Somehow, The Almighty packaged the man, and sent him into the world with all the gifts necessary to put noses out of joint of the self proclaimed powerful people of New Hampshire.

Early Signs

It all started in the 70’s, when his daughter Samantha was not allowed to attend school with "regular" children. Pete asked why?

No one gave Pete an answer he considered a good one, so Pete took matters into his own hands. There is no force as powerful as a parent advocating for their own child, and that motivation with the package of talents he already carried made Pete Eldredge a force to be reckoned with in New Hampshire for the next 40 years.

First, Pete worked for his Samantha to provide her the best education possible, during a time when segregation of children with disabilities was accepted practice. People who wanted their children with disabilities accepted into regular schools were looked at like they were aliens.

Pete was finishing off his military career at the time, and living at PEASE Air Force Base when Samantha was young. He was newly divorced, and a single enlisted man raising a disabled daughter. The military provided Pete the training and mental mind set for the tough work which was in front of him.

When he asked for help in placing Samantha into a school, he was first referred to a volunteer program in Portsmouth for disabled children. This program took Samantha for a few hours each day, and Pete observed that his neighbors on base had children who were in school for 5 to 6 hours a day, every day of the week. This was not happening for his Samantha, and he took up his pen and wrote a letter to then President Jimmy Carter.

President Carter did not respond, nor did anyone from the President’s staff. That really "frosted" Sergeant Pete Eldredge, USAF.

Pete separated from the USAF and took up residence in Somersworth, NH. He then enrolled Samantha into the Somersworth School System. "Somersworth essentially out-sourced her" Pete reported to me. She was enrolled into another "special" program in the city of Rochester. "I always had the theory that Samantha would stay a step or two behind the best student she was near, because she did not like to be a leader." So, Pete decided that the best students to challenge Samantha would be in "regular" programs and he worked hard to get her into one.

When a Vocational Center opened in Somersworth, Pete worked hard to get her accepted. Pete succeeded in his application, and to put it into his words "she blossomed." "She integrated herself", Pete went on, just by being herself among the rest of her "regular" peers. When she needed a repair accomplished to her wheel chair for instance, she rolled it down to the auto body class and her classmates took it apart, cleaned it, polished it and put it back together in top notch shape. Samantha never again had to worry about repairs to her wheelchair.

After high school, Samantha like hundreds of other citizens with disabilities entered the notorious "waitlist". During the 80’s when she was on it, it had many categories and sub-categories. Samantha found herself on the D or E list… a hopeless place to be.

"I had to take seven years off without work to take care of Samantha; I could not leave her at home alone with no one to help her." Pete during this time became familiar with the wait list and internalized his drive to end it. Then, Governor Steve Merrill made a sweeping move.

"Important People" meet Pete

Governor Merrill appointed a successful venture capitalist as the head of Health and Human Services for the state of New Hampshire. A self proclaimed cost cutter and business process re-engineering guru from industry became the Commissioner, Mr. Terry Morton.

Pete’s activism broke into high gear for the first time, during Terry Morton’s tenure. At first, Pete and his activist friends took Morton on in the press, and throughout the state. Pete and his friends contended that business models did not apply to human service models all the time, that sometime you needed redundancy for the sake of safety and service to human beings – not product production.

"Terry Morton would listen to you" Pete remarked, "he was not like John Stephen later, John Stephen was too full of himself to listen to anybody." Pete continued, "Terry Morton was the reason why I teamed up with other activists and founded the GSCPAs". (Granite State Concerned Parents and Advocates)

Then a miracle happened. The area agency found a slot for Samantha and she received services. "I think Terry thought this would shut me up, but he was wrong. I said I would remain an activist until the wait list was ended. I said I wanted to be there when the wait list train pulled into the station."

