This week we begin a multipart series recounting my school days in a special education school here in Indianapolis.

Hello, this is Chris Young and welcome to Episode 15 of Contemplating Life.

This week we begin a multi-part series recounting my school days in a special education school here in Indianapolis.

In the mid-1930s, Indianapolis Public Schools built James E. Roberts School #97. It was specially designed for handicapped children and was in many ways in response to the polio epidemic. It was at the corner of East 10th and Oriental Streets on the near east side near Arsenal Technical High School.

The two-story Art Deco building featured ramps, an elevator, and a physical therapy department with a small swimming pool. Students from kindergarten through high school were educated there for 50 years.

The school closed at the end of the 1985-1986 school year. It was used for a variety of purposes for a few years and was considered a candidate for demolition however given its history, there were efforts to preserve the building. It was renovated into an apartment building and is now known as the Roberts School Flats.

In episode 5, I told the story of how my mother tried to enroll me in St. Christopher Parish School. They really weren’t equipped to deal with a disabled child so I was enrolled in Roberts School in kindergarten in 1960 at the age of five.

In the summer of 1960, my parents purchased my first wheelchair. Prior to that, they would just carry me around. Most of the day I would sit in a small chair at our coffee table in the living room where I would play with toys, eat lunch, and watch TV. At dinnertime, I would sit in a high chair at the dining room table.

IPS Schools operated 10 school buses at the time and all of them were used to transport children from all over Indianapolis to Roberts School. In those days, there was no bussing of children to any other school for any reason such as to achieve racial integration. Kids walked or were transported by their parents to their neighborhood schools. There were probably seven or eight high schools and I don’t know how many junior high or middle schools. The Roberts buses were stationed at the school and were occasionally used for field trips by other schools.

The Eagledale neighborhood where I lived was in the far northwest corner of the city and initially, there was no bus route to reach me. They hired an eight-passenger taxicab to pick up several of us in my neighborhood. The cab driver, or perhaps my mother I don’t recall which, would lift me out of my wheelchair and into the taxi. When we arrived at the school, the driver would pick me up and transfer me to a wheelchair that belonged to the school.

There was a girl several years older than me named Erica who lived near here but was just outside the IPS boundaries. I believe she had cerebral palsy although she could walk with difficulty. She persuaded the school to allow her to attend but they would not cross the city limits to pick her up. A family member would drive her to my house and they would sit in the car and wait until the taxi arrived and then she would join us.

I don’t know how long I rode the taxi but it was not for the entire year of kindergarten. At some point, they got a new bus or they rerouted an existing bus to handle the west side. It was an ordinary school bus with the only accommodation being safety belts. The bus driver would lift us out of our home wheelchair and into the school wheelchair upon arrival. And reversed the process at the end of the day.

Among the people who rode that bus with me for many, many years were Chris Fryman who was my age, and Carol Brumett who was about four years older than me. Chris had osteogenesis imperfecta more commonly known as “brittle bone disease”. He used a wheelchair and he had his legs in braces mostly to protect them from breaking. Carol had contracted polio, spent some time in an iron lung, and had minimal use of her arms and legs. They both rode with me for the entire 13 years I attended. (Well Carol graduated before I did.) My good friend Mark Herron who had a form of muscular dystrophy and was a few years younger than me lived right around the corner. He also rode the bus with me for many years. I’ll talk more about him in later episodes.

One of the interesting things about the population of Roberts School was how it reflected the impact of the Salk vaccine for polio. That vaccine became available the summer I was born in 1955. If you looked at my classmates, more than half of the people older than me were there because of polio. No one my age or younger had polio. It’s like someone just flipped a switch and the disease disappeared.

Not all of the kids at Roberts School were in wheelchairs. Some, such as those with mild cerebral palsy could walk perhaps with crutches. Others had severe asthma like my friend Ted Hayes, or a heart condition such as Lily Ottinger, and a few had epilepsy. Many of them probably didn’t need to be segregated into a special education school. Any medical condition that a child had that the average school nurse didn’t want to deal with would get them sent off to our special school. Anyone not in a wheelchair was referred to as a “walker”.

I mentioned that I used a wheelchair that was provided by the school. That doesn’t mean that IPS purchased the wheelchairs. There was little or no extra funding for special education. The wheelchairs had either been donated or had been purchased by the PTA. Every year, we held a cookie sale and the proceeds went to purchase wheelchairs and other equipment. It seemed as though the attitude at IPS was, “Hey… We built you a special school. What more do you want?”

My first wheelchair at Roberts was nothing more than a child-size wooden chair nailed to a plank with four small caster wheels and a handle mounted on the back. I had to be pushed everywhere. It didn’t have large wheels that I could push with my hands. My standard child’s wheelchair that my parents had purchased did have large rear wheels and if I was on a completely smooth flat surface I could push myself a few inches with a great deal of difficulty.

The kindergarten was a large room complete with its own dedicated restroom, a piano for music class, a TV set (something none of the other classrooms in the building had), and lots of wooden blocks and other toys.

The teacher was a wonderful woman named Miss Helen Martin. I’m pretty sure she was still teaching kindergarten when I graduated.

After lunch, she and one of the custodians would set up a bunch of cots and we would spend most of the afternoon in “naptime”. Considering that many kindergarten classes are only half a day, spending the other half of the day trying to nap was not unreasonable. The problem was, everyone in the school had at least one hour of naptime after lunch. I don’t think it went all the way up to the high school level but it did go through junior high which meant 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. We will talk more about nap time in a later episode.

