Background on Denise Karuth and Fred Pelka
Born prematurely in Buffalo, N.Y., in November 1954, Denise Karuth spent the first several months of life in an incubator, resulting in permanent damage to her eyesight. It was only at the end of her junior year of high school, however, that her visual disability was formally acknowledged, and only while a student at SUNY Buffalo that she was identified as legally blind. Starting college as a music major, she gradually tapped into the support services offered by the state's Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, receiving mobility training and assistance in learning to use a guide cane, to read Braille, and to make use of readers and Recordings for the Blind. Hoping to add a specialization in what was then called "exceptional children" -- and to build a career in teaching children with visual disabilities -- she soon encountered an ingrained resistance from her instructors. By their reasoning, a blind person was unsuited to be a teacher of children with disabilities, being too "emotionally involved;" one instructor went so far as to question why she was studying the subject at all.
With growing doubts about her prospects in teaching, Karuth completed her degree in music and relocated to Boston in 1976, having learned that the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind was willing to hire people with visual disabilities. While earning a Masters degree in rehabilitation counseling at Boston College, Karuth's awareness of the need for "safe, reliable, affordable, accessible transportation in all its forms" was greatly sharpened. Living in Brighton, she often found herself waiting for hours on trains only to discover that no one would assist her in boarding, that drivers could not locate the key for the access ramp, or that there was no enough room.
Public transit, Karuth recognized, was a key to people with disabilities in gaining employment, receiving medical care, or performing even the most basic daily routines and became the focus for much of her early activism. From the mid-1980s, when she became confined to a wheelchair, she served on the Governor's Commission on Accessible Transportation and eventually becoming chair. She also began a long and successful career in peer counseling, including stints as Executive Director of the Boston Self Help Center, as a consultant for the Human Genome Initiative, and as a grant writer at the Stavros Center for Independent Living. As Chair of the Massachusetts Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities she helped raise support for passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 and she was an outspoken figure in defeating the 2012 state referendum to legalize suicide, arguing, that legalization "will greatly add to a deadly mix of factors that already lead people who are terminally ill to feel that it is time for them to die." Witnessing the example of her own church, the First Church of Cambridge, she was inspired to broaden her activism still further, working with the Cambridge branch of Amnesty International and perhaps most notable, becoming the a principal founder of the First Church Shelter of the First Church in Cambridge and an advocate for people who are homeless. Amidst her other accomplishments, she earned a second master's degree at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. She was ordained in October 2016 and received a call from the North Hadley Congregational Church.
Karuth met her partner Fred Pelka, while the two were undergraduates at SUNY Buffalo. Himself a person with disabilities, Pelka was born into a German immigrant family in Patchogue, N.Y., on October 16, 1954, and like Karuth, he developed an interest in disability at an early age: he received speech therapy as an elementary school student and had a brother who lost a leg in Vietnam. Working as a writer and historian since the 1980s, Pelka became involved in disability rights activism in 1983 while working at the Boston Center for Independent Living and has developed into an important historian of the movement. A 2004 Guggenheim Fellow, he has written three books on disability issues: The ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement (1997), The Civil War Letters of Charles F. Johnson, Invalid Corps (2004), and What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (2012), the last of which is based on dozens of oral histories with pioneers in the movement, including many collected by Pelka himself. His fourth book, A Different Blaze, was published by Hedgerow Books in 2014, and is his first published poetry.
