The something that happened was, in retrospect, nothing mysterious. A woman who’d felt mostly shame and anger arrived at a place where she felt love and belonging. In a way, she didn’t have to do anything to deserve it. She felt it as a gift, just like her white T-shirt. Everything changed, and it’s easy to see why: she found her place in the world. And after a few weeks, it happened again. Mr. Lee announced to the students at the workshop that they were invited to another Special Olympics event. This time, it would be a two-day games. They would be going away for an overnight.
“Not me,” Loretta snapped. “I don’t have the money for all that.”
“It’s free, Loretta,” said Mr. Lee. “Ask your mother for permission to go to the Westchester games. Make sure to tell her that there’s no charge.”
Loretta took another paper home to Rita with all the information on it, but Rita took one look at the bus trip and the overnight and had the same reaction as Loretta. “You ain’t going nowhere, Loretta. I don’t have money for you to do all these things.”
“But look at the bottom of the paper,” Loretta begged. “Mr. Lee told me it says on the bottom of the paper that you don’t have to pay.”
Sure enough, at the bottom of the permission slip that would allow Loretta to ride the bus to Westchester, compete in games, stay overnight in a dorm, and attend a dance were the exact words that Rita needed to see: NO CHARGE.
“Well then,” she said, “you can go. But you tell them to be sure there isn’t going to be any charge, cause I am not paying for you to go to that game.”
Loretta was thrilled. She packed her things immediately, even though the games were almost a month away. “I was going to be on my own and I had never been on my own before. That was a big woop! And when the day came, I could barely sleep. I was spending my first night ever away from the projects. When I got to the dorm, there was another person in my room and she was nice and we had food and candy. The next day, we woke up to go to the opening ceremony and there were thousands of people cheering me on. All those people around me, and no one called me ‘bozo’ or ‘retard’ or ‘Clarence the cross-eyed lion.’”
The volunteers at Special Olympics saw something in her that she’d never been able to see in herself. They saw an athlete, not a “retarded” child. Instead of seeing limitations, they focused on expectations. All of a sudden, Loretta was scared, because all of a sudden, she cared—what she was doing mattered to all those people in the stands. She’d never raced against so many other runners with so many people watching. So she decided to do what great athletes do: leave it all on the track. She threw herself into the competition—and she won her race, and received the first medal of her life. When she got home, she told her mother she was so happy, she could do the dishes forever and it wouldn’t bother her one bit. “There’s three hundred sixty-two days till the next Special Olympics,” she said, “and I can’t wait.”
In the twenty years that followed, Loretta never stopped running. There were hundreds more Special Olympics races after that first one, and she collected dozens of medals. Then, in 1978, she entered the Harrisburg Marathon and finished in 3:35—a better time than her coach, Bob Hollis. Mr. Lee had told her that her feet could take her places, and they did not disappoint. She ran another local marathon a few months later, then the Marine Corps Special Olympics 5K in Washington, and then she registered for the oldest yearly marathon in the world: Boston. Not only did she qualify to run the Boston Marathon, which women had been allowed to enter only since 1972, but she finished among the top hundred women in the world. She was on her way to becoming a world-class runner and a superstar of the Special Olympics movement.
At one race, soon after she’d finished the Boston Marathon, a local Special Olympics coordinator asked her to give a brief speech to the volunteers and donors. Loretta had never spoken in front of people in her life—she’d never even given a presentation in school—but she wasn’t intimidated.
“I’m an athlete,” she remembers saying. “I’m proud. I ran a marathon and this is what Special Olympics means to me. I ran my first race a few years ago and everywhere I looked, I saw people like me. Nobody called me names. Nobody made fun of anybody. It was all people like me and people who wanted to help and that was all the people who were there. I got a medal and I had the best time of my life. This is a very special thing and I can tell you for sure, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Thank you.”
Loretta Claiborne went on to run twenty-seven marathons. In 1982, she became the first Special Olympics athlete in history to join the Board of Directors for Special Olympics Pennsylvania. After that first little impromptu speech, she went on to speak around the world, teaching the searing lessons of her own childhood and the beauty of belonging. She visited hundreds of schools, teaching thousands of children not to bully one another and to welcome their peers with special needs. In 2012 she was invited to give a TED talk on the subject of fearlessness and intellectual disability. Hollywood made a movie about her life, The Loretta Claiborne Story, and it aired on television networks around the world. She still struggles with reading and with many tasks that require school smarts, but not with life smarts. When Rita Claiborne became terminally ill and began to decline, the only one of her eight children she could always count on to help her was Loretta.
* * *
Loretta came charging into my world when the legendary governor of Connecticut Lowell Weicker decided to lead the host committee of the 1995 Special Olympics World Games and bring the biggest show in the world of Special Olympics to my adopted hometown of New Haven. At about the same time, my work in the New Haven Public Schools began to collapse. John Dow left New Haven because of his years of confrontation with the political establishment. The Social Development Department I led was just visible enough to be identified with Dow, and the hammer started to come down as soon as he left town. Within months, Roger Weissberg, too, was gone, offered a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Our funding for preventive social development training was chiseled away and redirected to truancy officers. In the blink of an eye, our work became of secondary importance for the school district. No one ever questioned our results, but more and more people began to question our power to sustain the level of change required to make social and emotional learning stick. The last lesson I learned in the New Haven Public Schools was the most bitter: political agendas often overrule the best interests of children. We in social development were on the outs.
