At the very same time my mother was working in the halls of power, she was also inaugurating Camp Shriver back at home in Rockville, Maryland…
Like every effective revolutionary, she was also an observer, an experimenter, a risk-taker. In 1962, there was little consensus in the fields of science or public policy as to what, exactly, people with intellectual disabilities could do. Could they function in society outside of institutions? Could they form friendships, play sports, fall in love, hold jobs? No one knew for sure, because so few alternatives had been tested.
One of Camp Shriver’s primary purposes was to serve as a testing ground, an informal scientific exploration of whether kids with intellectual disabilities could play sports and games and, if so, whether they would benefit from doing so.