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National Disability Radio: Alden’s AuDHD Journey

Posted November 14, 2025 • 00:30:12

Alden Blevins, the newest host of National Disability Radio, has a personal journey with autism and ADHD that has shaped her perspective on disability rights and advocacy. Alden was misdiagnosed with anxiety and depression as a child, and did not receive the correct diagnosis of autism and ADHD until her late 20s. Alden describes her experience navigating the workplace and healthcare systems as an autistic individual, emphasizing the challenges of “passing” as neurotypical and the importance of self-accommodating. We also discuss the evolving public perception and representation of autism, noting that while awareness has increased, the diversity of the autistic experience is often overlooked. When it comes to policy and advocacy, Alden highlights the need for greater autistic representation and input, as the perspectives of those with high support needs or who use augmentative communication are often left out of importangt onversations To recharge and find joy, the PodSquad turns to their interests, particularly music and pop culture, which play an important role in ever important their self-advocate self-care regime. To view or download the full transcript, click here. Michelle Bishop: How could we not talk about Taylor getting engaged and dropping a new album? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Oh my gosh. Michelle Bishop: Taylor, she understood the assignment and she was like, “The world needs me to bring them joy right now.” Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Alden Blevins: Oh, absolutely. I’ve been totally enjoying some good escapism by entering into the Taylor verse, and that’s been helpful for my mental health as of late, so. Michelle Bishop: Maybe we should do our podcast. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Welcome to National Disability Radio. Alden Blevins: Let’s go ahead and do that. So I’m the newbie here in the mix today. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yay. Alden Blevins: Yes. But I will welcome everybody to National Disability Radio and introduce myself and say that I am Alden Blevins. I am a new addition to the NDRN team. I started last year around November. Before that, I happened to work at the Virginia Protection and Advocacy organization, disAbility Law Center of Virginia for two years. So I have learned a lot from the PNAs in the disability community, and I’m super stoked to be here today. Michelle Bishop: Love it. Welcome. Alden Blevins: Yeah. Michelle Bishop: Stephanie, were you going to introduce yourself? Stephanie Flynt McEben: I was just going to say, Alden, we are super excited to have you as a producer and host. So yeah, we are super excited to have you with us on our pod squad team. But yeah, I’m Stephanie Flynt McEben and I am NDRN’s public policy analyst and I guess it’s one third now, one third of your podcast hosts. Michelle Bishop: One third, one third. I’m Michelle Bishop. I’m the manager for voter access and engagement, and I usually have to introduce myself first every single episode, so looking- Alden Blevins: Oh, wow. I didn’t mean to steal your thunder. I just wanted us to get into the mix. Michelle Bishop: And I know you’ve got hella professional experience, but also one of the things we highlight on National Disability Radio is also the lived experience of having a disability and why that is also as important and as valid and useful as the professional experience and data and that sort of thing. Alden Blevins: Absolutely. So I have my own experience with disabilities. I identify, as the kids say, AuDHD, meaning I both have autism and ADHD, and that has shaped so much about how I moved through the world. Other than that, some more lived experience I have is that I started my career out working in public education, which just happened to teach me a lot about the systems and the barriers that everyday people face. And in addition to my own lived experience with disability, my mom is also a power chair user. Sometimes she uses a walker. She uses various mobility aids. She’s had a disability for most of my life growing up, so while I bring my own perspective, I’ve also got a lot of experience with a different type of disability through my experiences growing up with my mom. Michelle Bishop: I’m sorry, did you call it AuDHD? I’ve never heard that before. That’s amazing. Alden Blevins: Yes. AuDHD. A-U-D-H-D. Michelle Bishop: Yes. I love it, I love it. We’re already learning new things. This episode is about you as our new pro host. So back us all the way up. Let’s let our listeners get to know you a little bit. Can you talk about your journey to joining NDRN? Alden Blevins: Yeah, absolutely. So like I mentioned, I did start out working in public education and from there I moved into nonprofit work first with the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Virginia. And then again with the Virginia PNA, the disAbility Law Center of Virginia. I feel like each step to getting to NCRN has been a new layer of experiencing how disability rights touches every aspect of our lives. I feel like I’ve really learned a ton. And today I see the world through the lens of ableism, and I want to be in a world where people with disabilities, whether visible or invisible, are valued for who they are. At its core, I believe people like me deserve to exist and know that we are valid to show up however we show up. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Alden, I know that you’ve talked a little bit about your experience and what interested you in joining NDRN and the network. Can you talk a little bit more about what disability rights work means to you personally? I know that for me, that’s just something that we automatically connect to. I know for me as a multiply disabled person, that’s definitely something that I take with me when it comes to doing my work from the day-to-day. And I imagine that you’ve got similar points, but would love to hear you expand a little bit more on that. Alden Blevins: Yeah, absolutely. Again, I see everything through that lens of ableism because of my own personal lived experiences. I have my own things that have happened to me through the lens of employment, through the lens of healthcare that are related to my own disabilities. So when I hear stories of other people struggling with some of the same instances of ableism or the same barriers that I struggled with, I’m able to really empathize with them and put myself in their shoes. So I think that my own disability identity has definitely helped me understand better what the world of disability rights means and why people maybe have more pride or try to cultivate that self-acceptance in their disability identities because I think that’s what feels the best and the most affirming to me. And I try to bring that to my work here at NDRN. Michelle Bishop: 100%. Absolutely. Disability, we talk about it all day every day in this work that we do on this podcast, but it’s not this abstract thing. Disability and disability rights are very real. It’s something that we live every day. It shapes so much about our lives, our personal lives and our work. Can you walk us through that journey for you? You talked about how it impacted your education, you and the workplace, healthcare advocacy. Can we take it back to, tell me about young Alden? Did you know you had AuDHD at the time when you were in school? And how did that impact you? Alden Blevins: I definitely did not know that I had autism and ADHD. I went through some processes of misdiagnosis. When I was really small, I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at age 10 due to extreme fluctuations in behavior and my ability to cope. They were interpreted by my family as dramatic moods or tantrums, but what I was actually experiencing were autistic meltdowns. But because clinicians in the ’90s didn’t really see me or any young girls for that matter as autistic, they missed the root causes of my behavior. I began taking anxiety meds and I continued with that all throughout high school and early college, but there were still a lot of other sensory and social things that the diagnosis just didn’t explain. I always knew there was something different about me. I remember feeling like an alien as a very little kid, and I did continue to struggle a lot with meltdowns and mood regulation through early adulthood. Alden Blevins: I was misdiagnosed with that anxiety and depression for years. Later, I eventually acquired another misdiagnosis of bipolar. The clinicians just generally lacked knowledge about how autism presents in women and girls throughout the 90s and 2000s. And especially because I had already made it to adulthood without the diagnosis, they didn’t necessarily have the knowledge to interpret what do these symptoms look like on an adult woman. I get the comment a lot of like, “You’re nothing like my 8-year-old nephew who loves trains.” And I’m like, “I am a 32-year-old woman, so I am different from your 8-year-old nephew.” And sometimes people don’t necessarily realize what that diagnosis can look like kind of on different people. Alden Blevins: But once I finally did get my diagnosis of autism and ADHD, I began self-accommodating. The diagnosis really gave me the confidence to claim my place in the disability community. And I began starting thinking about myself as a member of the disability community. But before that I didn’t, which is honestly a little silly because under my old diagnoses of anxiety and depression, I was struggling just as much, but that didn’t feel like to me a valid enough explanation for everything or a reason to need extra help. These labels fit me better, that they were really helpful for me in contextualizing what were the root causes of some of the things I was experiencing. So no, little Alden did not know at all, and she did not find out fully until she was 29 years old. So it’s been a journey. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I can only imagine that is… Oh my goodness, definitely been there, done that. I know that I had a similar journey with my own mental health disabilities. There’s just so much stigma that surrounds different mental health disabilities. So it’s understandable that there’s just this worry of identifying with the disability community in that sense. And I’m really glad that I feel like we’re getting to a point where we’re seeing folks more or less identify with the disability community when it comes to mental health conditions. Because I feel like, it’s just like you said, it really does affect people just as much as other disabilities. And I’m glad that we’re at a point where we’re seeing that. Would love to know what barriers you encountered during those points, but also too, how you overcame them and how you’ve overcome different barriers knowing that you were a part of the AuDHD community. Alden Blevins: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say for me, the key places where barriers seemed most likely to manifest were at work and in healthcare. And for me, I am somebody who can quote-unquote, “Pass” as neurotypical where you wouldn’t necessarily know I was autistic just from your first interaction with me. And that could have pros and cons because it means that I’m able to access better career opportunities, it means that I’m able to protect myself in spaces that feel ableist or unsafe by maybe going a little bit more under the radar, but it also means that I wasn’t really accommodating myself or thinking about myself as a person with a disability. Alden Blevins: And it means that sometimes when you are in those situations where you’re having to mask or having to put a certain face on your behavior to get people to take you seriously in the workplace, it means that sometimes I would run into situations where I was falling in people’s uncanny valley, if that makes sense, where they knew something was up with me and that I wasn’t communicating in a way that they would normally expect, but they didn’t have context or understanding for why that might be. Alden Blevins: And I found that that was really challenging for me in the workplace. People would misinterpret my need for clarity and asking lots of questions as, say, challenging their authority, or people would interpret bluntness as me being rude, or people would, say, interpret my focus on little details as being pedantic and not just the way that my mind works. And I find that when I do lead with some honesty about where I am and who I am and what I bring to the table, that people are just generally more compassionate and willing to meet me where I am. So that’s been part of the self-accommodation process. Alden Blevins: But also, especially in the workplace, I think finding a job that is really suited to your strengths and your weaknesses for that matter is something that can be really helpful to autistic people. I know that there are autistic people who find a lot of refuge in, say, the coding community because they are known for loving rules or needing to pay attention to detail or noticing things other people miss. That makes them accepted and is considered a norm within the coding community. I also find that careers like the arts or the disability service space tend to be a little bit more accepting of people with disabilities. Alden Blevins: So I’ve been very lucky to find opportunities within the disability service space so that I was able to better accommodate myself at work. Unfortunately, when I was teaching in the public schools, there was just not a lot of room or flexibility to be able to accommodate myself, and it was really, really challenging for me to be able to work full-time. So changing the way I viewed things and forcing myself to look for opportunities that really met my own needs were something that really helped me with encountering those barriers in the workplace. Michelle Bishop: You mentioned the healthcare system too, and I’m really glad that you did. And you talked also about getting a late diagnosis and being misdiagnosed. And I think all that’s really important because we’re hearing so much these days about the number of people with autism is increasing. Why is autism on the rise? And I’m like, “Is it increasing or are we just actually correctly diagnosing people these days?” Were they just going undiagnosed in the past and people though, like you said, that they were maybe just be rude or something like that if someone was a little too blunt? I think of it the same way, I think it was like a bunch of combat soldiers didn’t suddenly start getting PTSD. That was always happening, we just didn’t call it that and we didn’t know what it was. And we didn’t ever talk about it and we didn’t do anything to help them when they came home. Michelle Bishop: Sometimes the numbers go up because we start paying attention to and speaking about something that we’ve been ignoring for a long time. And I think that in my mind, school us on this, Alden, but in my mind, I think that’s really true in the healthcare system right now and how autism is being addressed. Can you talk a little bit about that, what it feels like maybe being mislabeled or misunderstood in the system? Alden Blevins: Yeah, so absolutely. For me, it definitely feels like we are just now getting to the point where the information that clinicians have is up to date and where the stigma around autism has decreased enough that people are willing to publicly claim their identities and to talk about their experiences more openly. I know that there’s a lot of fear in the autistic community at times with self-disclosing, especially in our current climate. And I think that part of the reason that it appears that diagnoses are rising is simply because there is less stigma and there is more increased information. Alden Blevins: So more people are willing to take the risk of getting their child labeled with something like autism if they think it means that their child’s going to be better able to act access services and supports instead of it just being something that is a label that hinders their child’s journey or stigmatizes them in some way. And I know from teaching, speaking with parents who I was very frank with about my own mental health experiences and my own experience with disability, that there is still fear of labels and what that means and what does that mean for your child’s future. Alden Blevins: So I think that overall a lot of the attitudes around autism are changing. We have shows like Love on the Spectrum. There’s a lot more autistic community that’s available in online spaces and public for the world to see. And I think that those kind of spaces that make autism more visible has definitely made a lot more people think to themselves, “Could I be autistic? My parents always behaved in this way.” Thinking about the traits in their families and things like that, I think it’s all really contributed to that feeling as if the cases are rising. Alden Blevins: Another thing that I do want to mention just from a historical point of view is that the diagnosis of autism is fairly new and has gone through some diagnostic changes over the course of developing the Diagnostic Statistical Manual 5, which is what they use to diagnose people with today. There was a point in history where autism was categorized either as being feeble-minded or as childhood schizophrenia. So there is periods in history where people were not being diagnosed with autism at all, and of course that makes the, “Rise”, quote-unquote, that’s happening now appear more stark. Alden Blevins: So just to have that historical context as another example, in the DSM-4, Asperger and Sensory Processing Disorder or SPD were all separate diagnoses. Whereas in the DSM-5, all of those things have been folded into autism. So it really is a case of kind of a confluence of factors making it appear that the numbers are going up. When in reality, in my mind, I feel as though autistic people have always been here. You can hear examples of us in people throughout history. You can hear whispers of autism and descriptions of Michelangelo or Albert Einstein. Alden Blevins: So I think we’ve always been here and it’s just a matter of it being more labeled and discussed now that really is having people feel like there’s some sort of epidemic or major change. When in reality, I think we’ve gotten a lot better at understanding what autism actually is and what it looks like. Michelle Bishop: I love historical and pop culture references in that, yes. Love on the spectrum, now all I’m thinking about is we have to get Tanner on the show. Alden Blevins: Ugh, I love him. Michelle Bishop: Tanner, if you’re hearing this, please come on our podcast. We are fans. We just want to chill with you and maybe record an episode. It’s true, I think there’s a lot to the idea of disability identity and disability pride and identifying with a disability community. That’s a journey for everyone. And I think especially if you have a disability that is somewhat invisible, I think it’s really different than going through life using a wheelchair where everyone knows, everyone knows, versus having unseen disabilities and really owning that and having a sense of identity and pride in that. I think that’s really cool. And I agree. I think we’re having more mainstream conversations about autism these days. The kind of discourse we’re seeing around autism now, does it reflect your experience? Do you think it’s accurate in telling the story of the autistic community? Alden Blevins: Not really. I, like I mentioned, am what people would call a high masker. So on the outside, I look like I’m fine, but on the inside, I’m really doing a lot of behind the scenes work to function or appear as normal or neurotypical. So contrary to popular belief, I can write poems, I can pay my taxes, I can do more than most people in a lot of ways, but I am still very much autistic and I still need supports in ways that other people don’t. Furthermore, I think I honestly have more in common with someone who can’t do those things than a lot of other people might realize or recognize. Our sensory struggles look the same. Our struggles with mood regulation look the same. And I want to emphasize that people who can’t necessarily put pen to page or quote-unquote, “Contribute effectively to society” are still valid, they’re still entitled to their life, their autonomy and their happiness, whether or not they can do those things. Alden Blevins: So I think that as a whole, we don’t really seem to understand well that autism is a spectrum. Something that I’ve heard over and over again is if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism. And I think that that really resonates true for me. And I think that there are a lot of other people as well who probably don’t feel like they’re represented in the public perception or the public conversations around autism, either because they’re a high masker like me, or I think sometimes there’s an opposite end of the autistic experience that isn’t as represented in the media. What is it like to look like someone who doesn’t speak, who instead uses something like AAC, augmented communication device, to be able to communicate with their peers? I think that those perspectives of autism are also often left out of the conversation. Alden Blevins: So I think it’s getting better, but I do think we still have a long way to go in terms of autistic representation and really thinking and knowing and understanding what the totality of the autistic community looks like. Michelle Bishop: That’s really interesting. As someone who probably knows half of what I know about autistic people from what I see in pop culture and the other half from people I know, that’s interesting to think through, and now I’m wondering… Because I think that’s what a lot of people know about autism is how they see it represented on television. How does that translate into public policy? Is what we’re seeing in terms of policy reflective of who autistic people are and what they need and want to see? If not, this podcast mostly goes out to the PNAs, like what role can we play in making systems work better for autistic people? Alden Blevins: Yeah. I would say that a lot of times autistic people are left out of those conversations and perhaps not intentionally, not maliciously, but there’s this double-edged sword where in the autism community, if you are someone who has a lot of support needs, then you are denied autonomy, you are denied agency, you are denied your point of view about what’s happening to you and what’s happening to autistic people is valid or trustworthy. So that happens to people who have a lot of support needs. And then on the flip side, for someone like me who maybe has fewer support needs, you’re often denied supports or the conversation is, “You don’t need that, you can get along just as well as everybody else.” So there’s this push and pull between no matter what end of the spectrum you’re on, you’re dismissed for being able to represent your experience. Alden Blevins: A lot of times there’s this push and pull between the caretaker community and autistic adults. And I think that they see someone like me who can use their words, who is able to get opportunities. And there’s a resistance to someone like me speaking or using their voice and them feeling like it’s on behalf of their child who does not necessarily have the same experience as me. So I would just say that a wider breadth of autistic representation so that both people like me and people who have a totally different experience with autism are still seen in the diagnosis and understood that that’s what they’re experiencing. Alden Blevins: I think a lot of times people have one person as their frame of reference. And again, that’s one person with autism. So I think meet more autistic people, talk to people you know, think critically about some of the representation that you see on TV and in movies. Surrounding myself more with those perspectives helped me be able to see what the reality is in terms of the diversity of the autistic community and how many different points of view we really represent. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I loved that. Thank you so, so, so much for sharing that. And that’s one thing that I feel like we don’t think about as much subconsciously. When we’re consuming media, a lot of the time when it comes to the disability community, that’s where people get that representation, like Michelle was saying, and like you pointed out. When speaking about your experiences, media really can and does have an effect on the way that individuals with disabilities are seen and the way that autistic people are seen. So thank you for spotlighting that. Oh my goodness, I could get on a soapbox about media and disability and the various representations that I’ve seen that have been good and not so good. So yeah, oh my goodness. Stephanie Flynt McEben: But yeah, we have definitely talked a lot about lived experience, putting those lived experiences into policy change. And clearly there is so much going on in the world. Would love to know how you like to unwind, how do you take care of yourself in doing this work? Because we all know we cannot do this work unless we take care of ourselves and fill our own cups. So would love to know how you do that. Michelle Bishop: Yes, retweet, the important questions. Alden Blevins: So something else that’s really special to me about being an autistic person, and I think that’s like one of the most beloved or most thought of aspects of our community, is that we have what are called special interests. And special interests are just a topic that we focus really intensely on and go for both depth and breadth. I’ve experienced students whose special interest was taking apart speakers and putting them back together. I’ve experienced students whose special interests are One Direction, their favorite boy band, something that looks like very natural for a teenage girl to be interested in. I’ve seen all sorts of special interests. The 32-year-old dungeon master who will talk your ear off about his favorite MMA fighters. That’s another way that special interests could look. Alden Blevins: So when I am really trying to recharge myself, I dive into my special interests. I love music, I love pop music, I love studying the billboard charts, I love playing music and songwriting. And those are the things, those kind of creative outlets are what I turn to when I’m really needing to fill my cup. Experiencing those interests in community is another thing that really helps me fill my cup, so going to a concert with some friends in the real world or some people go to conventions and things like that to dive deep into their special interests. So those are some things that really help me recharge myself and feel ready to tackle the day and whatever’s coming at us next in the realm of disability advocacy. Michelle Bishop: I felt that a little too hard, I’m not going to lie. Speaking of autism being a spectrum and everyone falling on that spectrum somewhere, I’m definitely a special interest queen. I become obsessed with things and learn everything about them. So I feel very seen right now, Alden, thank you. Michelle Bishop: Anything else that we need to know about you as our new feels leader of National Disability Radio, the important stuff like things that bring you joy? Alden Blevins: We talked about it a little bit earlier, but something that’s bringing me a lot of joy right now is just obsessing over Taylor Swift and what’s going to happen with this new album. I’m ready for a new era, baby. I’m ready. Stephanie Flynt McEben: We are ready for it. Michelle Bishop: We are all going into our show girl era. Alden Blevins: Yes. Michelle Bishop: The swifter hood. We’re going to start getting emails to the podcast email that are like, “You have to stop talking about Taylor Swift and start talking about disability rights.” Alden Blevins: Yeah. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Haters are going to hate. Alden Blevins: As the queen herself said, haters are going to hate. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Right. Exactly. Michelle Bishop: Before we wrap up today, first, Alden, oh my gosh, thank you so much for just sharing all about you and jumping right in and talking all about autism and lived experience and policy and everything under the sun. That was amazing. And I’m sure you’ve heard the podcast before, so I’m sure you know that before we wrap up, Stephanie has a joke for us, I’m sure. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I will say this. I’ve gotten some constructive criticism that my jokes have been a little too hard lately. So I think this one’s going to be easier, but yeah. So what is a tree’s least favorite month? There are only 12 options. Michelle Bishop: I feel like December when they all get chopped down and decorated. Stephanie Flynt McEben: That’s a good one, but no. Michelle Bishop: Alden, what you got? See, these are still hard. Alden Blevins: I truly have no idea. I am sitting here reciting the months to myself like an elementary schooler and have not yet found the right answer. Stephanie Flynt McEben: My goodness. Okay. No more guesses? Alden Blevins: Okay. Oh, what is it? Stephanie Flynt McEben: September. Alden Blevins: Oh my gosh. Michelle Bishop: [inaudible 00:28:27]. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh my gosh, I’m so proud of myself. Michelle Bishop: Look, you’re winning me over. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Y’all heard it here first, folks. Michelle Bishop: It’s about time. We’ve actually been friends for years. It’s probably like me and Jack, they probably think we hate each other. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Michelle Bishop: Stephanie is the most wonderful person ever. She’s the nicest person you could ever meet. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh, thank you. Michelle Bishop: It’s all love on this podcast, guys. It’s all love. Other important business before we wrap up, I hear Alden does some songwriting and we totally need a new theme song for this podcast. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Alden Blevins: Ooh, okay. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I can help with piano composition if you want, Alden, and then we can help with lyrics. I actually do some songwriting also, so we should definitely connect. Alden Blevins: Okay, yeah, absolutely. We need a jingle. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes, yes. Jack has been pushing for this for a while and life has been life-ing, and so I haven’t had a chance, so we should totally do that. Alden Blevins: That would be awesome. Michelle Bishop: I’m into it. Look, we had a good joke, we had a good conversation. Alden, can you tell the people where they can follow us? Alden Blevins: Yes, we are actually now available on all of the platforms where you get your podcasts. You should be able to look up National Disability Radio on iHeartRadio, on Apple Podcasts, on Pandora Music, on YouTube Music, and be able to find us in any of those places. If you cannot find us somewhere, you can always go ahead and check out our website. Under the resources tab, you’ll be able to find a button that says National Disability Radio where you can find a full feed of all of our episodes. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you so much, Alden. And again, welcome, welcome, welcome. We are so excited to have you as our pro host, but until next time, folks, bye.