When you get to school, it’s typical for your family, especially grandmas, aunts, and great-aunts to ask, “Have you got a girlfriend yet.” Apparently, they’ve never heard of puberty and don’t realize that those kinds of concerns are not a priority for several years. Yet I still received frequent pressure to answer the question. It seems that my classmate Cheryl was receiving similar pressure from her family to find a boyfriend so, although we were both clueless as to what that kind of relationship involved, we agreed to be boyfriend and girlfriend.

Cheryl was born with no arms. She had tiny appendages perhaps 3 inches long each of which had two tiny fingers. Throughout our grade school years, we would frequently get visitors in the building. They were typically nursing students or special education teaching students. Upon seeing Cheryl, you would hear the word “thalidomide” whispered. The infamous drug thalidomide was prescribed to women in the early and mid-1950s as a very effective method of combating morning sickness during pregnancy. The problem was, it caused severe birth defects in many cases–most often missing limbs. They naturally assumed that was the cause of her condition.

Decades later, I saw a documentary about the drug and did some research of my own. As best I can tell, it was never used in the United States and it was completely discontinued in 1954. I was born in 1955 as was presumably Cheryl. Unless her mother was Canadian or European and was unfortunate enough to have taken the drug shortly before it was pulled from the market, her condition was NOT caused by thalidomide.

Anyway, one day we were sitting at a table coloring. I was about to complete my masterpiece of an airplane flying over houses complete with fluffy clouds and a smiling sun in the sky. Cheryl was sitting on top of the same table that I was using drawing with a crayon between her toes. For reasons I never understood, probably my fault somehow, she reached over and scribbled all over my drawing. I was furious. When I tried to retaliate, she pulled her paper away from me to where I couldn’t reach it. Now I was even more furious because she was exploiting my disability (or rather my inability) to climb up on the table and scribble on her paper. I took that extremely personally. A nasty argument ensued. I don’t know for certain who “went there” first but I will give her the benefit of the doubt and say that I took the argument to the extreme that I’m about to describe.

“I don’t want to be your boyfriend anymore!”

“Good! I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore!”

“I don’t think anybody will ever want to be your boyfriend because you can’t hug them or hold hands with them because you got no arms.”

“So… you’re never going to get married because you’re in a wheelchair and you can’t walk down the aisle!”

At that point, Miss Martin rushed over to intervene and broke up the fight.

Looking back at the incident, I find it fascinating that it illustrated a five-year-old’s concept of a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. For the boy, it consisted of hugging and holding hands, and the girl was already anticipating marriage.

Although James E. Roberts School was built with a physical therapy department, ramps, and elevators to accommodate our special needs, the reason that most of us were there was to protect us from the cruelty we would encounter from other students because of our disabilities. This incident, and many others I could recount, illustrates that we were more normal than they thought. We could be just as cruel to one another regarding our disabilities as if we were integrated into a regular education setting with able children.

Cheryl left Roberts School for a couple of years but I never knew why. When she returned, she was a year behind me. She attempted to use artificial arms but they never were worth the effort for her. By the time she reached junior high, like most walkers, she moved on to a regular school.

When I was in my early 20s, I saw a newspaper feature article about her. The accompanying photo showed her sitting at a desk at her office job typing on a typewriter with her feet. It was your typical feel-good piece about a disabled person making it in the world. She was well-employed and engaged to be married. Some 62 years after our argument, she was right and I wasn’t. She got married and I didn’t.

I’ve got one more story about Cheryl that reflects almost as poorly on me as the one I just told but it’s too funny not to tell.

Fast-forward about 14 years and I’m in my first-semester college physics class at IUPUI. My instructor is a wonderful educator Professor Emeritus Golden Flake. Yes, somewhere along the way Mr. and Mrs. Flake actually decided to name their little boy “Golden”. His motto was, “Physics is Fun” with “fun” spelled PHUN.

One day he was lecturing about the conservation of rotational momentum. He explained, “Did you ever wonder why you swing your arms when you walk or run?” Having done neither yet observed the same I was still curious. He continued, “It’s because when you put one foot in front of the other, and your other foot goes backward, your hips and entire lower body twist. In order to keep from waddling, you have to swing your arms in the opposite direction to absorb that rotational energy.”

I turned to my friend Mike Gregory and said, “Eureka! That explains Cheryl.“ To which he replied, “What? Who?” Later when I had time, I told him about Cheryl and her disability. I explained that when she became a teenager, what God had denied her in the way of limbs, he more than extra made up for in her ample bosom. The poor girl – although she kept her bra straps extremely tight, when she walked her boobs bounced all over the place.

I told Mike, “Now I understand why. All of that rotational momentum had to go somewhere and she couldn’t swing her arms so it went into her…” Mike interrupted to finish my sentence, “coupled harmonic oscillators.”

Mike went on to tell me about a book of humorous essays he found in the library titled, “Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown”. It was a spoof of scientific journal papers in which they applied rigorous engineering and scientific disciplines to ordinary events. The title of the book was the same as the lead essay. It explained in extreme engineering detail complete with force vector diagrams of what it takes to avoid a wardrobe malfunction in a strapless evening gown. Mike suggested if they ever did a volume 2 that I should submit a paper about my kindergarten girlfriend.

Admittedly the whole story is very misogynistic but hey… We were 19-year-old college students. What do you expect?

I found the book on Amazon while preparing this podcast. I couldn’t resist the nostalgia and I ordered a used paperback copy for $10.

In our next episode, we will continue the saga of my school days at Roberts School. Somewhere along the way, we will have my reading of an award-winning article I wrote about my experiences there.

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