disabilities, and for the rehabilitation and personal assistance services that would make an empowered life possible for them in their communities. "[M]orally, institutionalizing young people with so much potential for service is wrong," she said in 1963. And in 1977, " Of first importance is the right to freedom of choice to live as normal a life as possible within the community… Segregation is unnormal." Her work was honored at the national level with the President's Distinguished Service Award in 1979 and the Marion Mill Preminger Award of the People-to-People Program; at the state level, in Missouri, with the Jefferson Award; locally in St. Louis with the St. Louis Globe Democrat 1979 Woman of Achievement award and the prestigious St Louis Award in 1986; by her alma mater Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1981, with the first in its continuing series of Alumnae Achievement Awards; and posthumously by a permanent exhibit in the Missouri History Museum. Life, and Life's Work Gini Laurie was born Virginia Grace Wilson, in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1913. The year before her birth, there was a nationwide polio epidemic, and its effect on her family explains a good deal about her later commitment to helping polio survivors. She put it this way at the 1988 dedication of the new St. John's Rehabilitation Hospital in St. Louis: My father was a surgeon and on staff at the old Euclid Avenue St. John's [Hospital]. In 1912, the year before I was born, four siblings were struck by polio: a 12-year-old sister was mildly disabled, a 6-year-old brother very severely disabled, and two sisters, aged 3 and 9, died within days at St. John's. In their memory, my mother painted a mural on the ceiling of the St. John's chapel depicting them as angels. Sixteen years later, I watched my significantly disabled brother die of pneumonia and underventilation at St. John's. His funeral mass was in St. John's Chapel, underneath the mural of our sisters. She was named for the two sisters who died in that epidemic – Virginia, and Grace. She was, as she sometimes put it, "a replacement child." Her connections to disabling diseases, and in particular polio, went deep. In 1934, she received a B.A. degree in Latin and Greek (with Phi Beta Kappa honors) from Randolph-Macon Woman's College (now Randolph College) in Lynchburg, Virginia. She had gone to college with the intention of becoming a