Richard paved the way for the ADA

Bounced between a mentally ill mother and an orphanage for much of his childhood, Richard Pimentel had plenty to struggle with long before he became disabled.

So when, as a soldier in Vietnam, Pimentel suffered profound hearing loss when a bomb exploded nearby, it would have been easy to sink into despair. Instead, Pimentel was galvanized, fighting for equality for the disabled. His efforts launched a program used around the country to train companies about hiring and working with disabled people, and he helped lead the push for the Americans With Disabilities Act.

After growing up in Portland, Ore., he now lives in Nampa and is a motivational speaker and disability management expert for a California-based training and development company.

Pimentel's story is the inspiration behind the new movie "Music Within."

"When I told my friends they were making a movie about me they thought it was 22 minutes long on the Discovery Channel," Pimentel said.

Not exactly. It's a full-length film with a limited release in nine major cities on Friday. It will go to 11 more cities starting Nov. 9, with more to be added if audiences respond well.

"Hollywood, in general, when you say 'disabled film' people start running or shoot you right to 'Movie of the Week,'" said Steven Sawalich, who directed and produced the film. "I wanted to have the characters in the film be portrayed not by their disability but by their characteristics. For me it was a fine line to walk between getting your message across and not hitting it over the head."

Sawalich met Pimentel about eight years ago. Sawalich's stepfather, Bill Austin, is the head of hearing aid manufacturer Starkey Laboratories, and years earlier Austin had fit Pimentel with his first hearing aids. When Pimentel was speaking at a nearby conference, Sawalich decided to attend.

"The story he told was his life story," Sawalich said. "He has this amazing ability to take the audience on a roller coaster of emotion, and one minute people were laughing and the next people were crying."

Sawalich decided then to make Pimentel's life into a movie. It took a few years to get the script written, and a few more for the movie to get picked up for production. It is Sawalich's first film, made on a budget of less than $5 million.

Pimentel wrote out much of his own life story to be used as a framework by the screenwriters.

"When I first started, I thought, you know, I don't want to be the hero of my own life. That's just wrong," Pimentel said.

The more he wrote, however, the more he discovered something:

"Being the hero wasn't even an option. Then I struggled not to be the villain of my own life," he said. "Finally, I realized I'm not even the protagonist. Ultimately, your life isn't about you. It's about all the people around you."

Pimentel is quick to list his strengths, if asked, and his weaknesses as well. But he shies away from any suggestion that he was the leader of the disability movement.

"No one person in America was the disability movement. There was no Martin Luther King, Jr. There was no Gandhi. Steve (the director) wanted to show it through my eyes and my perception," Pimentel said.

Pimentel's hearing loss left his upper register totally blown, with high sounds vanishing from his hearing except for a constant ringing that never goes away. He can still hear lower noises, but can't hear well enough to understand most voices, especially if the speaker isn't facing him. For years, he also battled fierce anger, spawned from his difficult upbringing.

Pimentel's mother had schizophrenia and severe postpartum depression, compounded by a series of miscarriages. Several times a year, she celebrated the birthdays of her miscarried babies, falling into a deep depression and sometimes attempting to commit suicide.

Unable to cope with her own illness, Pimentel's mother dropped him off at an orphanage. When his grandmother later discovered the abandonment, she took the young boy in and raised him - at least until his mother decided she wanted to try again.

The turmoil left a wound that still seems hard for Pimentel to talk about. As a little boy, he coped with his anxiety by refusing to speak, becoming a selective mute during his stay in the orphanage.

"I spent the first six years in school diagnosed as retarded. I was in special education because I figured out if I didn't talk, people would ignore me," he says. "Once at school they told my grandmother she should teach me to make change for a dollar, because that's all I'd be doing."

Pimentel eventually began talking again and found he had a gift for public speaking. He hoped to attend college on a speech scholarship, but was turned down. Instead, he joined the military - lured by the promise of the GI bill - only to have the promise of a free education yanked away by officials who didn't think a deaf man could succeed in college.

Undaunted, Pimentel got his college education and found work helping others who were disabled to get jobs. His efforts were noticed by lawmakers, and he was asked to write a training program to help Oregon employers hire disabled people. The program, called 'Windmills,' spread around the nation and was a critical step in the disabled civil rights movement. Pimentel began writing other workplace training programs - including one focusing on mental illness - and fought for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in 1990.

"When someone comes to you and they have no arms and they say they want to be a ballerina, guess what? Don't tell them they can't," he said. "It comes down to desire. When I stopped trying to fix people with disabilities and started trying to fix the environment, that changed everything."

He may be his own best example. Pimentel has written several training programs designed to help employers hire people with physical and mental disabilities. Now he has a successful career as a speaker, despite a slight lisp that developed after years of being unable to hear himself speak.

Hearing aids have drastically improved his hearing, Pimentel said. But the only fix for his anger was years of daily effort.

"Apartheid made me angry; people who don't know how to count change made me angry. The day the ADA was signed I was angry because I didn't have something to be angry about anymore and I was mad," he said. "I never want to be angry again. If I had to pick between hearing and anger, the sound would be cut off."