UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY Valley University Library George Sutherland Archives & Special Collections Oral History Program

Utah Women’s Walk Oral Histories Directed by Michele Welch

Interview with Karen Hahne by Sharon Haddock January 18, 2017

Utah Women’s Walk

TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET

Interviewee: Karen Hahne

Interviewer: Sharon Haddock

Place of Interview: George Sutherland Archives, UVU, Orem, Utah

Date of Interview: 18 January 2017

Recordist:

Recording Equipment: Zoom Recorder H4n

Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709

Transcribed by: Kristiann Hampton

Audio Transcription Edit: Kristiann Hampton

Reference: KH = Karen Hahne (Interviewee) SH = Sharon Haddock (Inverviewer) SD = Shelli Densley (Assistant Director, Utah Women’s Walk)

Brief Description of Contents:

Karen recalls her early growing up years in Laketown, Utah and her educational opportunities at Utah State University. She shares the details of how she came to earn a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and a master’s degree in Special Education. She mentions teaching a class of special needs students in Orem before the birth of her first two children. Karen describes how these experiences and others led her and her husband to eventually adopt two Navajo children, a son from Korea, and later a baby with Down syndrome. She reflects on the sadness she felt when she was counseled to not expect much from her son with Down syndrome. Karen shares how her desire to provide better opportunities for her son Reed, and other children like him, led her and a friend to found the organization Kids on the Move. She describes the many ways that this organization has provided support and help for thousands of families of children with special needs in Utah County, which in turn has enriched her life as well.

NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as uh and false starts and starts and stops in conversations are not included in this transcript. Changes by interviewee are incorporated in text. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted.

Audio Transcription

[02:44] Beginning of interview

SH: My name is Sharon Haddock. I am here today interviewing Karen Hahne. She is the founder of Kids On The Move in Orem. She is a mother, a wife. She is [a] courageous, hardworking woman for children with special needs—for children everywhere actually. She is going to tell us today how it worked out so that she, in her middle age, was suddenly the mother of a [baby with Down Syndrome] who had needs that were not being provided, and she needed to change that and make things better for him. So Karen, if you will just kind of describe where you came from, your background, and then how Reed came into your life and your other children. That would be great.

KH: I grew up in one of the smallest towns in Utah, in Laketown, up by Bear Lake. And so when I went to school at Utah State University, I was so excited because now instead of having thirteen in a class, I had a lot of people on campus and a lot of learning experiences. [I] loved going to college. I had the opportunity [to teach] school in River Heights, up in Cache County and had the opportunity to observe a class of children who had special needs. In those days they were categorized as trainable and educable. And the trainable children were usually housed at the [Utah] State Developmental Center in American Fork. Educable children could go to school. This was in 1963. Anyway, I observed the teacher. I saw that the children weren’t treated well. They weren’t accepted and neither was the teacher—by the other faculty. That really really bothered me. I was teaching a regular fourth grade, but became acquainted with the situation.

My husband worked out of town one summer. So I decided to renew my certification for teaching, but instead I heard about the new Special Ed. program that was being launched at Utah State. And so, I thought, I’m really interested in that. I’ll apply for a fellowship. I got the fellowship. It was twenty-four hundred dollars [a year]. My husband was a dependent because he was still going to school, and that’s what we lived on, which was about the same as when I was teaching. That was about what my salary was then. Anyway, he was a dependent, and we lived in student housing. And I started going to school in Special Ed. and had a lot of experiences. It was a brand new field. President Kennedy had just been really really brave and said that he had a sister with developmental issues and started this whole new movement. I later heard—and I think it was true—that people with disabilities were the last population to be served by the Civil Rights movement because they had been forgotten or warehoused, based on a diagnosis. I loved graduate school. I student taught a class of emotionally disturbed children. I student taught children who had been warehoused in a home there in Logan and just had a lot of different experiences.

