You’d never guess that the Bulova Watch Company played a crucial role right at the start of modern disability activism in the Greater New York area.
Bulova began in 1875 as a little jewelry shop on Maiden Lane in Manhattan, run by a German immigrant named Joseph. It eventually grew into the largest watchmaker in the world, famous for its clever marketing and the “Accutron” line of electronic timepieces. A very American (and very New York) success story.
The tie to disability comes via the Bulova School of Watchmaking, in Woodside, Queens. A project of Joseph Bulova’s son Arde, the school opened for business in 1945, as a tuition-free vocational program for disabled veterans of World War II. As Arde put it, the Bulova School was intended to “repay, in some small measure, the sacrifice and service of returning disabled veterans after the Second World War.”
An entire generation of watchmakers got trained at the Bulova School. Its single-story Georgian schoolhouse was then one of the only purpose-built barrier-free buildings anywhere. Entry was via a ramp which led to doors that opened automatically, thanks to an electric eye mechanism. The elevator had doors at opposite sides, so that a wheelchair user didn’t have to turn around to get out. Doorways had ramps instead of saddles, and the floors were finished with cork, to prevent skidding. Classrooms had extra-high, roll-under workbenches.
Plus, there was a fully outfitted rehabilitation facility on campus, including an on-staff physical therapist, and a gymnasium. Because of these unique facilities, the Bulova School quickly became a center for disability athletics.
As early as 1950 the school boasted a wheelchair basketball team called the “Bulova Watchmakers.” Students at the school had access to a number of sports, including archery, table tennis, pool, and volleyball. Beginning in 1957, the Bulova School, along with Paralyzed Veterans of America, sponsored annual tournaments known as the “Wheelchair Games,” which drew teams from as far away as Cleveland. All this made the Bulova School an ideal feeder for American participation in the Paralympics, which began in 1948.
Meanwhile, unrelated to the Bulova School, in 1960 a former Brooklynite named Richard Match got the ball rolling for disability rights activism in the Greater New York area. Match had moved to the town of Great Neck a few years before. When he learned that a nearby middle school had an accessible swimming pool, he managed to persuade the local Board of Education to start a program of evening swimming for disabled adults—at what was then the one and only accessible swimming pool in the entire metropolitan area.
The pool randomly brought together dozens of men and women with disabilities, including Donald Broderick, a Navy veteran who went on to reinvigorate activism at the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (now United Spinal), and Julie and Mollie Shaw, who would become among the earliest and most important founders of the New York City disability rights movement.
Among the more prominent pool personalities was Bobbi Wailes, a moon-faced Brooklyn-born chatterbox, who had reconciled her disabled lower limbs with her jock ambitions by becoming a champion archer, training at the Bulova School. She was then en route to taking the gold at the 1964 Paralympics.
As the pool people got to know each other, they began talking about architectural barriers and the many other obstacles they faced just trying to live their lives. Maybe they could actually mount some form of pushback. First things first, though, they had to find somewhere to meet—preferably on weekends, and preferably somewhere that didn’t involve doffing braces and changing clothes, getting wet, then changing clothes and donning braces again.
Bobbi Wailes came to the rescue here. Over the course of her archery training, she’d become friendly with the Bulova School staff. Never before had the school hosted a political meeting, but she talked them into giving it a try. The pool people assembled for the first time at Bulova on a Saturday afternoon, sometime in 1961.
No one then could have known that out of this little meeting would spring organizations like the Handicapped Drivers Association, the Architectural Barriers Committee, and a whole series of pioneering efforts to pare back the barriers faced by people with disabilities—free parking at meters, accessibility amendments to the New York City Building Code, and much, much more. The Bulova School remained the principal meeting place for most of this activity, well into the late sixties. It became the springboard for the disability rights movement, both in Nassau County and New York City.
You have to wonder what the immigrant and founder, Joseph Bulova, would have made of it all.
For more of Warren Shaw’s work in disability history, please go to www.DisabilityHistoryNYC.com