EFE's Honored Event Guest, Dolly Hallstrom

At this year's annual benefit, December 2nd, Equip for Equality will be celebrating the life and public service of one of Illinois' most dedicated advocates for disability rights, former State Legislator Mary Jeanne "Dolly" Hallstrom. A lifetime board member and one-time legislative resource coordinator for Equip for Equality, Dolly turns 80 this December. But to appreciate her 50 years of advocacy means to realize that her legacy lives very much today in its own prime. Some of her work on such bills as 1407 in the '60s and '70s built the foundations for special education in Illinois and the nation.

Photo of Dolly Hallstrom, EFE's Honored Event Guest One of Dolly's first forays into public life, in 1957, was as a housewife, a mother of two young children, and a nurse. She raised $5,000 to provide a boy with learning disabilities proper school supports. Many successes soon followed. She quickly transformed this early effort into a permanent resource called the Fund for Perceptually Handicapped Children, and the resulting organization, The National Association of Children with Learning Disabilities, would soon hold ground-breaking nationally recognized conferences. In 1965, Dolly went on to become a volunteer lobbyist for parents of children with learning disabilities. She served as State Education Chairman of the committee in Illinois on the White House Conference on Children and Youth from 1968-1970. Today, she is the longest serving member of the Illinois Human Rights Commission, appointed by Governor Jim Edgar in 1991.

Colleagues, on both sides of party lines, tend to recall Dolly in a deeply personal light - as a friend and mother fighting for the dignity and justice of children - belying her exceptional statesmanship, intellectual grasp of the issues, and pioneering efforts. This is partly her own doing; Dolly made her struggles look easy, even when they were most certainly not. On the eve of her first election to the state legislature, in 1978, she suffered a serious stroke and still won, despite her party's admonitions to step down; she won with the largest number of votes for any state Representative in Illinois history.

Ever since her germinal effort, Dolly has endeavored on two of our nation's most cherished native impulses: charity and entrepreneurship. She found ways to fix problems and, in the process, stirred the social conscience, giving people not only the means but the passion and commitment to help one another. She recognizes that some of us have the ability to give, some the ability to advocate, and all of us, with the right opportunities, the ability to realize our greatest potential and live with meaning and dignity. Below, is a snapshot through Dolly's lens of what the early disability-rights movement in Illinois looked like.

Q: Tell me about your introduction to disability rights.

DH: It was 1955. A good friend of mine and I were in the North Shore Juniors, a group for women under 35. I was Philanthropy Chairman - somehow I get into things and then I get in over my head - and my friend who was Secretary came over and started to cry because she found out that her son was brain damaged. And I said 'Well, what does that mean?' I had two normal children. She said that her son had had measles as a baby and had had a high fever and as a result was brain injured and didn't learn like other children. In my position, I was supposed to find a charity to raise money for and I said, well, here's someone to help. There was a school in Texas for brain-injured children, so we raised the money by having a raffle, which I didn't know at the time was illegal in Illinois. We had Governor Stratton send his aide to pick the winning ticket. We sold 1,000 tickets at five dollars a piece. They called it Dolly's Follies because they thought it would never work. From that we made One Child Has Lead to Thousands, because we made up our minds we weren't going to quit until there was not one child in Illinois whose school district didn't have a program for brain-injured children. We didn't like the name 'brain injured' so we found out through Northwestern we should use the name 'perceptually handicapped.' We didn't have teacher training for that disability either, so I went to Springfield and got Senate Joint Resolution 25 passed that said that all teacher training institutions had to train teachers on perceptually handicapped children.

Q: Tell me about early special-education legislation.

DH: We lobbied for House Bill 1407. What a thrill when that was passed! It meant that every child that had a disability had to be taught. Part of the bill required an advisory council, and somehow I ended up being the chair of that for 18 years. If school districts had less than 15,000 students in them, they could join together and one district would provide for the deaf and one for the blind and learning disabled and so forth. And when we found out that some schools couldn't do it we had House Bill 28 passed, which stated that if the school could not provide the services, it had to provide the funding so the child could go someplace else for the services he or she needed. Bill 1407 was some of the most progressive legislation in the country. From that, we went to the federal government to help lobby for national legislation.

Q: You were involved in establishing some of the terminology used today.

DH: In 1963, our early group had a national meeting in the old LaSalle Hotel, which is no longer there, that included about 15 professional people from different parts of the country and panels of 10 people representing parents, teachers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and so on. Sam Kirk from University of Illinois was the one who actually gave us the name of the organization. People from Wisconsin called their organization Society for Brain Injured Children, and we didn't like that. And then there was the Alabama Association for the Aphasoid, which is for aphasia, and then we had the California Association for the Neurologically Impaired. And so Sam Kirk said, 'Let's just think about what the children can't do like other children. Why don't we call it learning disabilities.' So that's where the name came for the National Association for Children with Learning Disabilities. And that's where the phrase came from.

Q: Describe becoming a state legislator.

DH: That first time was a little scary, I'll tell you. My husband was my campaign manager, and he didn't know any more about politics than I did. There were six men running at that time and two vacancies. I came in third. My husband said, 'Dolly, you gotta do this again. You did amazingly well.' The second time came around and I had the endorsement of every newspaper - the Daily News, The Tribune, the Sun-Times. So that time we won the primaries easy enough. And then on May 4, 1978, I woke up and I couldn't use my dominant arm. I got to the hospital and sure enough I had had a stroke, a brain aneurism. Everyone thought I was going to call a press conference to say I wasn't going to stay in the election, but I said, 'No! I can still talk!' And sure enough, I won.

I made friends with the Democrats as well as the Republicans. I had a precinct captain on my right side who was a Democrat, and he'd say, 'Vote yes! It's a Dolly Bill!' I had more fun, I tell you! I had all these guys on the left side of me that were all Republicans and very conservative, and they would say to me, 'Dolly! Don't vote the issue, vote the personality!' And I thought, that's no good. You should vote the issue.

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