Utah Women’s Walk: 2

Karen Hahne

And then when my husband graduated, and I received my master’s, we moved down to Orem, and I taught a unit of children that were educable, [meaning that they could be taught and benefit from being in a classroom]. In the old Spencer School—it was on State Street in Orem—I taught there. I was actually part of the faculty of the Lincoln Junior High. I loved that. I loved teaching. It was great, but that year I was pregnant with my first child. They were still—the school administration was still a little “iffy” on if you were pregnant if they would let you teach. But they decided that they couldn’t get anyone else to teach these kids, so I could finish the year. And the kids in the class just thought I had a bunch of new dresses that looked like tents. Anyway, I finished that year and we started our family. We had two children and then lost three babies with the RH problem, so we decided to adopt.1

At the time when all of the things were happening at Wounded Knee, we received two Navajo children, which is kind of a miracle.2 And then we decided to adopt a baby from Korea. And so our family—we thought—I thought was complete because we had five children at that point. I thought we had done a great service to humanity by adopting these children. I might say that the Navajo children were considered special needs children because they were a minority. Even though they didn’t have special needs— that’s the way it was phrased on the adoption papers, which was really interesting to me. [I guess I was rather smug thinking that we had done our bit for the good of society. In reality, we were blessed through our unique family.]

When our youngest son, our Korean son, was seven, I decided I would go back to school and teach again because I said to my husband, “Everybody is potty trained and mobile. We can do this now.” And he thought that would be a great idea, you know, help the budget and all of this. But within just a couple of months of saying that, our sixth child, our son Reed, was in our family. We don’t know exactly how that happened because we were over forty, and so the state of Utah didn’t accept that you could be adoptive parents if you were over forty, unless the child had special needs. And I never quite figured that one out. (laughs) But anyway, we were both over forty, our file was closed—who knows where it was—and our caseworker had retired years before. I was going to school at BYU [Brigham Young University] when I got a call saying, “Would you consider adopting a child with Down syndrome?” And so in that split second—and I’ve thought so often, What if I hadn’t said yes? But in that split second, I said, “Yes!” My husband was in California going to a special school, but I just said, “Yes.” And I think of what Reed has brought to us and to the community. Because I see all the things that happened that he is the impetus for—that if he hadn’t come to our family, I don’t think I would be involved—

1. Karen refers to the Rhesus factor which is a blood disorder that can cause complications for a fetus during pregnancy. 2. In 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee for 71 days to protest conditions on the reservation.

Utah Women’s Walk: 3

Karen Hahne

SH: Kids On The Move would not exist.

KH: Kids On the Move would not exist. It wouldn’t have been born. When we got Reed, we became aware—I became aware that there was a great need for a program, which would support parents and help parents. In those days, the idea—and this was happening in a lot of states—and I have to be diplomatic and careful here, but the premise of Special Ed had evolved so that the Special Ed people were the experts. And they knew what to do, and the promise was, “If you give us your child, and we segregate them, and we do all of these special things, then when it is time for them to leave school, we will take care of them all the way along.” But then when it was time for them to leave school, what happened? There was nothing. There was nothing. And the parents didn’t know what to do. It was just a hard time. But there was a movement too, saying—well, this started happening back east in one of the Midwestern states. The training school, developmental center, they used to call it, was full. And so they would say to parents, You’ve had this child with this condition or this condition. If you’ll just take the child for a little while, then when there is a spot—a slot is what they used to say—when there is a slot open, we’ll take your child and put them in this center—in the institution [and you wouldn’t be burdened with the care of this child]. Well, often times, when the social workers would go back to the families and say, Okay, we’ve got room. The parents would say, You can’t take this child. This child is part of our family. We don’t want to institutionalize this child, but what we need is support. We need help. We need people that can come and help us raise this child or do whatever. And so this was a movement that was happening, [beginning in the 1960’s].

At the same time, there was a family [in the Midwest], who got a court order to not have surgical intervention when their child with Down syndrome was born. It was a very simple procedure, but they didn’t want the burden [of raising a child with a disability], as children with disabilities were often thought of. They didn’t want the child in their life, so the child passed away. Parents throughout the nation said, That’s not what this nation is about. That’s not how we feel about our children. And so there were movements. There were ground swells of movements, and there were also court cases. Brown vs. The Board of Education, which was a segregation issue. Parents were saying, Our kids should have the same rights as their brothers and sisters. They should have the right to go to a neighborhood school. They should have the right to a quality education. They should have a right to be part of the community.

