Veteran Marvin Meyers stands up for the underdog

WHAT do people think of Marvin Meyers?

It’s not difficult to find out. Just put out the call, and plenty of volunteers will show up.

One longtime friend and fellow Colorado lobbyist, Bill Hanna, put it succinctly:

“He’s a pusher. He’s a demander. He’s a clear thinker. He doesn’t tolerate incompetence, but he recognizes that people have different strengths.”

Another close friend and fellow activist on behalf of veterans’ causes, Artie Guerrero, takes a somewhat gentler tack in describing Meyers.

“There are givers and takers,” Guerrero says, “and he’s a giver. He’s a genuine humanitarian.”

Meyers sees himself as an initiator — and a planter of metaphorical trees.

“I start a lot of things and others will come in and help finish. I stimulate people. I’m an organizer. I fine tune things. I’m like the guy who plants trees. It’s going to be a generation later before you realize the benefit.

“That’s the excitement and the joy I get out of doing things.”

Meyers is also a stubborn and resolute fighter on behalf of the causes he believes in.

“The worst thing anybody ever said to me, during my entire career, was ‘No.’ You never accept no as an answer — never — if your position is right.”

And although Meyers — nearly 80 years old and doing his best to recover from major back surgery — hardly looks the part of a defiant rebel, in many ways that’s exactly what he is.

“It’s very important,” he says, “to challenge authority. The people in authority will give you immediate ‘no’s’ or ‘this isn’t going to work,’ and you have to challenge them.”

That philosophy, however, isn’t quite so combative as it first sounds.

“My whole approach, my entire career, is to work with people, establish close working relationships, build trust and then help them to be the hero.”

A REBEL Meyers may well be, but he’s definitely not a rebel without a cause.

Actually, there have been two hallmark causes in his long and varied career — the disabled and veterans.

When it comes to the disabled, Meyers’ mission has been to return as many of them as possible to the fully functioning world. Using the parlance of his profession in special education, Meyers’ goal was to “deinstitutionalize” and “mainstream” the psychologically and physically challenged.

“I was on a mission,” Meyers says about the disabled and the institutions in which many of them were once housed. “Get them all the hell out of there.”

On behalf of veterans, Meyers has worked tirelessly — and continues to work — to improve treatment and conditions for people who have long been “screwed over” by the very government they faithfully served.

“Veterans have frequently been denied many services,” he says. “Veterans have been promised a lot of things that didn’t happen.”

The common linkage between these two long-neglected populations — “injustice” is his word for it — clearly outrages Meyers. Normally a soft-spoken and articulate man, his voice rises and grows confrontational when he discusses the many battles he has fought for the disabled and for veterans.

“I WAS born in Chicago,” says Meyers. “And I came to Denver courtesy of Uncle Sam.”

He joined the US Air Force in 1947, just as it was being transitioned from the old Army Air Corps into a separate branch. He was inspired to serve, Meyers says, by the “stars in all the windows” of his West Side Chicago neighborhood — symbolizing the older brothers who had served in the just-finished Second World War.

The Air Force brought Meyers to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver where he worked in finance until his discharge. He liked Denver and stayed, enrolling at DU and working toward his BA and MA degrees in special education.

In those days, the GI Bill was fairly limited, he recalls. It provided only $125 per month, which was supposed to pay for tuition, books and housing.

Meyers had a wife and child at the time but he somehow managed to make it work, supplementing his income by working as a plumber for DU, earning an additional dollar per hour.

After four years as a special education teacher in Denver Public Schools, Meyers went into special education administration, eventually rising to a state post in which he managed Colorado’s system of community services for children and adults with mental retardation and developmental disabilities.

He later added the management of three large state residential centers to his responsibilities.

From 1978 to 1991, he lived in Pennsylvania and managed five state residential centers and a network of community service programs for the disabled.

Meyers came back to Colorado in 1991 but was hardly ready for retirement. Instead, he began a new career — as a volunteer on behalf of veterans.

