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September 28, 1995

No horsin' around Pitt's coordinator of Disability Resources leads a double, and extremely busy, life

You want to know how I spent my weekend?" asked Marcie Roberts one Monday morning. Smiling, with a trace of pride, she held up her forearms to show they were criss-crossed with angry red scratches. "I think I broke this one," she said matter-of-factly, indicating a swollen finger, "or at least I stoved it badly." The previous Friday had been a typical weekday for Roberts: Wake-up at 4:30 a.m., run a couple of miles, make breakfast for the family, leave at 6:30 for the 90-minute commute from Ligonier to Oakland to put in a full day as Pitt's coordinator of Disability Resources and Services.

Then drive home, change out of the business clothes and pull on jeans and a T-shirt to resume the "other" life as a horse breaker, trainer, riding teacher and occasional deliverer of foals.

The scratches and swollen finger came from haymaking. At 7 p.m. Friday evening, Marcie and her husband, Bob, began cutting and baling hay and storing it in a barn. They finished the job at 10 p.m. Sunday.

"You have to make hay when it's at its peak of nutrition and palatability for the horses. Once you've cut it you can't let it get rained on, so you have to work fast," Roberts explained. "It's a real art form." So is living a dual life. During the last decade, Roberts has held full-time jobs as a horsewoman and, since 1994, as the administrator who coordinates University services for some 300 students with physical and/or learning disabilities.

Between 1987 and 1993, Roberts earned her bachelor's degree from the College of General Studies (CGS). For two of those years she was president of the CGS Student Government. She recalls serving at one time on 13 University committees and governance groups, including Senate Council and the Provost's Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Programs. Roberts did much of her reading for class while sitting on hay bales during breaks in horse shows or during all-night "foal watching" sessions – waiting for mares to give birth.

Marcie and Bob Roberts and their three sons — Robbie, 16, Adam, 9, and Matthew, 7 — live on a farm in the Ligonier Valley in company with 39 horses, 10 sheep, two dogs, an untold number of cats and a pet turkey that follows the boys everywhere and insists on joining in their games.

Marcie grew up in the Ligonier Valley and developed her passion for horses early. "As a kid, I begged, borrowed and stole every ride anyone would give me," she said. While in high school and for two years following graduation, she worked for Rolling Rock Farms as a groom and exercise rider and filled in as a riding instructor.

In 1979, she and Bob relocated east to Unionville, Pa., where they took jobs on a racing and fox-hunting farm. This was in the heart of horse country, the great eastern Pennsylvania-Delaware-Maryland breeding, training and racing region.

In Unionville, Marcie would begin taking horses through their paces at 5 a.m. She worked out as many as 10 horses in a morning. She also did "layups," or convalescent work. While at the Unionville farm, Marcie also learned to train horses for steeplechase races.

In 1981, Marcie and Bob moved back west, to Cochranville, Pa., to work at a small private farm producing horses for racing, fox hunting and event riding. In Cochranville, Marcie earned a trainer's license for flat and steeplechase runners and trained race horses. For the next seven years, she herself raced horses in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.

"I had a bad spell in the early '80s when I was breaking and training a lot of horses that were young and awkward, and I was taking a lot of falls," she said. "I remember one two-week period when I fell almost every day." Occasionally, too, a skittish thoroughbred would gallop away with her. Because jockeys ride low with their heads extended forward over the horse's neck, all Marcie could see at such times was a blur of track a few feet below her.

Falls and runaways come with the territory, Roberts said. The riding accident that paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve "was really a freak accident," she noted. "You'll see the same kind of thing at most any horse show: a horse comes up to a fence and refuses to jump. The rider is perched forward in anticipation of the jump, and when the horse doesn't go, the rider gets thrown over top. It was the way he [Reeve] landed that caused his injury." Roberts's scariest moment as a rider came a few years ago when her horse reared and almost fell over backward on top of her. "He was scared, and it's the scared ones that will hurt you," she said. To settle the horse, she rapped it between the ears with her riding baton. "It's not a whip, it just makes a lot of noise without hurting the horse," she explained.