National Disability Radio: And Then There Were 2

Posted September 10, 2025 • 00:31:48

Jack is going off to law school. So the gang sits down to reminisce on his time at NDRN, share a few stories from behind the scenes, and hear a joke from Stephanie that gets a good laugh out of us. Full transcript available at: https://www.ndrn.org/resource/ndr-august25/ Jack Rosen: Like we have any sort of agenda for today, so just sort of going to get what I get. Turn that into a podcast, I guess. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Sure. Michelle Bishop: And that’s different from any other episode because… Jack Rosen: It’s not, it genuinely, I guess is not, I suppose at some point we’d have a guest and questions we thought we should ask them. Michelle Bishop: Oh. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I’m the guest and I have the questions. I don’t know. Jack Rosen: I’m pretty sure you’re not the guest. Michelle Bishop: It’s fine. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I’m pretty sure Jack is the guest. Jack Rosen: I’m sort of the guest. Stephanie Flynt McEben: What? Michelle Bishop: Wait what? Stephanie Flynt McEben: This episode is for Jack, isn’t it? Jack Rosen: It would be very funny if we just made it the Stephanie episode, even though we’ve done like two of those. Stephanie Flynt McEben: No. That would make me feel like such a bad chicken nugget. Jack Rosen: Even though we’ve already done- Stephanie Flynt McEben: This is all about you. Michelle Bishop: We already did a Stephanie wedding episode. Jack Rosen: We did a whole one about you getting married. Stephanie Flynt McEben: We’ve already done a bunch of episodes about me doing chicken-nuggety things like, come on. Michelle Bishop: Oh, that reminds me. My mom wants to hear about the legally blind Uber driver. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I forgot that I slipped that into an episode. Michelle Bishop: Yeah, she’s still listening and she has some follow-up questions. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I love this. Michelle Bishop: Well pack might have to address that at some point. Jack Rosen: Well, Stephanie, do you want to address it? I mean, let’s give the people what they want, I guess. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, I guess we can give the people what they want. Michelle Bishop: Yeah, we have one listener, so we should probably follow up on that for her. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And Carol, thank you so much for being a dedicated, loyal listener to this wonderful podcast. So I will give a slighter Cliff Notes version just so it doesn’t take up the whole hour. So I am waiting for a car outside of, I can’t remember which Metro stop it was, but I had to go get something, and so I just figured I’d take an Uber home from the Metro because that particular Metro was a lot easier to get a car and it would only be a 20-minute ride. Okay, fine. This is what I’ll do. And so I get out of the Metro station, I’m trying to find my driver or whatever, yada, yada, and I can’t even remember his name. Maybe we should just call him Bob for anonymity. I am bad at saying that too. But yeah, so Bob pulls up in some sort of Toyota of some sort and I get in the car and we start driving and I noticed that I’m hearing a lot more horns, but I’m just not thinking about it because it’s rush hour DC traffic. And then we started, he was like, “You know, I’ll be honest with you, I’m legally blind. I can only see out of one eye.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And I’m just trying to think of some of the things that he said, but he said different things that were essentially low vision, blind hacks or what have you. I’m trying to remember the specific hacks, but honestly, when he said, “I’m legally blind,” I was kind of like, “Huh, Jesus, take the wheel. Please get me home safe.” So it was a wild ride. No, that was not an intended pun but we can make it a pun. Jack Rosen: So you’re saying he might’ve had limited vision in the one eye? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, potentially. But, he said that he was only legally blind, he was legally blind or totally blind out of one eye, and then he could see out of the other eye just fine. Jack Rosen: You don’t sound convinced he could see just fine out of the other eye. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I’m not. I don’t want to say it. Jack has to say it. Jack Rosen: I don’t want to say it. Michelle, kick us off as always. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, Michelle, you do that. Yeah. Michelle Bishop: Why is it always me? Okay. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Because you’re such a good public speaker and I’m really sad right now. Jack Rosen: We’re already dealing with enough change. I don’t want to deal with more. Could you please kick us off? Michelle Bishop: On this very special episode of National Disability Radio, we say goodbye to our pro-host extraordinaire, Jack Rosen, who is leaving NDRN to go to law school. Yay, Jack. We need an applause. We’ve never had an applause. Can we- Stephanie Flynt McEben: I know I keep saying that. Oh my gosh. But seriously, Jack, we’re going to miss you so, so, so much. And you have been an amazing pro-host with the most. Jack Rosen: I also have bad news. I definitely did not have enough time left to add in the applause, but… Stephanie Flynt McEben: Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap clap, there. I’m trying not to, oh man. That made me sound facetious. I might have to- Jack Rosen: No, we’re keeping that in. Michelle Bishop: That’s definitely staying in. The part where Stephanie was very salty with you is definitely staying in. This is still the most professional podcast in the business. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes, it is. Michelle Bishop: We pay the big money for the good effects. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Jack Rosen: But thank you Michelle. I am sad to be leaving NDRN. It’s been five years here. I started back, for those who don’t know, I started back in 2020. It was actually pretty early COVID. It was May the fourth, because I’ll always remember it’s Star Wars Day. Michelle Bishop: Yes. You started- Stephanie Flynt McEben: May the fourth be with you. Jack Rosen: And it’s funny, NDRN was pretty much the last job interview I had at the start of COVID because nowhere else in the world was hiring. And I interviewed with Michelle and David Hutt and our former ED for a position on the voting team, and I told them at the time like, “Hey, my background is really in politics and comms. I’m a person with a disability. I have ADHD. And I’ve received services throughout my life for it, but I don’t know a ton about the disability rights movement, but I’m willing to learn.” And I got lucky enough that they decided to take a chance on me. And so for the first two years I was here, I worked for Michelle helping get out the vote in the role that our friend Monica is in now. Then about three years ago, I switched over to the communications team, and one of my first projects there was that we had this podcast they wanted to restart and for, God, yeah, three years now since, we have been putting this out together, meeting once a month, usually meeting twice a month because we’re disorganized and what we do is create a podcast episode and then every time forget to do the intro and outro to it. A little behind the scenes, we have never recorded one of those in the same time we’ve recorded the interview. Michelle Bishop: They have to know because sometimes one of us just isn’t .there Stephanie Flynt McEben: Or is sick or something. Thank you- Michelle Bishop: For part of the episode, how come Stephanie was in the interview, but she wasn’t there when they did the intro? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Right. They have questions. Michelle Bishop: We’re super good at this. Stephanie Flynt McEben: We have all the questions. We are sorry guys. Sometimes we have migraines, sometimes things happen in life. Michelle Bishop: Also, Stephanie made us start the podcast. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I did not. Michelle Bishop: That was 100% Stephanie. I was the only host that was left, Justice and Erica were already gone. And Stephanie was like, “I want to host a podcast. We need to do this podcast.” And then they were like, “I guess Jack has to do it and produce it.” Stephanie Flynt McEben: So what you’re saying is that I made Jack and you do this against your will. Michelle Bishop: Yes. Stephanie Flynt McEben: No. Jack Rosen: You definitely added a significant chunk of my workload. This is one of my core responsibilities. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I’m sorry. Michelle Bishop: We remember it the same way. It was totally Stephanie. Stephanie Flynt McEben: It was not. Jack Rosen: I kind of think it was you Stephanie. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Lies, slander, blasphemy. Jack Rosen: I know Michelle did not want to start doing this again. Michelle Bishop: Another episode. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I kind of made it worth it with my awesome jokes, right, yeah? Michelle Bishop: Oh, um… Stephanie Flynt McEben: No? Jack Rosen: I’ve enjoyed Michelle’s reaction to them a lot. When did we, now I’m wondering when we started adding the puns. I think it was- Michelle Bishop: From the beginning. Jack Rosen: It wasn’t the first episode. I’m looking right now. It was the second one Stephanie. Stephanie Flynt McEben: It only took me one episode. Jack Rosen: It took you one episode, and then on the third one we added, I believe Stephanie’s iconic sound. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Michelle Bishop: For Stephanie’s Joke of the Month. Everyone else needs to know what we are living with over here with Stephanie and the puns. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I’m sorry that you guys have been personally victimized by me for almost four years now. Jack Rosen: So yeah, after five years here, I decided it was time to make a little bit of a career change and I decided to go to law school. I decided, I’ll say hopefully a career change, but not necessarily a field change. The law school I picked out is one that has a disability law clinic and a strong focus on public interest. It’s sort of funny. It all comes full circle that I can remember five years ago telling you guys, I don’t know a lot about this, but I’d like the opportunity. And it was something I always vaguely wanted to do, disability rights, but I thought it would be like, oh, after I’ve had a corporate or a politics career, maybe I could give back that way. And even then it was just vaguely I’ll do something to help people with disabilities, it wasn’t, I want to get into legally-based disability advocacy. And five years later I’m like, oh, when I’m looking at these law schools, I need to find one where I can go further in this field and expand my skill set and be able to do more here. So I don’t know, I’m sad to be leaving. I’m also grateful to you, Michelle, because it definitely changed my career trajectory in a way I never expected. And it is bittersweet. But we have shared probably too much of our personal lives on this podcast for three years now. So we figured really no other way to end it than with the podcast. Michelle Bishop: And we are three of the least interesting people. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Hey, rude. Everybody thinks I’m interesting. Michelle Bishop: No, Jack, we’re going to miss you. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah we are. Michelle Bishop: It has been a pleasure to work with you all this time. I’m glad we converted you into a full-blown lifelong disability rights advocate. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Michelle Bishop: [inaudible 00:10:09] on you when you were young, scrappy and hungry. Stephanie Flynt McEben: We did not throw away our shot as NDRN. Michelle Bishop: I’m going to quote Hamilton in this episode until we get sued because we have to get sued at least once. Stephanie Flynt McEben: We have to get sued for Jack’s last episode. Michelle Bishop: We have to get sued at least once before Jack leaves. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Lawsuit, lawsuit. Jack Rosen: It’s been my entire goal while producing this podcast has been to get us sued. I’ve tried by- Michelle Bishop: We’ve tried everything. How many copyrights can we violate? Jack Rosen: We’ve tried to get Taylor to sue us. We’ve tried to get the cast of Hamilton. We didn’t do Disney. We’re scared of them. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I thought we did do Disney. Remember, we sang Let It Go? Michelle Bishop: We sang Let It Go? Jack Rosen: You know what, yes, we did do Disney. Michelle Bishop: I thought Jay-Z was going to sue us when I didn’t put him in my Top Five on the live episode. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh, on the live episode. I was like, wait, is going, how is Mississippi, Michelle? Michelle Bishop: It’s raining. Stephanie Flynt McEben: The rain in Mississippi is annoying. It’s like extra humid. Michelle Bishop: Totally. All the time. Oh yeah. It’s humid. I’m not built for this. Stephanie Flynt McEben: No, it’s extra humid. Michelle Bishop: It’s stormy. The whole time. So I haven’t really gotten to see the glory of your home state. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh, so sad. Yeah. Nope. You got to go to Keefer’s and Bulldog. Michelle Bishop: Okay, I’ll work on that. Jack Rosen: What is Bulldog? Stephanie Flynt McEben: But Jack, seriously, we are very much going to miss you, and I just can’t thank you enough for being such a good coworker, colleague, friend, and confidant during my time at NDRN. And I know that you won’t be far, but yeah, it’s been amazing working with you. Whether we’re coming up with tweets or I’m bothering you with puns or all that good stuff. Oh, or that one thing that happened last year at annual conference], the getting kicked out of the bar thing, which probably should be. Michelle Bishop: That’s why- Jack Rosen: In our defense, and we’re not going to say which bar, they were being kind of ableist. Stephanie Flynt McEben: They were totally being ableist. Jack Rosen: Can we tell the story on the pod? Michelle Bishop: Don’t name the bar. That’s definitely how- Jack Rosen: We’re not going to name the bar. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Is it bad that I can’t even remember what the name of that bar was? Michelle Bishop: Where was I even when this was happening? Jack Rosen: I think you must have been asleep. Wait, we can’t say where we were either, Stephanie. Michelle Bishop: Did you just call me old in the middle of a podcast episode. Where was I when you guys were at the bar? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Asleep, Michelle, you’re ancient. Jack Rosen: You were invited. Yeah, but I think we were there at like 11:30 at night. Michelle Bishop: Okay. That’s worse. Could you tell people it was like 2:00 A.M. or something? Jack Rosen: Yeah. Stephanie and I were out, we were at the club. It was 3:00 A.M. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Everybody in the club getting, okay, I’m done. Anyway, it was 3:00 A.M. We were at the club in Nowhereville. Michelle Bishop: It’s 11:30, you know your Gen X bedtime does not allow you to be up past 10:00. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Low key. I go to bed at nine o’clock on the rag. Michelle Bishop: We need older people on this podcast. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh, come on. I go to bed at nine o’clock. I’m basically an oldish person now. Jack Rosen: I’m pretty sure your new producer is going to be my age, I’m pretty sure. Michelle Bishop: But if we’re getting the producer, I think we’re getting, she is a Swifty, so now it’s just going to be an all Swifty crew. So we look forward to the next episode of this podcast where it’s all about people with disabilities who love Taylor Swift. Jack Rosen: I may have warned her when I was telling her how to produce the podcast. I’m like, so for the first 20 minutes they usually talk about Taylor and then I turn the recording on after, so I don’t have to go through all of that because eventually we’ll just get to the podcast. But you got to let them go through talking about Taylor Swift first. Stephanie Flynt McEben: > Michelle Bishop: Nice. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I’m over here- Michelle Bishop: You don’t need to hear all my theories about when Rep TV was going to be dropped since it’s apparently never coming. So that’s fine. I have a little embarrassment. Jack Rosen: You have been predicting it for years. Michelle Bishop: I mean, some of the evidence was convincing, okay. Never mind. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. Jack Rosen: Is she not now that she owns her catalog? I thought she would anyway. Michelle Bishop: She never actually recorded it, so… Jack Rosen: Really? Michelle Bishop: Yeah, she’s only recorded like a quarter of it, so I’m thinking it’s a no. There’s going to be Vault Tracks though, Stephanie Vault Tracks. We still have things to look forward to. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I love the Vault Tracks, honestly. Michelle Bishop: Right? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Nothing New is like my jam. Michelle Bishop: You know I saw that Live with Phoebe Bridgers. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I am- Michelle Bishop: Oh, this is already transitioning into a Taylor Swift podcast and Jack is still here. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Right? God bless it. I’m still so jealous that you got to see Phoebe and Taylor and you got to see Taylor three times. Michelle Bishop: Okay. Jack Antonoff also came out that night and Ice Spice. Anyway. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Hair flip. Michelle Bishop: We should probably talk about Jack or at least disability rights or something. Jack Rosen: At least the podcast, maybe? Michelle Bishop: The podcast. Stephanie Flynt McEben: No. Let’s talk about Jack. This is the Jack episode. Jack Rosen: Okay. I guess we’ll do a couple stories from my time at NDRN. Michelle Bishop: Yeah, we need your favorite stories from your time at NDRN. Yes. