One volunteer’s memories of the beginning
Special Olympics movement got its start on 20 July 1968, when the first Games were held at Soldier Field, Chicago, Illinois, USA. But the concept of Special Olympics was born much earlier, with a day camp at the Shriver family home in 1962.
Virginia Weschler of Adam A. Weschler’s & Sons, Inc., in Washington, D.C., USA knows what it’s like to be different and unique. Not only is Weschler’s the only auction house in the city, but it also just happened to be the inspiration for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry’s Cadillac Jack: A Novel. Even more unique, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl in 1962, Weschler participated in the first Camp Shriver, a gathering of those with intellectual disabilities for three weeks of fun and learning.
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"It was a different world, but it was also an awful lot of fun because the kids were great, the other campers were wonderful, the students were lots of fun," recalls Virginia Weschler of the first Camp Shriver, where counselors assisted campers with intellectual disabilities with activities such as swimming, pony rides, and more. "It was just a ball." |
The previous school year, Weschler had taken a course to teach religion classes to those with intellectual disabilities, so when she heard a call for volunteers at Camp Shriver, it was something she decided to do.
“We [counselors without intellectual disabilities] were all local high school kids,” said Weschler. “It was interesting seeing kids learn. It’s hard to go back 40 years and remember how protected these people were, how isolated from what was going on in the rest of the world.”
Right she was. Remember what was going down in the early 1960s: the civil rights movement was underway, Vietnam was knocking on the nation’s door, cultural mores were changing and the space age had just begun. Back then, discrimination was par for the course for many Americans, including those with intellectual disabilities.
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In 1962, Maria Shriver, then just 6 years old, and her brothers Bobby (8) — even Timothy at two and half! —participated fully in Camp Shriver. A newspaper of the day reported "they extend the same helping hand, the same politeness, and the same loving kindness as their mother." |
“They did a good job of pumping us up and telling us that this was important,” Weschler remembered. “Some of these kids really weren’t in classrooms; they weren’t in any kind of educational program, as I recalled. A lot of them I think were going to classes at the Kennedy Institute. It was a big deal that these children were going to day camp.
"It was a different world, but it was also an awful lot of fun because the kids were great, the other campers were wonderful, the students were lots of fun. It was just a ball. Mrs. Shriver put a lot of herself into it, she had the kids there everyday — her children — and they participated as well.”
Weschler added: “Most of them were children under the age of 12 who for the most part had not had a chance to do things. They didn’t know how to catch a ball, they didn’t know how to run between bases, they didn’t know how to do these things and so our job was to teach them.”
And for those three weeks that’s just what Weschler and the other counselors did. With their help, the campers learned to catch, run, swim, ride a pony and take a big step forward into the mainstream.
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