Wheelchair activist Rhine dies at 56

BANGOR – The man in the wheelchair, the one you probably cursed at because he was traveling in your right of way on a busy street instead of on the sidewalk, died on Tuesday.

To thousands of people in the area, the man in the wheelchair didn’t have a name. He was just the person they had to avoid hitting with their car.

Richard Rhine, though, had a voice – a strong one at that – and he would tell you he had as much right to be in his wheelchair on the street as you did to be there in your car.

And there were a lot of people who heard him say that being in a wheelchair did not mean the end of independent living. Rhine’s audiences included the governor’s office, the state Legislature, the Bangor City Council and groups focused on the rights of the disabled.

Ask him and Rhine would tell you that the sidewalks were in terrible condition for a wheelchair. Plus, he would say, many of them didn’t have exit ramps.

“I’ve had a couple of people holler at me and say, ‘What do you think that is? A car?,'” Rhine told the Bangor Daily News in October 1999. “I think it is. That’s what I use it for.”

Rhine spent as much for the wheelchair as the sticker price on an automobile – about $23,000. And, according to his friend, Greg Martin, Rhine had to soup it up with headlights and brake lights so he could travel at night.

Rhine, 56, was stricken with polio at age 10 and spent the rest of his life in the wheelchair. In recent years, he was on a ventilator and although that made it harder for him to be active in his causes, it still didn’t stop him. Only his death on Tuesday, March 12, could do that.

“His attitude was really reflective of a person who was just amazing,” Martin said.

Especially to Martin. In 1983, Martin fell 16 feet at a job site and broke his neck. Richard and his wife, Priscilla, became his peer counselors and taught him how to get around town in a wheelchair and how to hire caretakers that would accommodate his lifestyle.

Martin said he especially remembers the lessons the Rhines gave him on how to maneuver his wheelchair to get in and out of doors at Bangor City Hall and other public buildings.

“They got me to try to live an independent life,” Martin recalled on Thursday. “It was really, really scary. But they were key support people to get me to make that decision.”

It was in the 1980s that Rhine took it upon himself to make it easier for the disabled to travel around Bangor and get into its buildings. Besides fixing doors and sidewalks and building ramps, Rhine convinced the city to install wheelchair lifts in public buses.

As a founding member of the Maine Action Coalition, Rhine raised more than $170,000 for the 19-year-old nonprofit group, and the money was spent on programs to help the disabled realize that a wheelchair is not a barrier to living, it’s an accessory. For seven years, $1,500 was sent annually to the spina bifida teen camp, where teens were inspired and encouraged to go to college and live in dorms or to study to get a driver’s license.

“He was a very professional fund-raiser, and he taught me how to do it,” said Martin, a member of the Maine Action Coalition.

Rhine said people repeatedly asked him if he missed walking. He would tell them no.

“I would like to, sure,” he said in 1999. “But it’s kind of a moot point now.”

It probably would have slowed down his active lifestyle.

“I get around faster than most people walking,” he said. After all, his wheelchair traveled at 16 mph and he would go anywhere within the 40-mile range his wheelchair could handle on one battery charge.

Sometimes that was back and forth from his home at Bangor House to Shaw’s Supermarket, both on Main Street, to pick up groceries for neighbors. Sometimes it was seven miles, three days a week to Hampden to study his Jehovah’s Witnesses faith with three other families.

Sometimes, even in the blizzard-like conditions of winter, it was an errand for a friend.

Rhine fought the prejudice that nondisabled people have toward the handicapped every day of his life.

And he fought it in the traffic on the streets.

“It was funny. I was going up the Union Street hill when the cars couldn’t,” Rhine recalled in the 1999 interview of a winter’s day in which he passed a man whose vehicle’s wheels were spinning, unable to get traction in the snow.

“He looked at me and I kept charging along.”

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 24, at the Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, 2029 Broadway in Bangor.