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To continue my story, I must go back a couple of years. In the
summer of 1963 I turned five, and like all other kids my age, I was
old enough to begin school. When Mom called the district office
to ask what had to be done in order to enroll a new student ready to
enter kindergarten, a secretary on the other end of the phone assured
her that there was nothing to it. “All Steve needs,” she said,
“is a school physical, a completed and signed registration form, and
some school supplies—glue, paste, scissors, and so on.”
As to whether or not any accommodations could be
made in the classroom because of my cerebral palsy, that question was
met with a bewildered silence. Apparently, the school district
had little or no experience with physically disabled kids who
demonstrated above-average intelligence, because nobody there knew
what to do with me. After a few moments, one of the school’s
administrators came up with what seemed to her a brilliant idea.
“It might be easier,” she suggested, “for both Steve and the other
students in the school, if he attends the school for blind children, a
couple of miles from here.”
I hope that today people know that something is
fundamentally wrong with placing a kid with perfect vision in a
school that is specifically designed for visually impaired students,
even if that kid has cerebral palsy. At the time, however, their
plan seemed to make sense to them. I could go to school to
receive an education, yet I wouldn’t disrupt the “normal” kids in
school. Unfortunately, that’s what it boiled down to. The
school simply did not want to be bothered with accommodating a
disabled student in the classroom. It was easier to ship me off
somewhere else than to figure out a way to educate me at a regular
school for nondisabled students.
In any event, my parents’ persistence paid off,
and I was mainstreamed during a time in our country when most kids
with disabilities were either placed in an institution or kept at
home. The Education for all Handicapped Children Act, which
would guarantee disabled kids the right to a free public education in
the least restrictive environment, was still a dozen years away.
For the first three years, I was one of the most
popular kids in school. Whatever my classmates did, I did.
From recess to nap time, from painting to learning to read, I did it
all. The other kids paid little attention to the electric
typewriter sitting on my desk that I used to do my class work.
Nor did they seem to mind that I left class two or three days a week
to go to physical therapy and to the local high school, where I
learned all the ins and outs of operating a typewriter. My
classmates went out of their way to accept me and made me feel that I
belonged in their class. Unfortunately, everything changed when
our family moved to Newark Township in southern Wisconsin in the fall
of 1966.
Mom and Dad bought an old farmhouse about ten
miles from town a couple of months after I began third grade. I
was excited about the move and looked forward to finding the same kind
of friends at my new school as I had at my old one. But to my
surprise, that didn’t happen. It’s hard for anyone to enter a
new school in the middle of the semester, but it’s especially
difficult when that someone has cerebral palsy. I was the
outsider trying to fit into an already established group of friends.
It’s not that any of the kids intentionally tried to exclude me.
It was simply easier for them to pretend that I did not exist and to
ignore me than to make a sincere effort at friendship.
It wasn’t until about a year later that the
teasing started. One kid in particular went out of his way to
make my life miserable. There wasn’t anything nice about Bobby
Hogan. Bobby and I rode the same school bus, and every day it
was always the same—teasing, teasing, and more teasing. For
whatever reason, he took great pleasure in watching me get mad.
“Hey, Steve! Come over here!” he’d say, just to get my
attention. “Is your real name Shaky?” he’d whisper as he ran
away, knowing full well that I was incapable of catching him. I
wanted to kill the guy. Okay, maybe that’s a little extreme, but
I wanted at least to hurt him just as much as he had hurt me. I
would have, too, if he had stood still long enough for me to get my
hands around his neck.
Bobby was the worst but by no means the only kid
I had trouble with at Newark Elementary School. Jim Phillips
seemed like a nice-enough kid; he was nice enough, that is, when Bobby
wasn’t around. But when the two of them were together, Jim
became a different person, and at my expense. He was torn
between trying to be my friend and wanting Bobby to like him. I
asked him once why he treated me one way when we were alone and
another way when Bobby was around. “I have to,” he confessed,
“or else Bobby won’t be my friend.”
His answer seemed pretty lame. How could a
person be a friend one minute and not a friend the next? In
Jim’s defense, I have to say that he did apologize. A couple of
years after graduating from high school we happened to be together,
and he told me how sorry he was for some of the things he had done and
said in grade school. It was good of him to apologize, even if
the apology was twelve years late in coming.
I wish that Bobby and Jim had been the only two
kids who tried to make my life miserable. Unfortunately, there
were others as well. Dave Thompson kept to himself most of the
time and usually caused little or no trouble in the classroom.
But every once in awhile, when he saw me off in the corner somewhere
by myself, he would get his nose out of joint and go out of his way to
torment me. Such was the case one day during an afternoon
recess period during the sixth grade.
Both of us had stopped off at the restroom.
I was going to the bathroom, minding my own business, when Dave
noticed that I had dribbled a couple of drops of urine onto the tile
floor about an inch away from the base of the urinal. I noticed
the look of mischief in his eyes and a few minutes later discovered
what he was up to.
“Dave told me about what happened in the
restroom,” Mrs. Palmer said, as I walked into class. “Would you
explain yourself?”
I wish I had had the courage to challenge Dave on
the spot. But at eleven years of age, I lacked the courage
needed to defend myself against such an outrageous accusation.
Instead of standing up for myself as I should have, I just stood
there and listened to Mrs. Palmer lecture me in front of 30 other
students about how disappointed she was in me for having relieved
myself on the middle of the restroom floor.
A couple of years later, I had another run-in
with Dave, only this time we were leaving the gymnasium and heading
for the guys’ locker room. Dave said he wanted to play a game,
the object of which was for him to run up, touch my crotch with his
hand, and then run away before I could do anything about it.
Some game! It may have been fun for Dave, but it wasn’t fun for
me. It was humiliating to have him touch me. Why would he
do such a thing?
I was too embarrassed to tell anyone about the
stunt Dave pulled that day, so I decided to keep the whole thing to
myself—a decision I now regret. What Dave did was wrong, and
someone should have set him straight about what a stupid and intrusive
thing he had done.
I struggled for a long time with whether or not
to write about so many of the details related above. I wasn’t
sure how necessary it would be to describe some of the more
embarrassing things that Dave did to me over the several years that I
knew him. But after giving the matter a lot of thought, I’ve
concluded that, as humiliating as they are to write about, the things
that happened between Dave Thompson and me are very important parts of
my life.
If a few people are uncomfortable with reading
some of the more graphic details of what happened to me in childhood,
I understand that. But I want my readers to understand that
it’s not easy being a kid with a disability. These events
provide a very real glimpse of what it was like for me growing up with
cerebral palsy. Having cerebral palsy is hard. And
sometimes, as was the case with knowing Dave Thompson, having cerebral
palsy is down-right awful.
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