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Don’t let either of us jack the episode from you. Michelle Bishop: Nothing illegal. Jack Rosen: Oh, come on Stephanie, that one was lazy. Michelle Bishop: Stephanie, did you really just say that? Jack Rosen: I have heard that- Stephanie Flynt McEben: Don’t let any of us jack the, oh, come on. That was fun. Jack Rosen: Not giving you that one. Michelle Bishop: I don’t don’t know if I’m disappointed or proud of that one. Stephanie Flynt McEben: You should be disproud-pointed. Michelle Bishop: It’s like 50/50. Anyway Jack, no illegal stories, please. Jack Rosen: No. Stephanie Flynt McEben: We don’t want to get sued for that reason. Jack Rosen: Okay. Michelle Bishop: Yeah, there’s certain things we want to be sued for and certain things we should avoid. Stephanie Flynt McEben: What are some of the funniest stories from your time at NDRN? Jack Rosen: Let’s think. I mean, yeah, as we alluded to, there was the time, Stephanie and I, at one of our annual conferences, we were out at an undisclosed location. It was very late. Michelle was in fact there earlier partying it up, but then she was like, “Hey, it’s 3:45 A.M. I got to get out of here before sunrise.” Michelle Bishop: Thank you. Jack Rosen: Yes. But no, they double charged Stephanie at this bar. They were claiming the credit card transaction wouldn’t go through, it was bad. They just kept trying to talk to me and show me the receipt and I’m like, A, I’m not dealing with this. You guys figure it out, and B, you are just being wildly ableist to us right now. Stephanie Flynt McEben: So ridiculous. Jack Rosen: But let’s see, what else? That one was wild just because I did not ever think in my years of working here, I would be not quite asked to leave, but certainly not asked to come back. Michelle Bishop: You did also ride in a self-driving car. Jack Rosen: We did- Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh yeah. Jack Rosen: We did record an episode from a self-driving car. That was when Raquel was on the pod. It was me, her and Marcia. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I think I was also leaving a bar if I’m correct. Jack Rosen: That one was. That was after when we all went out to a Mexican restaurant at the Phoenix conference and Marcia just, we ordered it and Marcia just sort of volunteered. She’s like, “Okay, I wanna come along and see this.” I’m like, “Okay, but you’re on the podcast.” Stephanie Flynt McEben: That is the trade-off. Jack Rosen: Yes. Michelle Bishop: I also wasn’t there. I’m never there when these things happen. Jack Rosen: I don’t know why you weren’t there for that. Michelle Bishop: Am I always sleeping? Stephanie Flynt McEben: No. Jack Rosen: I feel like both of you weren’t there for the self-driving car one. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, I wasn’t there because I had, we were doing a public policy team dinner, so that’s why I wasn’t there. Michelle Bishop: It was supposed to be for Stephanie, because- Stephanie Flynt McEben: I know and I never got to ride- Michelle Bishop: Because it was supposed to be about self-driving cars for blind people. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I know. I never got to ride in it. Jack Rosen: Stephanie, they’re coming to DC. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I know. I’m so excited. Quinn on the other hand is not. Michelle Bishop: I’m pretty sure I saw one already. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, they were doing test laps around our building. Jack Rosen: Yeah, they’re testing a ton out in my neighborhood. I don’t fully trust them, but I’m not going to lie, they’re cheap and convenient and I’ve had some bad Uber drivers in DC. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh Lord boy, do we. Jack Rosen: Let’s see. What’s another appropriate NDRN story we could tell? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Appropriate. Jack Rosen: Really appropriate. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Any stories from traveling for the documentary? Michelle Bishop: That’s why I’m not here for any of them. I might only be there for the stories that are inappropriate. Jack Rosen: I mean, with the documentary, this was funny. So we’re there and we’re getting towards the last day of our travel in, so yeah, we were in South Carolina. It was me, Monica, and a third person who helped make the documentary who’s a little more private, but shout out them. They helped a ton with it and taught me a lot about filming. But anyway, so the three of us, we discovered early on that week that our last night there Katt Williams was going to perform and we wanted to go. We all wanted to go really bad, but as the director, I had to keep being the bad guy and being like, “Okay, Monica, we will, if we don’t have any interviews scheduled that day, and we have all these people we need to interview before we can leave South Carolina, we can’t blow any off to,” she didn’t want to blow any off, but I had to be, as I often am at NDRN the last few years, the person who says no to things, and I don’t know if that’s feasible. Stephanie Flynt McEben: You guys don’t don’t know what kind of a bummer Jack is on a regular basis, y’all. Jack Rosen: And finally we got the last interview scheduled and we were so hyped. We all just went out to see Katt Williams together and it was the perfect way to end having worked together and been on the road for two weeks, traveling, filming, doing 10-hour days interviewing people. Stephanie Flynt McEben: And it probably saved your friendship with Monica. Jack Rosen: Oh yeah. Even if she’ll never forgive me for the fact I didn’t invite her to a music festival with my friends. That’s a joke. Michelle Bishop: She’s still trying to get into that with you though, right? Jack Rosen: What? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Daily. Michelle Bishop: Into that festival, or is this a different one? Jack Rosen: She what? Stephanie Flynt McEben: It’s a different one. There’s been two incidents. Michelle Bishop: There’s been two. Okay. Jack Rosen: Both times that I went to a music festival in Los Angeles I did not invite her to. It’s okay. You know I love you Monica, and we’ll go to the next one. Michelle Bishop: I do have a very special announcement to make for the After Hours Jack’s Goodbye episode. I have to say, you’ve been our producer for a couple of years now. We have frequently referred to as our pro host since you’re our producer, you’re our Gelman, if you will. Our producer who gets to talk during the episodes, not so much a silent partner as you first began. And so I want to say before you go, Jack, you are a host of the podcast. Stephanie Flynt McEben: See, finally. Jack Rosen: I’m genuinely a little touched. Stephanie Flynt McEben: We finally, we finally got you to admit it, Michelle. Jack Rosen: Finally. Michelle Bishop: That’s a very bad hatchet. Jack Rosen: After hosting episodes you haven’t been on. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Wait, Jack, are you crying? Jack Rosen: No. Michelle Bishop: No, but that’s how we’re going to tell the story, and then Jack cried. Also, the people need to know that we don’t actually hate each other. Jack Rosen: No. Michelle is like my mentor, she’s a friend, and she has been a mentor to me as I’ve entered a career in disability rights. Michelle Bishop: I’m like the sarcastic persona on this show, and I’m pretty sure everyone thinks that I’m mean, and I hate you guys, but we actually all get along quite well despite the fact that I’m apparently never there when anyone goes to the bar. But other than that… Stephanie Flynt McEben: We’ll make sure you’re there for the next one. Michelle Bishop: Thank you. I’ll probably be too tired, but I appreciate the thought. Jack Rosen: It’ll be funny. You’ll just miss my goodbye Happy Hour. Michelle Bishop: Oh. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I was going to say, are you going to miss that? Hopefully no. Michelle Bishop: No, I’m going to be there. I am, but that’s happy hour. That’s early enough so I can still get to bed on time. Jack Rosen: But thank you, Michelle. I appreciate that. Michelle Bishop: You do intros, you do outros, you help interview guests. Sometimes we make you read the guest bios because me and Stephanie just didn’t prepare, so I feel like at some point I have to let this go. We have to call you a podcast host. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes, and Jack is always the first one to come up with questions if me and Michelle are like, ugh, blank canvas stares. Michelle Bishop: I don’t want to say me and Stephanie never prepare, but… Stephanie Flynt McEben: But… Jack holds us together. Michelle Bishop: Yeah, yeah. It’s all him. Stephanie Flynt McEben: We’re going to miss that. Jack Rosen: My job is to wrangle everything together for the podcast. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah. If you recorded all of the behind the scenes conversations, I’m pretty sure the podcast would be an entire Taylor Swift album and more. Michelle Bishop: Honestly- Jack Rosen: It used to, remember the podcast used to be an hour long and after the first year. I just said, “I am not doing that anymore. I am spending like 15 hours a month on this podcast.” Michelle Bishop: I’m also pretty sure that’s why no one was listening. Who wants to listen to an hour-long podcast? Stephanie Flynt McEben: I don’t know. I listen to hour-long podcasts all the time. Michelle Bishop: Oh, I can’t listen to podcasts. I don’t even listen to our podcast. I can’t listen to disembodied voices. Jack Rosen: I got to be honest, I still don’t know other than your mom who listens to our podcast. Michelle Bishop: I have no idea. Jack Rosen: Please, if you listen, write in at podcast@NDRN.org and tell me why you do. I have never quite been able to figure it out. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh my gosh. Yes, please. We need encouragement. Or maybe not encouragement, if people are like, oh my gosh, get these ding dongs out of my newsfeed. I don’t know. Michelle Bishop: Yes, there’s a good chance. There’s a good chance that could be the responses. It’s been a tough year, guys. Maybe just the good stuff. Thanks. Podcast@NDRN.org. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Retweet. Michelle Bishop: Also, Jack, if you just do a outtakes and bloopers episode and just go rogue and drop it on your last day so no one can do anything about it, I respect that. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I would totally respect that. That would be so fun. Jack Rosen: Pretty much- Michelle Bishop: How about all the outtakes of Southern Belle Stephanie cussing? Jack Rosen: Yeah, yeah. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Where are you going to find those? Michelle Bishop: Like one time that happened, probably. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I try not to curse on the recordings. Michelle Bishop: Or in real life, you say chicken nugget. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I know, but this year is a change in me. I don’t know. Look, I’m not trying to jack the episode away. Jack Rosen: Okay. A second time is lazy. This is like when you and Claire get all that mileage out of, I didn’t see you there. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh, come on. Michelle Bishop: That one never gets old. Stephanie Flynt McEben: That one never gets old. Claire and I would bump into each other and we would literally go, “Oh, I didn’t say you there. Oh, neither did I.” Jack Rosen: No. You know what? That might be my favorite NDRN story that Claire once did that to me twice in a day though, and the first time I was like, okay, that’s hilarious. And the second time it was still funny, but I’m like, damn, you are using this line every time you bump into someone, aren’t you? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Honestly, it’s really funny when you’re out in public and you say it just to random passersby because they don’t know how to take it. Usually there are some folks that are like, “Okay.” And then of course there are the folks that it seems like they’re gobsmacked when they hear, “I didn’t see you there.” And then they realize that it was a blind person who ran into them, and then here comes the end of the world. > Michelle Bishop: Oh, R.E.M can sue us. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah. Jack Rosen: You are really going for it on this one, Stephanie. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I am. Jack Rosen: I appreciate it. This is the send off I wanted. I can’t wait to be named in the lawsuit. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh my gosh. Jack Rosen: Oh wait. No, crap. Wait. No. I guess it’s okay because I’m doing this still as an NDRN employee, they can’t sue me personally. If I do come back as a guest, it can’t be one where I get sued. That’ll be a problem. Then they can go after me. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Fair enough. Michelle Bishop: We’re going to have you as a guest and just violate 30 different copyrights on that episode. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Just so that we can sing 80s music and Santana. I know Santana is not 80s, but I know that that was something I could never live down. Michelle Bishop: It is still too soon to talk about how you thought Smooth Criminal was a Santana song. Jack Rosen: Oh my God. That was still, just confidently telling that pun. Folks, if you go back and listen to, I don’t know which episode, but if you, let’s see if this will work. Can you find it? This one. Yes. If you Google Stephanie Flynt, Smoothie Criminal. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Wait, what? For real? Jack Rosen: Yes. Michelle Bishop: You can Google that? Jack Rosen: Everything’s transcribed for accessibility, so yeah, Google captures all of it. Michelle Bishop: Guys. We made it. We made it. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Man. Jack Rosen: In fact, if you google Stephanie Flynt, the fifth result is our recent episode. Should Stephanie get a Cat? Stephanie Flynt McEben: And the answer is still no. Thank you for checking. Michelle Bishop: Oh, that reminds me. Tell Quinn, there’s this stray cat that keeps laying on my patio. I’m going to get a carrier and snag her and bring her over for you guys. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh gosh. Michelle Bishop: Yeah. I got a cat for you. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Don’t bring it to Quinn at our happy hour on Tuesday. Michelle Bishop: Okay. I’m bringing a cat. Jack Rosen: Michelle, you got to bring a cat to the happy hour. Michelle Bishop: Right? Jack Rosen: Stephanie, I think it’s like a Godfather situation. Stephanie can’t refuse to take that cat on the day of my Goodbye Happy Hour. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Well, of course not. That would be inhumane. Jack Rosen: Okay. That was a good one. I’ll give you that one. Michelle Bishop: That was pretty good. That was pretty good. Can’t lie. I’m impressed today and I kind of like all the puns with Jack’s name. I don’t know why he’s so salty about it. Probably because he’s been hearing them for like 30 years, but whatever. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Probably so. I wonder how many puns ChatGPT has. I’ll have to figure that one out and send that to you, y’all. I do have a fun joke. Michelle Bishop: I was going to say, how do we end this episode? This has been an episode of nothingness. There has to be a way to wrap it up, but I guess if there’s a joke… Stephanie Flynt McEben: There is always a joke. Okay. This is not an original. I actually got this one from Ms. Pencils Away, which if y’all like my jokes, you would absolutely love her. Oh my gosh, she’s so funny. And here we go. So what is Beethoven’s favorite fruit? Jack Rosen: What? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Y’all got to guess first? Jack Rosen: Okay, let’s think Michelle. Beethoven’s favorite fruit. Do you want to hop on? My girlfriend’s sitting next to me and she thinks she figured it out. Michelle Bishop: Okay. what is it? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Speaker 4: Peaches? Like an ear of something? A slice of something? Jack Rosen: No. You’re thinking of… Speaker 4: Mozart? Jack Rosen: No. You’re thinking of the painter who cut his ear off. Stephanie Flynt McEben: No. Jack Rosen: Okay. What is Beethoven’s favorite fruit? I am stumped. Michelle, do you have anything here? Michelle Bishop: I got nothing. Stephanie Flynt McEben: For real? Both of you? Jack Rosen: You think… Michelle Bishop: Nothing. Jack Rosen: Was a conductor, A composer. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Okay. Do you want me to put you all out of your misery? Wait, you have a guess? Jack Rosen: No, I got nothing. You stumped me. Michelle Bishop: Absolutely nothing. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Okay. What is Beethoven’s favorite fruit? Ba-na-na-nas, ba-na-nas. No? Jack Rosen: Oh, that was good. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Did y’all get it? Michelle Bishop: I can’t decide if that was amazing or awful. Jack Rosen: My girlfriend just walked away, just experiencing too many emotions from that. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh, I’m sorry. Michelle Bishop: You broke her. Jack Rosen: I really, really liked that one. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I’m glad you like it. Michelle Bishop: It’s good. This is Jack’s episode, so it’s good that it was one that brought him joy. Stephanie Flynt McEben: That was my hope. I’ve been saving this one for like a month. Because I heard it and I was like, “Ooh.” I’m kind of shocked none of you said kiwi, because that was my first thought. Jack Rosen: Why Kiwi? Michelle Bishop: Yeah. Why kiwi? What? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Ki-wi? Ki, Beethoven. Michelle Bishop: That is such a stretch. Jack Rosen: I’m not getting it. Michelle Bishop: The key, like the key of. Jack Rosen: Oh, the key. Michelle Bishop: The key, like the key of. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, like a key. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Jack Rosen: Well, I guess I have a joke. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. I’m so excited. Jack Rosen: I’m thinking how to phrase this. Let me think. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Michelle, you got to come up with one too now. Michelle Bishop: No, I did my cat tuna fish library joke. And you guys didn’t like it, it was a classic. I used my best material on you guys. Jack Rosen: Oh, I think I know. Stephanie Flynt McEben: What is it? Michelle Bishop: Okay. Jack Rosen: What do you call putting out my Goodbye podcast two months after I’ve actually left NDRN? Incredibly on brand for us. Stephanie Flynt McEben: It really is though. Michelle Bishop: That’s fair. Jack Rosen: Yeah. Sorry folks. If you’re hearing this, I’m already gone and I am possibly wondering, oh my God, how am I going to make it through law school? What did I do? Or, I’m having the time of my life. We’ll find out. I’ll be back sometime in the future to let you know. Michelle Bishop: So sorry folks. He’s gone. You’re too late to say goodbye to Jack. But, if you want to be the new producer/pro host of our podcast, email podcast@NDRN.org, and we’ll consider your application. Jack, one last time since you’re no longer here. Do you want to tell the people where they can follow us on social? Jack Rosen: You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads. If anyone actually uses Threads, I don’t know who does, but we’re on it. We’re on Twitter. I’m still calling it Twitter. I think we are maybe going to make a TikTok at some point, but- Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh yeah, don’t we use that? Jack Rosen: But that is no longer my problem. So the other member of the comms team, that is their problem. But if we’re on TikTok by the time this episode is out, Alden, if you’re listening, you should add it to the show notes. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Alrighty. Well, until next time folks, this is not goodbye. This is see you later. Michelle Bishop: For Michelle and Stephanie because Jack’s already gone. Bye guys. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Bye.