[I took] Reed to the only existing program in Utah County, the woman in charge said to me, “Love him, but don’t expect much.” And I remember thinking, This is not going to help me. I’m a middle-aged mom. I feel like I need some help with my son, but if they don’t expect much, then I’m not going to get a lot of help. And then I remembered the thought—a thought came to my mind—that if my son—and on our street in Orem, you have to understand, there were ten houses and there were eighty kids because there was a family with fourteen children. There was a family across the street with ten children. Then there was one next door with eight children. We were the small family with six children, but I kept thinking, If my son, growing up on this street, with all of these Utah Women’s Walk: 4

Karen Hahne

wonderful, wonderful kids, if he is seen as that weird kid who gets on the bus and goes far away to school—I mean clear to American Fork—how is he going to fit in a community because, you know, by this time I was probably forty-five and thinking, okay, he can stay in school until he’s twenty-two, but how [is he, when he leaves the public school, going to fit into the community? How will he have any happiness or success if he has been segregated from life all his school years?]

SH: If he doesn’t grow up—

KH: If he doesn’t grow up part of this community, on this street—it just didn’t click in my head. When it came time to send him to the district program, I said, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” And I was told by the professionals that I would be throwing him to the wolves, and that he would just have horrible problems. But I had figured out by then that the best role models were the other kids his age. And all the way along, we found teachers who were willing to take a chance. They’d say, Wow, I’ve never had a kid with Down syndrome in my class, but let’s give it a whirl. Let’s see what happens. And I look at Reed today and how he functions in the community. A whole community knows him and loves him. I mean everywhere we go. [We will always love those teachers who saw his potential and recognized that he was a child first. That Down syndrome was only part of who he was.]

SH: Tell us a little bit about what he does today. I think that’s—

KH: What he does today?

SH: Things he has accomplished.

KH: He served two missions.3 His first mission was down here at University at the Institute of Religion. He was a service missionary, and he helped the instructors. We told him that the most important thing was to do what the secretaries wanted him to do, and he learned that. The director of the institute said, “We can teach Reed not to hug everybody, but we can’t teach the world not to hug him.” So he served here for two years. It was a great mission. And then we went with him back to Nauvoo, and that was fantastic—perfect place for him. He became an ordinance worker in the Nauvoo temple. He memorized all the scripts for the different sites. He didn’t like serving with my husband because my husband would ad lib, and Reed knew the script, and he wanted him to tell it like it was. “Stay on task Dad. Stay on task.” But it was great. He was the only Elder in the mission that believed in Santa Clause, and so we had a lot of fun with that.

3. A mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a geographical area to which Latter - day Saint missionaries are assigned. Missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints are volunteer representatives who engage in proselyting, Church service, and humanitarian aid.

Utah Women’s Walk: 5

Karen Hahne

But let’s get back to Kids On The Move because I am thinking that I am skipping ahead. I met a woman at this program whose daughter if five or six years older than Reed. And I looked at her, and she had appropriate behavior, and she was articulate. And I said, “Where did you get services? Where was this happening for you?” And she actually had started out in California and had been in a program. We talked about it, and the program wasn’t working for me, and I wasn’t feeling like I was getting the help I needed for Reed. And they really didn’t have high expectations. I really think that was the bottom line. So we talked about doing just a parent support program. It started on probably the coldest night in January at Mountain View High School. We were in the DECA business room.4 We had talked to some therapists who basically donated their time to come and help the parents. We started out with a group of parents—about ten people that night—with their babies. It was wonderful because the parents would share with each other. The therapists would guide them along and say, “Okay, here’s the next step.” If you want your baby to talk you need to take the pacifier out of the mouth, you know, just helping. We did that for a while. And then my friend—her name is Brenda Winegar—she and I talked about how we need to offer more—instead of just once a week. What more can we offer? So we found a therapist who had an extra room in his building and he let us go in there. And we started doing a three-day a week program—just volunteering. Brenda and I would talk about the things that we saw the children doing, but we knew we needed to hire professionals that really had been trained.

[21:20]

One time we were in Salt Lake and went passed the Social Services building, and I said to Brenda, “We’re doing a social services kind of project. Let’s go see where we can get some support.” So they told us where the director was. He happened to be in that day. They gave us an audience with him. He said, “What would you like?” I said, “I’d like five thousand dollars.” And he said, “What for?” And we told him what we were doing. He said, “I’ll give you a check for two thousand dollars.” And we walked out of there thinking, Wow! We’ve got two thousand dollars! The first thing we bought was a pencil sharpener, and then we bought toys, you know, educational kinds of toys. So we were doing that three days a week, and then we said, We still need to hire the professionals and two thousand dollars was pretty much gone. So by that time the program in the valley was in trouble. A lot of parents had been saying, This isn’t working.