I applied for and was granted a leave of absence from my position as supervisor of social development to work on a Ph.D. At the same time, the governor asked me to devote my energy to the 1995 Special Olympics World Games. And the brash, independent governor was a man to whom few could say no. He was a pioneer of disability rights in the House and Senate of the United States, the father of a son with Down syndrome, and the kind of man who made things happen. It made sense to commit to a year of full-time work for Special Olympics, I thought, and Linda agreed. I never went back.
TEN
Loretta
By the mid-1990s Special Olympics had become a global phenomenon with new affiliates in the People’s Republic of China, in Egypt, and throughout Europe, Africa, and Latin America. It boasted close to one million athletes around the world. Hosting the Special Olympics World Games was nothing like planning the event in Chicago decades earlier. It was a massive undertaking.
In the fall of 1993, I left my office in the vocational wing at Hillhouse and moved downtown to one of New Haven’s only high-rise office buildings, to be the president of the 1995 Special Olympics World Games Organizing Committee. An irrepressible social entrepreneur and CEO of Special Olympics Connecticut, Peter Wheeler was the creative genius behind the games, and he took on the role of executive director. Within a few weeks, one of the first volunteers to show up ready to help was Loretta Claiborne.
Can you imagine a better coach for me than Loretta? I was stepping back into the world of huge events, hi
gh pressure, and powerful people. I was coming from my own small school of the heart in the New Haven Public Schools, where I’d worked on and off for thirteen years, trying to understand the still point within myself, trying to understand how to make sense of that stillness, trying to understand what skills I could teach that would allow me to communicate it to others. I had been working and living outside of my “family business” for a long time—with the kids in New Haven, with scholars of religion and psychology, with Linda and our children.
Then all of a sudden I was sitting in a corner office, with a mandate to raise $34 million from private sources, with an eighty-thousand-seat stadium to fill, with hundreds of thousands of spectators to host, and with the president of the United States as our anticipated guest. The world of Special Olympics included more than a hundred countries, and they were all sending teams to New Haven—more than six thousand athletes in all. The scale of everything changed.
Loretta did her best to coach me through it. Week after week, she’d take the bus from York, Pennsylvania, to New Haven to volunteer in the office. She still lived with her mother but would travel to Connecticut for a few days at a time to help with mailings, with the phones, and with preparing agendas for the hundreds of volunteer meetings taking place every week around the city. She was unassuming, quiet, and easy to please. Sometimes she’d just spend the whole day wandering around the office, asking various coordinators and managers and directors if they had any work she could help with. If they did, she’d join. If they didn’t, she’d knit in the waiting room and talk to visitors or volunteers.
She happened to be volunteering in the mailroom on the day when we were preparing for our first visit from our boss, Governor Weicker. At the time, the games were still eighteen months away, but that wasn’t much time considering the scope of the work that needed to be done. The governor was coming to New Haven to conduct full briefings with the staff and leadership and to evaluate our progress toward our goals. Weicker was tough, impatient, and demanding—a powerful figure who’d spent the early part of his political career fighting Nixon Republicans while leading the business-oriented wing of the Republican party in the northeast. He was a political independent who was known for an independent spirit that bordered on dominance. He used every inch of his six-foot-six frame to lead, intimidate, cajole, and win. In Connecticut, he was known as “the Bear.” On this particular day, the Bear was headed to our office to evaluate me and my team. I scrambled around the office, pushing everyone to have their reports ready, their presentations brief but articulate, their numbers accessible, and their plans sharpened.
An hour before the governor was scheduled to arrive, his advance security detail came to make sure the conference room and his desk were ready. At that point, I was on the anxiety express, so I started pacing from office to office. “Can you clean up your desk, Sam?” I said in one office. In the next: “Do you have all your venue maps, Peter?” Then I stormed down the hall barking orders and announcing the governor’s imminent arrival. When I reached the mailroom, documents and envelopes were scattered about.
“Can someone please clean up this mess in here?” I fumed. “I’ve been saying for a week that the governor is coming today, and this whole place still looks like a disaster.”
I can’t remember the name of the colleague who was in charge, but I brushed past him, only frustrated that I couldn’t scream out loud. And as I stomped out of the mailroom there was Loretta, sitting at the coffee table with her knitting. Almost under her breath, she said to me as I passed, “You know, the governor puts his pants on in the morning the same as you.”
“I know that!” I snapped. “I know the governor puts his pants on just like…” Then I stopped in my tracks, realizing that she’d said something I wanted or needed to hear again. “What did you say?”
“I know the governor’s coming, Tim, but he’s just a person. That’s all I said.”
