A few months ago, in the April issue of Able News, I wrote about Richard Match and his formative role in getting disability activism off the ground in the Greater New York area, in the early 1960s. I thought it only fair to follow up by discussing his legacy in Nassau County.
In 1956 or so, Richard moved from Brooklyn to a ranch house around the corner from his sister—in Great Neck, just beyond the Queens border. Richard’s move to Great Neck would turn out to be one of the most uniquely important coincidences in the history of the New York City Disability Rights Movement.
Richard had always spent a good deal of time with his two nephews, and in the fall of 1957 the older of the two enrolled at a nearby junior high school. The school boasted a rigorous program in a new and well-equipped building. Nothing obviously unusual about that—postwar America was building new public schools by the fistful. But this particular junior high was unique thanks, as I understand it, to the richest man in town. His oldest daughter was born with cerebral palsy. She could walk for short distances and had only a slight speech disability, but her physicians advised that a comprehensive regimen of physical therapy was essential to maximizing her capabilities and minimizing her symptoms. Taking this information to heart, her father made a large donation to the town, on the conditions that (1) the new junior high school had to be designed with facilities for his daughter’s physical therapy, and (2) there could be no publicity for his donation, the school’s special facilities, or his daughter’s disability.
The upshot was that the new junior high school was built to be wheelchair accessible. It even had a swimming pool designed for use by people with disabilities. There was no civilian infrastructure like it anywhere in the New York Metropolitan area. But in accordance with the conditions of the donation, the school’s physical education facilities were kept under wraps, practically a government secret. Until one afternoon, when Richard’s adolescent nephew happened to casually mention it to him.
Swimming loomed large for Richard, because his disability was the result of a swimming accident, many years before. One might expect him to be traumatically averse to any repetition, yet the benefits of immersion were undeniable. There is no duplicating the freedom of movement in the water, virtually weightless, with a chance to ease and stretch paralyzed muscles, stiffened joints and tendons. And now Richard learned that there was a newly built and accessible pool just a five-minute drive away.
The town’s Board of Education had been experimenting with a then-novel program of adult education. It was in that vein that Richard, as head of the newly-formed Long Island chapter of the National Paraplegia Foundation, backed by officials from the Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine, asked the Great Neck public school system to set up evening swimming classes for disabled adults at the one and only swimming pool usable by people with disabilities in the entire metropolitan area.
As you might expect of a freelance science writer, Richard possessed a massive storehouse of instantly recallable information (his nephews, without a trace of irony, called him a “walking encyclopedia”), so much so that Richard became the first disabled contestant on the quiz show The $64,000 Question. More unexpected, perhaps, is Match’s capacity to charm people. One of Richard’s later colleagues, Anna Fay (herself a pioneering New York City activist), later recalled him as handsome and sociable, someone who “was attractive to both men and women.” And so it was that the friendly and persuasive Richard Match not only talked the Great Neck Board of Education into opening up the pool, but managed to ingratiate himself so well that he won a contract for a book-length history of the town’s school system.
Once the pool program was up and running, Richard continued his campaign on behalf of people with disabilities. He persuaded the Great Neck public school system to train dogs as companion animals and assistants, an important option in a time when personal aides were practically nonexistent.
And Richard pushed still further. I’m sure that he was influential, behind the scenes, in bringing Eugene Nickerson, a longtime Democratic executive of Nassau County, into disability activism. Later appointed to the federal bench, Nickerson presided over the notorious 1997 Abner Louima police brutality trial. Less well known is that Nickerson was a polio survivor, with a disabled right arm. In 1963, Nickerson convened a committee to advise him on the needs of disabled residents of Nassau County. It was, at least to some degree, the ancestor of today’s Nassau County Office for the Physically Challenged.
The Nickerson committee was notable for the simple fact that it was the first county-level action of its kind anywhere in the United States. Richard Match became one of the committee’s first appointees. A few years later, he was picked to lead a federally funded on-the-job training program for people with disabilities in Nassau County.
Finally, Richard persuaded Jones Beach to build a 250-foot-long wooden ramp that allowed wheelchairs users to get out onto the sand. My family and I used this ramp a number of times during my grade school years. It was always a bit nerve-wracking to watch my father hurl himself out of his wheelchair and onto our beach towel, but nowhere was Dad more relaxed and silly than during those lovely summer days in the sun and sand, munching on Mom’s sandwiches and downing Key Food soda. Those days were possible only because of Richard Match’s pioneering advocacy.
It is truly sad that Match’s daring and unprecedented successes on behalf of his then barely self-aware community have gone unheralded and commemorated.