
I was nervous when I knocked on the door of Spinal Network in August of 1991. My internship coordinator had told me that it was the best magazine published in Boulder, Colorado, so it was my first choice for learning on the job as I earned my master’s in journalism.
A tall, toothy guy who reminded me of both David Letterman and Alfred E. Neuman answered the door. “I want to be your intern,” I said without much prelude. “Come on in,” he said, cracking that crooked smile. A sea of blue magazine proofs littered the floor, and I got the feeling he could use a hand. Maybe I was the person for the job.
But what exactly was the job? Here, review this book, copy edit this news item, oh and can you go interview a guy named Mike Auberger about how ADAPT is fighting the nursing home industry and trying to redirect 25% of Medicaid dollars toward community-based attendant services?
Why yes, I could do that. I actually understood the issue, and that sounded like a pretty grown-up assignment for a 25-year-old on her first day at J-school. Put me in, coach.
Thus began my 33-year career at New Mobility, originally titled Spinal Network Extra because it was a spinoff of the giant resource book Spinal Network. I have worked on 350 of 357 issues of the magazine, rising from intern to publisher, and inhabiting several editorial and design positions in between. As I wrap up this last print edition, I need to set the record straight: Yes, my paycheck bounced at least once. Yes, I almost got fired for that outrageous “Sex, Wheels and Relationships” issue in 1997. Yes, I have worked for four wildly different owners of the magazine and somehow made it to the end of the print road without getting killed or caught. Now it’s time to file my last story: the story of New Mobility.
Lesson One: Write Like You’re Popping Gum

Sam Maddox, that guy with that Mad magazine smile, started the business he called “the Spine” because he identified an unserved niche when he met some paralyzed guys and found out nobody was reporting authentically about the life-altering realities of spinal cord injury. By the time I came on the scene, he was a few years into the endeavor and had long since shed any insecurity about walking in a world of wheelers. His street cred tacked to the wall in the form of a glowing New York Times review of Spinal Network: The Total Resource for the Wheelchair Community, he doled out insider advice like an old pro. “Write like you’re popping gum,” he urged his tiny team.
So we tried. Some of us were students attempting to learn the craft methodically, others came to it from discarded professions. I remember Marie McCarren, who must have been a nurse in a previous incarnation, feet up on a desk, interviewing guys about injection erections like she’d been reporting from a locker room her whole life. She seemed mature to me, but that probably meant she was like 28. I devoured her incredible articles like so many other readers hungry for truth. I wanted to be her when I grew up.
SAM MADDOX | Founder

Read Sam’s Reflection
Meeting Barry
One day early in my NM life, I was sitting at a shared desk in the Boulder office, earnestly trying to become a Disability Journalist. Bob, our ad sales guy, was out of his chair and scooting around on the floor, and Kathryn Zeeb, a writer and OT student, was pounding out copy when Barry Corbet rolled in. Nobody bothered to introduce him as the greatest living writer with a spinal cord injury, so what did I know?
What I didn’t know could — and did — fill volumes of New Mobility. I didn’t know about his chronic pain or his “short, mostly happy life as a methadone junkie.” I didn’t know about his mountaineering adventures on Everest and other world peaks before the helicopter crash. I didn’t know about his family, his kids, his filmmaking — any of it. And I didn’t know any of it when he left that day, either. He never said a word about himself, and his extraordinary qualities dawned on me only as I read more back issues and more of the magazines that we worked on together.
This, from Spinal Network Extra, Winter 1991:
There’s a catch, of course. Methadone seems to allow some alcohol use without evident penalty, but excess is punished abruptly and harshly with runaway depression. As usual, I moderated and wussed around, but I know I am an unrepentant drinker, and grave mistakes seemed possible. I kept writing myself notes to give up methadone or give up alcohol; I gave up writing notes.
Obviously, Barry gave up methadone too, but he never abandoned his honest writing about every aspect of his life. He became editor of Spinal Network Extra with the following issue, Spring 1991. “It wasn’t my ambition to become a magazine editor, but now that the reality is upon me, it seems like what I’ve always wanted,” he said. “I’ve unaccountably found myself with a job I’ve trained for all my life.”
Reinventing the Spine
In 1992, we renamed the magazine New Mobility. It was overdue, as we all knew that Spinal Network Extra sounded too medical, and we were about as far from the medical model as you could get. Sam did a trademark search for Push, but it was taken by a photography magazine. Barry didn’t like it anyway — he said it had the connotation of being pushed. I don’t remember the other contenders. New Mobility stuck.
Sailing was slated for the first cover, and as chance would have it, Sam and Barry met a young sailor by the name of Bob Vogel at that year’s Abilities Expo. “Bob unleashed some of his extremely contagious enthusiasm for the sport, and the next thing we knew he was in the article and the next-er thing we knew, he was on the cover,” wrote Barry in that issue. Perched on his sailboat and sporting his signature red Chuck Taylors, wheelchair to the side, Bob embodies the NM philosophy in so many ways. And that never changed — 32 years later, he has shared his passions in NM longer than any correspondent (see his tribute, below, and his many articles here).
BOB VOGEL | NM’s Longest Correspondent


