It’s a beautiful summer day in Venice, California, and everyone seems to be out enjoying the beach—except for me.

I am profoundly autistic. As a result, I may jump up and down at strange moments or laugh uncontrollably. I cannot speak at all except for a few rote phrases, though I can write with the aid of a letter board or electronic device. And I am profoundly afraid of the dogs off their leashes that seem to be everywhere, especially in summertime.

It does not matter how small or large the dog is or whether it is well-behaved or not. Moreover, I’m not the only autistic person who panics around dogs. I am not sure why so many of us respond this way. I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that dogs are unpredictable and can bark loudly, sound being another sensitivity for me and most other autistics. When a dog approaches me, it inspires such anxiety that I cannot calm down for many hours afterward. My heart beats in my chest until I fear it is going to explode. My synapses flood with adrenaline, and I get unmanageably nervous. I cannot relax, no matter how hard I try.

This means that I often have to leave public spaces when dogs are present. It breaks my heart that I cannot participate in many summer outings with my family because of the ubiquitous presence of dogs. The constant presence of dogs outdoors is one more way in which my already circumscribed life as a person with autism has become even more circumscribed.

You might say my dilemma captures a clash between two ways of thinking about the public—not only the physical spaces we share but who is allowed access to them—one from pet lovers and another from the disabled. Both approaches are well-meaning: They seek to expand people’s horizons, and fiercely defend the rights of their subjects. Pets help us to see that our world is not just for human beings—we share community with all sorts of non-human beings as well. The disabled show that there are many different ways to be human, all of them valuable.

In an ideal world, all would be welcome. But at present, the situation is weighted toward pets and away from the disabled. The irony is that, according to prevailing laws, dogs are not allowed in many of the places that I end up having to leave.

Take, for example, the beach, which is my happy place. The rhythm of the waves helps me feel relaxed and grounded. The sound is so soothing that I do not have to wear the noise-canceling headphones that I keep glued to my ears almost everywhere else, including when I sleep. I can spend hours playing in the waves.

Los Angeles County law states that “A person shall not bring or maintain on any beach a dog or cat.” There are large signs on many Los Angeles beaches reminding people of this statute. Yet lots of people use the beach as a giant exercise area for their dogs. Moreover, they seldom leash their dogs, meaning their pets run at me, bark at me, sniff me, and climb all over me.

Another summer space I treasure is the farmers market. I love to stroll through the stands, checking out the produce. It smells enchanting and offers a vision of small, natural farms tended by real, friendly people—often there selling their own harvest, picked only hours before. One of my favorite summer joys is eating a fresh, ripe strawberry from these markets.

Here, too, California’s Health and Safety Code mandates that dogs be “kept at least 20 feet (6 meters) away from any mobile food facility, temporary food facility, or certified farmers market.” Again, prominent signs are posted at the entrance to every market. Despite this, dogs roam everywhere.

Another special place for me is the park near our apartment. It is one of the few open spaces close to where we live, and one of the few places I can ride my bike or go skateboarding when the weather is nice. Dogs have their own fenced run in the park where they are supposed to play off their leashes, yet owners insist on letting them run anywhere and everywhere unleashed. When dogs come up to me and want to play, their owners often smile as if it is cute. Instead, I have to leave—or risk a full-blown panic attack.

I am sure pet owners have no idea of the dilemma that they are placing me in. Since I cannot talk, I cannot even politely engage the violators. Instead, I am the one who ends up looking strange, having a giant meltdown in front of everyone. It feels unfair that the onus is on me to figure out how to cope, rather than on dog owners to show some basic consideration and follow the law. When my parents try to explain what is going on, they are typically met with hostility. To me, it is as though dog owners think that their pets have more rights than I do.

As Nicholas Kristof discussed in a recent piece in the New York Times, a majority of dog owners now consider their animals members of their family and spend an incredible amount of money on special food, clothing, and other products for them. It is beautiful that people love their pets so much. But it should not come at the cost of downplaying the needs of the disabled.

