Paul Dick

Paul DickEnlarged view of Paul Dick

Transcript

My name is E. Paul Dick and I currently live in the City of Pittsburgh in North Oakland in a cooperative apartment that my wife and I purchased 17 or 18 years ago.  Before that I lived in a house that I had built because I couldn’t find an accessible place to live in the North Hills here in Pittsburgh and I found that to buy a place that met my requirements, which I did drive at the time, required a garage on the same level as the living space and all the living space needed to be basically on one floor so we’re talking about a ranch home.  And I could not find one till I paid for the costs and then the modifications that would have had to been done to make it livable for me, I couldn’t find one that I could afford at the time because I was still working as a young professional.

 

So I ended up buying a lot and designing a house and getting a contractor to build it and it was a lot cheaper.  It was just a plain three bedroom ranch-style home and I was basically out to the building lines because it was a small lot but it was tapered off level so I could use all of it.  We lived there for 20 years.  Before that I was in graduate school at Pitt and was in an undergraduate school in eastern Pennsylvania, which I’ll tell you the story to.

 

I contracted polio when I was 14 years old, living in Claysburg on a farm. I spent some time in an iron lung in Altoona Hospital.   When I had polio a couple of days after I went into the hospital, right after I went into the iron lung they were so full at this polio section in this hospital, Altoona Hospital, that I was moved to a sun porch at the end of the hall because you could only get one person if you had an iron lung in the room you were taking up the whole room just about.  I was in one about a month.

 

I was completely paralyzed.  My face even was paralyzed and I was in a coma for awhile

I was there for a year at the hospital and I had private duty nursing and this was all supported by the March of Dimes.  Would you believe there are still people in iron lungs?

There’s not very many but there are still a few people that prefer it to the alternative. 

 

Now after a year they made arrangements to take me to Warm Springs, Georgia to the Polio Foundation down there.   I spent about six months down there and while I was there I met Jonas Salk who had just come to visit.  I was in the beginning of my freshman year in high school when I had polio so I had a little bit of tutoring at Altoona Hospital.  And the next year, which was partially broken up, I went down there again.  A couple of teachers from my home school came and did some homebound teaching.  But there really wasn’t too much education for those two years. 

 

I couldn’t do sports anymore but I was also in student government.  I was vice president of my class.  I had done very well and I was one of the finals in the National Merit Scholarship.  When I graduated from high school it was obvious the thing to do was to go to college.   

 

In the end I decided that I preferred working with people so I had to come to Pitt.  I finished at Pitt and because I had done an internship at St. Francis I was able to get a job there.  That went on for about 20 years. After about 5 years there I was Personnel Director for the hospital. I stayed at St. Francis one way or another for almost 30 years.

Magic Carpet started and I was going to say one of the things even though in 1965, ‘66 actually when I bought the car and kind of solved for most of my life my transportation problems from there.  It wasn’t full proof but it was sure better than having a taxi cab.  I had by that point, had been impressed by the fact that that was a real missing link for people and I was an advocate for disability issues from the time I was a young adult.  Go back to when we were trying to get a handicapped license plate and parking spaces, handicapped parking spaces.  That was back in the early ‘60s.

 

I did a lot of work with Ruth Brenyo and Larry George and was very active for Open Doors for the Handicapped, which was a local consumer, strictly consumer organization.  At the time I got the car we were working on public accommodation laws for Pennsylvania which said that if you’re open for business somewhere in Pennsylvania you have got to be accessible. 

 

The thing I had run into by that time was everywhere transportation issues. George and Ruth Brenyo and I talked a lot about starting a paratransit system that would be run by consumers by our organization, not-for-profit.  And there wasn’t anything like that.  There were people out there who were ready to do something but there was no way to get where they needed to go.  So we kind of put together, and I was more behind the scenes, George Brenyo was really the one out front doing a lot of the public work with it and he got some funding from the city, county, steelworkers and bailing wire and what have you we put it together and I did a lot of the technical work behind it and we started Magic Carpet and I think it was about 1969, 1970.  I think the most we ever had was five vans.  But it was a county wide service, paratransit, just the way Access is now.  Access was modeled after our system.  And we operated that with a lot of volunteer help. 

 

I handled most of the personnel stuff and labor relations and so on because the teamsters organized our drivers, shame on them.  There was other county stuff, business things to take care of and I took care of some of those, George did some, we all pitched in.  There were a bunch of volunteers.  The only people that were paid were the drivers and the dispatcher and the manager who we hired. 

 

So then in ’75 or ’76, it might have been ’75, the Federal Department of Transportation, which was the one who had to come up with all the rules to implement that in the area of transportation, got a hold of my name and I was asked to serve on the National Advisory Committee to set up the rules and do rule-making for the Department of Transportation in Washington.  I was on that for a couple of years when we were doing the rule making. I was one of the few people on that group that had a background in paratransit because we had done it.   

 

So I fought for paratransit.  I don’t care how accessible you make the public system there were still people who couldn’t benefit from it.  And myself and a guy from Chicago who actually works with the Transit Authority out there were the only two that were taking that position. The decision was made that was given to all the public transportation agencies was make them give a local option that if they wanted to nobody was going to stop them from making accessible systems as they existed right now. So here in Western Pennsylvania, then the Port Authority, contracted with the Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Planning Committee to form a committee of accessible transportation for the elderly and handicapped. 

 

And I worked on that from the very beginning, as did my wife, and a number of the rest of it and, but we decided of course locally here to do paratransit.  And they way they decided to do it was the brokerage system. So they decided upon hiring someone to be a broker and use that person to contract with various agencies and whether it was public or private that had a fleet of vehicles or that could get some and they would contract with the broker not with the Port Authority directly but with a broker to provide the service here.  

 

Magic Carpet became one of the carriers that went into the new system.  And shortly after that we were very happy to have Magic Carpet go out of business.  Because the only reason we did it was nobody else would and we didn’t have the financial resources to keep it going.  The key people who worked with Magic Carpet and had been for 8 or 10 years were the first key people that worked with Access.  The Access System that we have here in Allegheny County now is basically considered to be the world prototype for running a paratransit system in terms of cost, ride sharing, what they do with evaluating people’s needs and handling on a trip by trip basis.

 

Interviewer: What do you think your greatest struggle was in life?

 

Well, I don’t think that’s been there yet.  I think my greatest struggle is going to be adjusting to my increasing infirmities and what it keeps me from doing which is being as active as I’d like to be.  I’ve been fortunate that since I was basically forced to retire from the position of senior vice president at the hospital because of post-polio syndrome.  I just didn’t have the energy or the endurance to do that kind of work.  And by medical advice that I just needed to not get tired everyday and slow down or I was going to be a basket case pretty soon.  I’ve fortunately been able to use my background and experience since I retired.  Right after I retired Al Condeluci asked me to do some stuff over there which I did and then he sent me to the Board of Directors and very shortly had me President of the Board over there.  I’ve been on three or four other Board of Directors Mayor Murphy right before he left office appointed me to the City Planning Commission and I’m still on the City Planning Commission.  I’m the oldest in tenure.

 

My greatest success in life has nothing to do with disability.  It’s that I’ve lived a pretty normal life.  Did the usual things that everybody else does:  go to school, I had a good education, build a home and get married, go on vacations, build a house, have a couple kids.