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bjbjD Well, I want to tell you a Judy Heumann story and then bring Judy in. I was honored
to be part of the first NCIL conference in St. Louis. Max Starkloff was the host and
I was actually Mark Johnson s attendant. We both shared a room and I did his attendant
services. Mark was kind of new to independent living or at least to the leadership. He was
working in North Carolina and then eventually came to Denver and is now in Atlanta. We were
talking about a number of things and somehow the when I was in Denver we were setting up
a Transitional Living Service. And I remember Judy was at the conference and Judy is a purist
and Judy is a phenomenal human being. When she heard transition living, her heart stopped
beating. Judy s dramatic, too. Mark was saying, transition living, sounds so good, how this
person could be against it. I think if you know Judy, you d know why she d be against
it and they re all the right reasons. Well, overhearing this was Lex Freiden. Lex responds
and says, transition living saved my life. Judy didn t happen to agree and throughout
this conference, the early stages, Judy s just fighting with everyone and she s a good
fighter and people are making points, and she s making points. But Judy can be, Judy
s Judy and she s going to take the position, the right position and people don t always
understand it. You know, again, Berkley and New York are very different from North Carolina
and Georgia, etcetera. So Max calls the media and we re sitting around arguing, I don t
know what we re doing with NCIL, the first meeting. And all of a sudden these people
come with big cameras and mikes and they walk right over to Judy. She kind of looks like
what are you doing? And she put on the microphone and they ask her a couple of questions. For
about 10 minutes she just speaks. And all these people who minutes ago were fighting
with her, yelling, arguing, just burst into spontaneous applause. It was one of the more
powerful things I d ever seen and I think some of the old leaders, the Judy s, the Ed
s, the Lex s really have their legacy is being felt I think by so many different people because
where she was years ago and people really understood it, people are subscribing to that
philosophy but if only the resources in some of these states were available. So we re back
to curriculum urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags country-region urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags
State urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags City urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags
place It was called Heritage House Owner Normal Owner Microsoft Office Word Microsoft, Inc
It was called Heritage House Title Microsoft Office Word Document MSWordDoc Word.Document.8