I recognize that there is a place in the discussion for service animals. Our neighbor is blind and uses a seeing-eye dog named Ellie. She is a very smart and well-trained animal, and she is always leashed when outside. Although Ellie still makes me nervous, I can manage—in part because she is so well-behaved, and in part because I recognize that her owner has a legitimate need to use her. As another disabled person, I realize that my neighbor needs her service dog to participate fully in public life.

Even though the ordinances outlawing dogs at the beach, in farmers markets, or in public parks were not passed with disabled people in mind, they have become de facto disability rights measures. They let disabled people like myself gain access to some of the few public spaces available. This is especially true in summer, when we all want to enjoy the outdoors.

I know that dog owners do not mean to exclude us, but through their carelessness, this is exactly what they are doing.

And I understand that I don’t have all the answers. One small step toward a solution might be to have lifeguards, farmers market managers, and park officials monitor peoples’ behavior more closely.

More meaningful change, however, will only come with a shift in perspective: recognizing the presence of autistic people and believing that we deserve a place in society. For much of our history, we have been locked away and institutionalized—out of sight and out of mind. We are only now emerging from the shadows to join the rest of you.

It would be a joy to step into public space without fear, knowing that my fellow beachgoers who have dogs have accommodated me so that I, too, can enjoy the idle dog days of summer.

The post I’m Autistic and Scared of Your Dog appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, nearly 75 years later, this unassuming tableau—which would have been a new, even puzzling image for readers at the time—resonates like a thunderous slam-dunk.

To understand the significance of this long-forgotten image, it’s important to recall that after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States in the early 1930s, he used a small wheelchair to get around his office and home. But the leader of the free world, who had contracted polio as a young man, took great pains to conceal the fact that he couldn’t walk unaided. He refused to be photographed or filmed while in a wheelchair so as to “quiet the feelings of revulsion, pity, and embarrassment that his body provoked in others,” as his biographer James Tobin wrote in The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency.

FDR’s stance echoed the tenor of the times. People with disabilities were stigmatized and usually kept hidden from view. Many American cities passed so-called “ugly laws,” including Chicago, which banned people who were “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.” (This shameful law was not repealed until 1974.)

People with severe spinal-cord injuries, known as paraplegics, were rarely seen in public. Paralyzed veterans who fought in World War I could expect to live for approximately 18 months after their injury. But World War II proved to be a game-changer in preserving the lives of paraplegics. Medics deployed new-fangled sulfa drugs on battlefield wounds, and surgeons expeditiously treated the injured servicemen. Military aircraft transported them back to U.S. hospitals much faster than ocean liners had, and the advent of penicillin effectively staunched infections.

Bob Rynearson (standing, referee) and pioneering wheelchair basketball players practice inside the gymnasium at Birmingham Hospital in Van Nuys, California, circa 1946. Courtesy of the Rynearson family.

An estimated 2,500 paralyzed veterans returned home from the Pacific and European theaters. Doctors believed that, despite frequent aftercare complications, these veterans would probably experience a lengthy lifespan, perhaps even approaching their non-disabled counterparts.

That was the positive news. The downside was, they were re-entering a barrier-plagued society that was unprepared for them. There were no handicap parking spaces or curb cutouts at street corners; ramps leading to the entrances of public buildings were unheard of.

Unanswerable questions buzzed in their brains. Would they ever be able to walk unaided again? What employer would want to hire them? And, was it physically possible to have sex and father children?

To aid their rehabilitation, the Veterans Administration opened separate paraplegia wards in hospitals around the country, so that the paraplegics could recover a sense of equilibrium, physically and mentally. But even as these veterans pursued higher education, job training, and physical rehab, a key element was missing.

