“Zetta Murphy, I was born here in Pittsburgh. My parents weren’t from Pittsburgh. My mother was from South Carolina. My father was from Kentucky. My mother came here...
More »“Zetta Murphy, I was born here in Pittsburgh. My parents weren’t from Pittsburgh. My mother was from South Carolina. My father was from Kentucky. My mother came here after my dad and they met at a social at church. I have 6 brothers and sisters. 2 of my sisters are deceased because there was a lot of rheumatoid illnesses in our family. I grew up in the South Side. When we were little we were on the flat part of the South Side slopes. I was born 3 months premature and I have the written…of prematurity. I’m the only one that’s blind. I went to school from blind children my whole years from kindergarten through 12th grade. I liked it there. It was pretty good. I felt like a regular kid and it was a little bit tricky because I have hip deformities so they had to make some accommodations for me. I did pretty good. I was almost going into High School and they did give us a choice of where to go, which my choice would have been Chantey High School. And I decided that I wanted to stay at the school because there were more opportunities for training and I just liked my social network and I chose not to go. I stayed there, yeah, I stayed there. And I had more opportunities. I was in the band. I was in the choir. I was in the drama club and I did a lot of things there. I remember when they took me there and they showed me around and stuff like that and the principal said I was a good baby…cause I was holding on…he was carrying me through when he was showing my parents the grounds and I liked it. And he asked me would I like to stay here and I said yes. I was good so I was kind of a mama’s girl because I always sat with the grownups while the kids were playing. I didn’t play too much cause I wasn’t able to get around too much. Of course I used to crawl around on the floor. I liked the boys because I like their house parents. I crawled around on the floor and to the boys section. I’d pull myself from one of the boys beds and they’d come down the night to say prayers…I was in their bed. Yeah, I was a radical child. But when I graduated from High School I went to Community College, the North Side campus, and I took child development for my studies. I enjoyed that. It was a very interesting experience. I made some friends there. So I did that and then after I did that I transferred to Carlo College and I took psychology and speech and hearing therapy. They weren’t really sure that I would make it because they didn’t want to pay me to go to Community College because when I was in…how old was I? I was about 6 or 17 years old I started having mental issues, which I still have mental health issues. I have bipolar disorder. And they weren’t sure that I could handle the stress of it. They weren’t sure they wanted to pay for it since I was going have to have extended periods of therapy. And like my mother told them, she said ‘well she has the right to fall on her butt and fail just like anybody else’.”
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