A Year-End Review: Tying Up Some of the Loose Ends From ’84 : An Independent Life

When Jan Taylor was graduated with honors last May from Scripps College, Claremont, she spoke of what she hoped to do during the year she would take off before entering law school. Now she is doing it.

“I want to live in Oklahoma City (her hometown) for a year,” she had said in May, “and I’d like to see an independent living center started there, a place with apartments developed to disabled persons’ needs so they can be as independent as possible.”

Taylor’s interest in the disabled is a very personal one: She was born without arms or legs and must rely on help for the simplest needs--a shower, brushing her teeth, eating, getting dressed, going anywhere. Yet she lived independently in college and is continuing to do so.

She lives now in Norman, Okla., and works part time there for the Independent Living Project, a nonprofit service organization that promotes and facilitates independent living for the handicapped.

“I am in charge of the peer counseling program,” she said from her parents’ home in Nichols City, an Oklahoma City suburb, where she spent the holidays. “We try to provide support for the disabled, and they can relate to others like me with physical disabilities.

“I am also an observer at meetings and community functions, sort of a liaison person.”

In Norman, Taylor lives with a roommate, a physical therapy student, and also has another young woman come in to help. She plans to enroll in a few classes next semester at the University of Oklahoma.

Meanwhile, she is waiting to hear from the law schools she has applied to--Boalt Hall and Hastings in the San Francisco Bay Area, the University of Texas at Austin, University of Michigan and “out of curiosity--I don’t expect to get in--Harvard and Yale.”