Many of these young men had grown up playing sports, whether for their school teams or in the service. They missed the special camaraderie of competition, not to mention the strenuous workout. VA staff, most of whom were non-disabled, wondered how they could create enjoyable and meaningful recreation options for wheelchair users.

The wheelchairs themselves were part of the problem. To that point in time, “wheelchair design” was an oxymoron. Wheelchairs were wooden behemoths that weighed over 100 pounds and resembled La-Z-Boys on wheels; they were bulky sitting chairs for permanent immobility. The most common catchphrases used to describe paraplegics emphasized their apparent helplessness: they were said to be “confined to a wheelchair” or “wheelchair bound.”

Just before the war, an engineer named Herbert Everest, who had been paralyzed in a mining accident, brought wheelchairs out of the dark ages. He teamed with co-designer Harry Jennings, inside the latter’s garage in Santa Monica, to fashion a lightweight, foldable wheelchair made of chromium-plated steel tubing. They shifted the two large wheels to the rear so that users could easily and comfortably propel the chair, and they placed two small casters in the front to provide stability and pivoting capability. A backing and seat crafted from synthetic leather allowed the 24-inch-wide chairs to be folded like an accordion to a width of 10 inches. Each chair weighed about 50 pounds.

Their invention changed lives immediately. With some practice, paralyzed vets could wheel their E&Js from the hospital ward to their cars, open the doors, hoist themselves into the front seats, fold up their chairs and stash them behind the seat, and drive off using adaptive, hand-controlled equipment. They now had mobility—and the ability to look for work, live independently outside the hospital, and as it turned out, play competitive sports.

In early 1946, at the Birmingham VA hospital in Van Nuys, California, assistant athletic director Bob Rynearson noticed how the paralyzed veterans liked to roll their chairs onto the gym floor and take turns awkwardly lofting a leather basketball toward the net. What most resonated with Rynearson were the gleeful, totally unselfconscious expressions on the men’s faces as they traded good-natured jibes and hoots.

A thought struck Rynearson: why not use basketball, that most indigenous of American sports, to help the veterans with their rehabilitation?

At first blush, wheelchairs and basketball seemed a particularly odd combination. Height is important in hoops, and no one seated in a wheelchair can boast about that. Basketball also demands constant motion—running, dribbling, rebounding, passing—and it was difficult to imagine how paraplegics could simultaneously control the trajectories of their chairs, avoid collisions with nine other players, and maintain their balance. Oh, and somehow muscle the ball up to the rim and score, too.

But Rynearson noticed that the smooth, flat surface of the basketball court was far superior for rolling wheels than grassy fields, and that the court was large enough to accommodate 10 athletes. Basketball can also be played year-round, and the upper-body contortions required for passing, rebounding, and shooting the ball produce a sweat-filled workout in the chest, arms, neck, shoulder, and core muscles, precisely those areas of the body that paraplegics most need to strengthen.

Rynearson configured a set of 10 rules that closely mimicked two-legged basketball. His most perceptive insight was that the wheelchair, which he called the “means of ambulation,” should be considered the natural and integral extension of the player’s body. Incidental contact between opponents’ chairs was tolerated, but deliberately ramming an opponent’s chair resulted in a personal foul. The veterans themselves persuaded him not to lower the rims from their standard height and not to shorten the distance from the free-throw line.

Above all else, Rynearson made sure that the experience was gratifying for the veterans. “It was just fun getting out there to play basketball,” recalled Birmingham patient Ed Santillanes, who was injured near the Rhine River with the 65th Infantry Division when the jeep he was driving on patrol hit a roadside mine. “The hardest thing was trying to dribble while you’re in a wheelchair. You didn’t just put the ball in your lap and take off like a bat out of hell.”

On November 25, 1946, Rynearson arranged for the paralyzed veterans to play their first game. Their opponent? A squad of able-bodied doctors from the hospital who used wheelchairs for the occasion. The veterans took advantage of their hard-won experience with their E&Js to easily defeat the doctors, 16-6.

