A knock at the door of an old house converted into an office building is answered with an invitation to enter. The proprietor of Digital Designs Inc., a graphic arts firm in this suburb of Baltimore, can make a computer screen come alive with complex images and color, but she can’t turn the knob to open the door.
Denise Ovelgone, an accomplished artist and entrepreneur, is a quadriplegic with only limited use of her hands and lower arms. This visitor lowers her gaze to return the greeting of the pretty 32-year-old woman with large brown eyes and a mane of dark hair is seated in a motorized wheelchair.
An initial pang of pity quickly passes as Ovelgone gives a tour of her office and paintings and offers a cup of coffee. She gets down to the business of explaining why she rejected what were once considered the boundaries of the disabled and set out to define the world in her own terms.
“It was no one’s fault,” she said of the muscular dystrophy that left her crippled from birth. “It was fate, and you can’t change fate. You can look at the world very negatively and always be down on something. Or you can think of it as you only have one life to live, regardless of how limited your abilities may be.
“There are still more things to do than you can possibly accomplish in one lifetime. If you start looking at it from the mountain of things you can do and think, `My God, how am I going to do all of this in just one lifetime?’ there’s no time left to think of all the things you can’t do.”
Ovelgone credits much of her positive outlook to her parents, who rejected conventional wisdom and transferred her from a school for the handicapped to a public elementary school long before the mainstreaming of children with disabilities was common.
When she first enrolled in college in the early 1980s, Ovelgone planned to study art or art history, her true passion. But her parents suggested she consider something more practical, like computer programming, that would make it easier to find a job.
During her early years at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Ovelgone sat in on a computer graphics class, an art form in its infancy at that time, and “fell head over heels in love with the idea of doing computer art.” The instructor took Ovelgone under his wing, and along with a handful of other students, incorporated her into the university’s computer graphics research laboratory.
Ovelgone said she became the first student in the state of Maryland to design a course of study in computer graphics, combining the requirements for a degree in art and computer programming.
“I thought if I wrote a degree and stuck it out for the extra credits to have something specialized, it would help open doors,” she explained. “If there are two people applying for a job and one is disabled, who will they hire? It didn’t take a genius to figure that out. So being one step ahead in education was a way to become better than the next person,” she said. “I don’t regret that choice. It’s still paying off today. However, the doors didn’t open quite as easily as I thought.”
Although she found temporary jobs after her graduation in 1986, she believes her physical disabilities prevented employers from offering her a full-time position.
“Those were the days before ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act),” she said. “For a disabled person to enter the work force, there was extreme discrimination, particularly when it came to benefits.”
The ADA is a federal law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, transportation, public accommodations, communications and activities of state and local governments. A separate law offers similar anti-discrimination guarantees in federal programs. The ADA’s employment protections took effect July 26, 1992, for companies with 25 or more employees and will become effective this July 26 for employers with 15 to 24 employees.
Ovelgone commended the law as “long past due” but said she was disappointed that even when the employment provisions are fully effective later this year, they still will not cover companies with fewer than 15 employees.
She recounted a few of her own stories of what it is like to be disabled and in search of a job.
Despite an impressive portfolio and letters of recommendation from Walt Disney Studios and the late Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets and a major benefactor of Ovelgone’s college research lab, one prospective employer told her flatly, “We don’t hire incapacitated people.” When she insisted on being interviewed anyway, he asked her to wait in a room but never returned, she said.
“I could have sued, but I would only have been spiting myself,” she said. “To work for a company that obviously didn’t want me would not prove anything.” But the experience spurred her to get involved in local political issues affecting the disabled and eventually led to an appointment in 1988 to the governor’s Special Commission on Employment of People with Disabilities. She is now a board member of Volunteers for Medical Engineering and Maryland’s Technical Assistance Program, organizations dedicated to improving the lives of the disabled through technology. And she is active in The Very Special Arts of Maryland, an arts program for disabled individuals of all ages.
While on the subject of disability, she emphasized it is a word she doesn’t like.
“`Disability’ and `disabled’ focus on the things you are unable to do. `Uniquely abled’ focuses on things you are able to do. If you really think about it, everyone is disabled in some way, some more obviously than others. If you start think of someone as uniquely abled, you start thinking of them as an asset.”
