Good Friday.

It was January 17 of 1997 My mom, my oldest brother, Jesse, and I were planning to go to Cordaline, Idaho.

And we need to do some car maintenance and we were going to see a movie.

It used to be a windy kind of mountain road to get to this Cordaline And that day we slipped on black ice into oncoming traffic on a curve.

And there happened to be a pretty big utility truck on that lane that we had them.

I was five and I was in the backseat behind my mom driving.

And I had taken off the shoulder strap and just had the bell strap on because it was rubbing on my neck.

And what happened is I hit I just went forward so quickly that I snapped my spinal cord.

I remember being in the car right after it happened and thinking I was getting really tired.

And I remember telling myself like don't fall asleep because you may never wake up again.

I was born in Burns, Oregon, and then I moved to Chico Washington when I was two and live there the rest of my life.

Chico is a very small farming community.

It's 800 people, and it's surrounded by wheat and lentil fields.

So they're rolling hills, very agricultural, but just about five miles.

east of us is the Idaho border.

And that's Idaho Panhandle.

So it's northern Idaho, which is very mountainous.

You basically see nature Wherever you look, whether that's wheat fields, or you see mountains in the distance.

I was a kid who loved being outside and my mom always has had dogs and so we're the kind of family that takes our dogs on long walks every night, we would always go bike riding on the trails, swimming in lakes and rivers were a big part of growing up.

The best thing my small town community could have ever done for me was treat me exactly the same.

I was already learning life as a kindergartener using a wheelchair.

But the bar wasn't set lower for me.

I was still expected to perform my homework, I was still expected to go to recess when everyone else did.

And my classmates still asked me to play the same games.

So I remember rolling down the hill at recess.

And so that meant I had to learn how to get back in my wheelchair on my own.

I still have being very physical.

We climbed the monkey bars, I did everything that they were doing.

And I just, I think, because of that learned how to creatively do it.

And in third grade, I was excited to play basketball with my classmates.

But that was where I realized I had a wheelchair.

And I realized that there were some downsides to being wheelchair.

And that was kind of the first time I was the slowest on the court.

So everyone had to wait for me to get there.

And then became a role they need to pass me the ball once before we tried to mask it.

And I felt very patronized, and I just really hated the experience.

So I was like, I'm never doing that again.

But that's why the next year when we learned about a wheelchair basketball team, my mom insisted I go and I was really hesitant.

But that day I was around kids and about in wheelchairs playing basketball and was everything I wanted the year before.

I just fell in love with that it was so free and that I was finally doing a sport on an even playing field.

That that spring when track practice started.

They asked if I could come so I started doing wheelchair racing that year as well.

Fourth grade I recruited Susanna when she was in high school, but unfortunately she she said no.

And she went to a school in Montana instead for her first two years taking.

But I didn't give up I kept on her and I was able to persuade her to transfer to you by when she was a junior at University of Illinois has been leader for people with disabilities for decades, and it is only getting better and better.

The more we understand accessibility and the wide needs for accessibility that there are.

I remember getting here and I got a email or text from Adam saying, hey, Soos we're doing a half marathon tomorrow morning.

And I was I was my first night at my dorm.

And I was with my mom.

And I was like, Oh, my gosh, I've never done half marathon before.

And I was like, I don't think I can say no.

So I remember getting here doing my first half marathon.

Afterwards, we went to get breakfast together as a group, and everyone just kind of got to know me from there.

I have been here, six days a week.

When I first got here, I didn't really my goal was not to have a career in wheelchair racing.

I just loved the training part.

And I still mostly just love the training part.

Now I see it as a career.

jeroni has gone out front says karate will come through, I was gonna be very tough for three Turabian figures coronial Ron's for the American suzanis groaning, I'd say that long distance shows me I have an mindset, I guess that matches, you know, this fitness capacity and nutrition capacity, where I like to just keep going to my highest performing athletes, I have to tell them to take a day off, I have to force them to step back from training.

They don't want to just don't want to that's not the way they're bill and she shares she has that characteristic.

That's a common point of discussion between us is that I always have to pump the brakes on on her a little bit just so that she can rest, recover and regenerate and improve and take advantage of all the hard training.

I feel like I've got a whole toolbox of things to get hard that I can pull out tools to try and make it easier.