“Call it the most unusual basketball game ever played—or the first time in the United States that paraplegics have entered competitive sports in wheelchairs—or simply say it was an action-packed, fast-moving and exciting contest,” the facility’s in-house newsletter breathlessly reported. Coverage of the new sport elsewhere followed. The stories, though typically upbeat and encouraging, oftentimes brimmed with ignorance and condescension, with headlines like “Legless Five Wins Game” and “Crippled Vets Love Sports.”

Nevertheless, like a well-orchestrated fast break, wheelchair basketball quickly spread to paraplegia wards around the country.

In early 1948, Rynearson’s Birmingham squad combined sports highlights and advocacy for disability rights in one epic road trip. They scheduled a slate of wheelchair basketball games in eight cities and, before thousands of disbelieving spectators in some of the nation’s largest sports arenas, faced off against other paralyzed veterans as well as able-bodied teams in borrowed wheelchairs.

When they played the McGuire VA hospital team in Richmond, Virginia, they detoured to Washington, D.C., and rolled their E&Js through the marbled hallways of the Capitol. Their goal: to lobby Congress for legislation that would enable paralyzed veterans to purchase wheelchair-accessible homes, equipped with widened doorways, ramps instead of stairs, and bathrooms and fixtures to accommodate their disability. (President Harry Truman signed Public Law 702 on June 19, 1948.)

Their message to anyone who would listen was consistent and succinct. They wanted no sympathy or special treatment. They simply wanted the opportunity to take their place in society. “With continued evidence of what a disabled man can accomplish, not only will many be given renewed hope and confidence, but the public, business and industry will be made to realize that the disabled—with a little help and understanding—can be useful, valuable and self-sustaining citizens,” said Fred Smead, an early leader of the nonprofit advocacy group Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA).

On March 10, 1948, days after the Birmingham team concluded their barnstorming trip, paralyzed veterans from Cushing and Halloran VA hospitals (in Massachusetts and Staten Island, respectively) wheeled their E&Js onto the court of Madison Square Garden.

Hyped by nightlife columnist (and soon-to-be TV personality) Ed Sullivan, some 15,561 spectators watched as the players warmed up.

The wary crowd was alarmed at first as the veterans wheeled up and down the court and, occasionally, fell from their chairs after mid-court collisions. But their unease quickly turned to relief and then amazement as the men hoisted themselves back into their chairs and returned to the fray with a mighty yell. The fans cheered on both teams, but were thrilled to see the local lads from Halloran cruise to an entertaining 20-11 victory over Cushing.

The game’s leading scorer was Jack Gerhardt with eight points. A paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, Gerhardt was wounded in France in 1944. He rehabbed at Halloran hospital and soon established himself as one of the nation’s top wheelchair basketball players. “He can go like hell in that chair,” said one of Gerhardt’s teammates.

A few days after the game at Madison Square Garden, Gerhardt appeared on the cover of Newsweek. Striking an athletic pose in his polished, state-of-the-art E&J chair, he also subtly boosted the fortunes of his compatriots; the three letters emblazoned on his navy-and-white singlet stand for the nonprofit advocacy group Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA).

The cover image, far from being innocuous, told the story of a group of men who took a second chance at life and upended the stereotype of disabled people as weak and powerless.

Later that year, the National Wheelchair Basketball Association was formed, complete with an annual tournament, and the pool of players soon expanded to include post-polios and amputees (and, later, women and youth with disabilities). Also in 1948, in England, Dr. Ludwig Guttmann unveiled the first edition of the event that would become the Paralympics.

These paralyzed World War II veterans did not just help reduce the stigma of disability; they were among the first people to be applauded for their condition, the first to be considered as something other than freaks or damaged goods. If paraplegics could play basketball—basketball!—they could, if given the tools and the opportunity, do anything and everything non-disabled veterans could do: drive a car, hold down a job, buy a home, get married, and raise children.

