Boulder Sunday Camera

By John Quigley

February 7, 1999

Business Woman works to change image of physically challenged

Peggy O'Neill was poised to give her first talk to a large group of employees at StorageTek in Louisville. It was an all day seminar on diversity, and she was nervous. But she had carefully prepared, and she was excited to work for a big, well-paying client.

When the time came to go on, however, there was one problem -- she was in the women's restroom and couldn't reach the door handle to let herself out.

"I was already five minutes behind schedule, and I had to bang on the door until someone came by," says the 43-year-old Boulder resident. "I was almost in tears. I was so frustrated that this would happen at such a pinnacle hi my career."

O'Neill is a little person.  She stands 3-feet  8 inches tall. "I'll have to incorporate that story into one of my talks in the future," she says laughing, a few days after the incident.

Spreading a message

Peggy O'Neill In her talks, the psychotherapist jokes about some of the peculiar challenges of being short in a world designed for taller people. She uses anecdotes, some relatively humorous (like the bathroom story), some disturbing like getting picked up - literally, off the ground - by complete strangers), to make her point. She wants her audiences to go away with an appreciation for how difficult it can be to look different and with an understanding of how they should treat people who aren't the same.

With the passage in 1990 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, businesses are required to provide equal access for people with disabilities. And although dwarfism is legally considered a disability, not all little people consider themselves disabled. In O'Neill's, case it is more of a trait, since she doesn't suffer from any of the debilitating physical or medical complications that can be disabling to some dwarfs.

But the daily environmental challenges that little people have to deal with -- the high door handles, light switches and counters -- do put them at a disadvantage. "The efforts to bring elevator buttons lower, light switches lower is really intended for people in wheelchairs because they have a louder voice," she said. "But its a good thing for little people, too."

The ADA will gradually change the physical environment to accommodate disabled people, but that's the easy part. It's the social barriers that O'Neill and others, such as her husband, Bradley Laise, face. The stares, name-calling and heckling are harder to overcome.

O'Neill's appearance at StoragTek came after the company's diversity coordinator, Susanna Escalante, saw O'Neill speak at a Diversity Associates International conference in Denver and, was moved by what she had to say. "I thought Peggy's story was inspiring," said Escalante, "and I was interested in developing some inspiration and awareness around disability. I thought she did a great job at that."

O'Neill's appearance was a pilot class attended by 45 employees. Escalante said it went so well that she plans to invite O'Neill back for' future classes. "I think that her story is unique," she said, "and she has a way of delivering it that is very effective."

Originally certified in Hakomi therapy - what she describes as a , " homeopathic" version of psychotherapy - O'Neill started spreading her message to school children and service groups years ago and has recently expanded her work into the corporate market. An ongoing theme in her talks is that everybody has a gift inside, if people can just get past the outer package.

Overcoming obstacles

But for O'Neill, the outer package offers real challenges in a world run by and designed for a person who is at least a foot taller than she is. She has repeatedly come up against the preconceptions of the average-sized world and has also had to overcome her own doubts about herself.

When she was in her mid-20's, O'Neill attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., to study photography. She thrived on the competitive environment, putting in 80-hour weeks, and was headed for a career as a professional photographer.

About a month before she was to finish her four-year program, she was asked to meet with the dean of the school. The dean invited her into his office and explained to her that when she went out into the commercial art world, advertisers weren't likely to hire her because of her size.

O'Neill was devastated and took his words to heart.

"I already believed it in myself and his words were just confirmation," she said. After graduation, when all of her peers headed to New York or Los Angeles to pursue careers with big agencies, she took what she calls the safe route, working for herself, doing portraits and school photos. 'I feel like that education was a real waste," she said. But over the years, through lots of anguish and personal growth, O'Neill has tackled her doubts and has set out to dispel the reservations that the world has about people who are different.

"Sometimes she does have a hard time with her size," said Kekuni Minton, a Hakomi therapist and old friend. "But the largeness of her presence has made up for it."

Indeed, her friends and colleagues say she is a dynamic woman who has struggled with great personal and social challenges that have made her stronger and more alive than most people of average size.

Little person defined

Little People of America, a non-profit organization that provides support and-information for people of short stature, defines a little person as an adult who is 4 feet 10 inches or shorter as a result of a medical or genetic condition. LPA has more than 5,000 members. And while no one knows exactly how many little people there are in America, it is estimated that about one birth in 10,000 in this country results in a baby with dwarfism - the generic term for any of the 100 conditions and diseases that cause short stature.

