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Wednesday, March 26, 1980
University Daily Kansan
Handicapped gain independence with resource center's support
By BENJAMIN JONES Staff Reporter
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being made easier for handicapped persons this year by the newly established Kentucky Living Resource Center, $89 Kentucky S
The center, which opened last September, helps the handicapped in Douglas County by providing a variety of services, and meet a variety of other needs, according to M McCoys, a community worker.
McCoy said the center served physically and developmentally handicapped adults from 18 to 60 years old. She said that when people were not in their homes or their friends, it would set up appointments to visit the handicapped persons in their homes, if they could not do so.
in institutions, such as nursing homes, leave the facilities and lead more independent lives.
Lenore F. Talafera, director of the resource center, said the center's primary function was to prevent premature institutionalization, or to help people already
"We're talking about day-to-day coping," she said.
TALIAFEROA SAID that the center served all of Douglas County, but that many handicapped people were not aware of the service because it was so new. The center is called "The Bottom Court," sort of a *project* of its parent state agency- Vocational Rehabilitation.
Mccoy said a rural model of the center would open soon in Hays. The Lawrence center is one of the few in the Midwest, and it has provided federal government, supplemented by a $80,000 grant from the state. She said the federal dollars came from Rehabilitation Services Administration, a federal agency independent living centers across the country.
President Carter recently announced that federal matching funds would be sliced by 75 percent, but McCoy said the budget
decrease would not cut into programs for the handicapped.
McCOY SAID the center would get more business when it had become more established in the community by word-of-mouth. She said the center's efforts to reach the handicapped were hindered by the lack of care of handicapped persons in Douglas County.
the center must rely on census figures, she said, but added that these were vague. McCoy said about 10 percent of the population in some way; 40 percent of these severely.
Tailferrair that because handicapped persons 'haven't been identified in a case of abuse, they have these people. These handicapped people referred to the center were eager to hear about services the center could offer to them, but had not been offered to them in the past.
Talferaro the center was taking interviews to establish a pool of attendants for handicapped persons. She said those students were all able to find care students or friends of the handicapped.
She said that although KU provided a bus service to take handicapped students to and from the center, the bus station center hoped to start a bus service to other places handicapped people needed to go.
Applicants should have a knowledge of campus and state issues. Lobbying experience would be helpful.
TOPEKA—"You haven't had a shine on these since the snow," Robert Foster told the senator settling onto the Kansas Capitol shoesthe stand.
By SCOTT C. FAUST Staff Reporter
The Campus Director, paid by ASK, is responsible for organizing and coordinating all lobbying activities at KU.
The Associated Students of Kansas
Applications and more information about ASK are available at the Student Senate Office, 105B in the Kansas Union.
Shoeshine adds polish to Statehouse
Students Working for Students
Only students with an interest in politics and with organizational and leadership abilities need apply.
Foster, 76, who has manned the stand for the last nine legislative sessions, was not born with an eye for such shem. detail He acquires it in a hell-bent-for-survival life.
Lathering the black oxfords with hands worn hard by decades of labor, Foster said he had to do his 75-cent shirts "as good as I can as fast as I can."
Each morning, as he has since retiring at Kansas Supreme Court junior in 1970, Mr. Baldwin and his staff, the Statehouse, sets up his polish-stained, three-seat stand and waits for passing
On a good day, he thines 15 to 20 pairs to supplement his Social Security, food stamps and Medicare.
Return applications to the Senate by 5p.m. Monday, Mar. 31.
The grandson of a slave and the son of a Bobby, Miss. sharecropper who had to give a bile of cotton to "the man" for every shirt he wore. The boy he shinned his first pair of shoes as a kid.
The Associated Students of Kansas, the statewide student lobby organization, has an opening for CAMPUS DIRECTOR at KU.
"That's the way it satisfies the customers," he said.
Satisfying the customer has been Foster's concern for much of his life.
"I used to have a little old box," he said.
"I put it on the street and men would put
FOR LEADERS ONLY
"There were a lot of towns in the South where you could set up a shine stand anywhere."
one foot on at a time. A shine was a nickel a shoe.
EXPERIENCE SHOWS in Foster's careful blacking of polish.
When Foster was six and living in Arkansas, his parents left him to a white family who owned a grocery store. He never lived with his parents again.
The family did a shop. He went to a black school until the fifth grade. Doing odd jobs for the family took precedence over education.
The family didn't adopt him.
In his early teens, Foster left the white family and worked in Arkansas and Louisiana saw mills.
At the various hotels, Foster's jobs included dishwashing, waiting on elderly live-ins, bellhopping, and of course, shining shoes.
When lumber work was hard to find and hunger touched him, Foster went to railroad depot hotels and offered his labor for bed and board.
Foster worked in hotels all over the country. The Hotel Noble in Jonesboro, Ark., the Hotel Zimbo in Rochester, Minn.—he knows them all.
Free to wander by freight train when unemployed, Foster headed to New Mexico in 1828 and was put off the train in 1830. "200 miles from any colored people."
He went back to work at Missouri Pacific, working on the tracks in the summer and in the shops during the winter, until 1969.
HE SAID white children playing along the tracks had never seen a black man before, and they tried to rub the black off him.
"They thought I was some kind of varmint," Foster said.
Railroading was Foster's next calling, and in 1930, he finished laying the Missouri Pacific's line from Poplar Bluff, Mo., to Tarkaardan, Texas.
Black Tuesday's effects soon reached the railroads, and the Missouri Pacific laid Foster off.
IN KANSAS CITY, he slept in boxcars and worked all day breaking rock for a bowl of soup in one of President Hoover's "Helping Hand" programs.
FDR's New Deal put Foster in a Works Progress Administration job building Kansas bridges and reservoirs.
"Because there wasn't no union when I first started," Foster said, most of his long years with the railroad did not count. "Since I was born, I receives no retirement pay from the company."
But Foster said he did not get a bad deal from life.
"I had to take what I get all my life. You got to make the best you can out of life, and that's what I've been doing."
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