And I think that is what endurance athletes have just ways of making what starts to feel hard, a little bit more doable.

She really has has a breakthrough in her performance since 2020 2021.

Coming out of COVID Five point to one race it was at the Tokyo Paralympic Games 12 and a half laps around the track.

suzanis Corona is all alone on the screen right now, this is absolutely spectacular, Susanna Skaros.

He's the champion of 5000.

And a new Paralympic record, really one of the most more convincing wins at the Paralympic games on the track and wheelchair track that I've seen for a long time.

And they really put a stamp on that she was so on.

After Tokyo.

Two weeks later, I was training and I was heading east on Windsor Road, which is four lanes.

And I got hit from behind.

And I sustained a burst fracture.

Three vertebrae in my back.

I did not know what was gonna happen.

I was like, What is my life gonna be like with this back injury.

Because when you're a wheelchair user, I think you just ever you're very sensitive to anything in your body becoming wounded.

But when it was my back, I was so just like fearful that I may have to adjust my way of living.

I had been arguably best I've ever been at and had some marathons coming up that I really wanted to compete at.

So very disappointed.

But then immediately after that was so much thankfulness but I was alive.

In January of 2022.

I was given the okay to get him back my recent chair.

So I started pushing on January 3.

And from there, my racing highlights have been pretty consistent.

The New York City Marathon was a big highlight, because I love that course.

And that course is hard this year at around mile 23 was very challenging.

That day, I remember doing amazing grace, the song Amazing Grace and singing that over and over again to get me up to that hard part.

I just wanted to meet it and do everything I could.

And I just did not expect we had a really good feel that day.

And I didn't expect to be able to go alone under the course record.

That 31 year old American in total control as she wins her first Boston Marathon.

I have very effective training right now because I have had so many experiences.

And I think that has helped, you know, make me be really fast this year, because I can I can actually visualize a time where I'm going to need a skill.

And then I can practice that skill, a training.

She's taking that success and really has become the number one female in the World War.

I still think that the hardest challenge I've gone through is not the marathon but is grad school and I think it's because it forced me to win Learn A lot of times as I was struggling through grad school because it was something so different than anything I've ever done.

I would draw upon wheelchair racing for assistance.

I was like, Why do I love training, and I just hate trying to write this literature review.

And I would remind myself that when you train every single morning, you're actually doing exercises to get better and better and better.

And now it feels easy.

And you like that I needed to read more academic papers, I needed to perform more statistics, I need to do things that regularly, like accumulate it and made it feel better and easier.

And it took me a while to like realize that there are many times, especially in the winter, when you know, it's snowing, and I would like to not push through snow.

I love being outside, I always want to be a forester, I would love to be able to hike through the woods, or when I'm in Eugene, visiting my family to actually hike up the sand dunes like I carried.

There are many times that I feel that way.

And I just wish that I could walk.

Those are also the times where I realized that I have been given a different perspective.

And I am very thankful for that.

And I also not deny that if I have the thought that if I could be given like the chance to walk tomorrow, I would probably take it.

But if it meant that I couldn't have what I had had to this point.

I don't think I would, because it's one thing to want to go hiking.

But we're all of the many things that I've learned along the way I would never trade for anything else and I know that's true.

If you look closely at my work, you can't see a haul of it.

But if you really think about it, you will see something musical I grew up in Decatur, Illinois, a wonderful city, a thriving city at that time.

My father was a minister and my mom mother of 10 children didn't realize that we were what we would think of as poor because we never felt that way.

My family.

They were providers just like all the families on Sunset Avenue.

Anyway, very large family, very close knit family.

I owe that to my becoming an artist finding my niche.

I want it to be seen, especially under the eyes of my older brother.

I think I became an artist at the age of seven and middle school I began to get a little mischievious about drawing.

Later I applied to Southern Illinois and Carbondale and you know like Quint doors explode open.

That's what it was like culturally because I had never seen that many people who look like me spoke like me.

It played music.

I mean, it was total awakening I raised alligators when I was small, but I could never keep a roommate when I was in college because they'd all split the smell of alligators and and late at night get him jumping in the bathtub.

