There wasn’t too much along the lines of disability awareness 50 years ago in Oneonta, compared to present day standards.
Most people were aware of those with disabilities, but little to nothing was being done in terms of accommodations.
The Daily Star took an opportunity to make readers aware of the barriers facing people in wheelchairs in July 1976.
Star reporter Linda Willcox joined Nancy Cole of Oneonta, confined to a wheelchair, to find out what people with disabilities faced in performing routine duties and tasks, long before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was enacted. Willcox obtained a wheelchair, and the two travelled through downtown Oneonta.
As Willcox reported in The Star’s July 19, 1976 edition, “Nancy Cole cannot fight City Hall — only because she cannot get inside. Neither can she get into the Internal Revenue Service Office, the Employment Office, the Motor Vehicles Bureau, the Public Health Nursing Service Office, nor her church, several restaurants, many doctor’s offices, nor the Huntington Memorial Library.
“In fact, most of Oneonta’s public and private buildings and facilities have some architectural barrier to keep her and other physically handicapped people out.
“‘It’s sort of an outgrowth of medieval thinking that handicapped people should be hidden … a basic attitude that you don’t belong,’ said Ms. Cole who is confined to a wheelchair.
“She added that she thinks that architectural barriers are not intentional forms of discrimination, but matters of oversight.
“Ms. Cole is only one of up to 12,800 handicapped people in Otsego County. This estimate includes people who need wheelchairs, walkers, canes or crutches; blind or deaf people; elderly people; people who should not exert themselves, and amputees.
“Ms. Cole has been in a wheelchair since she was afflicted by polio more than twenty years ago. Now a teacher of remedial reading, she tutors school children in her home.
“The barriers, which most people do not even recognize, include curbs, steps, and narrow doorways. Other problem areas which make the City of the Hills a city of walls to the handicapped includes drinking fountains that are too high, unreachable public telephones, narrow toilet stalls, small parking spaces, heavy doors, elevator buttons out of reach of the person in a wheelchair, and sidewalks sloping in a direction other than the line of traffic.
“An Oneonta resident for two years, Ms. Cole is working with the League of Women Voters, hoping to change the present situation.
“She would like to have level sidewalks with curbs cut at intersections and at mid-block crosswalks, ramps into buildings, doors light enough to move easily, and wide enough for a wheelchair to pass through.
“‘It’s a matter of enforcing the law,’ she said. ‘It’s not a new idea.’ The law she is referring to is the National Architectural Barriers Act of 1968.
“Briefly, that legislation requires that all buildings built, renovated or otherwise altered through use of federal funds, in whole or part, must be accessible to the physically handicapped. Such buildings include those the federal government rents for office use.
“In Oneonta, that law applies to the Urban Renewal project, although the original UR grants were made before the law was passed.”
As Willcox said in her story, “I had expected routine stares, strange glances of pity from strangers, and lonely anonymity. There was little of the kind.
“Rather, there was a very real element of danger that one would normally equate with such exotic professionals like James Bond.
“And there was also a degree of neighborly concern, and friendly helpfulness.
“And there was insensitivity from more than one well-meaning stranger. I was about to see Oneonta in a new light. Years of huffing and puffing up the hill to Hartwick College is nothing like trying to go down Main Street in a wheelchair.”
Readers followed the duo, enduring high curbs, maneuvering between parked cars and through lines of moving traffic. Fortunately, in 1980 many of those barriers were removed when Main Street was thoroughly reconstructed.
On Saturday, our area’s local life and times in August 1926.