In addition to serving as a member and chairman of the Colorado State Board of Veterans Affairs, he served as legislative chairman and eventually chairman of the United Veterans Committee of Colorado, a coalition of 53 veterans organizations which represent nearly a half-million Colorado veterans.

Meyers remains the UVC’s registered lobbyist at the Colorado legislature where he regularly testifies before House and Senate committees on legislation affecting the state’s veterans.

Those who have watched him work at the Statehouse say that Meyers has become an effective lobbyist indeed.

“What he has is unique,” says his fellow veterans advocate Guerrero.

“He never tires. The man is going to be 80  years old in a couple of months — he just never tires.”

Guerrero says that a big part of Meyers’ effectiveness is old-fashioned stubbornness.

“I’m just as stubborn as he is,” he says with a laugh, “and I think I’ve learned a couple of things from him.”

Fellow lobbyist Hanna suggests that Meyers has achieved considerable success with legislators because the causes he represents are such significant ones.

“I think that Marvin Meyers has had an incredible impact,” Hanna says.

“He has gotten more recognition for what he has done on the veteran side, but I think he also very much deserves acknowledgement and recognition for what he has done for the disabled community.

“It’s much more than reform; it’s changing the paradigm and the mindset and the systems of providing care and opportunity for people to be as fully human as they can be.”

WHEN Meyers began his studies at DU, he shouldered a special targeted course load, in which every single subject he took related to his chosen field.

“Everything I took was exclusively in the area of the disabled: mentally challenged, physically handicapped, emotionally disturbed, deaf, blind, people with hearing problems, or combinations thereof.”

Why?

His own experiences, Meyers says. He describes his own mother as inherently bright but “educationally challenged” when it came to studying and reading. As a boy, he helped her.

He also had an uncle who had physical handicaps and a neighbor who had cerebral palsy. He spent time helping them both, and found that he was pretty good at it.

Most people at that time, he says, didn’t understand. “They were afraid of it.”

It was an era, he reminds, in which children with Down Syndrome kids were called “mongoloids,” and microcephalic children were known as “pinheads.”

When Meyers entered the field as a teacher and later an administrator, it was the dawn of a movement. Most people with significant psychological or physical disabilities lived in residential centers, or “homes.”

Meyers’ introduction to these institutions was Colorado’s Ridge Home. He remembers an early visit there, when staff members were preparing a “shower” for adolescent male residents. They were herded naked into a large room with a drain and literally sprayed with a hose.

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Although he didn’t yet have the authority to give orders to staffers, Meyers shouted at them in anger. “Stop! That is absolutely inhuman!”

When they resisted, he threatened the director with publicizing the practice by calling the media.

It would be far from the last fight Meyers would wage with those reluctant to change such long-held practices. He fought bureaucrats and supervisors, both internally and in the courts, and once lost a job because he wouldn’t back down.

“I had difficulty here in Colorado,” he says without elaboration. “That’s one of the reasons that I left and went to Pennsylvania where I closed institutions. They had better attorneys in Philadelphia than we had in Denver.”

CLOSING institutions became the battle cry of Meyers’ career in caring for the disabled. He was an early and consistent advocate of mainstreaming the residents of institutions — he refused to call them “patients,” which was then the industry standard.

“I truly believed that institutions were dehumanizing,” he says. “I wanted to help parents keep their children home by providing local resources. I had to work with doctors and ministers, and some of them were our biggest opponents.

“We had to bring about culture change. A lot of us lost our jobs across the country because the decision-makers were not ready to bring about needed change.”

Early in his career, he saw a young resident in a residential facility in Grand Junction. He was a Jewish boy who had lived at the home for several years.

He seemed “quite alert” to Meyers.

He got the boy’s name and that of his parents, who happened to reside close to him in Denver. He paid them a visit and told them that despite their doctor’s advice, “If he were my son, I would seriously consider bringing him back.”

Ultimately, they did bring their son back, and were happy they did. The boy ended up graduating from George Washington High School and getting married. He continues to live a fulfilled, largely independent life.

“That made me believe that there were a lot of people in institutions that didn’t belong there,” Meyers says.

“It moved me to close a lot of institutions, both in Pennsylvania and out here. There are untold numbers of people in those institutions who shouldn’t be there.”