The conventional terms for little people are "midget" and "dwarf." But, as O'Neill explains it, these terms are from another era when little people were marginalized and stigmatized and are considered offensive by many. "Ifs kind of like referring to a black person as a 'negro,' "says O'Neill. "Ifs just not appropriate for modem times." But O'Neill grew up in the late '50s and '60s, before the era of identity politics and political correctness, and most people's knowledge of little people was derived from the Wizard of Oz and the circus.

She was born in 1955 in Cleveland, Ohio, where she lived until she was 18 years old. The daughter of a prominent Cleveland businessman who ran a multi-million dollar trucking company, O'Neill grew up in an insulated pocket of wealthy America and led a relatively comfortable and seemingly happy childhood. "It was a typical affluent American scenario," she said. What wasn't typical, though, was that O'Neill and her brother were both born with dwarfism. Dwarfism is rare and doesn't run in families. Like O'Neill, most dwarfs are born to average-sized parents and usually have average sized siblings (in addition to her brother, she has two sisters, both average-sized).  She says even though her brother was the only little person she knew growing up, there was a taboo in her family against talking about their size. "It didn't even dawn on me that he was a little person," she says, "because there was such a denial about it." But when she left the sheltered confines of Cleveland at 18 to go to college, her peers were acutely aware of her difference.

Freshman year of college is a hard time for most young people, but for O'Neill it was a disaster. She went to the University of Hartford in Connecticut to pursue studies in photography and education. "I got stared at so much," she says, "I felt like an animal in a zoo."

After one year at Hartford she left to attend Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, an alternative meditation school. There she found a more welcoming community. "They were four of the happiest years of my life," she says. "My size was not an issue." But she discovered, that there was one area where her size was still an issue; she was excluded from the world of dating and intimate relationships.

"When I was a child," she says, "the wounds came from being called names; when I was a teen it was the same thing but less direct, and then in college it was the exclusion from dating that hurt so much."

She says that the few relationships she had with average-sized men were unhealthy, and the only date she had with another little person, a blind date set up by her sister, was a flop. It wasn't until she was 24 that she got what she considers her first boyfriend. She met him at her first little People of America convention, and though the relationship didn't last long, O'Neill says the intimacy was incredibly nourishing for her soul.

The LPA holds an annual weeklong convention and sponsors numerous regional gatherings throughout the year for little people. The conventions feature workshops, meetings, dances and talent shows. It was at an LPA talent show in Denver almost 15 years later where she met her husband.

A Perfect Mate

Laise, who was working at a board-game company in Milwaukee at the time, came to Boulder to stay with O'Neill after the conference, and he never left. He says he was immediately attracted by her "dynamic energy and spirited lifestyle," and, he adds, "she's quite beautiful."

Aside from their size, the two are a fairly typical married couple. They like to go out to dinner, dancing, skiing and bike riding. They have special pedals that adapt to their cars, so they can get around town pretty easily. Laise says that he and his wife attract a fair amount of attention when they go out, some welcome and some not. But the taciturn Laise says his wife is good at handling the attention. "She has the gift of gab," he says. "Strangers will come up and engage her because people are interested in people that are different than them, and if they're open, she'll engage them."

O'Neill says that she likes living in Boulder because there is more of an awareness and respect for difference than in many other places she's been. But she still encounters people who she says, "just don't get it." O'Neill says that children are particularly drawn to her since she is their size, but is clearly an adult. She says that children can be cruel, but it is the parents who she ultimately holds responsible.

A few weeks ago she was at a local copy shop. As she sat at a desk working on a project,, a little girl who was probably 5 years old walked around her for several minutes meowing like a cat. "She was making me and the man next to me very uncomfortable.' O'Neill looked over toward the girl's parents, who were both on the other side of the room completely oblivious to their daughter's behavior, in the hope that they would come and supervise their child.  They didn't.

"Finally, the parents finished their business and headed for the door with their daughter in tow, still loudly pleading for them to look at the "funny lady." O'Neill approached them and tried to explain to them what had been happening. "I said, 'Your daughter has been making a spectacle out of me for the last five minutes, and I think you should really show her proper behavior." But instead of an apology or an explanation, the mother gave O'Neill a hard time, telling her it wasn't a big deal, and that she was overreacting. O'Neill says the mother made her out to be a bully. Luckily, she says, experiences like that one don't happen to her very often.

When O'Neill talks about the challenges of being a little person, and tells the stories of the degradation she has had to endure, she doesn't sound angry or bitter. She doesn't solicit pity or retribution.  She looks back on her experiences as a necessary part of the journey that got her to where she is, and who she is now, and says she has come to appreciate the gift of her difference.

"I feel like I got a speedup course in terms of knowing who I am," she said. "I think that people who face challenges in their lives, particularly physical differences, have an opportunity for accelerated learning about the inner dimensions of life, which are the dimensions that bring real fulfillment."