Around the country Monday, people marked the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a law that was supposed to literally remove hurdles and open doors for people with disabilities and give them opportunities both on the job and off.

Advocates give poor grades to America’s accommodation of people with disabilities, who number about 34,000 in Allen County alone, according to the 2008 American Community Survey.

But stories of people’s struggles to have the same opportunities as everyone else reminded me of another story, centered on a man named Tim Nugent, who faced the same problems more than 60 years ago.

Nugent was a young graduate student in 1949 when he helped launch a program at the University of Illinois rehabilitating people who were paralyzed. It has been years since I’ve spoken to Nugent, but I remember some of the stories he told me, of finding a man who had been paralyzed in a diving accident at 15 or so, who had spent years since literally lying in bed at home. It was invisible people like this, people isolated at home or relegated to institutions, whom he attracted to his program and taught how to be self-sufficient.

Among the programs he helped start was wheelchair basketball as a way of showing that people with disabilities, people with legs paralyzed by polio or spinal injuries, could play sports, too.

I remember how he said he’d advised one student, who was brilliant and had earned a degree but who was convinced he could never get a job because he was in a wheelchair, to put on his résumé that he had played college basketball. He had. He’d played for the University of Illinois. It’s just that he played wheelchair basketball. Nugent said it worked.

The program went on to produce many successes, and its participants went on to become politicians, advertising executives, businessmen and even doctors.

I couldn’t help but think, people have been tackling these issues for a long, long time, and accomplishing amazing things – people including Nugent, a virtual unknown whose name is probably remembered by only a few of the original surviving wheelchair basketball players.

After a news conference in Fort Wayne marking the anniversary of the ADA, I spoke to David Nelson, president and CEO of the League for the Blind and Disabled, about Nugent and others who decades ago tackled the problems faced by people with disabilities.

Yes, Nelson acknowledged, there were people who had great victories and helped people find jobs and show others in the workplace that someone with a disability can do the job.

But programs like Nugent’s couldn’t overcome systemwide problems that still exist.

“It wasn’t long ago that you didn’t see people with disabilities in public,” Nelson said. They were stuck at home, and venturing out involved confronting obstacles. Nelson told the story of a friend in a wheelchair who was approached by a woman at a mall. The woman slapped him and said she was with her children and that they didn’t need to see people like him. That was only 20 years ago.

Yes, Nelson said, that was the extreme, but it happened.

People with disabilities are always the last hired when times are good and the first out when the economy sours, Nelson said. Unemployment among their ranks is about 65 percent right now, he said.

There are lots of reasons, Nelson said. Businesses don’t know how to accommodate employees with disabilities because they haven’t been exposed to such people in the workplace and witnessed that they can be as capable as anyone else.

Businesses are also afraid, he said. They fear insurance costs will go up if they hire an employee with a disability, or that they will be sued if they hire such a person and it doesn’t work out.

And there is still some blatant discrimination, he said.

But there are great success stories, too, and touting those is perhaps the best way to drive home the message that people with disabilities can be more accomplished and productive than some people ever imagined.