On the Move for Disabled : Sacramento: The new director of California’s Department of Rehabilitation made his name in San Diego as a no-nonsense advocate.

William Tainter, new director of the California Department of Rehabilitation, is showing off his modified state car, which he can start with his toes, shift with his knee and steer by foot with a gadget attached to the floor.

“Even though it looks like I can’t do a lot with my hands, with the combination of hands and feet I can do a lot,” he says about life in general since polio ravaged him as a teen-ager, as he nearly clips an unsuspecting pedestrian while making a tight right-hand turn downtown.

What the pedestrian sees has shocked many: A 49-year-old man, his “compromised” body leaning back, driving a titanium-colored Taurus with no hands on the wheel and a respirator hose clamped in his mouth.

But Tainter knows only too well how to use that surprise to drive home what, by now, seems like a well-worn point: People with severe disabilities must be set free, especially from the prejudices of society.

Over the years, Tainter has become a symbol of that philosophy--known as “independent living”--as a student activist and later while serving as director of the Community Service Center for the Disabled in San Diego, a nonprofit group aimed at helping people with disabilities become self-sufficient.

And, along the way, he impressed a former mayor named Pete Wilson, who, as governor, appointed Tainter earlier this year to lead an obscure 2,000-person departmental backwater in the sprawling state government.

“He’s a very articulate advocate . . . . He has great humor, great dignity and a great deal of intellectual honesty,” said Gov. Pete Wilson, who appointed Tainter as rehabilitation director in April. “And he’s fiercely jealous of the independence of the disabled.

“In that respect, I think he is an extraordinary role model for those who are disabled and those who are not,” the governor added. “He demands performance from both.”

Tainter proved the point dramatically last week, when he filed a lawsuit against United Airlines in Sacramento Superior Court for keeping him off a flight from San Diego to Chicago because his portable respirator had a gel-cell battery believed to contain “hazardous” material. Tainter is demanding $250,000 in emotional damages against the airline and the Arlington, Va., travel agent who booked the flight.

In a less-publicized episode, Tainter distributed pamphlets to state Health and Welfare Agency department heads so that they will correctly refer to people with disabilities. The crux: “Emphasize the person rather than the disability.” Avoid terms such as “cripple,” “gimp,” “victim” and “invalid.”

Tainter says those terms are part of the rhetoric that cause people to “focus on limitations.” And he brooks no pity, whether it is found in telethons, newspaper headlines or among disabled people themselves.

“Last week, I was in L.A., and I went to a dialysis center and read a . . . kidney-users newsletter,” said Tainter, who undergoes dialysis three times a week because his kidneys shut down three years ago. “I noticed a letter that was kind of a poem, and it was so negative, it was unreal! You know . . . how negative it was to live with kidney failure . . . .

“That’s why I don’t like to go to dialysis centers,” he said. “They seem to dwell too damn much on the negative aspects of it.

“Just get the stuff over with and get on with it.”

Not everyone has been pleased with Tainter’s go-for-it style since Wilson appointed him to the $99,805-a-year job. He acknowledges there is some internal resistance in the agency, with a budget of $265 million, to his plans for hiring more people with disabilities in top slots, over some able-bodied administrators who have long seniority.

And there is the nagging feeling among some that Tainter favors the “physically disabled, wheelchair folks” over people with mental or sensory disabilities--a fear that broke out into rancor this summer after he disclosed plans to close the Orientation Center for the Blind near Berkeley because of a proposed $5-million budget cut.

“I just think he really tried to create a fiasco, and he used the blind for the brunt of it,” said Sharon Gold, president of the National Federation of the Blind of California. “I think that’s unfortunate.”

Yet it worked. Tainter leveraged the outcry and talked Wilson out of any reductions. Another large state deficit for the coming year, however, probably means Tainter will preside over the downsizing of a department that helped him get where he is today.

“He doesn’t want that to happen, I know . . . (but) you are caught in a dilemma,” said Ed Roberts, Tainter’s mentor and rehabilitation department director under former Gov. Jerry Brown. “He knows exactly what that would mean, and I know he has already protested within the Administration.”

It was in the polio ward of a San Leandro hospital that Roberts first met Tainter more than 35 years ago.

The youngest of eight children born to an Irish San Francisco cop and a housewife, Tainter contracted an unusual case of polio in 1955, when he was 13. The disease attacked his torso, leaving his arms mostly paralyzed and greatly restricting his breathing. But, unlike many polio patients, he could walk.

Doctors eventually fused his spine so that he could sit upright; he needs a respirator to force air into his lungs through a mouth hose during the day and a tracheal tube during the night.

“He was kind of the kid in the place,” said Roberts, who lives in Berkeley. “I remember him walking around . . . and towing this little cart with a respirator and a battery. He was pretty self-contained. He would wander.”

During their lengthy rehabilitation, Roberts and his young friend often talked about society’s prejudice against disabled people and their mutual fear of becoming dependent on others.

“I said, ‘Look, Bill, it’s clear to me that we have to develop our minds. Our bodies aren’t going to help us out,’ ” Roberts recalled.

Tainter took that advice, graduating in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from San Francisco State University and a master’s degree from San Jose State University in 1976. The state Department of Rehabilitation paid for his tuition and books.

