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Health & Fitness

Bill to honor Rex Trailer moves to House

State Sen. Mike Barrett’s bill to designate pioneering disability advocate Rex Trailer the Official Cowboy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has passed the State Senate.  Trailer starred in the local children’s TV show Boomtown during the 50s, 60s and early 70s.

 

Bills go to the Governor’s desk for his approval only after passing the Senate and the House of Representatives.  “Senate passage alone is not the time to celebrate, but it’s an important milestone on the way to this legislation actually becoming the law of the state,” Barrett said.

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Trailer, who last year passed away at age 84, owned a television studio in downtown Waltham and lived in Sudbury.

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“Rex Trailer is an iconic figure in early educationally-appropriate children’s television,” Barrett said.  “Long before PBS he was engaging kids in valuable ways.  And long before The Americans with Disabilities Act he was determined to make his youthful audience inclusive,” said Barrett, Senate Chair of the Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities.  “In 1961 he led a wagon train across Massachusetts to raise awareness of the challenges facing individuals with disabilities.”

 

That trail ended at the State House, where Barrett is now pushing the legislation to recognize his efforts.

 

The bill has received support from The Arc of Massachusetts, an advocacy group that partnered with Trailer during his cross-state campaign, as well as Emerson College where Trailer taught broadcasting for more than thirty years.

 

Barrett filed the legislation at the initiative of CC Carole, a Chelmsford constituent and longtime friend of Rex.  In September Barrett and Carole testified before the Legislature’s Committee on Tourism, Arts and Cultural Development.

 

“As fun and entertaining as the show was,” Carole said, “I didn’t realize at the time I was being taught a life lesson.”  The lesson: “inclusion of all individuals with disabilities.”  Carole added that when she grew up it was rare to see children who had disabilities, but Rex’s Boomtown “changed all that for me and thousands of others.”

 

At the hearing Carole said, “I stand before you today giving back to a wonderful man who gave so much to all of us.”  In a serendipitous twist, Carole is the constituent of the House Chair of the Committee, State Rep. Cory Atkins (D-Concord).

 

In December the bill received a favorable vote from the Tourism Committee and more recently from the Senate Committee on Ethics and Rules, before clearing the Senate.  The bill now heads to the House for consideration.





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