By firing the opening salvo in what has become a protracted fight for disability rights for U.S. citizens, the paralyzed veterans championed the principles that continue to resonate today within the disability community: accessibility, inclusion, acceptance, and respect.

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The servicemen who took to the hardwood that night were as extraordinarily ordinary as any group of veterans. They could have been the “mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys” from Ernie Pyle’s Pulitzer Prize–winning columns, or “Willie and Joe” from Bill Mauldin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoons. They were your brother, your neighbor, your best friend from high school.

Except, they were different. The home team consisted of paralyzed veterans from Halloran hospital on Staten Island. The visitors were paralyzed veterans from Cushing hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts. All of the players rolled onto the court in shiny wheelchairs.

Behind the sharp-shooting wizardry of Jack Gerhardt, a wiry paratrooper who was wounded at Normandy, Halloran took a 12-9 edge at halftime before cruising to a 20-11 victory. But the final score didn’t seem to matter much to the boisterous crowd; they cheered both teams with equal fervor because they knew they were watching something special.

To that point in time, wheelchair sports did not exist. The Paralympics had not yet been invented. These veterans were sports trailblazers.

They were medical miracles as well.

Before World War II, paraplegia was considered to be a virtual death sentence. The life expectancy of soldiers who suffered traumatic spinal-cord injuries during World War I was estimated at 18 months. Most died from sepsis or infection. The “dead-enders” and “no-hopers” who survived were shunted off to institutions or hidden from view by their families. They were stigmatized for their disability and considered unlikely prospects for employment or marriage: How could they start or support a family, the logic went, when they couldn’t control their own bladders?

This stigma extended all the way to the office of the president of the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt used a wheelchair after he was stricken with polio in the early 1920s. He did not hide his affliction after he was first elected president in 1932, but he rarely appeared in public in a wheelchair and took extreme measures to avoid being photographed that way.

World War II would prove to be a game-changer for the public’s perception of paraplegia. The war unleashed, along with new weapons, innovative medical practices, and drugs that saved soldiers’ lives. The discovery of penicillin in 1928, and the ability to produce large quantities of the “wonder drug” in the early 1940s, dramatically reduced fatal infections, especially among those with spinal cord injuries. So did the use of sulfa powder and tablets. The collection and distribution of plasma allowed for life-saving blood transfusions, while advances in anesthesia enabled surgeons to save lives on the operating table. Field hospitals and portable surgical units situated close to the battlefield enabled doctors to treat the wounded expeditiously.

Thanks to faster evacuation and transportation methods, including transport planes and hospital ships, injured service-members could return home sooner and in better health.
Once stateside, an estimated 2,500 U.S. paralyzed veterans regained their health and equilibrium in one of the seven newly opened spinal-cord injury centers within the Veterans Administration hospital system.

Ernest Bors in California and Howard Rusk in New York were among the doctors who helped popularize treatments in which paralyzed veterans used recreation to repair their damaged bodies and to adjust to their “new normal” condition. Veterans and their doctors experimented with several sports, including seated volleyball and wheelchair baseball, but none caught on until a physical education instructor at Birmingham VA hospital in Van Nuys, California, created a new sport: wheelchair basketball.

That P.E. teacher, Bob Rynearson, was a coach’s son who grew up playing sports in the San Fernando Valley. At the Birmingham VA, he noticed that the paralyzed veterans liked to play a crude form of pickup basketball after the non-disabled players abandoned the court. He began organizing practices for the wheelchair crew and then wrote the first set of rules for the sport.

Rynearson’s goal was twofold: maintaining the speed of the game without jeopardizing the players’ safety. Players were allowed two pushes on their wheels while in possession of the ball, after which they were required to pass, dribble, or shoot. Incidental contact between wheelchairs was allowed, although ramming into an opponent on purpose resulted in a personal foul.

