UNDER THEIR OWN POWER

By JAMES WILLWERTH/SAN FRANCISCO

At precisely 1:25 p.m. on Hayes Street near Franklin in San Francisco, Mary Lou Breslin's motorized wheelchair spat out a shower of sparks and died. Breslin, 50, disabled by polio since childhood, had been shopping with her friend, Kathy Martinez, 36, who is blind. "I haven't been dead in the water for years," Breslin muttered angrily. With that, she and Martinez began to "strategize," their term for improvising in the face of emergencies. As able-bodied pedestrians moved past in a hurried blur, Breslin pulled out her cellular phone and started making calls.

Nothing is simple in the life of the disabled. Breslin and Martinez not only live daily with such obstacles, they evaluate them as well. Breslin helped establish the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, while Martinez has traveled worldwide as a consultant on blindness (and she water-skis when she gets the chance). Despite Breslin's wheelchair breakdown, a day with them on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area shows that commonplace life has improved dramatically for them since the advent of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Several years ago, for example, Breslin stopped at a drugstore near her home in Berkeley. The tight turnstiles at the entrance made access difficult, the checkout aisles were too narrow for her wheelchair, and Breslin had to wheel backward against the flow of other shoppers after she paid her bill. On a recent visit, she found that the store, now run by a different retailer, was much easier to deal with. There were no turnstiles to negotiate, and a wide checkout counter had been installed. "Without the ADA," Breslin said, "this wouldn't have happened."

Yet annoyances remain. An assistant manager seemed vaguely huffy when Martinez asked for help finding cough drops. The clerk assigned to the task was polite but, Martinez confided, "sometimes they just take my [walking] stick and pull me along."

Later, at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Berkeley, Breslin had to wheel backward into a small, smelly elevator, while other people used escalators. Martinez, who also rides BART, feels safe there, thanks to bumps, or "edge detection strips" that warn the blind away from the edge of the platforms. Despite the tight-elevator problem, bart is regarded as a disability-rights pioneer. "It was such a treat to take this train when I came to California years ago," says Breslin, who was raised in the Midwest. "I'd never lived anywhere where there was access."

But when the train pulled into the San Francisco Shopping Centre, a mall on Market Street admired for its accessibility, the wheelchair lift refused to work. Breslin tinkered and finally made it move by asking a bystander to hold the bottom gate tightly shut while she pushed buttons inside. Later she spoke of the frustrations of "the Blanche DuBois life," a reference to the lonely, high-strung character in A Streetcar Named Desire who relies on "the kindness of strangers."

When Breslin's chair broke down an hour later, she was once again at the mercy of others. After telephoning a disabled-access taxi service, she had to wait nearly two hours. The driver charged $90 to transport her and Martinez to a wheelchair-repair shop across the bay. Strapped in her chair like furniture, Breslin rocked uncomfortably in the rear of the van with each high-speed freeway turn. A technician fixed her electric motor, and soon a friend arrived to help her get home. Such is the life of the disabled: determined, resourceful and, all too often, reliant on the kindness of strangers.

--By James Willwerth/San Francisco