Bob on the first cover of New Mobility, left, and one in 2005.
Read Bob’s Reflection
The First Crisis
Life at the Spine went on like this until it didn’t. It seems that Sam had been shielding us from the harsh financial realities of indie print publishing. “We had in effect, been supporting the magazine with Ponzi delusion,” he explained, “funneling ad and sales revenue for the book back into the periodical, and as these schemes usually go, the jig was about up.” The year was 1993, and the signs were there. We fudged the quarterly print dates because “Winter” could be the end of one year or the beginning of the next, right? We were making frequent trips to the bank to deposit a handful of subscription payments. My $137 paycheck bounced.
Sam started shopping the magazine around and even hit up Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone via Hunter S. Thompson’s son, Juan, who worked as our graphic designer. He didn’t bite.
“We made a list of all the angels we knew, and it was a very short list,” says Sam. “So, I sent a postcard out to our mailing list — if anyone has any suggestions how we can save this thing, please be in touch.”
One of those cards landed in the hands of Tim and Denise Novoselski, who owned several trade magazines in Los Angeles, including two disability-related titles, TeamRehab and HomeCare. They liked the idea of adding a consumer magazine to round out their portfolio, and they had their people contact our people.
Mother Nature had other plans. The Novoselskis lost their home in a terrible forest fire, putting a possible meeting on hold. Then in early 1994 the Northridge earthquake again stalled Sam’s travel to meet the Novos. Finally the key parties met in February and began putting together a deal. I had graduated in December, and I was eager to work full time at the magazine if it was indeed going to survive. I flew myself out to L.A. and somehow convinced the Novos that they needed me to run the day-to-day operations while Sam served as publisher. I fit into their culture of young women willing to work hard for less money than it cost to live in L.A., so things looked pretty good. On March 29, my mother died suddenly, and Sam took over negotiating the terms of my employment, for which I am forever grateful.
Up From the Ashes
New Mobility probably saved my life that year. Every day, I tried and failed to conceal my grief behind the ridiculous half-walls of my cubicle at Miramar Publishing. Mortifying, yes, but the work itself brought so much joy. We were making magazines again, and now I had a bigger role: managing editor. The second-chance adrenaline ran high as I reported stories, edited news items, collected art, collaborated with Barry via fax and phone, and ushered the issues through layout. I met Christopher Voelker, the quad who photographed Ellen Stohl for our comeback issue. He was kind of a big deal — he had photographed Mick Fleetwood for an album cover, for chrissakes. Maybe this L.A. thing was going to be cool.

That first office was in a lackluster part of Los Angeles, but in another unlikely turn of events, we all moved to Malibu a few months later. The Novos bought a fabulous building near Pacific Coast Highway, and we landed in much better cubicles, some with windows. The place buzzed with young talent, including Doug Davis, who has illustrated close to a hundred stories for NM, and Alan Alpanian, who would go on to design NM’s iconic logo in 1997.
At Sam’s insistence, the Novos hired Barry Corbet full-time, and he worked from home in Golden, Colorado, long before technology made that easy. We became a team, talking on a land line multiple times a day, madly faxing, somehow making printer deadlines with a mostly analog workflow of film and hard proofs. Ad sales were strong, and in our new home we had a circulation director, a production director and other professionals running the show. Surely it was time for New Mobility to make a profit.
“I never made any money from New Mobility, and neither did the Novos,” Sam noted in 2013. “But they pumped life into it, pouring good money after bad into a full color redesign. They upped the frequency to monthly. They allowed me to hire Barry Corbet to set it on course toward its stature today as a cultural touchstone in the global disability community. If you’re fond of the magazine, now you know who gets the save.”
ELLEN STOHL | Writer, Cover Model