SH: Not going to work.

KH: The state of Utah decided to open up this area for a request for funding for proposals, and Brenda and I decided to write for a grant. We’re still just two mothers, but we had wonderful help from Utah State University. They were so great, and they said, “Go for it!” Everyone else said, Mothers can’t do programs. You can’t do it. And Utah State said,

4. DECA is a non-profit organization that prepares emerging leaders and entrepreneurs for college and careers.

Utah Women’s Walk: 6

Karen Hahne

“Yes, you can and we’ll help you, and we’ll help you with the grant.” Okay, the grant was due and Brenda and I were taking it to Salt Lake. She ran out of gas by the old Hart’s Station in American Fork. So we opened the doors [in order to push the car to the gas station]. The grant blew out, but it blew on the right side of the road, so that I could get it. (laughs) So I was picking it up and putting it in [the car]. We pushed the car down to Harts and got it gassed up and made it to Salt Lake, but all the way up I was collating and I said, “Brenda do you realize what we said we were going to do? Do you realize? Oh, my gosh! How are we going to do this?” Anyway, we got the grant in one minute before three o’clock. And then we just laughed and said, We need chocolate. We’ve got to get out of here, and we just sat back down and laughed and said, Well, this is a good experience. We’ll call it a learning experience.

Well, we got the grant and then Brenda moved. And the grant was supposed to be for two hundred thousand dollars, which just blew me away. The only place that we could find to hold the program was in the old Spencer School on State Street because that was the time that Word Perfect was starting and they were taking over the valley—all available office space. So we were in this old condemned building, which ironically enough was the building that I had taught [in seventeen years before with my class of children with special needs].

SH: Right.

KH: —my last year when I had taught school—the old Spencer School—but we started there. There were people who—I look back on it now. They were wonderful. Took a chance on someone who didn’t know what she was doing—because Brenda left. She moved to New York. So I called the state, and I said, “I can’t do this. I have six children at home.” I didn’t intend to do a program. That wasn’t my intention. I was just going to be the support and see it take off. And they said, No, you can’t do that and we’ll help you. Which meant that they would come down and audit us. That was the help that they gave us. (laughs) [But because my name was on the contract, I had to become the director. I think I cried for three days, but I knew it had to be done.]

SH: (laughs)

KH: But anyway, my husband did the books. My children did the janitorial part of it. And there were people there that were so good—so good at helping us those first three or four years. Then the district decided that the old Spencer School could not be brought up to code, so they were going to tear it down. We had named [our program] Kids On The Move, which became self-fulfilling [because we had to move!].

SH: Uh-huh.

KH: So we ended up in the dental lab on the old UVU [] campus in Provo. So we went from a school that had only sinks in the bathroom to an area that had sinks every few feet with foot pedals that the kids just loved. Utah Women’s Walk: 7

Karen Hahne

SH: I bet.

KH: (laughs) Anyway, we were there for a while. And then we needed to get back in Alpine District because that was our catchment area. And the Provo program really didn’t want us in their territory, so we needed to move back. I took the telephone book and marked the names of the people that I thought—here was my criteria—people that care about families. And we held a meeting in the Orem City Center. They had a multipurpose room. And I just said, what should we do with the program? We don’t have a place. It is called Kids On The Move for a reason. A lot of people came out that night. People I didn’t even know. Part of that was the Utah Valley Home Builders. And if you can believe it, that was at a time when they didn’t have a lot of business. When Utah County wasn’t really growing. That night the determination was made that Kids On The Move should build a building. The chairman of my board said, “I’m out of here. I’m not going to do this.” (laughs) And I said, “I’m out of here. I’ve been in over my head from the beginning. I can’t do this.” But that isn’t the way it worked out. Anyway, I had to stay. (laughs) And we had miracles. I used to wear a little pin that said, “Expect a Miracle”, because there is no other way to talk about it. We started looking for space. I went down to the hospital, IHC []. They had some property, but they didn’t consider us a viable program because we had lost three-fourths of our funding. The government took the three to five-year-olds program and put it under the school district. And so they took three fourths of our funding. So this year—and it was in about 1989, I think—we only had a fifty thousand dollar contract. We were only supposed to serve forty-five children, but our board had said—because we talked them into it—When a family has a baby with special needs, you don’t say, “Take a number and I’ll get to you when I can.” You say, “We’re family, move over.” And so we had way more children then forty-five.