But anyway, I did a lot of things because I was curious things like foundry casting and bronze covered it jewelry making covered it painting, I covered it so that was just an itch that needs to be scratch kind of overdid it you know, but you back, it was the 60s and I felt free.

I felt very good about life, you know, and we moved on to Chicago, believe it or not, I left Macomb and accepted a job in Chicago as a sculpture teacher.

And I stayed there 32 years because my habits, everything we know culturally and connected to entertainment and sports and all that kind of stuff came from Chicago, Harlem renaissance in Chicago was larger than the Harlem Renaissance in New York, the impact of that period, cause so much cultural richness.

And that's why I built Brownsville to Harlem.

My brother called me within Brownsville to Harlem, there are a lot of personal things.

That's what makes it alive.

Because these people are real.

There is a small figure of my father, holding two twins in his arm coming from St. Mary's Hospital where my twin sister and I was born.

Scale is important when they are becomes larger than your body.

There's a certain kind of respect that happens between you and the work large monumental sculptures that we see the city's larger cities that was done on purpose.

For small scale sculpture that I did you know, on Brownsville to Harlem, I can reach in there and grab it and pick it up.

Their proportions are a little strange.

Not so correct.

But you don't care.

I do what you call fine art.

social conscious art, because you can bend the rules.

Yeah, no.

And I haven't I've been doing that all my life.

music as a part of me, that evolved.

Along with the art, I put a band together called the rhythm basis indicator, we made records, we recorded Nashville.

Some of the most famous musicians on the planet was on that Chitlin Circuit.

We would drive a little Volkswagen bus.

We couldn't go downtown and stay in hotels, because most places even were in the north, were still segregated.

Fortunately, we didn't feel the segregation.

We were having too much fun.

Unfortunately, we should have known that was an opportunity to fight against segregation.

I've been known to be an activist, I've been known to be somewhat militant also.

But like I say things evolve.

And I learned that bad feelings can hurt you.

But bad feelings can also change things to create good feelings.

You see, I pride myself from not being afraid of nothing that's in my work and I can't hide it all of this stuff speaks another language and another language that's aggressive, but a language that put you at the front and say don't back up.

So I want my art to always remind people that there's positive consciousness out there I hope that my life has touched many young kids out there and I'm a teaching this length of time you know, 50 something years.

I better be good.

Because that's a lot have people that you've impressed?

Yeah, that's a lot of people that remember your personality.

And I just hope they become good people.

I can draw and paint anything I like.

And I marvel at the power that that creates.

I marvel at the fact that it does make a difference and it changes.

And if you believe in yourself, enough, you'll keep, you'll stay on net.

What's really interesting about the history of this house is that it was Abraham Lincoln who first proposed the appropriation to build a governor's mansion here in Springfield.

So this house was actually built as a governor's residence, it was completed in 1855.

This is one of the oldest governor's mansion and the largest governor's mansion in the United States.

The first governor to live here was Joel Madison, in he lived here with his wife and his, I think, three children.

And they lived here for approximately two or so years.

And then there was a change of Governor to Governor Bissell, who was a very close friend of Abraham Lincoln.

In the 1970s, under the Obama administration, they decided to save the house, the house really had almost been torn down several times, there was a lot of problems with this house with the plumbing and the septic system.

I was so lucky.

And I'm so grateful to Dianne around her and the committee of people and the architects that really worked on this house, she did an amazing job in four years, where she replaced the roof and the windows and the HVAC and did a major remodeling to this house.

And so when my husband was elected, we got to move into this, you know, house that was almost brand new.

Basically, what was left here was to do the decorating.

So I got right to work on that.

I went to school, the University of Nebraska and I studied historic decorative arts and interior design.

And then I went to the Art Institute in Chicago for preservation architecture.

So this was kind of like a duck to water.

I think maybe I worked with Michael Smith, who actually worked on the White House with the Obama administration.

When you arrive at this house, it really becomes your home.

And it is a public space.

And it does take a little adjusting, getting used to it because you know, you don't have people taking tours of your living room at home.

Right.

And but it's, it's really an honor to live here.

And that that supersedes everything.

I mean, it really is.

And I know my time here is limited, and it's such a special place to call home.

You also have to be really mindful that you know, you're only here for a short time.

