized that just because
people were handicapped, it didn’t mean they had
anything in common. I guess I reached a point where it
didn’t bother me to be involved in a handicapped
thing. I’d accepted my handicap to the point where I
didn’t have to prove anything to anybody anymore.”

And now, after 28 years of paraplegia, of coaching,
counseling, committees and conscience, has he had
enough? Nope. There are two teenagers here now,
waiting for Fred to finish the interview so they can do
the grocery shopping for this weekend’s camping trip to
Vermont. Fred’s leading it. Seventeen kids from his
church.

And between his job and church and ancillary
activities, surely there’s no time to spare?

“I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to make
enough money to do basically what I want to do. I
decided I wanted to skin dive, so I did that. I wanted to
sail; I sail. I swim several times a week. I travel a lot.”

Have the 28 years ravaged his emotional and
physical health? He admits to some depressed times
during the early years, especially when he had to drop
out of school to heal pressure sores. (This is an
extremely common occurrence, and it’s very easy for the
novice gimp to think that it’s always going to be this
way. As almost everyone finds out, maintaining a cord-injured
body is a learned skill that, once acquired,
doesn’t depart.) Fred describes his outlook and health
for the last 20-plus years as excellent, as they clearly are
today.

His new project? A three-wheeled motorcycle. At
the age of 47, Fred’s getting a dirt bike. For the hell of
it. As he says, “There’s a wheelchair motorcycle club,
believe it not.” Why not?

Nancy Becker Kennedy
--------------------

She’s mercurial in temperament, direct in demeanor
and articulate as hell. Such a mouth, in fact, that this is
a very easy profile to write. Nancy is so eminently
*quotable* that she does it for me. Here’s a little prehistory
in a nutshell, because Nancy’s going to take over
right away. (Lest the foregoing makes her sound
forbidding, she’s not. She’s warm, outgoing, witty,
energetic and very funny. Just another Jewish girl
running around in an electric wheelchair.)

1972. Nancy broke her neck diving when she was
20. C5,6. She did her rehabilitation, returned to college
three weeks later, finished her BA, met her husband in
graduate school, got her master’s in broadcast
journalism and moved to Southern California when
Steve was accepted to UCLA’s law school. She went to
work in rehabilitation at Rancho los Amigos in
Downey and he became a lawyer. It’s now Nancy’s
ambition to get a job in broadcast news. That’s all.

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I asked a really intelligent question to start things
off, which dissolved Nancy into gales of laughter: Did
your injury bum you out?

“No! It was like getting a bad bag of grapefruit at
the grocery. It was nothing. I just sloughed it off and
went back about my business! (Emotional about-face.)
No, it was terribly depressing. I mean, the idea you'll
become a social leper is not that pleasant to deal with.
It was *such* a feeling of shock, I was delirious for three
weeks. That was my way of coping with it.”

After three weeks, she asked her doctor whether
she’d walk again: “When he said No, I remember
putting my hand to my mouth and staring out a
window and thinking, How can a person hear this and
not blow up? How can you hear such a horrible thing
in the world, and not fall off?” But...

“There were good points for me, like when I
noticed an orderly in the hospital who was better
looking than he had to be. And he was paying a lot of
attention to me, and I even noticed that he was
responding to my personality, and that made me
remember that I was still a person.

“I had a very insane group of friends. They had me
shooting this movie, *Deep Spoke*, while I was still in
the hospital. It was about a woman whose clitoris was
misplaced in the spokes of her wheelchair and she finds
it out while getting a shoeshine. So they didn’t make it
easy for me to be depressed.”

There were ups and downs, and downs generated
by her ups: “Sometimes I would just trash out and feel
like a zero, and think, Wait a minute. If you’re being
happy, it’s just because you’re not being realistic. Now
get depressed again and get with it.” Up and down...

“I said to one friend, Do I look just like a person
sitting in a chair? He says, Oh, you mean instead of a
cripple? And I says Yeah! And he goes, You look like
Patty Duke rehearsing a movie for being a quadriplegic.
You don’t look like a real cripple. And I said, Oh thank
goodness!”

Three weeks after she left the hospital, she was
back in college: “Because I was thrust right back into
what I was doing before, I was back on familiar
ground. I was writing English papers again, I got my
personality and wit back, and I functionally became
very good because I had to type, I had to phone, I had
to get things through for school.” (She writes elegantly
and fast, holding the pen vertically in the hinge of her
hand. No splints.)

“So one big thing is to get back to doing things
real quick, and the other is to be crazy enough not to
lower your expectations one bit because you’re in a
wheelchair. I had this psychologist who told me: Love
will have to mean less to you, religion will have to
mean more to you, and work will have to take on a
greater significance in your life. And I asked, What
about falling in love? He said, Well, you'll have to
direct your energies into other things. I said, Look,
you’re asking me to play probabilities because of my
wheelchair. When you were in high school, somebody
could have said, Look, you’re skinny, you’re not very
goodlooking, you'll probably get married to a woman
you don’t think is pretty enough, and you’ll be very
unhappy. But you did a different thing. You became a
psychologist and you wear suede jackets and you’re real
happy. You turned things to your advantage and I can
turn things to mine.

“I wanted the same excitement out of life; I wanted
an exciting career, I wanted to be in love, and, even
though all indicators said I should forget it, I didn’t.
And it did happen.”

So why, with a journalism background, did she go
into rehabilitation work?

"The first thing I had a great compulsion to do was
to get to newly injured people and tell them, *It’s not
what you think*. Because I really, when I was first
injured, thought everything was all over. And my
biggest fear was that I’d be socially ostracized. I kind of
was carrying my prejudices against people in
wheelchairs into my disability. And when I found out
that I could resume my life and have as much pleasure,
if not more, than I had before my injury, I felt a great
need to get to newly injured people and tell them that.”

Why, then, does she want to go into news? “I was
an activist with concerns in all kinds of areas before my
injury. I was active in the women’s movement, the grape
boycott, the abortion movement —I was even a
socialist. I left some of these things behind, but I was
basically just concerned with things being fair. So my
desires for social justice are not just related to disability.
I felt that news would satisfy me because I had 20 years
of desires that pre-dated my accident that were not
being dealt with by only doing disability-related work.”

So far, she’s produced a 28-minute film,
*Wallflower: the Disabled in Society*, and has appeared
—with extremely positive effect —on a segment of
*Sixty Minutes* dealing with work disincentives. She’s
applied to two local stations, has been given
encouragement, but so far, no job.

Nancy’s marriage is obviously very precious to her.
She starts to talk about Steve, marriage, in-laws; she’s
alive with enthusiasm and love and compliments, then
she backs off because some things are to be
experienced rather than spoken of. She’s an irreverent
woman, is Nancy, but some things command reverence.

Parting shot, for the librarian: “Some people don’t
believe in themselves for various reasons, and they think
that the fun things in life are for somebody else.
Nobody out there is any less of an asshole than you are.
You can want everything they want. You know, don’t
feel insecure.”

Such a mouth.

News flash: Nancy just got her job as associate
producer at KCET News.