SH: How many were you serving at that time?

KH: At that time? I think we got up to about sixty-five. Some of our staff left when we lost part of our funding because this was their profession. But a lot of people stayed. We went back to IHC [to ask again about the property at Orem Community Hospital] because Orem City had given us a hundred thousand dollars. [The Orem City Council] had asked us to do a presentation for the city council, and I took families with little children, and the little children just charmed the city council. They would go take their nametags and pull them down, and all kinds of things. I didn’t have to do anything. It was this population. So the city gave us one hundred thousand of CDGB [Community Development Block Grant] money—block grant money—that they had to use or lose. We asked them to give it to us in the form of a challenge to the community, so Orem City did, and we started getting funding. And IHC said, by that time, that we could have some property—Orem Community Hospital—but we had to raise 95 percent of the money. And we said, Oh gosh! Oh gosh! But we had the hundred thousand from Orem City, which gave us Orem City’s blessing, and that’s a big deal.

SH: Yeah. Utah Women’s Walk: 8

Karen Hahne

KH: And then I had a friend who had grown up in this family of fourteen children, whose husband had gone to work for , and she sent a personal check for a hundred thousand dollars. She wanted to be in on this. And then we went to BYU [Brigham Young University] and [at] that time they had the school of architecture. There were three students who needed a senior project, and they designed the building. So we went back to IHC and said, We have a hundred thousand here, a hundred thousand there, we’ve got the plans. We are there! And so they gave us that little spot.

SH: That little corner.

KH: Yeah. They gave it to us for a dollar a year. They wouldn’t really let us have the property, so it took me about twenty years to work on them for that. The [Utah Valley] Home Builders came [and we became their project]. They contributed a lot. The building was truly a miracle—really a miracle because it was home grown. We couldn’t use any of the grant money for it. But people cared, and the thing that I learned was there’s—I don’t think there’s a family that hasn’t been touched by someone in their family having either a disability, [or] a special need somehow. People would come out of the woodwork and help. And right after that Alpine School District started to grow. Orem started to grow. We used to say, “It’s growing everywhere but in Lehi.” That was not very smart because now you look at that and say, “Wow!” (laughs) The whole premise of our program was to put parents in charge. [They know their child best. Parents needed information support and to know that they weren’t alone.] And I would tell staff, “Everything you know needs to be given to the parents because they are paying the taxes that support our program.”

After we had been in the building for a while we decided to write for an Early Head Start Grant. Early Head Start [serves] babies birth through three whose parents are in poverty. [Early Head Start provides comprehensive developmental services for children and social services for their families.] And I remember—we had to get community support to say that people believed that we could do the program. There were people that I really really admired that had been in involved with us at Kids On the Move. When we said that we were going to write the grant for the early head start some people pulled out and said, We can’t support you. You mean you’re going to support—you are going to write a grant to support those families. And their voices lowered because there is not hope there. These are the families that are intergenerational dropouts. And it really gave us the impetus to write for the grant and to say, “There are many many families who fall in that category, but why wouldn’t you do something—to start somewhere.” [Families in poverty love their children and want success just as other families do.] And now the early head start program at Kids On The Move is really strong. I think we started out with about forty families that we were serving and had to hire staff to come and work with them and to do the home visits. But it makes a difference. And the thing that we learned is more of the families from early head start qualified for early intervention. Their children needed services. The children were delayed because of poverty—because of the conditions in the home. The programs complimented each other. One of the big things we did too was to establish a library so that parents could get all of the information they wanted or needed. Utah Women’s Walk: 9

Karen Hahne

And we actually became a branch of the Orem Public Library. They catalogued our collection. So if parents were looking for something on parenting a child with autism or with other kinds of issues, it would list our book and then say, it’s at Kids On The Move and parents could come and check it out. I have really talked a lot. (laughs)

SH: You mentioned that the whole premise of the program was to put parents in charge, but isn’t the secondary or the primary goal also early intervention? I know—I understand that you have always advocated that the earlier you can help a child, the more chance he or she has for success from then on.

KH: Yes. [Providing services to babies which are based on building on their strengths and preventing further developmental challenges—to help parents maximize their young child’s learning and development. Parents are a child’s most important teachers.]

SH: So can you explain early intervention?