And I was I tried to be really respectful of the people that lived here before me, and also fix it in a way that would be helpful to the next person.

Much like what Diana did for me, I really felt I had the mission for my husband who loves people, and he loves to entertain.

And he really wanted people to be here in the house.

And he wanted to have parties and events whenever he's in town.

And he does that.

So my mandate really was to make this place fit his personality and what he wanted to do to get his job done.

Right now we're sitting in the Lincoln parlor.

And a lot of these items here are on loan from the Al PLM.

And their portraits of Abraham Lincoln.

This is probably my favorite piece in the entire house.

This is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln that was painted by Reverend Lewis clover in 1860.

And Reverend Clover knew Abraham Lincoln personally.

And this painting is really special because first of all, it was painted from life, which a lot of the portraits of Abraham Lincoln or not, so it's one of the very few, and he obviously doesn't have his trademark beard.

I just love this, this portrait of him because he just looks so kind and he said, you know, he's a young man.

And you can just see the kindness in his eyes.

So I think Reverend Clover did an amazing job.

The music room.

We have the Steinway piano that was donated by my friend Linda Johnson.

And that piano belonged to her father, John Johnson, who had Johnson publishing with Ebony and Jet magazine.

And as you know, they credible contribution to our history here in Illinois and really to the Black History of the United States.

Here we have this this beautiful, Carl were some piece, who was Carl was a ship pago image just member of the Harry who group and I thought this this painting would look really great here because it's it's it's very classical and this is a classical interior as you can see if you divide it up, it's very symmetrical.

This is quite a spectacular staircase just like dangerous for a child to be zipping down, you know, dangerous or fun depending on your perspective.

I, I think I actually think it could be fun.

I haven't I haven't tried sliding down but you know, I might take my chances or move out.

Maybe I move out date Yes.

This used to be a hallway right here.

And in the 70s.

They made this room on the second floor.

We call it the Kankakee room because the women of Kankakee donated the money in the 70s renovation to purchase that wall covering the factory that makes this wallcovering in France is still in existence.

And it's all they use.

It's called woodblock printing.

And so they they remade it, and it's depicts scenes of early America.

Now it goes all the way around the room.

In the Lincoln Bedroom, I hung the Colonel Edward Baker portrait, which was a gift to Abraham Lincoln while he was president.

Colonel Edward Baker was a very good friend of Abraham Lincoln, and he was killed in the Civil War.

So if you can imagine how horrible President Lincoln felt that this war that he was commanding, and part of that his dear dear friend had perished in this war.

And another friend of theirs had this portrait painted and gave it to Abraham Lincoln, after he was assassinated, married to have Lincoln gave it to the state of Illinois, and it is hung in this house ever since.

So here we have the China that I designed with Auntie Picard.

We have a picture here of an of an oak tree, which is the state tree of Illinois.

I use this room a lot.

If I receive visitors and have tea, we sit here and have tea.

And then I have more China on display here in these two cabinets.

This is from a company from Alton, Illinois called Mississippi mud.

And he catches bluegills and then cast them and fires them and paints them.

He's a potter out of out of Alton, Illinois, and I just think they're so fantastic.

And of course the bluegill is the state fish so I had to I had to have these.

These I found in the house they were in a cabinet.

And yeah, I just I thought they were interesting.

So hang them up there.

I don't know where they came from.

I maybe Jim Thompson bought them that's when I when I can't figure out or who would get either.

I bet big Jim bought those because you know, he, he loved antiques.

So I think the game when I look at these smile this is the the governor's office when when JB is here, this is where where he works, you know the capitals that are under renovation now.

So we actually spent a lot of time in here working and taking meetings and zoom calls and that kind of thing when he's here in Springfield.

This is Governor Horner I hung this here because I think he was such an important governor and well regarded governor he steered our state through, you know, the Great Depression, and was really much beloved.

He was also the first Jewish governor of Illinois.

Farming is you know, very, very important to the state of Illinois.

It's our drives our economy.

Farmers are very important and I thought it was really important to represent the farmers through the art.

I felt it was really important to honor the history of this house and then try to to honor that with my redecoration and live in a modern way but honor history.

I love old houses and I love history.

I think it's very important to preserve this for the future and for our children.

I'm just so honored to be the steward of this great house.