National Disability Radio: Senator Tom Harkin

Posted July 24, 2025 • 00:47:59

We wrap up our series on the battle for the passage of the ADA with none other than Senator Tom Harkin. Senator Harkin was the lead sponsor of the ADA in the Senate and has spent his career being a steadfast ally to the disability community. In this interview we talk to him about what that was like, where we need to go from here, and he even stumps us with a bit of disability rights trivia. Full transcript available at: https://www.ndrn.org/resource/ndr-harkin/ Michelle Bishop: Welcome back to another episode of National Disability Radio. This is the final in our series on the anniversary of the ADA. So before we jump into a very special guest that we have for you this episode, I am one of your podcast hosts, Michelle Bishop, the voter access and engagement manager at NDRN. Stephanie Flynt McEben: And I’m Stephanie Flynt McEben, public policy analyst here at NDRN, and another host, or one of our other hosts, for our podcast today. Michelle Bishop: Okay. Clearly taking his side, Stephanie. Clearly taking his side. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Okay. Okay. But Jack has proven that he is worthy of host, Michelle Bishop: Producer and pro host extraordinaire, please introduce yourself. Jack Rosen: Thank you, Stephanie. I appreciate the support. Hi, producer and host, Jack Rosen, here. Really excited about today’s episode. This guest has been at the top of our wish list for a while now, and we are so thrilled to have him on. So I suppose we want to just get into it. Michelle, why don’t you tell the folks that we have on today? Michelle Bishop: We’re really excited today to be talking to the honorable Senator Tom Harkin, who was so instrumental in so much of the early disability rights movement and passage of the ADA. In 1974, Tom Harkin was elected to Congress from Iowa’s 5th Congressional District. In 1984, after serving 10 years in the US House of Representatives, Senator Harkin was elected to the Senate and reelected in 1990, 1996, 2002, and 2008. He retired from the US Senate in January of 2015. I use the term retired loosely. He is still very active in the movement. As a young senator, Tom was tapped by Senator Ted Kennedy to craft legislation to protect the civil rights of millions of Americans with physical and mental disabilities. He knew firsthand about the challenges facing people with disabilities from his late brother Frank, who was deaf from an early age. What emerged from that process would later become his signature legislative achievement, the Americans with Disabilities Act. In September 2009, following the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Harkin became chairman of the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions, or as we know it, HELP Committee. Senator Harkin believed that to serve in this capacity was to carry on the legacy which helped lead to the passage of the Affordable Care Act. In 2015, Senator Harkin and Ruth Harkin establish the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa to inform citizens, inspire creative cooperation, and catalyze change on issues of social justice, fairness, and opportunity. The institute works to improve the lives of all Americans by giving policymakers access to high quality information and engaging citizens as active participants in the formation of public policy. Senator Harkin, thank you so much for joining us today. Jack Rosen: So we’re sitting here today with Senator Tom Harkin for our series commemorating the 35th Anniversary of the passage of the ADA. This is Producer Jack Rosen. I am joined by my co-hosts, Michelle Bishop and Stephanie Flynt. And to kick things off, we wanted to ask you, one thing we’ve found when talking to some of the folks who were involved in the passage of the ADA is that they recalled that was quite a fight to get people with HIV, AIDS and mental illness, as well as substance use disorders covered at the time, especially being 1990 and there was a lot of stigmatization of people with HIV, AIDS. Could you talk a little bit about that fight and why it was important for you to make sure those groups were included? Senator Harkin: Well, yes, because we didn’t want to leave any element of a disability group out of the coverage of the bill, want to be comprehensive. You start carving out one group, then there’s somebody else will carve out somebody else and the thing falls apart. The HIV, AIDS thing came up because there was so much misinformation about AIDS and how people got it. And a lot of it, let’s face it, was based on homophobia at that time. And we had some purveyors in the country and in the Senate of that kind of discrimination. Former Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina is predominant among that. And so they tried to do whatever they could to carve out that portion of our populace. Well, we were successful in the Senate in keeping it out, but the House at the last minute added what was called the Chapman Amendment. Chapman was a congressman from Texas. I think that’s right, from Texas. And at the last minute they added the Chapman Amendment to preclude coverage of the ADA for anybody with HIV or AIDS. It wasn’t just AIDS, it was HIV too, a huge populace. Well, as we pointed out at the time, everyone thought well, you only got HIV if you were practicing unsafe, same-sex. But we knew from medical studies and stuff that that just wasn’t so, it was absolutely not so at all. Well, Chapman Amendment came on at the last minute. Now keep this in mind, it’s a little bit in the weeds here on legislation. But we had passed our bill in September of 1989. It went to the House, got stuck in the House all winter until we had what was called the Capitol Crawl in March. After that, it began to get loosened up and we got it through the House, but not until the last minute the Chapman Amendment was at. And so when we went to conference… Okay, so the Senate had one bill, the House had another bill. When we went to conference, the Senate voted to instruct conferees as did the house, to instruct conferees to accept the Chapman Amendment. Well, of course, I’m the head of the subcommittee. I’m the person leading the charge on this and negotiating with the house. And we met with the disability community. And basically, I’ll tell you, the disability committee held together. They said, “If they’re out, we’re out. We won’t have a bill.” They had worked for so long and so hard to get this done. Well, so here’s what happened. We enlisted a person who had been sort of with us all along, but sort of dragged along kicking and screaming, and that was Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. And finally, the disability community came to him and some people he knew in Utah and said, “Look, we can’t afford to let this bill die. We got to save this bill.” And so a few people came to meet with Senator Hatch and convinced him to have a substitute for the Chapman Amendment that basically said that in disregard of HIV, AIDS, et cetera, that we would rely upon the latest and best medical and scientific studies and results in order to determine the further course of action. Anyway, it was just… got rid of the Chapman Amendment and substituted this language of we’ll take the latest scientific… And we sold it on that basis. We sold it to the Senate, even though they instructed them to accept the Chapman Amendment. We went back to them and said, “Look, this is a great compromise. Who can argue that we shouldn’t use the best scientific and medical information and data?” And that’s what we did, and that was the end of it. And so then the House went back and they passed it and it came back to the Senate and we substituted our bill, because we had some different things in it. So we took my bill, the bill we’d drafted and made it the final bill and sent it to the White House. That’s a long story, but it was very involved. Michelle Bishop: It’s actually one of my favorite stories, though, I have to say, Senator, about the passage of the ADA. It was such a moment in time and the way that the disability rights community really stood together- Senator Harkin: Yeah, you did. Michelle Bishop: … in a business where it would be very easy to say, “Okay, we’ll cut these folks out and we’ll get this for the rest of us.” The way the community really stood together and the way that you released stood your ground as well for what was right for people with disabilities. Senator Harkin: Well, I’ll tell you a little story that happened before, before the Chapman Amendment, but it was right about that same time. We still had some people in the disability community that were just… They wanted this, they wanted that, and I understood that. So I got Pat Wright and some others too from California. Who am I thinking of? I just lost the name in my… Anyway, Pat Wright was there from Oakland. Who am I thinking of? The Ed Roberts Center? Michelle Bishop: Yes. It’s actually the original independent living center in Berkeley, the Ed Roberts and the Rolling Quads and… Senator Harkin: What’s it called? It was called… There’s just been a disconnect between my brain and my vocal cords. Michelle Bishop: Sir, that happens to me frequently. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, same. Senator Harkin: Okay, back up. So Pat Wright, who had been with us from the very beginning, fighting for this from the outside, so I got Pat and I said, “Look, bring together as many in the disability community you can, and we’re going to meet in that big hearing room in the Dirksen building that I had jurisdiction over.” And it was like five o’clock in the afternoon and it was packed. Everyone was there. National Federation of the Blind, National Association of the Deaf, Cerebral Palsy, on and on and on and on and on and on. They were all there. And I had Bobby Silverstein with me. And Bobby was my staff director who really, really probably single-handedly was more responsible for the ADA than any other single person. So I said to Bobby, I said, “Look, get all these people together.” I said, “I’m going to lay the law down to them.” He said, “Okay.” He didn’t really know what I was going to do. So we got all these people in the room and I said, “Look, we’ve been through a long fight. We’ve held together, but there’s some people that are holding out that haven’t quite got on board yet.” I said, “Look, I’m about to bring this bell out on the floor, but,” I said, “I’m not going to do it unless you all agree. Unless everybody here agrees and they’re not going to be sniping in the back about this isn’t in and that is.” I said, “Now look, it’s a little after five o’clock, I have to go attend to something. I’m going to leave Bobby Silverstein here in charge. And I’m going to come back, I’ll be back in about an hour and we’ll see. If you agree on what I’ve just laid out, I’ll be on the floor tomorrow with the bill. If you don’t agree, we’ll all go home and that’s the end of it. So I’ll see you in about an hour.” And I walked out. I left Bobby holding the bag. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh my God. Senator Harkin: But he was good. He was great. And so I did. I came back in about an hour and one by one, all these different groups were on board. “No, we’re not going to try to do anything in the back round. Yes, we’re…” And that was it. And then I got to take the bill on the floor. Michelle Bishop: That’s incredible. Well, our thanks to Bobby as well then for that work. Senator Harkin: Right. Michelle Bishop: Before we switched the mic on we were talking about all the unsung heroes of the ADA, and especially the people who do the drafting. Right? Senator Harkin: Yeah. Michelle Bishop: Somebody sits down and writes the language. Senator Harkin: Right. Michelle Bishop: And one of the things that strikes me about the ADA, in addition to being this really powerful moment in time for our movement, is that as folks who work in the disability rights movement now, the ADA itself is such an incredible piece of legislation. It was really built on, in my mind, a very clear record of discrimination against people with disabilities. And the bill itself I think is clear and specific and detailed in what it asks of us. It doesn’t just say, “You can’t discriminate. It has to be accessible.” It tells you what that means. It charges agencies like the Access Board with creating regulations that are incredibly clear. And so for those of us who are doing the work these days, who rely so much on everything that the ADA lays out, and it’s certainly in an era of courts that really maybe look to limit its power somewhat, to me, the clarity and the specificity of the ADA is something that is really unique for a landmark piece of civil rights legislation. And I was wondering if at the time that you were doing this work, did you know how important that was and how unique this bill was? Or what is it to you that makes the ADA stand the test of time? Senator Harkin: Yes, we knew. We knew we were doing something that was both kind of profound, but also that we put in language that we thought would tell the courts what we really wanted to do. And of course, as you know, much of the provisions of the ADA are based on Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Is that right? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Senator Harkin: Yes. 1973, right. And so we lifted a lot of language from that. And we had the help of person who had been involved with 504. Well, I’m sorry, I just lost a name. I see him in my mind’s eye. I mean, he’s still alive. I mean like me, we’re old and we can’t remember our names. So he was still there, and he came in and was very helpful on the language and putting it together with Bobby Silverstein, who was my staffer, a lawyer. Heifelblum, another lawyer, she was at Georgetown at the time. Arlene Meyerson, another lawyer out in San Francisco or Oakland there. DREDF, that’s the name of it. The Disability Rights and Education Defense Fund. Michelle Bishop: Yes. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Senator Harkin: That’s who Pat Wright was with, and that was sort of our organization on the outside. Michelle Bishop: I used to work for Robert Funk, who’s a disability rights attorney back at the time, who was part of the founding of DREDF as well. Yeah. Senator Harkin: But, he was with DREDF. Michelle Bishop: Yeah, yeah. Senator Harkin: So, yes, we knew we wanted to be more specific in the language, and we thought we were pretty specific. Again, we had different people meet with different senators and different staffs. And well, it worked out fine. Now, again, I must tell you that it came to quite a surprise to us in 1999, 9 years later, when the Supreme Court decided those three cases, we call it the Sutton Trilogy. There were three cases that decided in one day that just tore apart the ADA in terms of employment. We were, I thought, quite specific in our findings. I remember I was at the Supreme Court the day they handed down the decision. I was there with Bob Dole, who was also a big supporter of ours and getting the ADA through. And I remember we walked out and met the press, and I remember Bob Dole saying, “Well, they said we didn’t have enough…” I think it was Scalia, maybe I forget who it was, said, well, we didn’t have enough data to support this or something. And Dole said, “Well…” Now again, don’t hold me to this figure. But he said, “We had like 200 specific instances of these violations. Now I wish they had’ve told us do they need 210? Do they need 220?” Stephanie Flynt McEben: 227. Senator Harkin: So he was really poking fun at the Supreme Court. Well, because of that decision, it held up employment. Because the employers really didn’t know what to do and the people with disabilities who wanted to be employed didn’t really know what to do. I can get into that more if you want, but it’s kind of in the weeds. But it had to do with whether you self-identified as someone with a disability. If you did, were you still covered by the ADA? It took us another almost nine years to get it corrected, and we worked through those years. And the second Bush came to office, he didn’t hold us up, but everybody got involved in 9/11 and the war in Iraq, and just one thing after another. But finally in 2008, his last year in office, we got it through, and that was the ADA Act Amendments of 2008, which told the Supreme Court, “Here’s what we meet,” basically. Michelle Bishop: Right. Senator Harkin: And so we redrafted some portions of the ADA to make it quite clear what it is we meant. And since that time, we’ve had a clear course on this whole idea of employment. That’s one of the reasons why employment was set back so far. I mean, we went for… Well, you figure that was 2009, that’d be 19 years? 2008, so 18 years. Am I right? Yes, that’s’ right, 2008. Michelle Bishop: Yes. I had to think about it too. Senator Harkin: So we basically went 18 years without really having a clear delineation and upholding of court decisions on employment. Just held us. We did all right on transportation. We did okay on an independent living with the Olmstead Decision and other things like that, but employment was held up back… And in 18… that was ’08, by the time we got the new rules drafted, you’re talking about 2010. So it set us back about 20 years on employment. Michelle Bishop: I know Stephanie asked something she wants to ask you about, but I got to jump in real quick. I just wanted to say quickly, I’m so glad you mentioned Senator Dole because we often find that really champions of disability rights issues come from both sides of the aisle. Senator Harkin: That’s true. Michelle Bishop: That it’s not so much a partisan issue as it is if you are a person with a disability or you love someone with a disability, you see how it impacts people’s lives and you just get it. Senator Harkin: Right. Michelle Bishop: And that’s been, to me, something that just makes disability rights such a unique space to work in. Senator Harkin: Yeah. Stephanie Flynt McEben: And just to add on to that, disability is the characteristic that affects one in four Americans. And also anyone can become a member of the disability community at any time. It intersects with every single minority group. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but that’s definitely something. Senator Harkin: Right, yeah. Yes, exactly right. You can become a member of the disability community at any point in time. And as some of us grow older and we can’t hear worth a darn, now we’re finding out that we have to lean on a lot of things for closed captioning and things like that. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. Senator Harkin: I have to give you another little bit of a thing. I know you’re talking about the ADA. Michelle Bishop: Yeah. Senator Harkin: Before the ADA passed, I got another bill through. Now people always say I’m the author of the ADA and all that, but I don’t say that. People say that, but I don’t say that. I always say the author of the ADA were the many thousands of people with disabilities that marched, that laid under the wheels of the Greyhound buses, that got arrested and thrown in jail, and then the staff and everybody. Did I have a hand in it? Yeah. I’m the lead sponsor, so I was the person that brought it through legislatively and got it passed. Okay, fine. I accept that. But there was one bill that I was the author of and got it through my committee and got it through the Senate and the House and got it signed by the president, that really changed a lot. And no one knows I ever did it. It was called the Television Decoder and Circuitry Act. I bet you’ve never heard of it? Michelle Bishop: No. Jack Rosen: I don’t think I have. Michelle Bishop: I was like, “He’s not going to stump us. We do this for a living.” Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Michelle Bishop: And then you did. Senator Harkin: You can look it up. I forget the public law number of it. But the Television Decoder and Circuitry Act, I had hearings on it. Here’s what happened. I had a brother who’s deaf, and so I got involved in the late ’70s and early ’80s in establishing the National Captioning Institute out in Alexandria, Virginia. And while I was only peripheral to the other aspect of the television stations’ networks making agreements to have certain programs captioned, in order to get the captions you had to buy a box. There was a big set top box, like a VCR you put on your television. You hooked it up. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh wow. Senator Harkin: And if the program had been re-recorded, then you could see the captions. Well, so I got the first TV decoder like that, was delivered to Jimmy Carter in the White House by me and Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia. Okay, so I got my brother one and put on the TV out in Iowa, and he could now watch programs. Some of the early programs like the Ed Sullivan Show. It was always done before an audience, but not live. It was an audience and then you would see it on television. And then there were other programs that were done and then shown later, but not in front of an audience. Okay? Michelle Bishop: Mm-hmm. Senator Harkin: You could get those captioned by the National Captioning Institute. So my brother got this box and he started watching this, fine. Along about the late ’80s, I’m now in the Senate and I get a visit paid by an individual who said, “We now are developing these computer chips. And all that stuff in that big box you have that Sears Roebuck sold…” You can only buy it from Sears, and they agreed to sell it at cost, and it was expensive, $279 at that time. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Wow. Jack Rosen: Oh wow. Michelle Bishop: Wow. Senator Harkin: That was expensive. So they said, “All this in it, we can put it on a computer chip like size of your thumbnail.” I said, “Really?” “Yeah.” I said, “Well, I got to find out more about it.” I had hearings from my disability policies, my subcommittee. So I had hearings on this. And I’m just a freshman senator, but Kennedy had agreed to give me this disability subcommittee called the Subcommittee on the Handicapped. So I had these hearings. I brought in the TV manufacturers. I remember it was Motorola, Sylvania, some of the other ones, maybe… There were a number of US manufacturers of TVs. I don’t remember if Sony… I’d have to go back and check. They may not even have been around at that time. I don’t know. Michelle Bishop: No idea. That’s a good question. Senator Harkin: So my ask was, “I understand we can…” “Yeah. Well…” They looked at, “Yeah, you could put all that in a TV set.” But here was the catch, but it’s going to cost anywhere from 100 to $200 more per TV to do that. Well, so I checked with my staff and they said, “You can’t get a bill through that’s going to increase the cost of a TV set by a couple of hundred dollars.” So I called in this friend of mine in the chip business. I said, “Well, is it really going to cost that much?” And he said, “Yes, if you make 10 of them or if you make a hundred of them, but if you were to make millions of them, why the cost would almost be nothing.” It’s like a light bulb went off in my head. So I drafted a bill to mandate that every television set sold in America, not made here, sold in America that had a size 13-inch screen or bigger… Now, don’t ask me… There was some technical problem in doing it smaller than that with the captions. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Interesting Senator Harkin: Every television set sold in America size 13-inch screen or… had to have embedded in the television set itself this decoding chip, and I got it through. Michelle Bishop: Can I also thank you as someone who watches everything with the captions on. Senator Harkin: I know. Michelle Bishop: I don’t even have hearing loss. I watch everything with the captions on. Stephanie Flynt McEben: My spouse is the same way. Senator Harkin: Well, we got it through, and we had a phase in period of several years. And what happened is J.W. Marriott Hotel… There was someone in his family who was disabled. I had a conversation with him at that time with J.W., Bill Marriott, I think. Was it Bill? I forget, one of them. Because they decided, not that they had to, it wasn’t part of the law, but they decided to take out all their TVs and all their hotels and replace them with TVs with these computer chips and use it as a marketing tool. Michelle Bishop: Wow. Awesome. That’s a great idea. Senator Harkin: Which they did. And of course, once they did that, then Holiday Inn and a Hilton and everybody… So there was this big rush to buy all these TV sets with these computers chips in them. And that happened. And years later, I remember I had a hearing on this and asked what the additional cost was for the chip. It’s not even factored in the price. Michelle Bishop: Wow. Senator Harkin: It’s just part of the internal operations. All the other things they’ve done with smart TVs and all, well, yeah, that’s factored in the price. But the computer chip isn’t, is so that’s why you have a remote and you can get the closed captions and all that kind of stuff. So there you go. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Really? That’s amazing. Senator Harkin: There you go, long story. Michelle Bishop: Okay. We led you all around. We led you all around, Stephanie, but I actually know you wanted to ask about technology anyway, so it might be a nice segue. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, I was going to say that is a really good segue. Talking a lot about technology and the ADA and the efforts around the captioning devices. The ADA was written in a different era in regards to technology, and of course addresses the technology of its time and how those things go about. And of course, in 1990, I’m sure we couldn’t have imagined a world with smartphones and Amazon Prime- Senator Harkin: No. Stephanie Flynt McEben: … all of these things, the AI, all of this technology that’s around. So how do you think that the ADA needs to be adapted to today’s tech? Senator Harkin: Well, my short answer it has been adapted. I mean, the language and the way we drafted it, I think has been very well incorporated in the new technological world. I mean, I may not see what is happening there that I don’t know about. Maybe you do, I don’t know. But I think technologically we have pretty much… I think the ADA pretty much has stood the test of the time on that. I’m trying to think of some instances where we had problems. Do you know of any? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah. So I think something that I’ve heard in various circles and in doing this work, it’s true that the ADA is enforceable when it comes to technology. But because of the fact that technology has just continued to evolve more and more and more over time, there’s been various guidance and that sort of thing that’s been issued in order to keep up with the times. And so I think that that’s kind of with the evolution of technology in mind, if that makes sense. Michelle Bishop: And we came to meet you today by using a smartphone app to call a car to come pick us up, which- Stephanie Flynt McEben: I feel like in the ’90s would you- Michelle Bishop: … that is a different world. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Would people have done that in 1990, requested a random car to come and pick you up versus a cab company? Michelle Bishop: But it opens up a whole new industry of people’s private cars or private homes being kind of a part of business now in a way. Senator Harkin: Now, you’ve jogged my thinking a little bit here. There has been over the last few years, a focus on making the ADA adaptable to programming and to software development and software design. It’s not so much just the hardware, but the software needs to be accessible for people with different accessibility problems. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, absolutely. Senator Harkin: And so we have been working with the Accessibility Board, I think it’s called. Stephanie Flynt McEben: The Access Board? Senator Harkin: And with getting some national standards on making sure that software at the very beginning [inaudible 00:31:02] incorporates within the software accessibility standards for people who have a learning disability, for people who may have an intellectual disability, for a person with cerebral palsy, for example, who has a hard time navigating boards and things like that and needs a different type of a device. For example, software that will allow a person with a pointer… They put it on their head. Maybe you’ve heard about these? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Yeah. Senator Harkin: They’re fantastic, but the software has to… All of the software that you might access that way has to be accessible for that kind of technology. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Right, right. Yeah. Senator Harkin: So that has been something that obviously we didn’t think about in ’90, obviously. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Well, of course, I mean, there was no way to know, right? Senator Harkin: But through court cases, we have developed the law that’s pretty good on this. I often liken it to this, that when our framers drafted the Constitution, they drafted… As you know, one one of the provisions of the Constitution as a provision against illegal searches and seizures. Your house is your castle. They can’t just go into your house and search through your drawers and stuff like that without a court… Michelle Bishop: Without a warrant. Senator Harkin: … warrant for something. Well, television or telephones weren’t around then. So when telephones came in later, could they tap your phone, huh? Well, it wasn’t in the Constitution. Michelle Bishop: Right, yeah. Senator Harkin: But there was a court case that said, “Well…” It’s the same thing. It’s basically the same. And so that has evolved. So that same kind of court adapting what we wanted to protect or do in the beginning changed by technology, they just adapted it to the new technology. That’s our hope on these court cases that a lot of them… aside from the Sutton Trilogy in 1999. But once we corrected it, that was it, it’s worked ever since. The court had a very… And maybe we weren’t clear enough. I thought we were, but maybe we weren’t. Stephanie Flynt McEben: No, I think that that makes a whole lot of sense. And I just thank you so much for your leadership on that. And, again, there’s just no way that we could have known what the technological future held. Senator Harkin: No. Stephanie Flynt McEben: And I think that the link to the Constitution and the phone tapping is a really good example. So thank you for sharing that. Senator Harkin: Right. Well, the next big thing is AI. Michelle Bishop: Right, right. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Mm-hmm. Senator Harkin: Now, is AI going to be accessible and adaptable for all persons with disabilities? Well, tomorrow there’s going to be a presentation by Beacon College on their use of AI for all their kids with disabilities. It’s pretty darn interesting. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Interesting. Senator Harkin: I had a preview of it because I visited the school. But AI could be very, very helpful. But, again, is it designed and are the algorithms that incorporate it encompassing a person with a learning disability or a physical disability, cerebral palsy or anything like that, a person with blindness or deafness or whatever? Are those algorithms going to be able to pick up on that and make sure whatever the AI you’re using or trying to use understands it has to be presented in a certain way, a certain way that’s accessible. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Fully accessible to all people. I think that that just speaks to the timelessness of the ADA too. Senator Harkin: You know you’re right. I got to tell you, sometimes I’m amazed at how adaptable the ADA and the language we used… I don’t know that we really thought that much about, “Oh, we’ve got to anticipate the future and this and that.” I mean, a little bit of that came around, but there was no such thing as a smartphone. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Right. Michelle Bishop: Right. Senator Harkin: There’s no such thing as smart TVs or nothing like that. Michelle Bishop: And if we had guessed in 1990, we probably would’ve been thinking about the flying cars from the Jetsons and not smartphones. Right? We probably would’ve gotten it wrong. Senator Harkin: That’s right. That’s right. But, yeah, I can’t say that we were prescient in some way. I don’t think so. I think we were just trying to nail it down as best we could. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Of course. Yeah. Senator Harkin: Yeah. Jack Rosen: I think that sort of transitions nicely. You mentioned the presentation that’s going to take place tomorrow. And obviously the fight for equality for people with disabilities didn’t end at the ADA and your work in this space hasn’t ended. So I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the Harkin International Disability Employment Summit and the work you’re doing here today? Senator Harkin: Well, yes, the International Disability Employment Summit, we started in 2016. I retired in 2015, January of 2015, and we had started the Harkin Institute at Drake University. And as 2015 went through… Again, I made sure when we drafted the ADA, we put in the titles that Title 1, the first one is employment because I always felt that was sort of key, jobs, employment. Well, we’d gone through all that 20 years with the Supreme Court’s decisions, 2010, it’s now 2014, and we just had not hardly made a ripple in employment. So I wanted to focus on that. So the first summit was in December of 2016. Yes, December. Either late November, early December of 2016, and that was it. We wanted to do it internationally because we also wanted to rely on the CRPD, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for other countries. And so that was it. That was it. There’s a lot on disability rights you can focus on, and we do some of that at the institute, but I wanted this to be focused on increasing employment in competitive integrated employment for persons with disabilities. And as I said today in my opening, I said, “We laid a marker down.” At that time I said, “In 10 years, I want to double the rate of employment for specific… I mean for you. I mean, if you have a business and you employ two people with disabilities, make it a goal that in 10 years you’re going to have four people. If you’re a big company and you got 2% of your employees are people with disabilities, make it 4% in 10 years.” It’s not a heavy lift, but I wanted to keep making progress forward. And so that’s still our goal to keep doubling the rate of employment among small businesses, against all businesses. And that’s what we’ve tried to do, to bring these… And what are the best practices? What are their hurdles? What are the problems? What are some people doing that are unique? We just had a presentation just before I came here for this podcast by Apple. I didn’t realize Apple was doing what it’s doing. It’s fantastic on how they’re getting their suppliers, not just Apple, but their suppliers to do more hiring of persons with disabilities. Wow. See, so there’s a lot of these kind of things happening out there. And that’s what we’re focused on, employment. And we’ve had two foreign engagements. We did one in Paris, France, which was well attended by African countries and some Mideast, European. And then we did the one in Belfast, and then in 2023 we were set up to do one in Amman, Jordan. Prince Murad has been to all of our summits and he wanted to host one in Jordan, which we thought would be great. But we had to cancel it at the last minute because of problems in the Mideast and travel and things like that. So we missed in ’23 then we’re back here in ’24 and we don’t know where we’re going to be in ’25 yet. We’re looking some different places. Michelle Bishop: If we can trouble you with one more question. Senator Harkin: Yeah. Michelle Bishop: Well, first, I assume you use the word retirement loosely. Sounds like you’re still fairly busy. Senator Harkin: I am. I do, yes. Michelle Bishop: We’ve talked so much about the history of the disability rights movement, and I’m wondering what you think when you look towards the future, what are maybe some new challenges on the horizon as well as do you see any new disability rights champions who are ready to pick up the torch and continue this work? Senator Harkin: First question, there’s one thing that I’ve just been trying to get done and haven’t, it’s been a great failure and that is to get housing built in America that’s accessible. Do you realize we now have a whole industry in America, they come to see me, a whole industry that will fix up your house when you get older so you can stay at home? Why the hell didn’t we build it that way in the first place? It’s much cheaper when you do it that way. Michelle Bishop: Absolutely. Senator Harkin: I have been proposing for some time now, but I just can’t get anyone to do it, and it’s this, what is one of the biggest factors in homeownership in America? The biggest single factor, aside from price of course, the biggest single factor is the fact that you can deduct from your income taxes the interest paid on the mortgage that you have. You buy a hundred thousand dollars house, you put $10,000 down, the other $90,000 you’ve mortgaged. And what is up front? The interest. If you ever look at the diagrams, you’re paying just interest and interest and interest for years and years for 20 or a 30-year mortgage, and finally at the end you start paying on the principal. All that interest is tax-deductible. That’s a federal law. What I’ve been advocating is that for you, for an individual, to get that tax deductibility to purchase a home, that home must meet accessibility standards. Then builders will start building houses where people will buy because if they don’t, they won’t be able to deduct their mortgage payments. So I’ve been trying to get this change made to get housing that is accessible from the very beginning, housing, apartments, condominiums. And as we know, the added expense is not that much in the beginning. It’s when you come back later and try to redo it, that’s what costs money. To me. This is one of the last great frontiers in America. I spoke with a young woman not too long ago in Washington D.C., she’s a professional person. Told me it took her almost three years to find an apartment in D.C. that was accessible for her. She uses a wheelchair and some other devices. She just couldn’t find it. I mean, she just couldn’t find what she wanted. What do I think? The number of those were so little. You know? Michelle Bishop: Mm-hmm. Senator Harkin: Anyway, so that’s one that I just I don’t know why. And here, Biden and Kamala Harris came out, “Oh, they’re going to have all this new money. We’re going to build all this low-income housing and stuff.” Not one word about we’re going to build low-income housing and it’s going to be accessible to all people with disabilities. Nothing. Nothing. I mean, I don’t know how I get through on some of this stuff. As you can see, it just frustrates me. Anyway, as you can see, I still think there are some barriers, a lot of barriers that we’ve got to overcome in that way. Transportation, we’re finally getting airlines… And this is a kudos to the Biden administration and to Pete Buttigieg. They finally did get some standards out for seating in airplanes for people with disabilities. Daniel Van Sant, who you’ve met here, who’s the head of our disabilities… We’re losing Bob Casey. But, yes, there are Maggie Hassan, Senator Maggie Hassan, Tammy Duckworth from Illinois. Those are two big champions right there. Michelle Bishop: Senator, you gave us so much of your time today, we appreciate it. Jack Rosen: Thank you so much. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Thank you so much. Senator Harkin: I forgot, I got to get my rear end out of here. Speaker 5: That’s why I’m here. Michelle Bishop: You gave us so much of your time, we appreciate it so much. Stephanie Flynt McEben: No, it’s totally fine. Thank you so much, Senator. Senator Harkin: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. See you, bye. Jack Rosen: Thank you, Jack. Speaker 5: Your dog is beautiful. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Thank you. Jack Rosen: Wow, that was so cool. I cannot believe we got to speak with Senator Harkin. I cannot believe we got to speak with him for that long. I’m not even sure what to say. It’s so exciting that we got to speak with him and hear about what it was like as a legislator while these fights were going on to pass the ADA, and to just learn a bit more history about it wasn’t… As much as we focus on the ADA, there is other legislation that is that people are always… We often hear, “Isn’t that an ADA violation?” Sometimes it is, but as he pointed out, sometimes there are other disability rights laws that are protecting people. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Right? I mean, honestly, all I can say really is… Sorry. No, Jack. I could not agree more. It was an incredibly moving interview. He is incredibly down to earth, and I genuinely am so grateful for the time that he gave us. And he’s just such a down to earth guy. I really enjoyed talking with him and learning the history and just hearing his perspective on everything going on, ways that we can improve the ADA today and just in general the advocacy that it took on both sides to make the ADA what it is. Michelle Bishop: Truly. Senator Harkin, thank you so much for letting us crash the Harkin Institute this year, for all the time you’re willing to sit down and talk with us about your achievements, for everything you’ve done for the disability rights movement, and most of all for laughing at all of our bad jokes. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. And speaking of jokes… Michelle Bishop: Oh, we know you have one, Stephanie. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes, I do. And it’s actually kind of on theme for this episode, so I’m kind of proud of myself. Anyway, what did the ramp say to the stairs? Jack Rosen: What did the ramp say to the stairs? Michelle Bishop: What did the ramp say to the stairs? Stephanie Flynt McEben: I don’t know, but you guys have to guess. I do know, but… Michelle Bishop: We had one easy one recently. Jack Rosen: Right? I think I got it. Michelle Bishop: Go on. Jack Rosen: I’ve got you covered. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Nope, that’s a good one, but no. Michelle Bishop: That’s a good answer. Okay. What is it? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Step aside. Get it? Michelle Bishop: Oh, yeah. No, I got it. Jack Rosen: Hey, that’s an appropriate one. Stephanie Flynt McEben: It really is though. I was so proud of it. Michelle Bishop: It was. That is a great joke for the anniversary of the ADA, and I hope that Senator Harkin is laughing at that one very hard. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I feel like he would. Michelle Bishop: Unlike me and Jack. Thank you everyone for joining us for our series on the anniversary of the ADA. We were really excited for the ADA’s birthday this year, and it was amazing to get the opportunity to talk to several people who were just instrumental in the drafting and the passage of the ADA who shared their experiences with us and talked about the future of the movement. We appreciate it so much. Jack, tell the people where they can find us on social media. Jack Rosen: You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, Threads. I’m forgetting one, aren’t I? Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, Threads. Oh, yeah, we also have a YouTube channel, follow us there. Michelle Bishop: Not TikTok. Jack Rosen: Not TikTok. Michelle Bishop: Okay, got it. Jack Rosen: And as always, you can email us at podcast@ndrn.org. Until next time folks. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Bye.