KH: Early intervention was the first grant that we got. It came through a federal law that said that—it provided funding for children three to five with a diagnosis, you know, Down syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Spina bifida. The premise was that the earlier you get them into services, then the less it will cost later on. That was one of the things and so that funding was set up for that. [We know that by starting earlier a child can be helped to develop their areas of strength and many times behavior problems can be avoided. Such as teaching a family to communicate in sign language may help prevent temper tantrums when a child doesn’t have oral language and needs to communicate.]

SH: Okay.

KH: When the school districts became responsible for the three to five year olds, then that is when we had the birth through three. You really need to work with children even before birth when parents have a prenatal diagnosis. In our community, Utah County has the highest birthrate in the nation. And I think that is a great blessing. And so we have more children with disabilities—with special needs. Not because we are extra blessed, but just because of the population we have. Fewer mothers have abortions if they have a prenatal diagnosis. It’s just a uniqueness of our community.

SH: And the parents need to touch them, encourage them, make contact, bond with them, teach them to—

[37:18]

KH: Well, and the thing that we say is, This child is more like your other children then—

SH: Different.

Utah Women’s Walk: 10

Karen Hahne

KH: —different. My son Reed used to say that Down syndrome was just a small part of who he is. And I loved that because there are so many things about him. Yes, Down syndrome is part of who he is, but it is not who he is. He is Reed, and he has a lot of gifts and talents, and he’s fun to be around. But definitely Down syndrome is part—just like what—me being seventy-five. It’s part of who we are. (laughs)

SH: How many children—do you have any way to estimate how many children Kids On The Move has helped over the years?

KH: Thousands. Thousands. They just celebrated their thirtieth year. We incorporated in 1986. And I had a number once, but I don’t remember what it is, but it is thousands over the years.

SH: And I assume that now you have parents coming back, who were in the program, who are bringing their children, who are asking for their grandchildren.

KH: Oh, yes. Yes, that happens. The babies keep being born.

SH: (laughs) And did Reed get a chance to benefit from what you did with Kids On The Move? Or did he kind of grow up while you were working that out?

KH: (laughs) You know, he went with me. He was born in 1983 and we incorporated in 1986. But we had been doing the volunteer program all that time. Almost from the time we got him we had been doing that volunteer program, so he really benefited from it. Maybe not as much as other kids coming through, but he received the benefits of being [a part of the program].

SH: He served two missions, acting in plays, has a job with the library. He’s funny. He interacts with the general population. [He contributes to the community.]

KH: He does. He just makes friends wherever he goes, and he is so well known. We were in the middle of Yellowstone one year and these kids came up and said, Reed, Reed. And I said, “So where are you guys from?” And they said, Seattle. And I said, “So how do you know Reed?” And he had performed at EFY [Especially for Youth] at BYU and these kids had seen him, and they just loved him.5 (laughs) That was just the week before.

My husband says—about our mission in Nauvoo—he said, “I was there and I think I did a good job on my mission, but nobody remembers me, but everybody knows Reed.” (laughs) We have people now who were visitors in Nauvoo all those years ago—well, one man came up not too long ago and said, “I’ll never forget when you took me through the boot shop and you bore your testimony and told me about the boot shop there in

5. Especially for Youth, often abbreviated, EFY, is a week-long summer camp during which children aged fourteen to eighteen focus on LDS gospel principles. Utah Women’s Walk: 11

Karen Hahne

Nauvoo. Or when you were in the Nauvoo temple and I have these memories of you. I remember you.” And Bob will say, “I was there too.” (laughs)

SH: (laughs)

KH: I don’t even say it because I know they don’t remember me.

SH: So your decision to create better things, more opportunities for your child, led you to a full time career and institution that will last far longer then you will on this earth. What would you tell somebody today? Just be tenacious? Just go for what your child needs? How—

KH: Exactly. I would say—well, I’ll quote a man. When Reed was about two, I went to a workshop in Washington D.C. And the main presenter was a man named Rod Turnbull. He was out of the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, Kansas. He had an adult son with autism, but he took this audience—and these were parents of children with Down syndrome—and he said, “Close your eyes. Close your eyes. Now take the highest thing. The highest dream you have for your child with Down syndrome. Think about that for a minute. Just think what that is.” And then he said, “Double it and then you will be getting close to their potential.” Well, I latched onto that because it was so different then what the woman from the [first] program here had told me. Double your highest dream, and you’ll be getting close. And that is what I tell a parent. You don’t know what your child’s potential is. And now days we see so many more kids [with disabilities] in the community, and they’re part of [their families].