At a number of points during his career, Meyers also worked to get children with disabilities into regular classrooms in public schools. He is convinced that this doesn’t just help the disabled, but also the others in the classrooms with them.

“One day the children in those classes will be the school board members, they will be in the state legislature, they will be decision-makers who will then be able to act upon these things because they had those experiences.”

Consider it the planting of another tree.

The standard argument of those who didn’t want such changes, he says, was “We’ve always done it this way.”

“My point was, ‘We have to treat people with dignity and this is not a way to do it.”

THE same principle, and a similar approach, has applied to Meyers’ work with veterans.

“A lot of what I’ve done with veterans is really a consequence of what I’ve done with the handicapped,” he says.

“I’ve used the same approach. I’m not the Lone Ranger. I get things started, I work with it, I identify people and work with them.”

Being a veteran is very important to Meyers, as evidenced by his membership in and leadership of many veterans organizations, including Jewish War Veterans of America.

“Unlike some of my friends, I never served in combat,” he says, “but my battles have been ignorance, indifference and people who didn’t want to do things.”

As an advocate and a lobbyist, much of Meyers’ work on behalf of veterans has been organizational — combining different groups into one, introducing fundraising techniques to give the movement added clout and visibility, getting veterans affairs placed higher on the list of government priorities.

At a relatively late stage in life, he discovered himself working in a new, albeit unpaid, profession — lobbyist, or as he prefers to call it, legislative liaison.

“After I started going down to the legislature, I was there almost every single day, during every session. They got to know who I was, who I represented and we established relationships. Down there your word is your bond. We do things with a handshake.”

Meyers has spent years working on a number of big veterans’ projects — the 180-bed, $26 million State Veterans Nursing Home currently under construction at Fitzsimmons in Aurora; a $5.9 million State Veteran’s Memorial Cemetery in Grand Junction; and the Veterans’ Trust Fund for veterans’ projects and services.

None of these were accomplished without fights.

And none of it was accomplished without a keen awareness of the many problems modern veterans face. Meyers has a virtual laundry list at hand: alarming rates of homelessness, suicide, substance abuse, domestic violence, post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s a daunting list, but Meyers prefers to think positive.

“It’s gotten better this last year or two,” he says, “because significant funding has been given to the Dept. of Veteran Affairs.”

But there is still a great deal to do.

“We have to get veterans to medical care, provide transportation for people living in rural areas, and we have to get family counseling, because if the veteran is wounded, the family is going to be wounded too.

“We have to do something about these repeated deployments. We’re up to six deployments for some of these fellows over there.”

Things have always been hard for veterans, Meyers acknowledges, and the present day is no different. But that doesn’t mean he’s willing to accept that status quo.

“What I’m trying to say here is that we take stands on things,” he says. “And we make things happen.”

Meyers has long been an enthusiastic supporter of Jewish community activities. He is a diehard B’nai B’rith member and leader and has been active with the JCRC, RMJHS, CAJE and ADL.

Still, he acknowledges that “in terms of Judaism I’m not what you would call an observant Jew.”

His good friend, the late Rabbi Daniel Goldberger, once praised Meyers as a religious, but not an observant, person — meaning that his life’s work exemplifies the highest ideals of Jewish belief.

The ideals of justice and repairing the world certainly seem to apply.

“In Judaism,” Meyers says simply, “we try to care for each other.”

Nearing the age of 80, Meyers is beginning to realize that it might be time to start slowing down and allow younger activists to take the lead. The recent tragic death of a son and his own medical issues have forced him to realize that it might be time for him to receive a little care himself.

“My daughter would probably like for me to pull back,” he admits. “I don’t feel like I’m 80, but I’ve learned a lot over the years. I had a good run at it.”

The graceful resignation of those words doesn’t last very long, however. Meyers’ phone rings and he snatches it up. There’s a fellow lobbyist on the line, offering details on some legislative snag and asking for the master’s advice.

Meyers’ eyes light up, his voice grows louder and a smile appears on his face as he finds yet another battle to wage, another tree to plant.