Ellen on the 1994 comeback issue, left, and a 2004 issue, right. Photos by Christopher Voelker.
Read Ellen’s Reflection
Another bellwether hire for NM was Martin Bibow. In 1996, he art-directed an ad campaign that took the community by surprise. “People of Colours” featured wheelchair users with progressive imagery such as a paraplegic woman spilling out of her overturned chair under the title “Sensuality” and a pregnant quadriplegic woman, naked from the belly down, under the title “Birth.”
There were five or six such ads that were made into posters and displayed at Abilities Expos, where they met with considerable pushback from a conservative mobility industry. To us, they were 100% aligned with New Mobility, so we wasted no time in hiring Bibow as associate publisher. He brought his vision to several NM photo shoots before he acknowledged that corporate life was not for him and opted for the less soul-sucking job of “creative consultant.” Bibow was an incredible visual collaborator, and we carried forward his ethos whenever we could afford to.
As Sam said, the Novos invested heavily in New Mobility, and they deserve much credit for saving the magazine, but in 1998 they reached the limits of their beneficence. New Mobility was once again on the chopping block.
Owner Number Three
Of all the unlikely champions of New Mobility, Jeff Leonard may be the most improbable. Small and squirrelly, with a shock of black, curly hair, he’s the kind of man who has been underestimated his whole life. But make no mistake, he is sharp. When our paths crossed, he was running an ad rep business in Horsham, Pennsylvania, and several magazines outsourced their ad sales to him — including New Mobility by the spring of 1998.
Jeff also had his own product, a direct mail packet of Disability Product Postcards, which he mailed to the largest database of disabled consumers in the country. Acquiring New Mobility seemed like a no-brainer to him — so what if he’d never published a magazine before? He already owned the most important financial pieces: an ad sales team and a relevant database.
Jeff agreed to take over publishing NM — but only if I came with it. I didn’t want to quit, but I admit I took some convincing: Southern California had grown on me, and I didn’t fancy a move to suburban Philadelphia. “You can work from home in Santa Monica,” he offered, and that cinched it.
Once I dropped my skepticism, I saw that he was that rare and generous boss who was going to give me free rein. Not only that, he was going to let me hire more people. Barry and I had been editing the magazine by ourselves for some time, and it was wearing us out.
I knew that I should be the last nondisabled person on the editorial masthead, and I made it part of my mission to find qualified people with disabilities. In 1998 I hired Douglas Lathrop as associate editor. He had had a journalism degree, lived with osteogenesis imperfecta and had five years of clips from another disability magazine. Score.
In 2000 I hired Josie Byzek. She brought a fearless advocacy voice from years of writing for Mouth and Ragged Edge, had lived experience with MS, and helped us expand our point of view. In retrospect, I think hiring Josie gave Barry permission to retire; he needed to for his health, but he didn’t want to leave me in the lurch.
Barry and I worked together to find his replacement. To be honest, there were only two viable candidates for the top editor job: a quad and rehab educator in Colorado, and a para and former English teacher in Oregon. We put them through the paces with writing and editing tests, and Tim Gilmer excelled. Tim, Jeff and I flew to Colorado to meet with Barry so we could all see if Tim was really the guy. We sat out on Barry’s deck overlooking the Continental Divide, exchanging ideas for a gentle while, and Barry voted yes. We all did — and it was once again the end of an era.
Fast-Forward to the Future
I have written elsewhere about the early years with Tim Gilmer, about our struggles over religious content and other points of disagreement. Our shared commitment to New Mobility sustained us through those awkward times, and now they are a distant memory, replaced by a 17-year run of imperfect badassery, NM-style. Of particular note: In 2006 Utne Reader named New Mobility one of its Top 15 Magazines of the Year; our work was recognized and honored beyond the disability echo chamber, and it was a wonderful bonding moment for us.
“No one has cancelled a subscription and sent us a shredded copy of the offending magazine in years. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Hard to say.”
As New Mobility continued to evolve into the publication you know today, we faced another threat to our survival when a decade of booming print ad sales started to decline. Jeff saw the writing on the wall and started shopping the magazine around to publishers with deeper pockets. We caught wind that one of the disability nonprofits had ambitious plans for a grassroots reboot — could that be the answer to our worries? Turns out it was, and in 2010 Jeff sold NM to United Spinal Association.
There was plenty of drama in the early days at United Spinal, but perhaps I’ll save those stories for my memoir. Time has a way of smoothing out the wrinkles, and I can honestly say that each United Spinal CEO has been a champion of New Mobility, in one significant way or another. Most importantly, the organization has offered New Mobility financial stability, and with that the invaluable chance to develop a younger staff that will propel the NM brand forward on new platforms for decades to come. I am truly grateful — and let’s hope it’s the last time a new owner has to save New Mobility.
I suppose stability has come with a few tradeoffs. In some ways, NM print has inched ever closer to the establishment we railed against in the early days. No longer scrappy and independent, we doubled down on polish and professionalism. No one has cancelled a subscription and sent us a shredded copy of the offending magazine in years. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Hard to say. But the improbable history of New Mobility print ends here, so it’s up to the next generation of editors to shake things up in their own way.
There are certainly plenty of 21st century fails in need of a disability media spotlight: mobility-industry monopolies, airline discrimination, and a deeply inaccessible and unresponsive healthcare system, to name a few. Fighting this good fight is the current NM staff — Ian Ruder, Seth McBride and Teal Sherer — and they will carry you forward into a digital future. I know they need no introduction to today’s readers, but I will say, for the record, that the stars have aligned again for New Mobility.
The Heart of New Mobility
By Tim Gilmer