There was a woman I knew from New York that ran an adoption agency for children with Down syndrome whose parents had decided they didn’t want the burden [of raising a child with disabilities.] Anyway, she said, I can’t believe how many families, where the parents had a sibling with Down syndrome, who [are] coming to me to adopt a child with Down syndrome for their families—and other disabilities too. Growing up in a family [with a sibling with a disability]—people could see the value of it and wanted that kind of learning experience for their own children, where they learned to be compassionate, and understanding, and go beyond themselves. And [to] see what people can achieve and what people can do. I would say, Don’t sell yourself short. You have the ability to help your child. And your child will help you too. We’ve had parents say, I couldn’t walk through your door. I couldn’t come into Kids On The Move [initially] because I was so afraid, and I thought the sun would never shine again. And then they would say, The sun rises with my son or daughter because of how I have changed as a parent. And it’s not easy, and we don’t tell them that it is easy. It is hard. It is really hard in a lot of cases where the child has Spina bifida or cerebral palsy [or other disabilities], and you know that there are going to be life-long issues. Lifelong.

[45:32]

Utah Women’s Walk: 12

Karen Hahne

SH: You have to hire somebody to be with you when you are old, I guess. (laughs) That is what her son is telling her now. You’ll have to hire somebody.

KH: (laughs) He told me the older day that in his future—well, he needed to hire someone. And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because in my future, I am going to be old and I need someone to teach me how to do that.” And I told Sharon, “I was so glad he didn’t look at me and say, You could never teach me!” (laughs)

SH: If you were to describe yourself—as you look back at the years of progress and the help—if you were to describe yourself in a couple of words, would you call yourself tenacious? Fearless?

KH: (laughs) I would describe myself—because I have heard this said—that I am the pain in everybody’s butt—because I didn’t go away. We kept going back to IHC and saying— well, I remember going in and saying, “You really need us.” This was at a time when they had to prove that they were non-profit by doing community service. And I said to them, “We’ll make you look really good if you’ll give us some property. You need us.” And they did, you know. I remember a professional saying, “You’ll never see bricks and mortar because this community does not care about kids who will not grow up and vote.” When we finished the original part of the building, we sent him an invitation and said, Come see our bricks and mortar. People do care. People do care. I just—I don’t know how to describe myself. I just know that I have been so blessed, and that it had to happen in this community, and that the right people would come at the right time, out of the woodwork. It’s just—it has been such an adventure, such a great thing. I can’t imagine what I would have done otherwise.

[47:50]

SH: I think it is just marvelous and inspirational. I thank you for being you.

KH: Thank you, dear.

SD: Can I just follow up on a couple of things?

SH: Certainly.

SD: Just a couple of things. So Karen, will you tell us your birthdate? You said you were raised in Laketown. Was that where you were born? And the names of your parents?

KH: I was born in Salt Lake—

SD: Okay.

KH: —but my dad went back to Laketown. That is where he is from, and my parents are Arlo and Vernetta Weston. Utah Women’s Walk: 13

Karen Hahne

SD: Okay.

SD: And what is your birthdate?

KH: November 13, 1940.

SD: Okay, yeah. Where are you in birth order of your family?

KH: The oldest.

SD: You’re the oldest—of how many siblings?

KH: Seven.

SD: So you are the oldest of seven.

KH: Yes.

SD: And how old was Reed when you adopted him?

KH: He was six weeks.

SD: So just an infant.

KH: He was. He had been at Primary Children’s [Hospital].

SD: The whole time before you got him?

KH: Yes. He had had to have surgery, and then they didn’t really have a place for him. So that is where he had been.

SD: And that was in 1983?

KH: Uh-huh.

SD: Is that right? Okay. And you have two children by birth and three passed away, and then adopted three, and then adopted Reed. Is that right?

KH: Uh-huh.

SD: Okay.

Utah Women’s Walk: 14

Karen Hahne

KH: And here is a fun thing about Reed. When we adopted him, they told us that he was Hispanic. And we said, Great! Great! We’ve got two Navajo’s, a Korean—that’s super. That’s great, but we did his ancestry DNA and he is 46 percent Polynesian.

KH: Oh, interesting.