She managed to land a few interesting temporary jobs after graduation, all without such benefits such as employer-paid health insurance. At one computer software company, she was responsible for designing the artwork to accompany the Apple version of a popular flight simulation game called Gunship.
Ovelgone said her first attempts were rejected as “too cartoonish” and she was told to try again to design a realistic portrayal of what it would be like to fly an Apache helicopter. She was sent home with blueprints and insignia from the aircraft and tape recordings of interviews with pilots so she could immerse herself in the subject.
“I was told to live with it, think with it, become an Apache helicopter pilot,” she said. “For the next week, that’s what I did, but I was really worried. For me, it was no longer becoming a children’s game. The third time around they liked it.”
Apparently her attempts at realism were successful. The game was later banned by several Europen countries because it was too violent, a designation that boosted its popularity in the United States, she said.
Ovelgone finished the contract and began looking for another job, sending out more than 150 resumes. After countless rejections, she gradually stopped telling prospective employers that she was disabled and would send her parents to scope out the facilities to see if they were wheelchair-accessible.
She eventually landed a temporary position with Westinghouse Defense Inc. in Hanover, Md., designing computer graphics of satellites and radar detection equipment for training films, requiring her to learn about technical subjects and think like an engineer.
“That’s the fate of anyone in an artistic field,” she said. “You’re never just an artist. You’re an artist and everything else the job calls for. In that way, it makes it more exciting. No two jobs are ever the same.”
After a few years of contract work, Ovelgone decided the best solution to her long-term job problem was to start her own company. She initially joined forces with an engineer she had met at Westinghouse. After a few months it became apparent that they had different business objectives and they ended the partnership. However, Ovelgone said, the experience was rewarding, teaching her about the nuts and bolts of running a company.
“I learned quickly how to write my own business contracts, set up a corporation and get titles for the company,” she said. “I picked up a lot of things that at the time I had no idea how to begin.”
That was a little more than three years ago, and Ovelgone was ready to go it alone. She found a site for her new business, a commercial property equipped with a wheelchair ramp, only two blocks from the house where she lives with her parents. On nice days she can get to work on her own in her electric wheelchair. And the rent was only a little more than she had been paying for gas and van services to transport her to her previous job in a distant suburb.
“That’s one of the reasons I opted to have my own business,” she said, referring to her transportation expenses. “I have my license, but I can’t afford to drive. For a quadriplegic to drive, the equipment cost is astronomical. I had enough money to either go for a loan on a car or start a business. The way I looked at it was I could be paying off this car the rest of my life unless I was able to generate enough capital to pay for it all at once. That’s one of my goals.”
Business projects at Ovelgone’s Digital Designs Inc., range from traditional board artwork of logos and graphic designs to high-tech computer imaging. She currently has three contractors working for her and has had as many as 14.
Her philosophy is to give employees an incentive to work creatively and efficiently and to reward them with a portion of the profits.
“I lay things out on the line. I don’t keep secrets,” she explained. “I say, `This is our overhead. This is what our client is willing to pay.’ The more we can cut expenses . . . the more that can come back to the employee as a bonus.”
While she enjoys owning her own company, she said there are downsides as well and those drawbacks should be weighed by anyone thinking of going into business.
“People sometimes think, `I don’t need to answer to anyone. I work for myself.’ No. That’s wrong. You answer to everyone. You work for everyone. You have to answer to your employees and all of your clients.” Ovelgone added that being the boss sometimes makes it difficult to have a friendly relationship with her workers. “It’s always employer/employee. The buck stops here. I’m the bottom line.”
Consequently, Ovelgone tries to keep her business and social life separate. Most of her friends are able-bodied people.
“When I was young, I had to make a decision,” she said. “Either I was able-bodied or I was disabled. There was no in-between ground to float back and forth. That was kind of sad. I tried to be just like everyone else, even though I really wasn’t just like everyone else. I really cut myself off for a long time from the disabled community.”
But her attitude has since changed, evidenced by her volunteer activities and public speaking engagements on behalf of the disabled.
“I’m reaching back to the disabled community,” she said. “Now that I’ve reached the point that I feel I can turn around and go back and try to help people overcome things as I was able to do.”
