Veterans inspired the curb cuts of Kalamazoo and the changes in the student population at the University of Illinois. Just as medicine increased the longevity and expanded the activities of veterans wounded in the military, medical progress also had enormous consequences for non-veterans.  Medical breakthroughs dramatically affected the polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s. Unlike FDR, many of these individuals contracted polio at an early age and did not come from wealthy families. 

The polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s left about 400 people around the country who both used respirators and were institutionalized. One hundred fifty eight of these individuals were housed at Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center near Los Angeles. The March of Dimes paid their bills, but as that organization became increasingly strapped for funds, they turned over this responsibility to Los Angeles County. 

The County, in 1953, conducted a study about attendant care costs. The investigation revealed that each iron lung user would cost the county $10 per day if they lived at home. The hospital billed the state $37 per day for identical services. This discovery led to beginning California's In Home Support Services (IHSS) program, one of the nation's first personal assistance programs (Levy 4-5).

At his home in Burlingame, south of San Francisco, a teenager named Ed Roberts, who had contracted polio and used an iron lung, received IHSS. As he grew older he became credited with breaking the barrier against significantly disabled people attending universities. Roberts has been called the Martin Luther King Jr. of the disability rights movement, the father of independent living. Toward the end of his life, he liked to call himself the godfather. Before Roberts passed away in 1995, he conducted many interviews. Many people also viewed Roberts as one of the best public relations persons in independent living. As a result, quite a bit is known about his life. What follows is his story. It is representative of many others. 

Roberts contracted polio when he was in high school. As a result of the virus he lost all but some movement of two fingers on his left hand and two toes on his left foot. The rest of his body, including his lungs, remained paralyzed, though he always retained feeling. Unable to breathe on his own for extended periods, he became a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic. He required a machine, such as an iron lung or a ventilator, to assist him with breathing. 

The only person in his school to contract polio, Roberts resumed his education at Burlingame High School at the age of eighteen. He attended via a phone hook-up. It began with a phone connected to one room at the high school. When Ed pressed a bar on the phone he could be
heard, when he released the bar he could hear, enabling him not only to listen but to communicate with his classmates. 

Roberts graduated from high school, at the age of twenty, in 1959. But not without a fight.  His post-polio paralysis prevented him from taking either physical education or driver's education courses. His high school counselor thought Ed should remain in school another year. Zona, Ed's mother, was determined that her boy would be as similar to his peers as possible and was mystified by this turn of events. 

Zona contacted the principal about the inequity of the situation. He supported his counselor. Zona next called a friend who also happened to be a school board member. A school representative met with Zona and Ed at their home and asked, "Ed, you wouldn't like a cheap diploma, would you?" A furious Zona contacted the superintendent of schools. She also notified some of Ed's teachers. Before they could act, the assistant superintendent of schools announced that everyone was proud of Ed and granted the diploma. Roberts later commented that he attained some of his own sense of determination from watching Zona persevere about his graduation. 

Ed enrolled at the nearby community College of San Mateo. To attend classes he was placed in a corset which enabled him to sit up. A head brace emerged from the back of the corset.  At first, Zona brought Ed to campus. They solicited help from passers-by to get Ed in and out of the car on campus, learning to avoid football player types who refused supervision. Ed attended class by himself, with assistance from fellow students to traverse the numerous steps. Another student was eventually hired to drive Ed. 

Roberts spent three years at the College of San Mateo, finishing two years of classwork. To complete assignments, Zona wrote while Ed dictated. Ed speculated about a career as a sportswriter. Others discussed technical writing. He eventually chose political science as a major.
The most fortuitous development at the College of San Mateo occurred in Roberts' second semester when he enrolled in an English class taught by Jean Wirth. Jean, like Ed, knew about difference. She had been six feet, five inches tall from the time she was twelve years old.  She became his unofficial advisor.

Jean asked Ed where he wanted to continue his education after graduating from the College of San Mateo. He responded UCLA. Roberts knew about the veterans who had attended and he thought that would make it fairly wheelchair-accessible. Jean dissuaded him from this idea because UCLA was a commuter campus. He would have to find housing, transportation, personal assistance, and friends away from the university. She suggested he apply instead to the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) where there was an outstanding political science program. Ed did just that and was accepted at UCB. The application form asked no questions that related to disability. The only hint was that Ed weighed only eighty-five or ninety pounds. Zona accurately predicted that school officials would guess Ed forgot to put a "1" before the other numerals.  Ed also applied to the California Department of Rehabilitation (DR) for financial assistance.  The DR counselor informed Ed that he was too severely crippled ever to work and would therefore be denied services. Zona, Jean, and Phil Morse, Ed's official advisor at the College of San Mateo, then met with DR to advocate successfully for Ed.

While this was happening, Jean, Zona, Ed and Phil visited the UCB campus prior to the commencement of the school year. UCB personnel were shocked to learn that Ed was a post- polio ventilator-using quadriplegic and were at a loss about where he might be housed. His large iron lung wouldn't fit in a dorm room. Morse contacted the Dean of Men, who suggested they see Henry Bruyn at Cowell Hospital, the on-campus student health center.

Bruyn, a physician, had worked with polios and commented that they were becoming of college age and should be able to attend college. He thought Ed could probably live at Cowell. Successful negotiations to do just that continued throughout the summer.

