Let Us Now Praise Great Men
Remembering local disability-rights pioneer Chuck Frahm
by Mel Duncan
David Korten, in his book
The Great Turning, urges us to change the stories we live by.
Chuck Frahm, who died in November, provides one of these stories
that we need to proclaim and honor.
I met Chuck Frahm in 1972 at the St. Paul United Cerebral Palsy
Center at the dawning of the disability rights movement in Minnesota.
He was a couple of years older than I. He was a skinny guy with
penetrating, brown eyes and Huck Finn hair. He walked with braced
crutches and covered about ten feet a minute, often falling and
banging his head and shoulders. He refused to ride in a wheelchair.
He talked by shakily pointing to letters on a tattered green board.
He talked even slower than he walked, and he drooled often.
He and some friends had graduated from high school and then spent
the next three years sitting alone at their homes. Now in their
early twenties, they were almost totally dependent on aging parents
for transportation and most everything else. They had started coming
to the cerebral palsy center for an accounting class. We spent
a lot of time talking together. The group shared their dreams and
aspirations. They wanted independence, jobs, transportation, entertainment,
housing, friends, sex and fun. They told of other people with disabilities
whom they had met, usually at charitable functions or when they
were in school.
After a lot of listening
and a little trust, they started talking about their anger and
frustration. The group invited other people with disabilities to
meetings just to talk. Soon all were sharing their stories, dreams
and frustrations. Often there would be knowing nods and comments
like “You too!” An amazing thing happened.
Chuck and the others learned that they were not alone in their struggles.
Individuals quit blaming themselves. They quit accepting. They started
organizing.
The group decided to register people with disabilities to vote in
the 1972 election. At that time few polling places were accessible.
Absentee registration and voting required notarization, so two of
the group members became notary publics. They advertised their service
in the newspaper. Small teams including one of the notaries went
to nursing homes and other large residential facilities that housed
people with disabilities. They registered people to vote and then
returned with absentee ballots. The group scheduled candidate nights
and questioned politicians about architectural barriers, accessible
transportation and jobs.
After the election, the group began talking about problems that
they had encountered during their voter registration and education
campaign. Chuck and the others now clearly saw issues as more than
personal. They identified barriers in their lives. They discussed
how these barriers not only impacted them but also the hundreds of
people they had registered to vote.
They started to list what they wanted changed. They wanted voter
registration and absentee balloting by mail with no notary requirements.
They wanted personalized rubber stamps to serve as official signatures
for those unable to write. As people talked they became emboldened.
They wanted accessible transportation and full human rights.
Chuck and his friends invited newly elected legislators to the UCP
Center, not for a charity tour but to present their demands. They
began developing legislation, doing research and finding legislative
authors. They met with the newspaper. They continued to connect with
more people with disabilities.
The idleness of the group members turned into a resource. Chuck
had plenty of time to be at the legislature. The group organized,
lobbied and testified. Within two years, postcard registration
and mail-in ballots had become law. People could use rubber stamps
as their legal signatures. And the state human rights code had
been amended to include disability. Metro Mobility came a couple
of years later.
Chuck had been active
in this entire campaign. He and his colleagues became regulars
at the Capitol. The slick marble floors were like a skating rink
for his crutches. He’d fall and get up, angry
if someone suggested that he use a wheelchair. He delighted in busy
legislators having to take time to read his language board as he
slowly and unsteadily pointed to letter after letter.
A couple of years later
Chuck’s parents decided to retire
and move to northern MN. He didn’t want to go with them and
return to isolation. His only choice was to enter one of the large
nursing homes where he and his friends had registered voters.
The group listened as he presented his plight. He wanted to be independent
and live in his own place. They vowed to organize a house that would
be his home, where he could be as independent as possible. Charlie,
Renee and Bill Smith, who would later found Access Press, became
active in developing the project.
Many people with disabilities of that day were housed in large nursing
homes. Welfare and health agencies were not interested in a house
that would be controlled by the residents. Chuck and his colleagues
went to meetings and researched. The group figured out a creative
way to fund their housing proposal. They met with foundation bureaucrats.
The group expanded their ranks of both people with disabilities as
well as the temporarily able-bodied.
Chuck organized a meeting with the county official who controlled
the residential program budget. The group presented their plan of
a real house, in a real neighborhood where the residents would be
in charge. It would cost much less than a nursing home alternative.
In a monotone voice, the official recited in sterile detail how such
a proposal was simply unfeasible.
Chuck stared at the
bureaucrat with his penetrating brown eyes. When the official finished
his rejecting comments, Chuck mustered his coordination into a
fist. He raised his arm with a directness I’d never seen in him. He crashed his fist on his word board. “God
damn, you!” He shouted in a voice that we had never before
heard.
Chuck found his voice. After a year’s work, the group opened
a house. Chuck moved in with three other guys.
While I would like to say that they all lived there happily ever
after, social change doesn’t happen with such tidiness. After
a couple of years, administrative problems sunk the place. Yet the
self-determination model has lived on.
We cannot let this story die with Chuck. ![]()