But it was another kind of education that would shape Tainter’s life, the education of doing. The student activism that breathed life into the environmental, civil rights and feminist movements also galvanized the disabled community on some campuses.

The rallying cry was “independent living,” and students such as Tainter saw themselves as another discriminated class of society. They began demanding reserved parking, barrier-free buildings and personal attendants, government-paid workers who could come to their homes to prepare food and help them get dressed.

“It was the Dark Ages, compared to now,” said Ray Zanella, a San Jose State student who enlisted Tainter in the struggle.

While at UC Berkeley, Roberts became a godfather of sorts in the movement when he started the first “independent living” center in 1972. The idea was to help disabled students in the community. Four years later, Tainter and Zanella moved to San Diego to further the cause--thanks to a $80,000 government grant from Roberts, who had been named state rehabilitation director.

“San Diego was barren territory,” Tainter said about the nonprofit venture he ran out of a San Diego bedroom on a telephone. “There was very little activity around disability issues . . . . When we hit town, basically, (it was) ripe for a disability movement.”

Their goal was to get people with disabilities out of the institutions, into their own homes, in touch with personal attendants and placed at high-paying, high-visibility jobs. Their clients, they reasoned, would help change public attitudes as they became “taxpayers, instead of tax-users.”

The message was appealing to the conservative political power brokers of a city that would give California “workfare,” and among its converts was a San Diego mayor who held the purse strings for hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal employment funds.

Wilson invested heavily in Tainter’s dream. The Community Service Center for the Disabled now has a $1-million annual budget, owns its own building at 1295 University Ave. in North Park, has a 30-person staff, serves about 1,600 clients a year and boasts a self-supporting business that sells medical equipment such as wheelchairs.

Eventually, Tainter became the center’s full-time director, polishing a flair for no-nonsense public relations. He sent educators out to local classrooms with slide shows to demystify the issue of disabilities. All the while, friends said, Tainter was keenly aware of the impression his own appearance makes.

“People stop and look at this guy, who looks kind of skinny at first, and they think, ‘What in the world is this guy going to be able to do?’ ” said Elizabeth Bacon, director of disabled student services at San Diego State University. “Then, they start talking to him, and they find out.

“He’s very comfortable with knowing just how much to use that impact to accomplish what he’s doing . . . . He enjoys those experiences, making people think twice,” said Bacon.

Tainter pleads guilty, adding that his appearance even helped him in the uphill fight to persuade the San Diego City Council that it should help the center buy its own building. On that and other issues, he regularly called out dozens of wheelchair users to “flash the chrome” at public hearings.

“You just get in their face and start talking about what your mission is and what you represent,” Tainter said. “It’s pretty hard to ignore me. If I have to, I sit outside of their office and wait for them.”

But it would be his friendship with Wilson and his wife, Gayle, that would bear the greatest political fruit.

After Wilson left for the U.S. Senate, Tainter persuaded him to become one of the first Republican co-authors of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the federal civil rights bill for people with disabilities.

Meanwhile, Tainter had to battle yet another severe disability after his kidneys shut down in 1988, leaving him prone to fatigue. Along with undergoing dialysis, he takes a drug that enhances the production of red blood cells.

“I thought that that would totally debilitate me and cause me to lose my job, only to find the opposite, that I end up as rehab director,” said Tainter. “It really blew my mind.”

The task, he says, is to transform a relatively obscure department that has been increasingly criticized by its clients for worrying more about its statistical boast of “closing” cases than helping those with serious disabilities.

Under the Deukmejian Administration, the number of drug addicts that were “rehabilitated” jumped 368%, contrasted with a mere 12% increase for the physically disabled, numbers show.

The reasons for this, critics say, is that counselors in the state rehabilitation department’s 115 field offices know it is cheaper to train drug addicts for nominal jobs than to help people who may need expensive equipment, such as $30,000 to modify a van.

Last month, the federal Office of Civil Rights gave credence to these charges by ruling that the department has demonstrated a “pattern and practice” of discriminating against quadriplegics in its San Bernardino district. Tainter said he immediately suspended the district manager with pay and called for an investigation by outside rehabilitation experts.

Tainter said his goal is to reorient the department so that it will begin sending clients to college, instead of trade schools or into entry-level jobs that tend to evaporate in a few months. He wants to develop some “leaders who go into the private sector and hopefully open up the private sector” to hiring more people with disabilities.

“That doesn’t mean we’re only going to train college professors, but I think we should spend more time on trying to get people who can have a real impact on the community in terms of disability causes than worrying whether somebody who gets out of Folsom State Prison gets some tools bought for him,” he said.

And the style he possesses is unapologetic.

“Bill’s pretty straightforward in how he addresses life,” said Bacon. “It’s not always a carefully studied and philosophically thought-through straightforward. It’s a ‘Well, let’s get going’ straightforward.”

Like the way he proudly shows off his car, which has been modified to include an electric ignition mounted under the radio and a floorboard steering wheel immediately left of the power brake. He steers with his left foot, which he slips into a boot built into the wheel.

And what about the stares?

“I get them so often I don’t even notice anymore,” he says, zipping around another corner.

Times staff writer Daniel M. Weintraub contributed to this story.