How a woman re-invented the wheelchair
alaur...@yahoo.com
By Joseph P. Shapiro
The story of the disability rights movement could be written about
Marilyn Hamilton's impatience. It would start the summer day in 1978
when Hamilton crashed her hang glider nose down into the side of a
California Sierra mountain. Her spinal cord was bruised and Hamilton
became a paraplegic-a very impatient paraplegic.
Hamilton zipped through rehabilitative therapy in three weeks. Most
people take at least three months. Then she was impatient with the
bulky wheelchair-"a stainless steel dinosaur," she called it-that her
physical therapist ordered for her. It was too heavy to get back out
on the tennis court.
So Hamilton sought out her friends and fellow glider pilots Don Helman
and Jim Okamoto. Helman was driving a truck delivering parcels for
UPS. Okamoto was managing a motorcycle shop. But the two, best friends
since kindergarten, were also brilliant weekend inventors. They had
begun designing hang gliders from a shed on the farm near Fresno owned
by Helman's parents. Build me an ultralight wheelchair, Hamilton asked
them, out of the aluminum tubing you put in your gliders.
What Helman and Okamoto designed was light and sturdy, weighing 26
pounds compared to the standard 50 pound wheelchair. It had a stunning
geometry. Instead of being big and boxy, like other wheelchairs,
Hamilton's sky-blue wheelchair was sleek and sporty, with a low-slung
back and compact frame that looked more like it belonged to a high-
speed racing bicycle.
So Hamilton, Helman and Okamoto went into the wheelchair manufacturing
business, pushing the hang gliders to one side of the tool shed. They
started selling their Quickie wheelchairs as fast as they could turn
them out.
Hamilton would compete in wheelchair sports tournaments. With her
cutting-edge chair, she became a two-time national tennis champion,
beating out men and women, and a member of the U.S. disabled ski team.
Other wheelchair athletes-a community known for cleverly modifying
chairs in search of a competitive edge-would want a copy of Hamilton's
featherweight wheelchair.
Sales skyrocketed once a folding version of the Quickie was introduced
in 1983. Then people wanted the chair not just for sports, but for
everyday use. Its lightness was liberating. It was light enough for a
rider to wheel up to the driver's seat of a car, jump in, and then,
unaided, fold the chair, pick it up with ease and store it in the back
seat.
Within 10 years, Quickie would grow into a $40 million-a-year business
and relocate to a 150,000-square foot facility. Purchased by Sunrise
Medical, a large medical equipment company, in 1986, Quickie's
lightweight chairs would be imitated by all other wheelchair
companies.
Most important, Hamilton had reinvented the wheelchair. She took a
piece of medical equipment and made it fun and sporty. She took the
universal symbol of sickness and turned it into a symbol of disability
self-pride.
>From the beginning, Hamilton hated the "weird" way people acted around
her in her first stainless steel wheelchair. "I knew I was the same as
always," she says. "I just got around by a different means of
transportation." But the gleaming wheelchair scared people, putting up
a chromium wall of discomfort between her and the world. Even her
doctor addressed himself to her husband, as if she were helpless or
not even present. Friends saw her sitting in a wheelchair and their
faces would cloud up, putting Hamilton in the odd position of always
being perky and bright, the one to cheer them up.
So Hamilton designed wheelchairs to put people-users and those around
them-at ease. Instead of chrome, Hamilton's chairs came in a rainbow
of hot colors. The customer could personalize a chair in candy apple
red, canary yellow or electric green. Neon pink was added at a user's
request. "Screaming neon chairs," Hamilton called them. A Quickie
chair was fun, refuting the idea that the user was an invalid. Randy
Snow with colorful Quickie
Quickie chairs said its riders were neither sick nor to be felt-sorry-
for, nor were they less than anyone else. The only difference was the
way they got around. "If you can't stand up," Hamilton likes to say,
"stand out."
Hamilton's proud chairs struck a chord with the emerging disability
rights movement. For one thing, there were more wheelchair users, up
from half a million in 1960 to 1.2 million by 1980, most of whom were
no longer living in nursing homes or institutions.
By the 1980s, survivors of automobile accidents and other spinal cord
injuries were cheating death in increasing numbers. People with
degenerative neuromuscular diseases, such as muscular dystrophy, were
living longer. Thousands of paralyzed veterans came back from Vietnam.
They all had enjoyed full citizenship before their accidents and
illnesses and, like Hamilton, rejected as old-fashioned the idea that
they should be hidden away.
A new class of wheelchair users was newly politicized and wanting a
life of maximum independence. They were demanding curb cuts, lifts on
buses and handicapped parking spaces. They had come to expect that
they would go to college, take jobs, get married and sometimes even
start families.
Hamilton's brightly colored chairs tapped into this growing sense that
there was no shame in being disabled. The only tragedy about being
disabled, went the philosophy of the new disability rights movement,
came in the barriers thrown up by society, whether it was an
employer's refusal to hire a paraplegic or a building made
inaccessible to a wheelchair.
Hamilton's wheelchairs reassuringly said it was okay, it could even be
cool, to be in a wheelchair. Even the double entendre of the
wheelchair's name, Quickie ("You need a Quickie," goes one company
advertising slogan) was a light-hearted mocking of the pitying
"walkies," the rest of the world, who seemed to automatically assume
that the loss of the use of one's legs must also mean the end of a sex
life. Or that paralysis meant the end of a life worth living.
Quickie understood that, to make its mark, it had to reach beyond
these usually non-disabled professionals and speak to the growingly
self-sufficient wheelchair users. Their product brochures showed their
chairs being used by active people, who were pictured at the office,
on the basketball court, on the dance floor, or in wedding chapels.
Abridged from original article.
©1991 Joseph P. Shapiro
Joseph P. Shapiro, an associate editor of U.S. News & World Report, is
examining the disability rights movement.