While watching the men wheel up and down the court and jockey for position, Rynearson arrived at his most perceptive insight: that the wheelchair should be considered an extension of the athlete’s body. In this he was aided by the new-fangled wheelchair models being produced in Southern California, which the rising aviation industry had turned into an engineering capital.

Wheelchair “technology” had long been mired in Civil War-era design. Old-school chairs were all-wooden, rigid-frame models that were essentially pieces of bulky furniture, with all of the maneuverability of an aircraft carrier. That changed in the late 1930s, when engineers Herbert Everest and Harry Jennings started to fashion something more maneuverable.

Everest, an engineer who broke his back in a mining accident, had become discouraged with the cumbersome models, and proposed creating a device that would become the first truly modern wheelchair. Everest & Jennings’ easy-to-propel, transportable wheelchairs were made of lightweight steel aircraft tubing and weighed around 45 pounds. They were designed for the paraplegics’ comfort and ease-of-use. And, as it turned out, the E&J chairs worked well for basketball action.

The Flying Wheels lobby for disability rights during their cross-country barnstorming tour in 1948. Courtesy of the Bob Rynearson family.

At about the same time the games were getting underway in California, paralyzed veterans rehabbing at Cushing VA hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts, started to play their own version of the sport inside the hospital’s gymnasium. Soon, wheelchair basketball squads with names like the Rolling Devils, the Flying Wheels, and the Gizz Kids were barnstorming the nation and filling arenas with cheering fans. They routinely trounced non-disabled professional and college teams who borrowed wheelchairs for the occasion, including the New York Knicks, the Boston Celtics, and the Harlem Globetrotters.

For a short while, they became media darlings. A photo of Halloran star Jack Gerhardt, sitting in his wheelchair while holding a basketball, was featured on the cover of Newsweek. Seemingly every publication covered their exploits, from Women’s Home Companion to Popular Mechanics to the Daily Worker. Hollywood came calling to make a feature film about them, The Men, which marked the Hollywood debut of Marlon Brando.

America’s wounded warriors-turned-playmakers were joined by their British counterparts at Stoke Mandeville Hospital outside London. There, the vets started with archery and then netball (a cousin of basketball that is played without a backboard and with a lowered rim). The brainchild of these games was Dr. Ludwig Guttmann, a German-born Jewish neurologist who fled the Nazis for England just before the war. There, Guttmann took charge of the spinal-cord injury ward at Stoke Mandeville and, like Bors and Rusk, incorporated recreation into the veterans’ rehabilitation regimen.

Guttmann launched the Stoke Mandeville Games and was not modest about his goals: he wanted to turn the event into “the disabled men and women’s equivalent of the Olympic Games.” His ambition came to fruition in Rome in 1960, when he orchestrated what is today considered to be the first official Paralympic Games. Their birth inspired countless other previously unimaginable events and activities for people with disabilities.

The pioneering wheelchair athletes didn’t just revolutionize the possibility of sport, but their public presence also helped reduce the stigma of disability outside the gymnasium. If people with paraplegia could play an exciting and exacting brand of basketball—basketball!—they couldn’t possibly be considered “wheelchair-bound” or “confined to a wheelchair.” Given the chance, they were obviously capable of doing everything non-disabled veterans could do.

“The years to come are not going to be wasted in self-pity or vain regrets,” the New York Times editorialized in 1948, after another early wheelchair basketball contest. “They are going to be participants.”

They proved to be more than “participants.” In 1946, as they were rehabbing in the VA hospitals, they banded together to form the Paralyzed Veterans of America organization. The PVA was an early and vocal leader in the protracted fight for human rights for those with disabilities. Its members raised money for scientists to research paraplegia; lobbied Congress for legislation that addressed accessibility, employment, housing, and transportation; advocated for the principles of independence and self-determination; and refused to be treated as objects of pity.

In demonstrating that ability matters more than disability, these veterans fired the first shots in what would become the protracted fight for disability rights in this country.

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