National Disability Radio: Jim Dickson

Posted July 17, 2025 • 00:31:15

On part two of our series commemorating the fight for the passage of the ADA, we have on long time activist Jim Dickson. Jim talks with us about the challenges they faced in getting the ADA passed, what changes he’d still like to see, and surprises us with a fun story about a former guest and friend of the podcast. Full transcript available at: https://www.ndrn.org/resource/ndr-jim-dickson/ Jack Rosen: You know, Michelle, we feel like this part of your life is more mysterious. What was living in St. Louis like? Okay, started that wrong. I’m trying to just get you to give us some St. Louis trivia. Mysterious was the wrong choice of word there. Michelle Bishop: Mysterious? Is it the biscuit? Jack Rosen: I wanted you to talk about the spaghetti and chili. That’s what I’m trying to get to, and I didn’t know how to get there. Michelle Bishop: I don’t know anything about that. I don’t even know what you’re referring to. I do know there’s definitely fish fries every Friday, and it’s always fried catfish with a side of spaghetti, if that’s what you’re thinking of. And we invented toasted ravioli, and most things that matter, like ice cream cones were invented at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. And there’s St. Louis-style pizza, but it doesn’t have mozzarella on it. It has Provel cheese, which is I’m pretty sure only exists in St. Louis. And pretty much everyone has some sort of connection to Nelly or Nelly’s mom. That’s about it. Jack Rosen: You know what? I was thinking of Cincinnati. Michelle Bishop: Gotcha. I gave all that, and you were thinking of something from Cincinnati. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Is Cincinnati famous for its pizza? Michelle Bishop: Is Cincinnati famous for- Stephanie Flynt McEben: For anything? No offense to any Cincinnatians. Michelle Bishop: Shout-out to Disability Rights Ohio. We love you. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yas. Michelle Bishop: Our bad. Our bad. I was just in Cleveland. It was cool. Do you not know Midwestern cities, Jack? Can you not tell them apart? Is it all the same to you once you get past like Buffalo? Jack Rosen: Well, then there’s Los Angeles on the other side of the country. Michelle Bishop: Hi. Welcome back to National Disability Radio. I’m Michelle Bishop, one of your co-hosts and the voter access and engagement manager at NDRN. Stephanie Flynt McEben: And I’m Stephanie Flynt McEben, public policy analyst, and also one of your hosts for this wonderful podcast here at NDRN. Michelle Bishop: And then we also have a producer, who’s just a producer. Why don’t you tell them hi, our producer? Jack Rosen: Hi, Jack Rosen here, one third of the podcasting team, as you know, a host. Michelle, do you want to tell the people who we have on today? Michelle Bishop: Yes. This is a continuation of our series on the anniversary of the ADA, and allow me first to say, Go ADA. It’s your birthday. Go ADA. It’s your birthday. Okay. I’ve been wanting to get that out since the last episode for the ADA, so thank you for humoring me. So this episode, we have Jim Dickson. He has over 30 years of experience with nonpartisan voter engagement work, particularly in the disability community. He served as the co-chair of the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Committee for the National Council on Independent Living. He is a former vice president for organizing and civic engagement at AAPD, the American Association of People with Disabilities, where he led AAPD’s Nonpartisan Disability Vote Project, a coalition of 36 national disability organizations, whose mission was to close the political participation gap for people with disabilities, focusing on nonpartisan voter registration, education and get out the vote. He actually played a central role, along with the leadership conference on Civil and Human Rights, in passing the Help America Vote Act of 2002, and he was part of the leadership team, which passed the National Voter Registration Act, which you probably call Motor Voter. He’s the past chair of the board of advisors of the United States Election Assistance Commission, and prior to joining AAPD, where he was for a long time leading this work, Jim organized the campaign to place a statue of President Roosevelt in his wheelchair at the FDR Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, DC. He has a long history of grassroots organizing with multi-issue organizations all over the country. I know definitely in Rhode Island, Connecticut and also in California, so that covers three states Jack has probably heard of. And with the support of the Sierra Club, he organized the first grassroots congressional mobilization for the environmental movement, which resulted in the passage of the first Clean Air Act. So Jim has a long history of civil rights work and grassroots organizing, but if you know him, you probably know him for his leadership with the disability vote work. That’s how I know Jim, who’s actually been a mentor of mine for a long time. Welcome him to the podcast. Jim Dickson: So Justin Dart really used his appointment to the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities to lay the groundwork for the ADA. He and Yoshiko, his wife, went around to every state, held a public meeting and prior to going, they sent out emails saying, “Sit down for a few minutes and write down all of the experiences of discrimination that you experienced.” I don’t remember whether he said in the last week or the last month. And then in every state, they held a hearing, and people stood up and said, “I experienced discrimination because I got in an elevator, and there was no braille on the buttons, and I had to go to four floors before I got to the right floor.” That was turned into a report to Congress, and that report was used for Congress to hold hearings. The hearings were fascinating, very important. This whole process, which took years, was really the first time that anything approaching the cross-disability community existed. The blind, we were off doing our stuff. The ARC was doing their stuff. There were a few organizations like Nickel and NDRN who were cross-disability and active in more than one disability silo. But the struggle to pass the ADA really eliminated those silos. And it was really interesting both first for me, because I had never thought that the lack of a braille button in an elevator was an act of discrimination. I just thought it was a pain in the ass. And many of us began, because of the way Justin and Yoshiko framed the discussion, we really began to think for the first time in terms of civil rights, is this a discriminatory structure or situation statement? And some people got that very quickly. But I think for much of the community, not the advocates, not the lobbyists, but for the rank and file, I would say it took a good year for that perception of accesses to civil rights to really be absorbed emotionally and intellectually by much of the rank and file. Simultaneous with Justin and Yoshiko’s going around the country and collecting stories and giving a report, Evan Kemp and his partner played bridge with George Bush and Barbara Bush. They were social peers, class, old aristocratic families. And Evan got, between the shuffling, would talk about discrimination that he felt and experienced. And Evan graduated fourth in his class from Harvard Law, at the time walked with crutches and did not get one single offer from a major law firm to come and go to work, totally because using crutches, he was perceived as somehow less competent. Pat Wright with CCD, Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, formed a strategy committee. And again, there would be 20 to 30 people at every meeting representing 20 to 30 different organizations, different segments of the community. And in the initial stages, there was a lot of talk about if you weren’t blind, the fact that there wasn’t braille on the buttons or an audio announcement on the elevator never occurred to you. So there was a lot of sharing of this experience and recognition that it was discriminatory and a violation of civil rights. And I can’t emphasize enough that the concept of it being a civil rights violation was just stunning and extremely powerful prior to this whole conversation. Those of us who had jobs, careers, when we faced a barrier, our attitude was, “I got to find a workaround. I got to fix this. I got to find a way for me to operate in light of this barrier.” Very, very few of us talked or thought in terms of this barrier is a violation of my civil rights. So the most exciting thing about the process of passing the ADA was meeting with people with different disabilities, sharing our stories. And while there would be meetings in DC, led by Pat Wright and Curt Decker, the then director of NDRN, was very important in the whole process, there were meetings with members at the grassroots level, in the beginning mostly with the staff and a few places with the members. I won’t go into the lobbying strategy and the fact that the committee, the Congress, divided the bill up and had it heard in four different committees, two in the House, two in the Senate, that required a lot of fancy footwork. What was a very important strategic decisions that, in retrospect some of us regretted that we made, was a decision that we had to exempt the churches because the conversation went something like, “We’re picking a fight with business, we’re picking a fight with state and local governments, with school boards. We can’t fight everybody. Let’s not take the churches on, too.” And that was thought through, essentially agreed to. I was one of the minor voices who said, “Yeah, we should not take the churches on.” In retrospect, I’m not sure that was the right decision, but it was made. I guess I’ll move to the signing. Michelle Bishop: Before you do that, Jim, can I ask you a couple of questions? This is fascinating, like this just has my gears turning. Well, first and foremost, the decision not to take on the churches. And now so many churches are polling places, and you and I spent our whole careers, Jim, being tortured by inaccessible polling places in churches. But I was thinking about, it’s really fascinating to me that a lot of people with disabilities didn’t think of some of those things that had always been a pain in the butt as a violation of your civil rights, and how much that has changed since the ADA has become law. That really that framework for looking at the world is this isn’t just a pain in the butt thing that I have to deal with. This is a violation of my rights. We could’ve have built this differently from the start, and I think that that’s really interesting. Jim Dickson: Yeah, and it was really important. It was an emotion. And I want to emphasize that wasn’t just a change in the way of thinking. It was a change in the way we felt about ourselves. It was a very emotional and, therefore, difficult change. But once people felt “You’re screwing me, and it’s not right, and it’s a violation of my civil rights,” that psychic, emotional, almost spiritual change was really essential to the passage of the ADA. There was lots of fancy lobbying footwork. It was people would list members of Congress, and it was okay because just about every member of Congress, somewhere in their life circle at home, had a relationship with somebody with a disability. And a lot of the lobbying was built around which member has a connection with which part of the disability community, and then getting the grassroots in that state or congressional district to be the ones who went in. So a lot of the initial contacts at the grassroots level wasn’t a broad coalition, though that happened in some places. It was more somebody known to the member where there was a relationship and a conversation about barriers equal civil rights violations. And they were, in general, I sat in on a couple of those conversations and I heard members say, “You know, I never thought of it that way, but I can see that.” Michelle Bishop: I feel like some of that is still so true today. It’s people who have a personal connection to disability who get it. Jim Dickson: Yep. Michelle Bishop: I think that’s really still true of disability champions and the work that we’re doing. But I wanted to ask you about one more thing. This is something I’ve always heard through legend about the fight for the ADA. You talked early on about that kind of breaking down of the divisions and there being like a disability rights movement, a community that’s kind of cross-disability. And I had always heard that it took several years to get the ADA a passed, which is not uncommon, especially for a really big, really important bill. But that there were points in the negotiation process where if people with disabilities had agreed to exclude some of the more, at the time, controversial folks, like people in recovery from drug addiction and particularly in the late ’80s, people who are HIV positive, that there might have been quicker passage of the bill. I’ve always been told, through legend, people with disabilities refuse to do that and said it has to be all of us, and the bill eventually passed with all of us. Can you talk a little bit about that? Jim Dickson: Yes. Addiction was not universally seen as a disability. We saw it that way, but not everybody in the community did. And there were lots of conversations about, “Well, somebody’s a drunk, do they need to be protected, too?” There was also a lot of less frank conversation, but discomfort around should this apply to people with developmental disabilities? What about people with psychiatric problems? We can’t change society’s attitudes and fears about psychological disabilities, but they’ll use that to try to defeat us. And the conversations were they’re going to try to divide and conquer, and it’s got to be all of us or none of us. And again, that process took a while to work through at the national level, but it also, simultaneous with the national conversations, was going on at city and state levels all across the country. And I do think that one real benefit, well, one unforeseen positive consequence from the passage of the ADA is it did play an important role in shifting away from the superstition and bigotry aimed at people with psychiatric, developmental and substance-related disabilities. It wasn’t necessarily a major objective, but I think it played a major role in forcing a national conversation about each of those constituencies. Michelle Bishop: So what was it like to be at the signing of the ADA after, I think it was what, a seven, eight-year fight for this bill? And it’s such a landmark piece of civil rights legislation, so comprehensive. It just must have been a really powerful moment to be there with all of those leaders in the White House then. Jim Dickson: Well, and a couple of things, the leadership, Justin, Pat Wright, Curt, Evan basically said to, and it was Evan’s relationship and Janine, his partner’s relationship with the Bushes. And I said, “We don’t want a little signing in the Rose Garden. This is a major piece of civil rights legislation. It affects everything.” And people all around the country worked, wrote, did letters to the editors. So we got to invite and hold it out behind the White House where all of those, who worked to make it happen, could come and be part of the celebration. And there was a long line to get in the White House, and Curt being Curt, he was chatting with everybody and moving up and down the line. And I was towards the end with Justin and Curt says to Justin, “I don’t have my wallet or ID. It’s in a different suit. I put this suit on this morning straight from the cleaners.” Michelle Bishop: Oh, no. And if people don’t know about Curt Decker’s suit collection, that’s a whole other thing. Oh, my gosh. Okay, what happened? Jim Dickson: Well, he didn’t have any ID, and so the guards knew Justin and Justin said, “This man is important. He needs to be here. It’s a simple human error. I’ll vouch for him. Let him in.” And so Curt got in, but there was a minute or two there where it looked like he was going to be tearing through the fence in his new suit. Michelle Bishop: Oh, that’s terrible. I know he fought hard for the ADA. And his heart must’ve been in his throat. Jim Dickson: Yep. So I sat with Bob Cooper and other folks from Rhode Island, and Evan was on the stage. Janine Bertram, Evan’s partner, had a colorful past and actually had a conviction around, I don’t remember specifically what it was, but trying to stop the Vietnam War. She broke through something, or pour blood on the records, or I don’t remember what it was. But in a big group like this, even though she had been playing bridge with George and Barbara Bush about once a month, there was real nervousness on the part of the security people about having her in the audience. And Cooper and I were assigned to sort of run interference for her. And a very genteel Texas lady aristocrat was assigned to sit between Janine and the aisle to make sure she didn’t leave the aisle. And I played my blind card with my dog, and I got myself in the aisle. And it was a riot because this woman was very nervous, and she had on a lot of jewelry, and whenever she jumped up, you could hear a jingle. And as people walked in and saw Janine, they’d all yell, “Hey, Janine,” and Janine would stand up, and people would hug, and I’d move out of the way so they’d hug. And this poor woman had mild heart attacks every time Janine stepped out into the aisle, but Janine knew she had to stay where we were. But it was a, I don’t know what you would call it, it was an ironic, funny kind of capstone story. I used a white cane in those days, and I had a little, bunch of us had American flags handheld, and I taped my flag to my cane. And whenever we’d cheered and waved, I would stick my cane up in the air and wave it with the flag on it. And at the very end of one of the network coverage, because this had never happened, there was well over a thousand people. And one of the networks picked up on that and showed the flag waving on a white cane a couple of times during this story. And after the signing, we all went back out onto the Mall and had refreshments. And Justin and Evan and Pat worked the crowd saying, “Passing this law is going to be much easier than enforcing it, and we’re going to need organized fights to force enforcement.” And some of that’ll be legal, but a lot of that has to be political public education. We were asked, people were asked to go back and meet with the editorial boards at their newspapers or TV. A lot of people had set up interviews with the local TV stations, either as they left or came back. And it was really important strategically and that the message for those who of us who were interviewed when we got home, “Oh, it was great, but it’s easier to pass the law than enforce it, and we’re going to have to work hard to get this enforced.” And that message was delivered hundreds of times to local media by the folks who had come to Washington. It was very important. Michelle Bishop: And ain’t that the truth? Jim Dickson: Yes, yes. Michelle Bishop: That predicted the next 30 years of the disability rights movement. Yeah. Wow. Jim Dickson: Yeah. We still have a long way to go. I mean, the unemployment rate is still double for the able-bodied. We still have lots of people, because disability can pop up in a family for the first time, we still have lots of people being hidden, sheltered, not integrated by their families. And unlike other civil rights movements, we have not moved yet to where people with disabilities will run for office with the disability story being central to their political message. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, African Americans ran, arguing, debating, telling their story of discrimination. The women’s movement came along, women moved and ran on their stories. The gay rights successes came. But where were the people with disability running for office with their disability being an upfront in Central Park why they should be elected? Michelle Bishop: And yet you’ve never run yourself, Jim. Wait, maybe it’s time. Jim Dickson: I’m too old. I’m 78. If I were younger, I would’ve. Michelle Bishop: Also wait, I have one more question about the day the ADA was signed. You all after the signing was over, went around town talking about how we’re going to have to fight to enforce this bill. Nobody said, “For today, let’s stop and have a beer?” Jim Dickson: No, we did. People did do some of that, but we had… It was hot, and so we had ice cream and cold drinks set up on the Mall for people, and clusters of people had their beers and that kind of stuff. Michelle Bishop: That’s a good point. It was July. I think the other lesson learned for future disability rights leaders is do not have your major bill signed in the middle of the summer. Jim Dickson: Right. Michelle Bishop: You will have to go to anniversaries on the lawn every year in the heat. Jim Dickson: Yep. Michelle Bishop: This was fascinating to me that… I’m sorry, I’m also monopolizing. Did anybody else have questions or thoughts? Jim Dickson: You know, it is amazing when I was thinking about this. It’s been years since I got in an elevator that didn’t have a braille button. It’s been years since I had a cab driver or a restaurant saying, “You can’t come in here with that dog.” So there has been real progress, but I’m not sure that it’s really spread thoroughly amongst the rank and file. Michelle Bishop: I was thinking that, too. Early on, you were talking about the braille buttons on the elevator. And when you were kind of bringing it all back around and talking about how we’ve come forward, but we still have a long way to go, in the back of my mind I was thinking, but I do always see braille on the elevator buttons. Jim Dickson: Yep, yep. Michelle Bishop: So we’ve solved a few problems. Jim Dickson: And now we even have elevators that announce, in addition to the braille. Michelle Bishop: So looking forward, I mean, this was really fantastic. We were all really interested in hearing about what it took to get the ADA passed, and also just that moment when you see your work come into fruition. But looking forward, what do you think is the next big task, goal, I don’t… for the disability rights movement? Where do we go from here? Jim Dickson: I do think we have to start getting leaders to run for office at the local] and national level. As much progress as we have may about the public attitude towards disability, what just happened to Joe Biden says there is still prejudice and fear that bodily dysfunction and psychiatric dysfunction can generate in the general public. And I think people running for school boards saying, “My experience being blind or deaf or using a wheelchair or whatever is important, and I can bring value to how the school system is run or the state legislature,” we need to force the dialogue. It’s great that we’re seen as having civil rights, but we need to be seen as leaders outside of the disability silos. We need to be seen as people whose life experience will make us strong leaders who make the country, the state, the city a better place to live. Michelle Bishop: Jim, thank you. This was amazing. This was fascinating. I know I’m looking at my co-hosts, and they’re all getting really excited and really worked up. Stephanie said, #CriptheCongress- Jim Dickson: Right. Michelle Bishop: … which I love. Thank you for hopping on with us and just sharing your story. I think it’s really important that we capture all of that. Jim Dickson: Right. I should mention Jonathan Young wrote a very good short book on the story of the passage of the ADA and for the life of me, I can’t remember the title. Michelle Bishop: Oh, we could probably find it and put it in the show notes if folks want to check it out. Jim Dickson: Yeah, should definitely be there because it tells a lot of good stories and points that I touched on for two minutes, get elaborated for 15 pages on the book. And it’s very readable. It’s not a tome. Michelle Bishop: Okay. Oh, thank you. We’ll look out for that. That’s amazing. Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate it. I don’t know if folks know, Jim and I go way back, well, maybe not like signing of the ADA far back, but pretty far back. Jim Dickson: Yep. Michelle Bishop: We’ve done a lot of work together over the years on access to the vote for people with disabilities. So feel like looking towards the future in saying we need to be seen as leaders and we should not only be voting, but be elected to office. I feel like that’s where we leave it, right? That’s the message. Jim Dickson: Yep. Thanks a lot, everybody. Jack Rosen: Wow, that was so great of Jim to come on and share his stories with us and talk about what it was like to fight for the passage of the ADA. Michelle Bishop: My favorite thing about this interview is that our last ADA episode had Curt Decker, and this episode featured Jim calling out Curt Decker for wearing the wrong suit to the White House that didn’t have his ID in it, and almost not getting into the signing of the ADA. I will pretty much never forget that story. Stephanie Flynt McEben: That’s too funny. Michelle Bishop: Thanks, Jim. We appreciate it. These days both Curt and Jim are, I’m going to say, mostly retired. Because they claim to be retired, but we still see them everywhere advocating for everything. So I hope Curt is off somewhere on a cruise and Jim is off somewhere sailing. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Wow. Michelle Bishop: Stephanie, do you have a joke for us? Stephanie Flynt McEben: I do, indeed. Are y’all ready for the… I feel like this one’s too easy, but oh, well. Michelle Bishop: I feel like we’re probably not ready. Stephanie Flynt McEben: No, it’s fine. So what do y’all call baked spaghetti? I feel like Michelle’s going to know this. Jack Rosen: Wait, I got it. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh, do you? Michelle Bishop: What is it? What is it? Jack Rosen: An impasta? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yep. Go, Jack. Yay. Michelle Bishop: Jack, it’s finally your time. You got the joke. Stephanie Flynt McEben: I knew it was too easy. Jack Rosen: Finally. We need it. These used to be easier. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Sorry. Jack Rosen: No, it feels good. It’s a nice win. Stephanie Flynt McEben: > Michelle Bishop: You really stepped up your… You can’t sing Demi Lovato. We’re going to get sued. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yep, exactly. That’s the whole point. Michelle Bishop: Okay, okay. That’s fair. Well, before Demi Lovato comes for us and ends our podcast, Jack, can you tell the people where to find us on social media? Jack Rosen: If Demi Lovato’s attorneys would like to reach us to let us know they’re suing us, they can reach us at podcast@ndrn.org. They could also let us know via the comments on our social media pages, which includes Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads and Blue Sky. So if you represent Demi Lovato, please reach out to us at any of those options. Until next time, folks… Stephanie Flynt McEben: Bye.

