There's No Office Like Home

Tweet

For now, the best they can do to address their entrepreneurial needs is to join forces with their neighbors. To that end, Opper has joined the board of directors of Community Development Corp. of South Berkshires Inc., which has a representative on the Telecommunications Task Force of the Berkshire regional-planning commission. "One strategy is to build a consortium of interested business parties [to close the gap in the infrastructure]," says Opper. "I'm confident that this is a problem we can solve."

Fred Fay: Necessity Is the Mother of Invention
When Frederick A. Fay was 16 years old, he broke his neck in a trapeze accident.

Sent to a rehabilitation center in Warm Springs, Ga., for six months of intensive physical therapy and the practical lessons that would prepare him for his new life as a quadriplegic, Fay found himself in a setting whose tone had been set by a famous polio patient, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt had bought the property, located on the outskirts of Atlanta, in the 1920s, when it comprised just an inn with hydrotherapy equipment. He'd added amenities such as a nine-hole golf course that was completely accessible to people in wheelchairs.

Fay was surprised--and outraged--when he returned home to Washington, D.C., to find that "every single curb was like a Berlin Wall telling me that I was not welcome to travel farther than a block." Lobbying to get access for the disabled immediately became his life's work; achieving it has become his life's triumph. Fred Fay's disability-rights rÉsumÉ since the 1960s is long and varied. It includes work that led to Medicaid's reimbursement of personal-care assistants and federal funding for community-based independent living. This past fall, he received the Prince Charitable Trusts' prestigious Henry B. Betts Award, which carries an unrestricted $50,000 cash prize, for his advocacy efforts. These days, he works full-time moderating the mailing list Justice for All E-mail Network, which he helped form in January 1995, right after the congressional elections. Relying primarily on the labor of volunteers, Justice for All works with state and national organizations that advance the rights of people with disabilities to get word from Washington, D.C., to the grass roots.

Yet in retrospect, the challenges of organizing and fighting for access to physical space were just a warm-up for the challenges he has taken on in the 1990s. Fred Fay wants all disabled men, women, and children to have complete, unfettered access to cyberspace. Whether they are blind or deaf. Whether they live independently or in an institution. Whether they started using modems 30 years ago--as Fay did, when he managed a small computer-programming information center in IBM's Federal Systems Division--or have never touched a computer before.

Fay's astonishing home office provides proof that the greatest disabilities most of us suffer are a lack of ingenuity and a failure of imagination. When a spinal-cord cyst progressed up his neck to his brain stem 18 years ago, Fay went from sitting upright in a wheelchair to lying flat on his back full-time. He designed and then moved into a contraption he calls a "wheelbed," which is controlled by a motorized joystick. Glancing in a well-positioned rear- and side-view mirror, he rolls down the halls of the simple ranch house in Concord, Mass., that he shares with his life partner, Trish Irons, and crosses a widened threshold. Once inside his office, he rolls the wheelbed into a three-sided work space made of wood and counterbalanced industrial-metal shelving. It is as intricately laid out as the interior of a space capsule.

Everything in this compact environment is made to the measure of the man. An array of electronics--fax machine, printer, VCR, cable converter, classy six-speaker stereo, shortwave radio--along with more mundane objects, such as his toothbrush and drinking water in plastic milk jugs, are placed within the span of Fay's arms, much of it on an oversize lazy Susan. Plexiglas shelves over his head slide out so that he can read books through their transparent surface. Two hefty computer monitors, their screens facing downward, float a comfortable 20 inches from his eyes. The CPU boxes themselves rest unobtrusively on the floor, at the base of the shelves.

The slower PC--a Gateway 486DX 100--is dedicated to Fay's environmental controls, including the thermostat and the air conditioner, as well as incoming faxes because, as he explains, when a fax comes in on the modem, it briefly ties up the computer screen. His second system, a 133 MHz Pentium PC built to his specifications, is used for word processing, E-mail correspondence, surfing the Internet, and watching CNN or C-Span via a WinCast video card. An A/B data switch allows him to add a camera and a microphone to the system so that he can participate in videoconferences with colleagues and friends. When Fay won the Betts Award and he couldn't travel to the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., for the ceremony, Bell Atlantic donated three high-speed ISDN lines so that he could address the crowd in real time, he says, and "not look and sound like a Charlie Chaplin movie played in slow motion."

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Small Business Success Newsletter

Email Address: