Inclusion, a voice, opportunity—no one in the disability rights movement today would question the wisdom of such objectives. The right to live as independently as possible, to participate fully and produce to the utmost of one’s capabilities is assumed. But in the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was president, Americans in need of extra support were often segregated from the rest of society—educated in separate schools or institutionalized.

JFK’s younger sister Rosie was born with a “mild case of mental retardation,” the family story went, and neither the wealth nor prominence of the Kennedy clan afforded her any protection whatsoever from the damaging notions of the time. A “social embarrassment” to her father and threat to his political ambitions, she spent most of her life in the nuns’ care at St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children. Shortly after JFK’s election, the family secret was disclosed in a journal article, and rather than denying Rosie’s condition, the President used his position to promote a long-overdo social cause.

In 1962 JFK formed the National Commission on Mental Retardation. The findings of physicians influenced federal legislation and policy for years to come. Nineteen research and training centers were established at public research universities throughout the country. All but one were linked to medical schools at universities in primarily urban areas. USU’s center was the exception. It was in a rural area and it was associated with a university that served low-income people with limited access to social and healthcare services.

A potential liability proved advantageous. As Dr. Marvin Fifield, the center’s director for more than 30 years, recalls, “We had a different attitude than the usual one in our field at the time. In the early years parents would tell us about their frustrations with the paternalistic and hierarchial medical school clinics. The physicians had noble intentions, but their profession in those days was dominated by the thinking ‘we know what’s best for our patients.’ We knew we didn’t know anything more than the parents did. Together we struggled to learn.”

On June 15-16, USU’s Center for Persons with Disabilities (CPD) celebrates its 35th anniversary. The pejorative label, mental retardation, has long since fallen into disfavor and been replaced by a long list of diagnosable developmental disabilities—from autism to multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. The more the CPD scientists learned about the developing brain and the complexity and sensitivity of the immune system, the more comprehensive the CPD’s services for clients.

The research and outreach of CPD faculty and their students remain as central to the mission today as in 1972, the year the center opened. The CPD’s teachers, therapists and physicians may be specialists in their field with years of training and experience, but they consult with parents and include them in the decision making. They not only collaborate with families but with colleagues in other disciplines to deliver training for caregivers in the home and service agencies. They travel to schools and clinics in remote rural areas and teeming inner cities in the interior West and overseas to evaluate the situation and offer their best advice. They help educate the state’s special education teachers here on campus and in distant communities in dire need of such specialists. They use the technology of the day to disseminate the latest information, and design and repair the technology that makes it possible for the youngster with cerebral palsy to get around and the school-aged child with autism to plan her routine for the day.

The treatment of people with disabilities has come a long ways since JFK’s father agreed to a frontal lobotomy for Rosie to calm her “wild mood swings.” The procedure, since discredited, went horribly awry, and the gregarious young woman with the volatile temper was reduced to an infantile state—incontinent, incoherent and institutionalized for the rest of her life. After JFK’s assassination, a doctor who served on the president’s commission publicly admitted to his personal diagnosis: severe depression resulting from Rosie’s inability to keep up with her brilliant, hyper-competitive siblings. The family secret followed JFK to the grave, after all.

From opening day on, the specialists at USU’s Center for Persons with Disabilities have never forgotten who they serve—the people they acknowledge in the title. Despite their testimonies before Congressional committees and presentations at international conferences, they do not allow their egos to get the better of them. They work long hours because they are humbled by the courage and determination of their clients—from the impoverished, Spanish-speaking family whose daughter couldn’t keep up at school because of her impaired hearing and unfamiliarity with English to the underemployed, divorced teenage mother of two who sought early intervention for her children so they wouldn’t drop out like she did. —Jane Koerner