National Disability Radio: Curt Decker

Posted July 10, 2025 • 00:46:49

To kick off our series highlighting the fight for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act we have on NDRN’s founder and former Executive Director Curt Decker. Curt tells us about how the disability community came together to make sure no one was left out of the protections of the ADA and warns us about the downsides of helping getting major legislation passed in summertime in DC. Full Transcript available at: https://www.ndrn.org/resource/ndr-curt-decker/ Jack Rosen: I don’t know. I guess someone has to kick it off, right? Michelle Bishop: One of us should definitely be talking. How long have we been recording? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Like four seconds? I don’t know. It’s raining outside, y’all. It’s gross. Michelle Bishop: Are we just sitting here not recording? Jack Rosen: We’re recording. Stephanie Flynt McEben: No, we’re sitting here recording. We’re just not speaking. Michelle Bishop: Sitting here recording nothing? Jack Rosen: I guess- Michelle Bishop: We can’t put out dead air. Jack Rosen: We could. We could do a more experimental- Stephanie Flynt McEben: [inaudible 00:00:24] nothing and it’d be fine. Michelle Bishop: Experimental? Jack Rosen: Yeah, we could do a more experimental type of podcast. Maybe it’s like jazz, where podcasting is about the notes you don’t play. Is that what people say about jazz? Michelle Bishop: Is it? Just roll the opening. Welcome back to National Disability Radio. I am one of your hosts. Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager at NDRN. Stephanie Flynt McEben: And I’m Stephanie Flynt McEben, public policy analyst with NDRN. Michelle Bishop: And our producer who keeps trying to sneaky call himself a host. Jack Rosen: Hi, producer and host. Really bit of everything. The workhorse of the podcast, if you will. Jack Rosen here. How are you doing folks? Michelle Bishop: Not the workhorse of the podcast. Okay. Okay, wait, so this is… We’re kicking off our ADA special? Jack Rosen: Yes. This is the first for our series of interviews with folks who were involved in fighting for passage of the ADA. And for this one, we have on an old friend. Michelle, you want to tell people who we have? Michelle Bishop: So for the very first in our series on the ADA, we actually have a good friend of the podcast, Curt Decker, who is actually the former executive director of NDRN. He actually founded the National Disability Rights Network in 1982 and led the organization for, what, 40 years? Yeah, yeah. About 40 years. Before that, Curt was actually the director of the Maryland Disability Law Center, which is the Maryland PNA. He was also the director of the Help Resource Project for Abused and Neglected Children. And was a VISTA worker prior to being a senior attorney for Baltimore Legal Aid Bureau. So Curt has deep roots in Maryland and the DMV and was our fearless leader for… Stephanie, were you here when… Did you- Stephanie Flynt McEben: I was very briefly. So I started in 2021, and then Curt retired in summer of 2022. Michelle Bishop: Okay, so every single one of us can say that Curt was once upon a time our fearless leader before Marlene Sallo took the helm of NDRN. So in addition to all that, Curt actually was instrumental in the creation and passage of the ADA and was on the White House lawn the day that it was signed. And he’s here today to tell us about that experience. Curt, did you go to Hamilton? Curt Decker: Yes. Michelle Bishop: I did not know that. Curt Decker: Oh yeah. That was so weird about my life. I grew up in Albany, went to Hamilton. I got accepted to Brown, but frankly, Hamilton gave me more money. So I went to Hamilton. Money was an issue. And then I ended up at Cornell for law school and took the New York bar, came down to Baltimore for one year as a legal aid attorney and never went back, and then… Never practiced law in New York, a total waste of time to take the New York bar and they still call me now to… Please, I’m long gone. Anyway. I did a couple things in Baltimore, got hired by Maryland Disability Law Center, [inaudible 00:03:37] it was called something else then. It was the very first iteration of the PNA system when it was only developmental disabilities. And then I helped… You know the story. I helped form the national association with a bunch of other execs around the country because there wasn’t anything. And then started going over to Washington because I was the closest guy there, maybe other than DC, and started representing at NAPAS it was called then, first as a volunteer, then as a paid consultant, then executive director. Michelle Bishop: What did you do when you were actually at the Maryland PNA? Curt Decker: I was executive director. I got hired. I was running a child abuse program for the state of Maryland. I knew people around. I got a call from one of my board members who was involved. She said [inaudible 00:04:23], “This new thing that just created by Congress called the Protection and Advocacy Systems, and it’s supposed to investigate abuse and neglect of people with disabilities, and we need someone to take it over and make it work.” And I said, “I don’t know anything about disability. I have no contact with the disability community at all. I never had a disability. I really didn’t have any relatives with it, so this is way…” And they said, “No, no, we don’t care. We need someone who can get this thing together and make it work.” The child abuse program was another federal grant. It was winding down, so I was like, “Okay, I’ll try it.” And I was lucky, it was right around when 94-142 came into existence, the Rehab Act. So I was like, “Oh, these are interesting legal issues. I never knew about this.” And then I went out to Rosewood State Hospital and the director there locked me in the room, the day room, with a bunch of adult, folks with developmental disabilities and tried to scare me, and it was like… Fortunately, I wasn’t scared. It was a great story. I walked in, these men were there, they looked around, there was a new person in the room. So they got all excited and they started coming towards me and it was like, “Ooh, this is interesting.” And I smiled and they all smiled and it was like… What’s when I realized that these… We tried to close Rosewood. We finally closed it in 20… I think it was 2010. I started in 1979, and it took 30 years to close that craphole down. So when I was there, there were 3000 people at Rosewood, and then eventually we kept pushing and pushing and pushing. So yeah. It was called MAUDD, the Maryland Advocacy Unit for the Developmentally Disabled, MAUDD. And I was executive director for three years. Michelle Bishop: I actually did not realize you started as the executive director. More than 3000 people in a single institution. Curt Decker: Oh, Willowbrook was 7,000. Michelle Bishop: What? Curt Decker: Those places are big. Michelle Bishop: I did not- Curt Decker: Very big, very big. I think Willowbrook, We always tell that story in the history of the P&As, it was the largest facility for people with intellectual disabilities in the world, I think. And a nightmare. You’ve seen that video a million times, I’m sure. Michelle Bishop: [inaudible 00:06:33], yeah. Curt Decker: Anyway. Yeah, so then I started, I spent some time… I left Maryland, but I was… Were working for NAPAS, but part-time I had other clients. I had clients in Annapolis I was representing. It’s now called AAIDD, but it was called AAMR at the time. I was working part-time, I was working on the CAP program, and I was sitting in the DC P&A office writing stuff, and we got the CAP program, and then we got the CAP grant, and then that was [inaudible 00:07:05]. They hired me full-time, and I think that’s when they hired Sally Rose and off we went. We had PAD and we had CAP, and then we got PAIMI and just kept going. Michelle Bishop: That’s funny. My mentor, when I started out independent living center in Missouri, and my mentor was one of the original disability lobbyists in Missouri, and he got into that work because he was working in independent living center, and they had a bill they wanted to get passed. They didn’t have a lobbyist then. So he was like, “I’ll go.” Went and found someone to sponsor the bill, and they were like, “We’ll take care of this.” And he went back to St. Louis and they didn’t do anything. And then of course, the bill went nowhere, and that was the one they learned the lesson that, if you’re not there- Curt Decker: That’s right. Michelle Bishop: Pushing for it, it’s not going to happen. And it sounds like the P&As were created, and then you understood that if you’re not there, somebody’s not in DC protecting what we have and building upon it, it’s not going to happen. Curt Decker: And that was exactly right, because [inaudible 00:08:07] I ran this child abuse program. I had done that for four years, and again, they were all over the country, a similar model. We’d have these meetings and I would say to people… And I helped organize an association of these child abuse programs, the same because they were federally funded. When I got to the P&A and I started talking to the other executive directors in the early days, ADD had money, and they brought us all together for a meeting. And it was like, who’s representing us in Washington? Well poor Marshawn, the ARC is the guy who’s [inaudible 00:08:44], “That doesn’t make any sense.” We had big fights. The first fight was whether we should have a national association. There were a bunch of Executive Directors, “People will tell us what to do from Washington if we have that.” Well, they were right, that’s exactly what happened over the years we kept saying. “Here’s a new program. Here’s a new program. Here’s a voting program. Shut up. Take it whether you want it or not.” So we had that battle and we’ve created the national association. Then we had to say, “We need dues, we need money.” And people, “Oh, no, no, no we can’t charge, we can’t use our federal money to pay dues. It’ll take money away from direct services.” We had the big fight about that. So then we created a due structure, and then that started getting us a little bit of money. That’s when they could hire me as a consultant, but each one of those developmental stages was a fight. And as you well know, we’ve been fighting ever since. Some of the P&As, “We don’t want this social security program.” “Shut up, take it. It’s great.” Michelle Bishop: I’m a little bit biased, but I’m glad that they took the voting program. Curt Decker: Yes, I guess I’m too. I worked on that. I worked really hard on that. It should have been $10 million. That was with the Help America Vote, but we only got five. What’s that turn now, about eight or nine? Michelle Bishop: Yeah. Yeah. It’s grown. Curt Decker: Yeah. Don’t get me going about history, I can go on for days. Michelle Bishop: Actually, that is somewhat the point of this- Stephanie Flynt McEben: That is the point, yes. Curt Decker: Right, right, right. Michelle Bishop: We’re doing a series about the fight for the ADA leading up to the anniversary of the ADA, and we were just hoping you could tell us about your experiences being a part of that fight to create the ADA, get it passed into law, get it enforced, all of that. Curt Decker: Sure. I can do that. Do we need to start free going here and just, or do you have specific questions or do you want me to start talking? Michelle Bishop: I feel like tell us a story. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, [inaudible 00:10:45] stories. Curt Decker: Okay. As I remember it, [inaudible 00:10:49] other people, the earliest iteration was the National Council put together a whole report on the need to… First I mean way back. We had the Rehab Act of 1974, where that banned discrimination based on federally-funded and federally-conducted programs. And from ’74 until about the late 80s that was in place. We and other people would use that to go after, again, federally-funded or federally-conducted. Somewhat broad because you had a lot of federal contractors. But people realized that that was, on the one hand, pretty narrow, and there was a whole other world out there that was not covered. So the National Council started with a proposal to do this, have a whole new discrimination bill to recover everything. It was a blueprint, it didn’t really go anywhere, but it got people organized around it. Initially, it was controversial because the original thing was it was going to be a flat earth position that everything had to be accessible. And when we started meeting with people, I met with Weicker and Tom Harkin with Bobby Silverstein and some other people, and it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to go anywhere because people would say things like, “What do you do with the New York subway? What do you do with all of these old buildings, old… With Amtrak, you just can’t mandate automatically a flat earth.” So that changed. I think Pat Wright was someone who actually came up with this idea, “We’ll go from the flat earth to a line in the sand. We’re going to dry a line in the sand the day this thing passes. Everything new is going to have to be accessible, and we’ll just live with the old stuff. There’s just not much we can do about that, and maybe over years things will get better.” And so we formed this coalition of all the disability groups. I always tell people that one of the things that I thought was terrific was that everyone sort of put down their cudgels and stopped fighting with each other and came together as a unified group. We created a grassroots group, we created a group in Washington that met regularly, and we started getting… Tony Coelho was taking the lead in the House, although he disappeared. I never ever figured out why he just left the Congress overnight. And so Steny Hoyer picked it up. And then of course, Weicker I think moved on. Lowell Weicker was very important to us as well. He’s the person I got the CAP program and the PAMI program from. He was a Republican from Connecticut. He had a child with a disability. Anyway. So we began the process and it was a pretty hard slog in terms of… Because if you think about it, now what we’re doing is we’re taking on the entire country, every business, every major organization, and they’re organized. So you have the NFIB, the National Federation of Independent Business, you have the National Restaurant Association, you have Amtrak, you have the Catholic Church. The one story I always tell people about is that the reason why churches are not covered by the ADA is pretty much because the Catholic church came in and the Senate especially, I remember that hearing really well where they came in and said, “We do not want to be covered by the ADA. We would have to hire. For example, we will have to hire people with HIV, which means they’re gay and we don’t want to have gay employees.” So there was this really interesting connection between homophobia and disability discrimination, and that’s one of the reasons why churches are not covered. And so today, the church across the street from my house in Baltimore, they just spent a bunch of money putting in ramps, but it was all voluntary because there’s no requirement. I think churches figured out that so many of their constituents are old that they better have things that are accessible. So that was one story. As I remember, in trying to kill the bill, these national associations, the two big issues at the time, ’88, ’89, were AIDS and mental health. And so the National Restaurant Association came in and demanded to have their staff of restaurants excluded. And their theory was that… It sounds ridiculous now, but I spent many, many hours, we all did, talking about blood in the salad. The restaurant association said that, “If we have to hire or keep waiters staff that have HIV, they’re going to cut themselves, bleed in the salad, and they’ll give AIDS to our customers.” There was an amendment in the House to… They called it the Chapman Amendment to try to eliminate food workers from coverage of the ADA under this whole shibboleth of AIDS. And so that was used as a sort of a stalking horse to try to throw the… People just wanted to kill the bill and so that was one way of trying to do that. The same thing was with mental health, [inaudible 00:15:59] have all these mentally ill people. Amtrak used that a lot. And we would get things like, “What are you talking about? You have people with mental illness on Amtrak now. You have no way of keeping them off.” So the idea that amendment.So then we got into all these side arguments. The Chapman Amendment passed the House, but we got it knocked out in the Senate. So that never happened. So there was no food worker exemption. Catholic Church won, but the restaurant Association did not. I spent a lot of time with, I think Congressman Dingell, time on Amtrak. One of the things that Amtrak, and you probably know this from all the work that we did later on at NDRN, Amtrak came and said, “We’re old and broken, and we have all these terrible stations, and Congress doesn’t like us and they don’t give us enough money, and there’s no possible way we could make Amtrak accessible.” And we went back and forth and back and forth, and we said, “Okay, we hear you. So we’ll give you 20 years.” There were various different negotiations like that where I think we gave over-the-road bus companies like Greyhound and Peter Pan five years, we gave Amtrak 20 years. And so there were all these… We gave city buses 30 days because the theory was that 30 days after passage, you did not have to ever… You could buy an accessible bus. And so they got one of the shortest timelines. But other people, over-the-road buses were like, “We don’t turn them over that often, so we need five years.” And as I think you probably know when we found out 19 years later, Amtrak did nothing. And that’s when we jumped in and did the report and started… And DOJ took the report and sued. And then that’s when Ken and I started meeting with Amtrak quarterly and all of that, as I tried to get them to… But it was pretty outrageous that they let 19 years go by without… And some of that was… I always tell people that some of it was on us. We didn’t pay attention. We ignored them. And we thought, “Now they’re doing it” and we never really checked to see if they were. And when we finally found out they weren’t, it was so embarrassed. we should have stayed on top of that. And then the other thing I remember is it really was a time when the entire disability community came together. And I do remember some very specific moments sitting in a congressman’s office with Lee Page from Paralyzed Veterans in a wheelchair, some blind people from NFB. And you’d get the congressman saying like, “You don’t want to cover HIV. You’ll be willing to take that out.” And they would say, “No, no. No, we’re not going to slice off unpopular disabilities from this thing. We’re going to stick together and we want the whole thing. We want everybody to be included. We’ll make these side deals depending on different industries, but basically…” And I thought that was an incredible moment when the disability community really came together and unified and said, “We’re not going to throw different people off the boat because right now they’re very unpopular.” Michelle Bishop: That’s one of the things that’s always really incredible to me about the ADA is that it was this moment where the community stood together and the definition of what a disability is and who’s protected being so incredibly broad, I think is so powerful. I did not know. The homophobia that was wrapped up and all that is wild to me. I’m not eating a salad with anyone’s blood in it. Curt Decker: Right, exactly. Michelle Bishop: That’s when you send it back. Curt Decker: Right. That’s right. Or even with a hair or a roach for that matter, but it’s like… Yeah. And that was an side issue in there that [inaudible 00:19:47]. Because if you think about, you’re probably too young, but 1988, it was the height of the AIDS crisis. There was very little in the way of… I think ACT came around. We didn’t discover HIV until 85, and then it was like ’87, ’88, there was really no cure. It was pretty frightening and people were pretty hysterical about that. And so that seeped into this whole issue about disability discrimination. And of course, the mentally ill have always been unpopular and still are, and still scapegoated. Michelle Bishop: And you were at the signing of the ADA at the White House, weren’t you? Curt Decker: I was. Where was I? So the signing was quite an event, and it was Sandra Perino from the National Council on Disability and Evan Kemp, because people did still credit the National Council on Disability starting the ball by coming up with that. As I said early on, that original report, which I don’t think really ended… It was the basis, but the actual bill was quite a ways removed from that initial, we want the world concept. Those pictures of the signing, it was a great day. It was a great day, but it was hot. Every time I’ve ever gone back to the White House for subsequent celebrations, it was always in July, and we were just miserable. So I always tell people, “Let’s get the bill signed in October.” The other thing that we did when we finally got… We lobbied to get a statue of Franklin Roosevelt in the Roosevelt Memorial in a wheelchair. The original design did not acknowledge at all that he had polio and that he was in wheelchair. And so we fought for that and we got that. And that ceremony was in December. I was like, “Here we go, [inaudible 00:21:38] freezing or boiling.” Michelle Bishop: So you need to plan bill passage like a wedding. You got to shoot for the spring or the fall. Curt Decker: Absolutely. Michelle Bishop: The White House, you got a suit on and everything. It can’t be/ Curt Decker: Oh my God, one of the worst just dreadful. [inaudible 00:21:53]. Was it the 20th? Was it five years ago? It might’ve been earlier than that. And it’s 90 degrees. And they also had… Patti LaBelle was going to sing. And of course the president and everybody else is in the White House. Cool. We’re out on this lawn just dripping. And out comes Patti LaBelle, and we’re like, “Great, this is going to be fabulous.” She starts singing and she’s going to sing New Attitude and we’re all bopping around. And then she goes off the deep end about her sister, her husband, she’s my shero. It couldn’t have been worse. I dragged myself over to the W Hotel to get a drink, it was so silly. But you know, it was great. We were honored to be there. We should definitely all be there, but it doesn’t come without its downsides in July. Let’s see, I’m trying to think of some other things that happened in the actual lobbying experience that were… Because the things that