New Mobility has a beating heart. I’m not talking metaphorically. The heart is real, and it belongs to Jean Dobbs, a woman who has dedicated her life to nurturing the magazine from its earliest years. Now that NM is moving on from print, I decided to ask her about something that had been lingering in my mind.
TG: What drew you in the first place to a magazine about wheelchair users with spinal cord injuries?
JD: In 1985 or ’86, before New Mobility even existed, I was in college at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and was the co-chair of the Hunger Action Committee, working on local and global hunger issues. The committee received a letter from a man named Bernie Jorn, a C4-5 quad and graduate student, who asked for volunteers to help him eat lunch. As a committee we felt it was a disability issue, not a hunger issue, but two of us decided to help him anyway.
TG: How long were you involved with him?
JD: What started as volunteer shifts evolved into a friendship. He was a few years older than me, studying rehabilitation counseling but ironically facing discrimination and a lack of accommodation from the school, like when he was penalized during a period of skin breakdown. He was laid up in his room a lot while he tried to heal, and we spent hours listening to Pat Metheny and talking. He taught me about the concept of independent living and let me see how he did it — with attendants, a mouthstick, an old ice cream truck that he had converted to a wheelchair van. I ended up doing a photo essay on him for a photojournalism class. Eventually he rejected the UNC program and enrolled in seminary in South Carolina. He went on to become a hospital chaplain, get married and raise three daughters.
TG: A “meant-to-be” story?
JD: That’s not all. The next semester I took a class on the psychology of aging, which had a practicum at a local nursing home. Our assignment was to get to know someone there, visit them regularly, then interview them for a final class paper. As I wandered the depressing halls, a voice called out from a resident’s room: “Hey, can you turn this cassette tape over for me?” I said sure, and he invited me to sit down. His name was Thurman George, and he was a quad with no hand or arm function who had been living from a bed for close to a decade. He was there because his wife couldn’t handle his care anymore, and this was the only way that Medicaid would pay for his basic needs. To me, he seemed full of stories and life, but he was resigned to living out his days in an institution. He felt trapped, treated badly at times and saw no way out. I learned from both these guys about the most important aspect of the disability movement — the difference between independent living and being stuck in a nursing home.
The “tale of two quads” set the stage, so that when the opportunity at New Mobility arose, Jean was ready for it, not afraid. Since her first day in 1991, from behind the scenes, she has brought her journalism training to every issue — whether about independent living, body image, sexuality, healthcare equality, employment, accessible travel, disability art, civil rights, discrimination, relationships, parenting, recreation — the list goes on. Jean Dobbs’ leadership has been the most important ingredient in the NM mix for decades. We — the entire community — owe her a well-deserved thank you for her decades-long sense of purpose, determination and heartfelt dedication.
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REVECA TORRES | 2015 Person of the Year, Writer


Read Reveca’s Reflection
KENNY SALVINI | Writer


Read Kenny’s Reflection
ANDREA DALZELL | 2021 Person of the Year


Read Andrea’s Reflection
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