Steven Brown, part 05 of 12: "Ed and Zona's Relationship"

bjbjm Zona was originally from Oregon and she had for a middle class white person, had
a very unusual upbringing, her mom was married four times before Zona left the house as a
teenager, so there were a lot of other things around that, but sort of the point about that
is that Zona herself had this unusual experience and therefore maybe some different ways of
looking at the world from here upbringing, and she talked about how the most important
thing to her after having those experiences once she got married was, having a solid family
and keeping the family together, so she really worked at that, and I don t want to exclude
Ed s father either, his name was Vern and I didn t know him, he died actually pretty
young, he died in the 60 s, but one of the things I do know about him is that he was
a, a kind of, could fix anything kind of guy, so when something went wrong with Ed s equipment
he was able to fix it and that made a huge difference in Ed being able to live at home,
you know they had a huge iron lung out in the ah, ah, in their living room, and in fact
before Ed could come home from the hospital they had to move from one house to another
so that they had space for him to be there. So their lives, excuse me, their lives were
really intertwined for all of Ed s life, or most of Ed s life, but, till the end of his
life in some ways, so someone is obviously there as his mom when he s a teenager, after
he does graduate from high school he goes to a community college and he s still living
at home and at first Zona s the one driving him to campus and taking notes for him, but
that changes as time goes along, and then he moves to Berkeley and goes into Cowell
the hospital there where he s the first person with this kind of disability to go to an American
university and that s really the first time he s away from Zona after he has polio, so
that happens Vegetable I think was the worst, although he made a joke out of that, he called
himself an artichoke, I m trying to think if he called himself, I think he probably
just called himself a person with a disability Who s that? Oh yeah, yeah I know that name,
but, OK, Uh huh, Oh yeah, right, right But I missed something, what did she say? Oh,
oh yeah definitely Oh yeah, the half a person, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that was after
Ed passed away that, that Jerry said that, have you guys seen the fifteen, the fifteen?,
the 60 minutes interview with Ed? It s worth watching because he ll talk about some of
the stuff, but in 15 minutes he talks pretty much about all of the issues that are still,
well maybe there are some other ones now, but the ones he does talk about are all still
relevant today and he also talks a little bit about the international stuff I hear you
have some good DVD s, Chris told me, so anything you d like to make me a copy of I d appreciate
it You know I can t think of anything Ed actually wanted to be called other than dad, that was
his big thing I remember The other thing he, I don t know if anybody, I m sure somebody
has probably talked about this, but he talks about in his 60 minutes piece, is how motivated
he was to get a power chair so he could go, yeah you ve seen that, or heard that, OK,
so as far as what he wanted to be called I can t think of anything but I, that s actually
not quite true, has anybody talked about his being a star and being stared at thing? hSa(
gdSa( well I first saw ED, I think, I knew about him but I first saw him at this actually
wonderful conference called beyond survival that was held in Denver in 19 Owner Normal
Owner Microsoft Office Word Microsoft, Inc well I first saw ED, I think, I knew about
him but I first saw him at this actually wonderful conference called beyond survival that was
held in Denver in 19 Title Microsoft Office Word Document MSWordDoc Word.Document.8