Disability Rights Advocates Organization

For former big-business lawyers Larry Paradis and Sid Wolinsky, the move was a risky about-face: trading the security of corporate work for the dice-roll of championing often-underdog disabled clients. Their goal was to get corporate institutions to see that people with disabilities would no longer accept being treated as second-class.

I was in my local Mervyn's department store the other day, checking the width of the merchandise aisles with a tape measure. The idea was to determine how many of them would be accessible to a shopper who uses a wheelchair, which by convention requires about 32 inches side to side. But in truth, it was hard enough for me to navigate some of the crowded aisles myself without dislodging stacks of jeans or shirts, and I was on my own two feet.

Who died in the Holocaust? The short, awful answer is 6 million Jews. Sid Wolinsky prefers a longer and also grim reply: Six million Jews. And, among others, nearly 300,000 people with disabilities, dubbed "lives not worth living" by a Nazi regime that despised them. Wolinsky has spent years helping disabled people shoulder their way into American life, into schools and stores, onto streets and buses.

For former big-business lawyers Larry Paradis and Sid Wolinsky, the move was a risky about-face: trading the security of corporate work for the dice-roll of championing often-underdog disabled clients. Their goal was to get corporate institutions to see that people with disabilities would no longer accept being treated as second-class.

I was in my local Mervyn's department store the other day, checking the width of the merchandise aisles with a tape measure. The idea was to determine how many of them would be accessible to a shopper who uses a wheelchair, which by convention requires about 32 inches side to side. But in truth, it was hard enough for me to navigate some of the crowded aisles myself without dislodging stacks of jeans or shirts, and I was on my own two feet.

Who died in the Holocaust? The short, awful answer is 6 million Jews. Sid Wolinsky prefers a longer and also grim reply: Six million Jews. And, among others, nearly 300,000 people with disabilities, dubbed "lives not worth living" by a Nazi regime that despised them. Wolinsky has spent years helping disabled people shoulder their way into American life, into schools and stores, onto streets and buses.