His story began to make newspaper headlines. So there were all these little gimmicks.” Roberts did so much studying and reading that the mouth wand he used to turn the pages of books started to push his teeth out of shape. On campus, an attendant would wheel Roberts to each class, where he would recruit a classmate to help him take notes - they would use a piece of carbon paper to create a copy for him. “It’s such a simple way to take notes,” Roberts recalled, “and of course to meet people and get them involved with you. Eventually, someone suggested housing Roberts in the campus hospital, inside a patient room remade into a living space. Among other things, administrators weren’t sure where he could safely live - his iron lung wouldn’t fit into a dorm room. Berkeley, the university initially turned him down. Roberts graduated from high school, then from a local community college, but in 1962, when he wanted to go on to U.C. Ed Roberts on the Berkeley Campus and at a protest via UC Berkeley When his mother, Zona Roberts, went out with him alone, she would enlist strangers to assist. They’d lift him over curbs, and up and down stairs. When Ed left the house, his family would run the maneuvers, helping him navigate a world that wasn’t built for a person in a wheelchair. He needed the iron lung while he was asleep, but during the day he stayed in school, going to campus once a week. Roberts was tenacious, but everything was hard. Roberts was told it was bad for his health, but he kept doing it, determined to live on his own terms. For polio survivors, whose weakened breathing muscles weren’t strong enough to inhale that needed oxygen, “frog breathing” meant a person could get out of the iron lung for short stretches of time. In order to escape his iron lung once in a while, Roberts taught himself a technique called “ frog breathing,” a deep-sea divers’ trick of gulping oxygen into the lungs, the way a frog does. The polio left Roberts paralyzed below the neck, only able to move two fingers on his left hand. He had polio, which damaged his respiratory muscles so much that he needed an iron lung to stay alive. But then, one day when he was 14 years old, he got really sick. He was athletic and loved to play baseball. He’d grown up in Burlingame, near San Francisco, the oldest of four boys. Roberts was central to a movement that demanded society see disabled people in a new way. If you live in an American city and you don’t personally use a wheelchair, it’s easy to overlook the small ramp at most intersections, between the sidewalk and the street. Today, these curb cuts are everywhere, but fifty years ago - when an activist named Ed Roberts was young - most urban corners featured a sharp drop-off, making it difficult for him and other wheelchair users to get between blocks without assistance.
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