Even as I write this, I’m embarrassed to admit that I really didn’t know the governor was just a person like me. I’m even more embarrassed to admit that I’m not sure I understand it even today. I know what the words mean, but I don’t know if I really understand it deep in my bones. I was raised in a family where politics was everything, and we spent a lot of time and energy focused on people with flashy titles and the glamour of political success. I guess it was obvious to Loretta why I was a wreck, but it wasn’t obvious to me. She was the only person in that office who understood that we were all racing around because we were in the grip of power fear. And she understood it so well that she could identify it and tell me the solution in one sentence: “The governor puts his pants on in the morning, same as you.” She didn’t follow it up with a pep talk about not being afraid of powerful people, about having confidence in myself, about feeling comfortable in my own skin, blah, blah, blah. Her intelligence about the deceptions of power was so acute that none of that was necessary.
This was the first of several occasions when Loretta coached me on how to see without judging and how to see the beauty of each person—two of the basic gifts of being fully alive. A few weeks after the governor’s visit, I received a call from the Yale Alumni Association asking us to provide a speaker for their annual meeting in New Haven. With Yale being the lead university among the hosts for the games, the alumni wanted to learn more about the Special Olympics movement and explore ways to help. The association represented thousands of Yale graduates in Connecticut and around the world. It included some of the world’s most prominent leaders in government, business, law, medicine, the arts, and more. Power, glamour, success: being invited to speak to this distinguished audience was a big opportunity to attract donors and press. The amount of wealth in the room would be extraordinary.
We chose Loretta to speak to the group. The meeting was held in an elegant banquet hall in one of Yale’s illustrious gothic buildings. I looked across the crowd when I introduced Loretta: mostly white men in pinstriped suits who represented everything Governor Weicker represented and more. They were high achievers, success stories, brilliant thinkers. They had won friends and influenced people. If only we could get these kinds of people to accept our athletes into their world, I thought, we’d be on our way to more opportunity, more inclusion, more dignity.
Loretta began her speech with her life story and went on to describe the joy of running and of discovering herself in the world of Special Olympics. She described what it was like to go out to schools to talk to kids about name-calling and bullying. She described what it was like to find a community of people who saw her abilities, not her disabilities. She described the anger that had infected every cell of her body for so many years but had now left her.
Then she told a story about the previous Special Olympics World Games. “I remember when I was getting ready to go to the World Games in 1991,” she recounted. “We were a year away from going to Minneapolis, Minnesota, when our coach gave us a description of what it would be like. He said that we would stay in dormitories and visit famous sites on the Mississippi River and compete against the best Special Olympics athletes in the world. He even made the point of saying that athletes from the Soviet Union would be coming, and even though there were always good athletes from there and even though that country was our enemy, we would compete in fairness and just do our best.
“And I thought, how could those athletes from the Soviet Union come all the way over to the United States and not feel scared and left out? I started to think what it was like when I was scared and I realized that even though they were coming to Special Olympics, they were coming to a country where they probably thought the people didn’t like them. And I thought to myself, ‘That’s not Special Olympics. We don’t let people feel that way.’
“So I decided to do something about that, and I asked the lady who lives near my house if I could get some tapes that I could play in my Walkman that I play when I run that could teach me how to speak Russian. I said to myself that when those Russian athletes come over here and
if I get to meet them, I want to say something to them in their own language and help them feel welcome. I want them to know that in Special Olympics, we don’t dislike anyone because of where they’re from or what language they speak or what their religion is or nothing. In Special Olympics, everyone is the same. So I just decided I would spend a year listening to Russian tapes on my headphones so that I could show them that in Special Olympics, they’re just like all the rest of us and we want them to feel good about coming all the way over here to have games with us. And sure enough, when I met athletes from the Soviet Union in Minneapolis and said ‘Privet! Dobro pozhalovat’ v nashei strane Amerike’ for ‘Hello! Welcome to America,’ they smiled from ear to ear.”
She then addressed the alumni personally: “That’s why I want you to come to Special Olympics. That’s why I want you to come into my world.
“In our world, we treat everyone well and we tell everyone that they can be a winner. There are no losers in our world. That’s the world I love. I say God is my strength and Special Olympics is my joy. I count on them both in my world. So come into my world. In my world, we don’t have any enemies like countries do. And in my world, we don’t look at what a person can’t do; we only give them a chance to show everyone what they can do. That’s why our world is the way it ought to be. Because that way, everyone has a chance to belong and there’s nobody who gets rejected or left out or excluded. So when the Special Olympics World Games come to New Haven in July, I hope you’ll all come out and join our world. You’ll see. It’s strong and joyful and you can’t beat that.
“Thank you.”
I was stunned. I’m guessing she stunned the venerable leaders of the Yale Alumni Association, too. Everyone tries to join their world. Everyone looks on their world with envy and admiration. They’re the ones who are the most clever, have risen the fastest, won the biggest prizes. Who was this woman with an intellectual disability, who might not even qualify for a maintenance job at Yale, to tell them they were living in the wrong world? If my first lesson from Loretta was about not being intimidated by power, this took it one step further: don’t even try to join the world of the powerful. Instead, create a welcoming world and tell power to come over to it.
Fully Alive_Discovering What Matters Most Page 17