KH: And my mother was born in Nuku’alofa, Tonga. And my grandparents spent sixteen years in the islands on missions, so here is this kid that we found out three weeks ago is part Polynesian, 46 percent. It just goes around and around.

SH: Did you ever find out how they got to you? You said they closed your file. You were over forty.

KH: I don’t—the social worker didn’t even know. He didn’t know how to say my name when he called us. He just said, “I’ve got your name here, and I need to ask you if you would be interested in adopting a baby with Down syndrome?”

SH: He was telling me a story earlier where she called her husband and talked to his colleague and he said, “If you don’t take him, I will.” Because of the joy and the opportunity—

KH: Bob was quite belligerent when he sat down next to his friend, and the man said, “You look like you are in shell shock. What is going on?” And Bob said, “What would you do if you called home and your forty-two year old wife said that you were being considered as adoptive parents for a baby with Down syndrome?” And that’s when the man said, “If you don’t take that baby, I will.” And Bob said, “Why? Why?” And he said, “Because we had a little girl with Down syndrome who passed away. I will come to Utah and take that baby.” And this was in Davis, California.

SH: Wow.

KH: So what are the chances?

SD: People are placed in the right place at the right time.

KH: And that’s been our experience all the way through. Every time I got anxious, and I got anxious a lot, about the building, and about everything. Every time I got anxious things kind of stopped, and I would have to stop and say, Let Him control Karen. (laughs)

SH: Just go with the flow.

KH: We had an experience where the building was all built, except the driveway wasn’t in, and we had run out of money. (laughs) We had used all of the money we had raised, but the city wouldn’t let us move in until all the paving was done. The chairman of my board said, “You’ve got to go back a woman who had given us some money.” And he said, “You’ve got to go back to her and ask her for more.” And I said, “No, I’m not going to Utah Women’s Walk: 15

Karen Hahne

do that.” She gave us some money, I’m not going to go back and say, “Can I have some more?” And he said, “Well, then you’re stuck down at UVU Provo Campus—way down by BYU until this can be done. You can’t do it.” Well, as I was driving down, I thought of a family in the program, and they had just become very very wealthy. And so I thought, I can call them. And so I called. And the husband answered, and I said, “I need fifty thousand dollars.” And he said, “Okay, somebody just returned some money to my wife. Drive by the house and she’ll make you out a check.” So I said, “Okay.” I drove by the house and went and deposited the money. The chairman of my board said, “What are you going to do Karen?” And I said, “I’m not going to worry. The money is in the bank.” So no papers signed, or anything. That was just the way it was. The man that loaned us the money, a few months later, [he] drove through, and we had a little drive through thing, and he said, “You don’t have the yard in yet.” I said, “Oh, I know, but we are depending on kids from BYU and UVU to come help us, and so it is taking us a little while.” And he said, “Well, it’s really important to get the landscape in.” And I said, “I know. I thought he was going to ask for the money back.” And he said to me, “What day did I give you that money?” And I said, “I think I went by your house about April first.” And he said, “Oh, good. I can claim that on my income tax. You don’t have to pay it back.”

SH: (laughs)

KH: Fifty thousand dollars.

SH: I was afraid you were going to say that he said, “April Fools!”

KH: No, he said, “I can claim it!”

SH: Oh, my goodness!

KH: I could tell so many stories of a community that just rallied around—and miracles.

SD: Yes.

KH: Every time somebody told us no, somebody else would step up with a better offer.

SD: How involved are you still in—

KH: Not much.

SD: Not much.

KH: Not much, no. They’ve got a new administration and they are doing good things. It’s different. It’s more business work ended. I wished I had a business degree instead of a Special Ed degree, but it’s more business focused, and has to be. They have a lot more money they are dealing with and a lot more kids. Utah Women’s Walk: 16

Karen Hahne

SH: Aren’t they doing more outreach?

KH: Yes. They are doing a lot of outreach.

SH: But you are still pretty much centered in the building?

KH: But we have an outreach in Lehi that we started before I left. And then they are thinking about other things so that those parents don’t have so far [to go] because really there is such a huge population over there now. And when I was there, it was just starting to grow. There weren’t that many families out in that area. Exciting things are happening. But they have us go back, you know, every once in a while, to educate new board members or something. We’re invited then, but that is about it.

[55:41] End of interview

Utah Women’s Walk: 17

Karen Hahne