The Cane School

Despite injury, Cloquet man stays involved in racing

By: Jeff Papas , Pine Journal

“I couldn’t do this without him.”

Those are the words of one of WISSOTA’s best late-model race car drivers – Hermantown’s Darrell Nelson, speaking about Cloquet’s Mike Meagher.

Meagher, a 1976 graduate of Cloquet High School, has overcome a particularly cruel twist of fate to stay with the sport he loves – and is one of a number of area race enthusiasts who helps put the cars on the local tracks each week.

Four years ago, Meagher was Nelson’s friendly rival in the late models, racing each week against a man he had known for nearly 30 years.

Then, a tragic workplace accident ended Meagher’s racing career.

While lying on a creeper performing work underneath a vehicle, a one-ton truck ran over Meagher’s ankles. The resulting injury ended his racing days.

“I got nerve disease from it, torn ligaments that still haven’t been fixed,” Meagher said. “But, you gotta live with it.”

Meagher’s matter-of-fact

attitude is remarkable, but to hear him tell it, he’s grateful to be where he is.

“I feel fortunate to be walking,” he admitted. “Up until two years ago I needed a cane to walk, until I got an experimental drug from a doctor in St. Paul. I don’t have much feeling in the joints now and I don’t need the cane.”

As a result, Meagher can walk – but can’t drive a competitive vehicle.

That’s where Nelson came in.

“I’ve been friends with him since we’ve been 12 years old,” Meagher said. “He asked me to help him – he knew I wanted to be involved.”

And involved, he is.

Meagher hasn’t missed one of Nelson’s races in two and a half years, including his late-model victory last Sunday night at Proctor Speedway.

Nelson runs two late-model vehicles and Meagher is vital to making sure both are in race condition.

“He’s good (people),” Nelson said. “Really, when you think about it, I couldn’t do this without him.

Girl With The Cane » Blog Archive Intellectual Disabilities: The ...

When I first started volunteering with people with intellectual disabilities, long before my brain avm and surgery, I was perplexed as to why the people the agencies supported didn’t work more.

I knew that many of these people were on Ontario’s government support system for people with disabilities: the Ontario Disability Support Program. I knew that you could only make a certain amount of money each month before your earnings started to affect how much you got from ODSP each month. And I knew that many people with disabilities were highly motivated to stay on the ODSP program because ODSP provides medical benefits that most jobs that a person with intellectual disabilities would not be able to obtain.

However, being still in my teens at the time and being blessed (cursed?) with an over-developed sense of fairness, I wondered why, if these people couldn’t work for pay, they didn’t volunteer more. There were definitely places in the community that were happy to have them volunteer.

Why did I have to go to school all day, 5 days a week during the school year and then spend 5 days a week working all day, and my parents have to work all day, every day to keep my family going, when the people that I was volunteering with could simply decide that working wasn’t something that they wanted to do, and sit around and collect a cheque?  The question festered in the back of my mind. I know that it festers in the back of many peoples’ minds.

Fast forward years later, after the brain AVM and the surgery, to working with youth with intellectual disabilities. Not very many of the youth with intellectual disabilities that I worked with decided that they didn’t want to work when they were done school, but there were a few who did. I counted them as successes in my program, because, even though they weren’t out and doing something, they truly were doing what they wanted to be doing. I’d have rathered that they be out and working, because I knew they were going to get bored very quickly, but it wasn’t what they wanted. So we planned for them to be home.

I hadn’t resolved for myself why this had become “okay” for me at this point, except that I now strongly believed that people should be allowed to choose what they wanted to do in life – no matter what I, or anyone else, thought they “should” be doing.  It wasn’t until a debate on an internet  message board with somebody who thought that people with intellectual disabilities shouldn’t be getting any help from the government or government agencies at all, that volunteer service would more than provide for their needs if we’d just let it (*that* particular conversation got me right riled up, let me tell you) that I sat down with a pen and paper and worked out for myself exactly why I felt income support for people with intellectual disabilities was necessary and why I thought they had every right to decide exactly how much or how little they wanted to work while they were receiving it.

School arts

Family Involvement in Children's Education, Successful Local Approaches: An Idea Book

High school agriculture

School, a monthly record of educational thought and progress

The Journal of education