Horses, especially race horses, are smart and individualistic, Roberts believes. She constantly meets horses that remind her of people she knows, or vice versa. "Horses are so much like people in their mannerisms and behavior that sometimes it's spooky. Some are delinquents, some are star pupils. You have lazy ones and hard workers. Each horse has an innate personality. You can only develop and manipulate them up to a point." Roberts discovered that the hard way in the mid-1980s when she bought an Arabian, a grandson of the great Secretariat, that had been orphaned when it was four weeks old. "This horse was…he was a delinquent, is what he was. He was neurotic and explosive. I could see he was going to require far more time than I could give, so after owning him for four years I had to sell him" — for $2,700, or $4,800 less than she had paid for him.

In 1986, Marcie and her husband moved back to the Ligonier Valley to work at an Arabian horse farm. Recently, Bob began managing a quarter-horse farm in the valley. He and Marcie also manage a horse-boarding facility.

"When we came back to western Pennsylvania in '86, I decided I'd pick up some classes," Roberts said. "I enrolled in CGS [in 1987] mainly because of its emphasis on external studies. I knew I couldn't make it down to Pittsburgh every day." In fact, Roberts averaged just one day per week on campus. "During one term, I arranged my schedule so I was taking all four of my classes on the same day. That was brutal." She carried a full course load during the winter, when the farm wasn't so busy, and six-to-nine credits during the summer horse show season.

After graduating with a B.A. in legal studies in 1993, Roberts began work as a graduate student assistant in Pitt's Office of Disability Resources and Services. She filled in for the coordinator when the latter went on maternity leave. When the coordinator decided not to return, Roberts got the job. She is the office's only professional staff member, although Roberts says she has been ably assisted by some outstanding work-study students.

A good thing, too. Roberts's workload has grown along with increasing enrollments of students with physical and learning disabilities. The office served 209 students in fall 1994. More than 300 registered for fall 1995. Roberts said she meets with each student for at least an hour and a half to develop a plan to accommodate the student in each of his or her classes.

Only about a quarter of the students report being physically disabled, Roberts said. The rest have so-called "hidden" handicaps such as attention deficit disorder and depression, often in combination. "For physically disabled students, the services Pitt needs to provide are pretty cut and dried," said Roberts. "A blind student will need to have lecture notes translated into Braille, for example. But for the students with learning disorders, it can be pretty complicated and require an amazing amount of time and effort." A student with an audio-perceptual impairment may find it extremely difficult to process verbal information but not written information, for example. For such a student, Roberts' office might provide written transcripts of lectures or arrange for a professor to give the student copies of lecture notes.

Pitt grants some students with learning disabilities "extended time" (time and a half) to take tests, while others receive all the time they need. "It's an individual thing. If you give someone with obsessive-compulsive syndrome no time limit, it can exacerbate their problem," Roberts noted.

While Roberts's office usually does not demand documentation of physical disabilities, a student wishing to register as suffering from a "hidden" disability must provide a physician's letter stating that the student has been tested and diagnosed with the disorder within the last three years.

"One of the ironies I see in this job is that students come to me, having gone through high school learning disability programs, and they still don't know exactly what's wrong with them," said Roberts.

She emphasized that her office isn't in the charity business. The Americans With Disabilities Act of 1992 requires Pitt and other institutions receiving federal funds to go to great lengths to accommodate the disabled, students as well as employees. And Roberts argues that the University benefits from enrolling students with physical and learning disabilities. "It makes for a more diverse student body that reflects the real world outside, and I think it raises our academic standards. I get students in this office with IQs of 130 or higher. There are a lot of students out there with disabilities who are extremely bright. And as Pitt gains the reputation as a place that can accommodate their physical needs, we can attract the cream of the crop." Because of the demands of her Pitt job (the commute from Ligonier can take up to four hours, one-way, during heavy snows), Roberts has cut back on her work with horses. But she still spends many of her spring, summer and fall evenings and weekends teaching riding, conducting clinics and judging horse shows.

Most of the requests she receives for clinics and demonstrations these days are for sidesaddle riding, which she says is growing in popularity — even though the requisite riding habit costs about $2,000 and sidesaddle riding rules are fussy to the point of dictating the height of a rider's top hat (4 1/2 inches) and the contents of her sandwich case (a "butter-based" sandwich and a flask filled with sherry, not brandy).

Physically, riding sidesaddle isn't as awkward as it looks, according to Roberts. "You hook one leg over a saddlehorn, so you're actually very secure up there on the saddle."

— Bruce Steele

Filed under: Feature,Volume 28 Issue 3

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