I worked on were the Chapman Amendment, the Amtrak stuff, tons of meetings [inaudible 00:22:54], a lot of the meetings with Harkin and Hatch to try to bring the Republicans over. So I don’t know. I don’t know if this is all helpful at all. Michelle Bishop: No, it is. This is amazing. This is stuff that we want to record and get down because like you said, Stephanie and I, we weren’t there. I only know a bit through legend. Curt Decker: Yeah, no, it was a major… It still needs to be enforced. I think Maryland just ended up suing the Baltimore City for curb cuts because things are still bad in lot of places and of course Amtrak just blew us off. The other things that are interesting, airlines are not covered because there was a separate Air Carrier Access Act that had passed earlier and that Ken and I did some reg neg or regulation negotiations with the airlines. Housing’s not in there because we’d gotten disability into the Fair Housing Act in 1988, I think. And that was an interesting experience as well. That’s when I ran into Wade Henderson for the first time, and he was adamant about… His position, which I understand was you can’t open up the Fair Housing Act to add disability. If you do, other forces will come forward and try to rip the whole thing apart. So he was pretty anti adding a disability, but we went forward and we got it and we were able to save it. But that’s one of the reasons went to Eric and I was like, “The DD council, for example, wants to reauthorize the DD Act.” And it’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, don’t go there because they’ll leave you alone, they’ll come right after the P&As. They’ll come after the access authority, they’ll come after the legal authority. You do not want to open up this bill.” So I understand the theory about not opening up established law for a good reason. And that was what happened. You probably know that we had to do the ADA Amendments Act because we started getting… You pass a bill and it looks great, and you think you’ve covered all the basis, and then it goes into the courts. And then over the next three or four or five years, we were starting getting one horrible opinion after another. And Sandra Day O’Connor was the culprit in the Supreme Court as it came to… Let me see if I get this right. The bill came to Supreme Court. Oh, I know what happened. So the case was there were two women pilots that flew regional airlines and they wanted to be promoted to the big airplanes which was where the money was, but you had to have 20/20 vision and they were denied. Their lawyer brought lawsuits under the ADA saying, “It’s discrimination.” In the surface, it wasn’t… If you were a pilot of a big airplane and you needed to wear glasses, you’re fine, but you couldn’t get to be a pilot if you needed glasses. So it goes to the Supreme Court and we’re hysterical because it’s like, “We do not want to get this bill before the Supreme Court.” And sure enough, Sandra Day O’Connor rules that if, yes, they have a disability in terms of poor eyesight, but they can ameliorate the disability by putting on glasses. And if you can fix the disability, you’re not covered. That just blew the whole employment section of the ADA out the window. Because think about it, you’re mentally ill, you take lithium, you cured disability. Getting in a wheelchair, “Oh, you’re no longer disabled because you’re ambulatory.” The ramifications were just stupendous about being able to fix your disability and not therefore not being covered. So we had to go back and after telling the whole disability community for years, “Do not open up this bill. Don’t you dare. You know there’s things we’d like to change. No way. Because we open this up and all those things that we beat back originally in 1989, ’90 will come back to haunt us.” But then we had a reverse course because this was so bad and just wiped out all the protections of the ADA that we would go back. I fell blue myself. I think Andy Imparato who was working… I know where he was at the time. Was he at APD? We met and we got the Chamber of Commerce in because they were relatively supportive the first time around. And we renegotiated, Jennifer Mathis renegotiated. Leadership Conference was involved and came up with a definition of disability that said if you had these conditions, you were covered. And it didn’t make any difference to what you did. You put on glasses, you wrote a crutch, or you had drugs or diabetes. It was like, wait a second, [inaudible 00:27:38] tell me the… And people with epilepsy were getting thrown out of court because, “Oh, you can take your seizure medication so you’re no longer a person with a disability.” It was devastating all based on a pair of eyeglasses. Michelle Bishop: I actually did not know much of any of that. I want to be honest, I didn’t know any of that. And as a wearer of glasses, I am offended. Curt Decker: Yeah. To me, what’s interesting about that story is you work on a bill, you think you’ve got it covered, you pass it, great, fabulous, big celebration, go to the White House, and then it goes into the world and it starts getting used and things start to happen and it starts going to courts and you get the backlash. We’ve got huge backlash about back problems. A lot of people, a lot of them, not great lawyers, you come in, “I was fired for my job.” “Oh, why?” “My boss.” “Do you have a disability?” “I have bad back.” “Okay, you were fired because you’re disabled.” And so we got a whole bunch of cases in the early years of these, mostly back issues, but lawyers who were looking for a way to defend their client would try to glom… Even though the fact that they were fired had nothing to do with any impairment, they were fired because they’re a lousy worker, but that’s what lawyers… And then we started getting this really bad reputation. The bill was getting a reputation for being all these insignificant cases and it was being abused, gone to a whole thing around accessibility stuff with restaurants. I remember was a big hoo-ha with Clint Eastwood who owned a restaurant out in California, and he came out and he went to Congress. And of course, there’s nothing worse in the world than to watch a congressional hearing with a movie star. These congressmen just fall apart and just lap it up. That’s why people are always trying to get movie stars to come and testify because the whole committee shows up, they just drool over them. And he got a lot of play about the abuse of the ADA making his restaurant bathrooms accessible. Shut up. And there were attempts at trying to amend the ADA around that as well. So just getting it passed ain’t enough. You’ve got to watch it and see how it spins out into the world and how it gets used well, not so well, abused. And then you have to deal with the backlash. And the thing, as I said, the… I think it was ’86 or ’96, the ADA Amendments Act. You go back in and try to clean that up. And then we had to do the stuff with Amtrak, still are. I think Kenneth is better now, is still probably meeting with them. So that’s what I know and that’s what I can remember anyway. Michelle Bishop: I also think these days, there’s so much wild misunderstanding about the ADA. I have heard people say, “Oh, you have to hire people with disability, so you’re going to have a blind person drive a school bus?” That’s not how it works. [inaudible 00:30:34], “Oh, you’re going to have a service boa constrictor and bring them into a restaurant?” That’s not how any of this works. Stephanie Flynt McEben: [inaudible 00:30:40] I want to drive a school bus. Just kidding. Curt Decker: No, that’s… [inaudible 00:30:47]. Let me tell you about this. So one of the things we did do in 1989 is because we had the experience of the ’74 Rehab Act. So all these concepts of reasonable accommodation, essential function of the job, readily available, readily achievable, these were all concepts that had developed all through the 70s and 80s about how you interpreted the nondiscrimination. As employment, you had to be able to do the essential function of the job. if you’re blind, you can’t drive a bus, so you cannot use the ADA to have a blind bus driver, you had to be able to do the essential function. So what we said, just like that whole story about the flat earth going to, “Okay, can’t do that, we’ll draw a line in the sand and go forward.” We also talked about putting the doughnut over the hole. The ADA was going to be the doughnut that sat over the concepts of the 74 Rehab Act, which we thought was smart because it was like these are tried and true concepts, reasonable accommodation had been out there for decades, over a decade, and so did readily achievable. And these were the things that were the balance, the statute that something had to be readily to make it accessible, and if it was going to cost a zillion dollars and bankrupt. So if you’re a bodega on the corner and you now had to make your store accessible, but it was going to bankrupt you, that was not readily achievable. You weren’t covered and you didn’t have to do that. If you were a big corporation, your ability to do readily achievable was a lot greater. So there was trying to strike these balances. And the same thing with reasonable accommodation. The accommodation had to be reasonable. You just couldn’t demand to do things, accommodations in the workplace that… I’ve never been a fan of Mother Teresa because she fought us on not wanting to put an elevator in her businesses. It was a compromise and it was a reasonable bill trying to use these concepts that we thought people did fight back obviously. But it was a good, I think, strategy to build on what had already existed and not come up with all kinds of new weird things. Because as I said earlier, we were going after the entire country, every doctor’s office, every dry cleaning establishment, every restaurant, you name it. And it was going to be covered under the ADA, and that was terrifying to a lot of businesses. Michelle Bishop: Okay, I’m thinking about it now. I’m about to look it up. I’m pretty sure the Mother Teresa I remember from my youth was using a wheelchair at some point. Is that true? I’m wondering if that changed her stance. Curt Decker: I doubt. I don’t know. Michelle, I really can’t tell, but I know she had two-story buildings and she refused to put elevators in there. But you know we always said… And the other thing with things had to be like the program accessibility. So if you had a program, if you had a building without an elevator, you just had to make sure the program was available. So you bring the program down to the first floor in order to accommodate a person with a disability. So there were these kinds of trying to come up with some reasonable [inaudible 00:34:13] head off opposition, but two, to be fair and not bankrupt places. Then we had the other abuse was these drive-by lawsuits, you probably remember. I don’t know if they’re still going on, but again, some fairly unscrupulous law firms would go get a person with a disability, travel around to a whole bunch of places, liquor stores, restaurants, and they’d go in and they’d say, “Oh, your bathroom isn’t fully accessible.” And the restaurant would say, “Okay, thank you. I’ll fix it.” They fix it and then they’d get a letter from the lawyer saying, “You owe $2,500 for attorney’s fees.” They would do that like 50 or 60 times. They did a lot in California, a lot in Florida. So where’d the businesses go? They went right to their congressmen and said, “We’re being ripped off. We made the fix. And yes, if we went to court, we would win, but it’s going to cost me $5,000 to hire a lawyer to fight it and this guy wants $2,500. I’ll just pay it and get my money back.” Then we started getting all these congresspeople who wanted to amend the ADA because of all these… It was all these frivolous lawsuits. They weren’t frivolous, there was a violation, but it was fixed. So it was just a scam by a couple of law firms who saw an opportunity to… You always have to be on guard for these kind… Everything can get abused. The tax code’s abused. Everything is abused. You don’t throw it out, but you try to deal with it. I remember calling a couple of those of law firms, trying to talk them to negotiate with them about, “You’re killing us here and giving the ADA a really bad name.” They didn’t care, they were making money. Michelle Bishop: Even though you accidentally, it sounds like, fell into working in the disability rights movement a long time ago, it clearly became a life’s passion. What do you see as the new frontier in disability rights? I think the ADA has changed so much about the lives of people with disabilities. It can’t be overstated how incredibly important the ADA has been, but a lot has changed since 1990. In your mind, what’s next? Where do we go from here? Curt Decker: It’s a good question. I’ve been retired now, and so I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these issues. I have a little bit of contact with a few people out there once in a while. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how.. By the way, you’re absolutely right. It changed the face of the country. As I said, for all of the downsides and fights and abuse that happens, it has been a phenomenal piece of legislation. I think it’s something like George H. Walker Bush, that it was his biggest accomplishment. It really was an impressive, massive kind of thing that really changed the whole face of society. Not that there aren’t curb cuts that need to be done and “blah blah blah” One thing I would think about is all this, and I don’t know much about it, but all AI and all these new technologies, making sure that they adjust and adapt. And I think the disability community has to be pretty vigilant. I have to laugh, the fact that Musk and the president wants to do self-driving cars, that’s a good thing. We want self-driving cars so people who are blind can have cars. That would be cool. I’m happy to see the paper straws go away because we objected to the paper straws doing away with plastic straws because people in wheelchairs and quadriplegics needed something stronger, they depended on to survive. So who knows, in a weird way, a couple of their little stupid things could actually have some benefits. The future of the disability stuff, it’ll be interesting. Technology helping people walk who are wheelchair-bound, what impact that’s going to have on. Is that going to be considered no longer disability? So the technology could have a pro and con, and I think that’d be something that we have to watch carefully. Although right now the most immediate threat is… Maybe we don’t even talk about the future, I’m going to talk about next week when they do away with the Department of Education and screw up the IDA. The EEOC has been devastated, and the Department of Labor’s discrimination and… I did a lot of work with them trying to make sure they were going after 14(c) violations and also just in general discrimination based on disability. And so a lot of the, what’s going to happen with the disability rights section, Department of Justice. So it’s nice to think about the future, but let’s talk about… The future as in next month when they try to… And it’s really odd, we survived pretty well during the first Trump administration. He didn’t care. We were not a base issue. They were on an immigration and they left us alone. And we stayed under the shadows as you know. I couldn’t believe we got the social security bill, one of the biggest programs we had in the Trump administration. He didn’t know what he was signing, thank God. And I was having a little bit of a crisis of conscience when I was like, “We finally got a pass. And oh God, if he does a signing ceremony, do I have to go there and stand behind him? I’ll spit.” He was not going to do that. He didn’t care about disability. Now, all of a sudden, it does seem like… And again, I don’t know if it’s so disability-focused, it’s going to have impact. If you do away with the Department of Education, what’s the Department of Education? It’s Title I and IDA, are two of their major biggest programs. So I see Carol Dobak a lot here. She goes to the wine shop. You’ve probably heard this story. I used to jump on her when I was working, and then I still see her every once in a while and say, “What’s going on?” See what’s happening with OSERS and RSA? She did think they were going to lose a lot of their probationary employees. Yeah. So I do think there’s a very real, very current threat right there. And then if we can weather this storm, think about your question about where are things going to go in the future? Michelle Bishop: I think you’re right as well that disability rights is such an interesting movement because our opponents and our champions always come from both sides of the aisle. Curt Decker: Right. Yeah. Michelle Bishop: And I feel like that’s really unique. Curt Decker: And we were very careful to stay nonpartisan. That was always a mantra of CCD and all the other. All of us was like, “Just don’t make this a partisan issue or we’ll lose because we need those Republicans.” And it worked pretty well, but I don’t know what’s going to happen now, so where are these people… Where is Susan Collins and all these people about IDA? [inaudible 00:41:24]. Michelle Bishop: We did actually do an episode of this podcast with Stephanie behind the wheel of a self-driving car. Curt Decker: Great. Yeah, so you have to give credit where credit is due. So plastic straws and self-driving cars might be a legacy of the Trump administration. [inaudible 00:41:42]. As you said, I dropped into the disability world unplanned and without any previous history and got very excited about… From a lawyer’s point of view, there were some really great legal issues. But then just in general, I’ve always been a civil rights-y kind of guy. I was lucky that so early on this was a major civil rights issue along with race and LGBT, and spent my life doing that. And I’m really grateful that I didn’t go to New York as a corporate lawyer, which is what Cornell Law School told me I should do. So I got saved. I was very lucky. Michelle Bishop: I can’t imagine you being a New York corporate lawyer, to be honest. This was totally the right path. Curt Decker: It turned out it was for me. That’s the other story I tell people all the time. When I was in Cornell, it was a very conservative law school. All the classes were tax business, they’re corporate and it was no… Not like now, law schools have clinics with civil rights clinics and [inaudible 00:42:43] used to have an LGBT clinic at Georgetown. Nothing. So I just didn’t know that I could be a public interest lawyer. And then I had dodged the draft and I joined VISTA, and they sent me to Baltimore Legal Aid. And that first year was like, “Oh, I didn’t know you could do this. I didn’t know you could represent poor people and go around and fight Medicaid system,” and all that stuff. And it was like, “This is kind of cool, and I’m really good at it.” And they offered me a job and I stayed, never went back. I’m sitting in my Baltimore house right now, never went back to New York, and it was a good thing. Michelle Bishop: I feel like that is everything I can think of to ask about. Stephanie, did we miss anything? Stephanie Flynt McEben: No, I think that we covered it. But yeah, thank you so, so much, Curt, for being willing to talk about your lived experience during the passage of the ADA and just giving us some insights to share with our listeners, we totally appreciate it and we appreciate your time today. It’s really been great. And like I said, I love stories, so thank you so much for sharing your story with us. Curt Decker: Sure. I enjoyed it. It was really fun. Brought back a lot of memories, so great. Good luck, and I hope things get better, and I hope… Very great. Good talking to you all. It was fun. Jack Rosen: It’s always great getting to catch up with Curt. He has such a wealth of knowledge about the disability rights movement, how they accomplished the passage of the ADA, and so many other milestones for this movement. That is fascinating, the part about blood in the salad and how they just showed solidarity and did not waver on these issues. It’s really impressive. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yeah, I’m here for it. And Curt is such a great storyteller as well. So just listening to his insight, it was really, really great to get to hear from him. You know what else is great? Jack Rosen: We should have asked Curt to stay for this part. I would love to see his reaction? Michelle Bishop: Yeah, yeah. We shouldn’t let him go. But Stephanie, please tell us your joke of the month. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh yeah. Of course, absolutely. How much do rainbows weigh? Jack Rosen: How much do rainbows weigh? Michelle Bishop: Do you find these on Popsicle sticks? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Sometimes I get them from other sources, yes. Sometimes they’re originals. This one is from source, but I thought it was fun. So we’re doing it. Jack Rosen: Okay. How much do rainbows weigh? Michelle Bishop: I got nothing. Stephanie Flynt McEben: You ready? Jack, do you have a guess? Come on. Michelle Bishop: We never have a guess. Somebody has to have a guess. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Right? Michelle, you used to guess all of the right answers. Michelle Bishop: I know. That was a scary time in my life. I have no idea. Stephanie, please tell us. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Okay. How much do rainbows weigh? Not much, they’re actually pretty light. Jack Rosen: I like that one. That one’s funny. Michelle Bishop: That one’s not bad. That one’s not bad. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Thank you. Michelle Bishop: We’re doing a series for the anniversary month of the ADA. Does that mean we’re going to have multiple jokes this month? Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. Michelle Bishop: Oh. Stephanie Flynt McEben: And there’s a very special joke, I believe, that’s probably coming to you at the end of the month. So stay tuned. Michelle Bishop: I’m sure everyone’s so excited. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Yes. I’m excited. I almost told it this episode, but we’ve got to give the people anticipation, the two listeners to this podcast. Michelle Bishop: All two of our listeners I’m sure are very excited to hear this joke. Jack, where can people] find us on social media? Jack Rosen: You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, Threads. I think that’s all of them. Maybe we’ll make a MySpace. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Oh my gosh. Jack Rosen: Write in. Write in to podcasts@ndrn.org if you think we should make a MySpace. Until next time, folks. Stephanie Flynt McEben: Bye.