So, rather than shut up and go home, Pete helped found the GSCPAs with three other advocates. Because of the nature of the GSCPAs, many of them never revealed who they were, except to each other. "We knew who was a GSCPA and who was not, the problem Terry Morton had is that he did not know." To this day, only one other founding GSCPA has been reliably revealed, and that was the late Chuck Raymond. Chuck was instrumental in getting inside other organizations, listening intently and finding out the pressures Terry Morton was exerting on them. This information became useful as GSCPAs would release highly effective ’bulletins" through faxes and other communication media at the time, under Pete’s hand. It was decided early on, that Pete Eldredge would be the public face of GSCPA activity, and his use of the Tele-Fax earned him the nickname at NH DHHS of "The Fax Man".

However, with time, both Pete and other GSCPAs found out you could talk and reason with Terry Morton, if he took you seriously. It became clear that Commissioner Morton took GSCPAs seriously, in the press and public scrutiny they could generate in his direction.

In fact, Commissioner Morton earned the high respect of Pete and all other founding GSCPAs at the end of his life. GSCPAs left in place throughout NH’s disability networks were able to determine that the former Commissioner was a voice of reason and advocacy for the disability community, when he became a member of the "Benson transition team".

Time would prove that former Governor Benson should have listened to Terry Morton, as his appointment of John Stephen as another ‘cost cutting’ Commissioner and both Benson and Stephen’s misleading the public about developing a secret Medicaid plan out of public scrutiny was revealed with GSCPA help on the eve of Governor Benson’s unsuccessful re-election bid by the Concord Monitor.

When Governor Benson appointed John Stephen as Commissioner, the GSCPAs were already in place. It quickly became apparent that John Stephen took seriously information leaks from within his own department as it was reported to Pete and other GSCPAs that e-mail audits were being accomplished. This had limited success of course, as the Commissioner became quickly unpopular among his own workforce. "Low Tech Rules" observed one GSCPA helping Pete, and meetings where paper copies were exchanged replaced e-mail as a communications medium.

And, thus was set the stage for the Concord Monitor to receive information and reliably follow the story of how a "secret plan" was being developed to totally replace Medicaid in NH. GSCPAs under Pete’s guidance knew if they quickly accused the Commissioner and Governor of developing this secret plan, they would go on record denying it – setting a rock solid example of public miss-information.

"The rest is history…" Pete observes now. "The Concord Monitor revealed the plan denied by Governor Benson and Commissioner Stephen about ten days before the re-election." Governor Benson was the first Governor in modern history denied a second term in Concord. "We played a part in that, Pete observed."

Physically, Pete has challenges today and is himself disabled. However, his mind is clear and sharp as a razor and states he feels he can go to his next life knowing he does not have to kick and scream. Pete has no family in the area, but he has engineered a good caregiver situation for Samantha which will survive him. Two women who happen to be sisters are "co guardians" with Pete of Samantha. Pete wryly observes, "I still keep my fingers in it"

This reporter asked Pete about his views of today’s parents of children with disabilities. I asked Pete if he felt they were up to the task of bringing influence and advocacy at the level his generation of parents did.

Pete observed that while new parents are getting information easier, they do not seem to realize the work which was done before them. The parents who constructed family support, the parents who shut down Laconia State School and other massive examples of advocacy are not widely known.

This will hurt them if they ever run into what we ran into with both Terry Morton, and most especially John Stephen. They need to know how to quickly organize, recognize and place each other into organizations to keep the information flowing. "Hopefully, we have seen the last of John Stephen, but if he comes back perhaps it will be a good thing – perhaps it will motivate them to get active."

"Others who went before us helped us, like Jackie Hamm and the other early activists. But these new parents just don’t realize what it took. They WILL need to fight for their children again, because much of the special education laws are open to interpretation. You can’t give up…. They need to look forward to the adult life of their children. Wills, power of attorney, trust documents, and other complex matters can and will make their life stories of living with disabilities a challenge."

Asked if he had words of advice to new parents experiencing disability within their families Pete did not hesitate… "Roll up your sleeves, grit your teeth and be ready".

Pete Eldredge was recently recognized by Sky One for his lifelong commitment to activism on behalf of people with disabilities in New Hampshire. Sky One could not have made a better choice.

The New Hampshire Challenge arranged for a short video to be uploaded onto U-Tube, and is available for your viewing at: