Episode 37: The Toomey Gazette

The podcast introductory segment is composed to evoke friction. It begins with the sound of an elevator crunching as it goes up. A robotic voice says “floor two.” Then music with a mysterious tone comes on. A series of voices define Contra*. Layered voices say:

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Contra is friction… Contra is texture… Contra is questions…Nuanced…Collaborative…Contra is world-changing…Contra is innovation, messy, solidarity, interdependence…Contra is thinking about design critically. Contra is a podcast.

 

Throughout, there are sounds of typing, texting and Zoom being opened. 

Then an electric guitar bass note fades into the sound of a digital call ringing and starting. The intro ends with the sound of a Facetime call ringing and then picked up.

Hi, I’m Kelsie Acton, the project manager for the Remote Access Archive. The Remote Access Archive contains oral histories much like the ones featured in this season of the Contra* podcast. But it also contains numerous, very cool  documents. This is one of a series of mini-episodes to share some of those documents with you. Today, I’m looking at the first issue of the Toomey Gazette, later known as the Rehabilitation Gazette. The Toomey Gazette was a print newsletter sent out by a rehabilitation center to its broader community. If you were a recipient of the newsletter, you would get it through the mail. The first few issues had 10 pages, and then it grew to between 40 - 50 pages, shrinking again in the 90s to under 10 pages. There are 63 issues of the newsletter digitized in the online archive of Rehabilitation International, and in our archive. 

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This first issue is from July, 1955. The Toomey Gazette was a newsletter started by Gini Laurie, who volunteered at a residential respiratory clinic for polio survivors. It was meant to help patients stay in contact after they had left the clinic. The newsletter is black on white, typeset in two columns. The front page features a rough doodle of a cat sitting in a picnic basket. When the newsletter was copied it was done so unevenly - some of the type is smeared and some is lighter in places.

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The contents of this first issue are very clearly written for a group of people who know each other. It contains a book review, profiles of the doctor and nurse of the month, but also news of a former patient’s engagement and the question of the month: What were all the people doing down around Room 106 on the night before Bob Novak’s departure?

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The Toomey Gazette would grow from this humble beginning into a newsletter with an international readership that would circulate for decades. The newsletter itself was a form of remote access and often lifesaving remote access. It shared information about the latest equipment and maintenance, both things that respiratory polio survivors' lives depended on. In the 1980s, letters to the Gazette shared information and focused medical attention on post-polio syndrome, which is marked by increased pain, fatigue and weakness fifteen to forty years after a polio infection. 

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The Gazette would also document numerous forms of remote access. Examples included articles about remote schooling, the accessibility of telephone sales jobs for polio survivors, and even intercom schooling where students would call into their school’s intercom system to participate in classes. For a long time the Gazette ran a column that connected people around the world as penpals.

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Skimming through issues of the Gazette, I’m thinking about how significant print and digital newsletters and other forms of remote access have been in creating disability identities. In the Remote Access Archive we also link to The Ragged Edge, a newsletter that covered disability issues, published opinion pieces and art work. The Ragged Edge was key to informing people about disability activism in the United States between 1980 and 2004, but also played a role in creating a shared disability culture. The Ragged Edge is now archived online but for most of its history it was printed and mailed. Much like the Toomey Gazette. We also link out to The Autistic Archive, an incredibly important piece of work by Ira Eidle to document the emergence of autistic culture through websites, forums and blogs. In the early days of the pandemic, disabled fashion designer Sky Cubacub returned to print, mailing out newsletters. Today, Kevin Gotkin’s Crip News shares disability news and activism from around the world through an email newsletter. Remote access has been, and still is, the way so much of disability culture has been formed. It’s the way we find each other, share life-saving information, discover new ways of understanding the world and fight for each other. 

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Thank you for listening. If this document touched you somehow - sparked your curiosity, made you angry, made you feel seen - you can find it in the Remote Access Archive at www.criticaldesignlab.com/project/remote-access-archive. Remember, remote access is disability culture.

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[Rhythmic pops. Strings ripple and play as Aimi speaks]

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Aimi Hamraie: 

You've been listening to Contra*, a podcast about disability design, justice, and the life world. Contra* is a production of the Critical Design Lab. This season's episodes draw on our recent project, the Remote Access Archive, created by a team of disabled researchers collaborating remotely. Learn about our projects, including the remote access archive at www.criticaldesignlab.com. 

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If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on Spotify, rate and leave a review. 

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This season of Contra* is edited by Ilana Nevins. Kelsie Acton and Aimi Hamraie developed the episodes. 

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The Contra* Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial share alike International 3.0 license.That means you can remix, repost, or recycle any of the content as long as you cite the original source, aren't making money, you don't change the credits and you share it under the same license.

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