Continuum

During the six weeks immediately following the rocket explosion, his father sat by his hospital bed every evening and read to him from novels and poems full of can-do heroes. His favorite was William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”: It matters not how strait the gate,/ how charged with punishments the scroll,/ I am the master of my fate,/ I am the captain of my soul.

Six months later, in the winter of 1963, he was again in the hospital, this time in San Francisco, where doctors tried to save his partially damaged eye but failed. His mother sobbed at the news, envisioning that he would be unemployable for the rest of his life. But he already he knew what he would not tolerate: “I will not be poor,” he announced; “I will not be dependent on others; I will not live at home, be led to the bathroom, fed and walked.” He would live an active life, “in a sighted world doing sighted things.” He now calls these pronouncements “declarations.”

“Declarations,” he says, “are the closest thing there is to magic.”

Russell Redenbaugh is three-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion. Photo by Bill Cramer

“He just wanted to keep on living,” remembers his high school buddy Darryl Milczarek BA’70, who took him snow skiing and waterskiing after the accident. While he was still in the hospital, Redenbaugh applied for a guide dog. With Minka at his side, he finished high school, entered the U, pledged Sigma Nu, and convinced his fraternity brothers that if they read his textbooks to him they would get better grades.

He had been a lackluster student in high school. But now, with new motivation, he excelled academically, winding up No. 1 in his class in the U’s business school. And then he made another declaration: “I will get an MBA from a prestigious university.”

He applied to Harvard and Stanford and was turned down by both. Each explained that a blind student wouldn’t be able to complete the program—although, as Redenbaugh pointed out, how could they know that if they had never admitted a blind student? (Years later, after he had made a lot of money as an investment adviser, he sent the dean of admissions at Harvard a copy of his tax return, as well as a yearly $5,000 scholarship, named after his grandmother.)

Rejected by his top two schools, he applied to the third school on his list: the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, taking the train from Salt Lake to Philadelphia to make his case in person. He graduated from Wharton fifth in his class.

And then he couldn’t find anyone who would hire him. There were 49 interviews and not one job offer. Finally, with the help of a Wharton classmate, he was hired at a small money management firm in Philadelphia, Cooke & Bieler—with this proviso: he would in turn hire a sighted assistant, out of his own pocket. If that didn’t work out, Redenbaugh would be let go.

It was an arrangement that would be illegal now under the Americans with Disabilities Act, notes Redenbaugh, who then launches into what at first seems to be a counterintuitive argument—by a one-handed blind man—against the ADA.

“The economy responds to changing incentives,” he begins, “and one of the incentives of the ADA was that it made it hard to hire people who were seriously disabled. No company wants to hire anyone who is ‘fire-proof.’ ” That, he asserts, is the unintended consequence of the act’s provision that if companies don’t provide “reasonable accommodation” to a disabled employee they can be found guilty of discrimination.

Yes, the ADA also had positive consequences, he says, including changing the way Americans think of and talk about persons with disabilities. And, he adds wryly, “it got curb cuts in the streets, which helps people who pull their suitcases.” But the unemployment rate for the seriously disabled has increased (from about 60 percent to over 75 percent) since the ADA was passed in 1990, he says.

Redenbaugh’s politics lean libertarian, based on his belief that the government should get out of the way and let people be responsible for themselves. His credo: “Take care of your own. Mend your own fences. Don’t milk your neighbor’s cow.”

His mother’s younger brother, Jake Garn BS’55, served as Utah’s U.S. Senator for three terms, and it was Garn who introduced him to Sen. Bob Dole, who suggested to President Ronald Reagan that Redenbaugh be appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. He served as commissioner for 15 years but resigned in protest in 2005, charging that the commission was spending money irresponsibly. His letter of resignation was blunt: “The commission, once the nation’s conscience, is now a national embarrassment beyond repair.” He urged that it be shut down.

In conversation, Redenbaugh is direct, sometimes brusque. “You can’t have an ego and work for Russell,” says Charles Williams, who has known him for 25 years and last year became a sales and marketing specialist at Redenbaugh’s firm, Kairos Capital Advisors. “He’s demanding; but he doesn’t demand more of you than he would of himself.”

Williams describes him as “at his core an investor; and he likes to invest in people.” He recalls sitting in Redenbaugh’s backyard years ago talking about ambition; at the time, Williams was a technician at IBM. “He said, ‘You’re black and I’m blind. It is what it is. You won’t ever be president of the United States’—this was pre-Obama—‘but you can always be more.’ ”

The big takeaway from his thousands of interactions with Redenbaugh, he says, is this: “It’s not what happens to you, it’s what you’re going to do about it.… He’s got a very low tolerance for people being victims. He’ll try to coach them out of it. But if they can’t hear him, or are high maintenance, he’ll just move away.”