By MARIA KACIK
Staff Writer

MEDINA — Carol Movius remembers her father not only dressed like Frank Sinatra, always looking debonair in a suit and his black fedora, but he lived like him as well.

Like the classic Sinatra song, Donald Tubbs, who died Jan. 29 at the age of 88, did things his way — a way that touched many hearts — hers, her family and those throughout Medina County.

At Tubbs’ funeral Saturday, the signature black fedora sat atop his casket as friends and family paid their respects, and Sinatra’s “My Way” played in the background.

“He did have a sense of he wanted to be in control,” Movius said. “So it was appropriate at the funeral to have ‘My Way’ playing.”

But the more Movius elaborates on her father’s desire for control, the more she describes it as a calling to care for others.

She remembers he was a loving husband to his first wife, Ann, and second wife, Ruth, and a compassionate father to her and her younger sister, Jane.

“He supported us, encouraged us and was there for us,” she said.

He was an active citizen, Movius said. Don served two years in the Navy, was a charter member of the Medina Rotary Club and was an active member of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. In addition, he carried on the family business, Tubbs Insurance, which his father, Harold, started in 1921.

But Tubbs’ community service took on a greater purpose when Jane was born with developmental disabilities — diabetes and Blount’s disease that made her bowlegged and gave her difficulty walking.

Movius remembered her sister was able to go to kindergarten with other children, but there were no classes for children with special needs offered beyond that. So Don made it his job to work for his daughter and others like her.

“Public school doors were closed to (the handicapped). … And special classes were not practical,” recalled Tubbs’ longtime friend, John Boehnlein, who has three handicapped daughters of his own. “That was the mental outlook of people back then. They believed they couldn’t educate the special needs people.”

After seeing his own daughter’s struggles, Tubbs set out to change that attitude, Boehnlein said.

“Being the person he was, (Tubbs) saw the needs of all the special people in the county and he took it much more beyond his daughter,” he said.

With the help of other parents of children with disabilities, Don and Ann Tubbs formed the Society for Handicapped Children of Medina County in 1953. The group’s very first mission was to provide classes for Medina County’s developmentally disabled, which they did for 33 students with three classes that convened in the basement of St. Paul’s.

Thanks in part to Don and Ann Tubbs’ work, “Medina was a very progressive county (in caring for disabled individuals) and really came up with a lot of ideas other counties had not yet,” said Patricia Keel, a former executive director of the Medina County Society for Handicapped Citizens.

In the society’s first year, it received the first-place prize in McCall’s magazine contest for public service and $100.

Once the first classes were established, Tubbs and the society set their sights statewide as they went to Columbus to lobby for laws to provide education for the disabled.

Boehnlein said Tubbs worked with legislators in Columbus and the Society for Handicapped Children of Medina County became a model for statewide education for handicapped children.

“He was a crusader, meaning once he believed in something, he was going to follow it all the way,” Boehnlein said.

“There is no better investment than that which we make in our children. They are our future,” Tubbs wrote in a Gazette letter to the editor, undated from the 1950s.

After Senate Bill 169 became law in 1967, establishing county boards of MRDD (mental retardation and developmental disabilities), Tubbs and the Society for Handicapped Children handed over its classes for the handicapped to the newly formed board. That board is now the Medina County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities.

Tubbs and the society “didn’t try to control it or hold it close. They wanted it to grow. … That takes some guts to let go of something and let it blossom into something,” said Melanie Kasten-Krause of the Society for Handicapped Citizens. “And he didn’t stop being an advocate. He continued to fight throughout his whole adult life.”

With the formation of the MRDD board, Tubbs and the society took on a variety of new projects.

In 1967, they opened Camp Paradise in Montville Township, which would serve as a summer camp for those with disabilities. In 1971, the group incorporated adults with disabilities into their services and changed its name to the Society for Handicapped Citizens. And in 1985 Tubbs named a new apartment complex for the handicapped on Northland Drive in Medina after Ann, who died in 1980 — Ann Tubbs Estates.

Tubbs’ crusading, as Boehnlein called it, for the community did not stop with the handicapped. As one of the charter members of the Medina Rotary Club, he worked with old and young, the challenged and the poor.

“I just think that he was committed to helping others in any and every way that he could. That was just one of his goals in life, to be available for others,” said Medina resident Ralph Waite, whom Tubbs recruited into the Rotary in the 1950s.

Waite remembers a young boy from Mexico named Benito whose life was touched by Tubbs. North Royalton’s Rotary was taking in its first exchange student, a boy from Mexico. His friend Benito had applied to be an exchange student with another Rotary organization, but was turned down at the last minute.

Tubbs decided to bring Benito to Medina through the Medina Rotary’s funds.

“That was the beginning of the Rotary exchange program in Medina,” said Waite, who has been involved with the exchange program since then. “Since that time we’ve had over 100 students come and go.”

But that was just one example of Tubbs’ giving, Waite said.

“He loved Medina and he was very committed to service above self,” he said. “What we do for ourselves goes with us when we pass away. But what we do for others lives on. And I think that was a key point he lived by.”

Kacik may be reached at 330-721-4049 or mkacik@ohio.net.

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