During Ed's first academic year, 1962-63, the same year that the African-American James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi, Ed was the only student with a disability at Cowell, and, as far as we know, the first student with a disability of this significance to attend an American university. An area paper ran a story about Ed headlined "Helpless Cripple Goes to School." It caught the attention of a social worker in nearby Antioch whose client, John Hessler, had broken his neck while diving. Towering above six feet tall, he was too big to be cared for by his parents and he lived in a Contra Costa hospital. He attended Contra Costa College, going back and forth by taxi. His social worker spoke with Henry Bruyn, and John joined Ed at Cowell in the 1963-64 school year. 

Bruyn began to earn a reputation for this program. Several more students arrived in 1965-66. Their attendance initiated a formal program for students with disabilities. The students began identifying with one another, calling themselves the Rolling Quads. With a nursing supervisor, the Rolling Quads took over the entire third floor of the hospital. Each student lived in his or her own room. They mingled in a common room and ate together in a dining room. 

Ed's DR worker in Berkeley, unlike his geographically-appointed counselor in Burlingame, supported his efforts. DR now paid for tuition, books and secretarial help. This changed again in the late 1960s when DR installed a new worker. She believed it was her responsibility to dictate behavior. She attempted to direct Ed's thesis topic, tried to instruct other students in what classes they could take, and strived to get two students evicted because she didn't approve of their educational goals or lifestyles.

The students responded to this counselor with activism. They informed the press of their frustration with her dictatorial methods and succeeded in getting her transferred. This success led to other actions. The Rolling Quads formally organized themselves into a student organization, and as such they developed and taught a university studies class called "Strategies of Independent Living," the main purpose of which was to conceive methods to live outside of Cowell. They began to talk to the Berkeley city council about building ramps in the city. The Rolling Quads got the city's attention when they went out in the middle of the night with their assistants and started taking sledgehammers to some of the curbs around campus and pouring tar on them to create makeshift ramps. Some of these still exist today. The Rolling Quads not only tested their own limits as fledgling citizens, they also began to understand their own power. 
By the late 1960s, as the Rolling Quads' activism heated up, Roberts prepared to leave Berkeley. He had completed both undergraduate and graduate school, finishing all but his dissertation. Ed accepted a temporary job at the Disabled Student Services program in Riverside, near Los Angeles. 

Before Ed moved, Jean Wirth called Zona from Washington to share information about a bill containing a lot of money for disadvantaged students, with ten percent of the budget earmarked for disability programs. Jean suggested Zona come to Washington for meetings about how to utilize the money, but Zona had a scheduling conflict and recommended Jean call Ed. Ed was agreeable and experienced his first airplane flight. Roberts weathered the first of many adventures traveling as an individual with a disability. First, no breathing apparatus was allowed on the plane, so Ed was forced to do exhausting frog-breathing for hours in the air. Then after landing he sat for hours while they retrieved his manual wheelchair. Jean arrived at the hotel before Ed to arrange for an iron lung to be delivered to the hotel. She learned that an iron lung would not be allowed because "they blow up you know." 

Despite these hardships, Roberts loved Washington. He reveled in interacting with Senators and Secretaries, and with time's passage he realized that he made a lasting impression.  Since Ed was on his way to his temporary job in Riverside, he urged John Hessler and others to submit a proposal to the old Cabinet Department of Health Education and Welfare (HEW) for funds to institutionalize what they had learned as the Rolling Quads. Their first attempt did not get funded, but their second one did. It became the Physically Disabled Students Program (PDSP). 

John Hessler became director of the program. Roberts, meanwhile, did not remain in Riverside long. His physician advised him to leave because the area was harmful to people with breathing problems. He moved to Woodside in the South San Francisco Bay area and began teaching at Nairobi College in East Palo Alto. The college attracted less traditional students than those attending UCB or nearby Stanford. 

PDSP began to attract individuals with disabilities from around the San Francisco area.  Many callers were not students, but there was nowhere else they could obtain the services they needed. The need to create an organization similar to PDSP for non-students became apparent. 

Three people, all of whom had been Rolling Quads, began an organization they called the Center for Independent Living (CIL). A small research and development grant enabled them to rent a small apartment to begin CIL. John Hessler, a CIL board member, quickly became concerned that the much-needed CIL would fail because of a lack of leadership. He contacted Roberts, who had recently returned to Berkeley from Woodside, about his fears. 

Ed and John met with their friends to discuss a CIL board take-over. Their strategy succeeded. Roberts then became CIL director because he did not have a job, while Hessler directed PDSP. Ed expanded CIL rapidly and a national, then international, reputation quickly followed. 

When Jerry Brown became governor of California in 1974, three of his former law school classmates, who also happened to be friends of Ed's, nominated Ed to become director of the Department of Rehabilitation (DR). Brown interviewed Ed and appointed him DR director in late 1975. Independent living advocates rarely tire of telling the story of Ed becoming the boss of the agency that had once told him he was "too severely crippled" ever to work. (Brown "Zona and Ed Roberts")

As chief of DR, Roberts soon had the opportunity to institute independent living throughout California. In his first year, $500,000 from the state budget set up eleven independent living programs in the state (Kidder, 10). Shortly thereafter, in the debate over amendments to the Rehabilitation Act in 1978, Roberts was one of many who fought to implement independent living centers in the federal budget.