How Lucy Got Through College
Barbara Mahany of the Chicago Tribune does a fine job on human interest stories. Her latest, "Lucy's Mom Was There," is the inspiring story of Rosa Trevino and her 24-year-old daughter, Lucy, who is confined to a wheelchair and has limited use of her arms. To attend college, Lucy needed a full-time personal assistant. Rosa volunteered, and for six years they were an inseparable duo at the University of Illinois. Here is Mahany's lede:
Lucy Trevino's mother cuts peanut-butter-on-whole-wheat into bite-size squares, unscrews a strawberry-kiwi juice and holds the bottle to her daughter's lips so Lucy can get through lunch and make it back to class.
She riffles through Lucy's lavender backpack to find the lab report for BioE 494, bioengineering-based physiology. When the cell phone rings, she holds it to her daughter's ear. She zips her coat. Dabs a tissue to her nose.
And before all this, she has slipped her into jeans, tied her shoes, smeared toothpaste on her toothbrush and combed her thick black hair into a perfect ponytail. Lucy Trevino's mother was right behind her firstborn daughter all through college—sometimes shoving through mounds of snow, or up an icy ramp if her motorized wheelchair balked. When they got stuck, her mother pulled out her cell phone to call maintenance and ask if someone could please come clear the walks. Over the last six years, Rosa Trevino also became fluent in the CTA's Blue Line and Pink Line, as the mother and daughter made their way five days a week from home, a red-brick two-flat in Cicero, to the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Lucy Trevino graduated Saturday from UIC with a degree in bioengineering, and the dean stopped the commencement of the Class of 2008 to tell of the Trevinos' triumph. He barely made it, he said, without breaking into tears.
chicagotribune.com/news/chi-lucys-mom-bd11may11,0,5910998,full.story