A vocal advocate for accessibility for the disabled, Jan Marie Cross died Monday at Mercy Regional Medical Center after a lifelong battle with muscular dystrophy. She was 53.
In 1993, Cross competed as Ms. Durango in the Ms. Wheelchair Colorado competition, the first time the competition was held in the state. She came home with the Ms. Congeniality Award, an award that described her approach to representing the disabled community.
“You’ll make more headway if you come off with more congeniality rather than the determinedness of fighting by chaining your wheelchair to the front of a bus,” Cross told a Durango Herald reporter at the time. “People will do a better job if you’re nice and state the law.”
That law was the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was passed in 1990.
“When you go through the Ms. Wheelchair program, the theme is to go back and become an advocate for those who cannot access places,” her mother, Merilyn Cross said. “She couldn’t speak very well, but she did what she could.”
Cross was a member of Barrier Busters, a group that went around Durango informing businesses about the ADA and urging them to make their enterprises more disabled-friendly.
An early campaign included making Ollie the Trolley, then owned by a private company, accessible to wheelchair users. The trolley was hampered by a light aluminum frame in the early 1990s, so it was unable to handle the hydraulic lifts now installed on the sturdier Durango Transit vehicles.
Cross, who worked at the Southwest Center for Independence in the early 1990s, was born to Don and Merilyn Cross on Jan. 10, 1963, in Phoenix. She grew up in Farmington and lived in Dallas for 10 years before moving to Bayfield with her parents. While in Dallas, she studied at Arlington Baptist College for three years.
In recent years, her body had been under attack after the muscular dystrophy affected her heart and began impacting other organs, her mother said.
A private family service will be held for Jan Marie Cross at a later date. To honor her wishes, cremation will occur, and the ashes will be buried in in a family plot in Petoskey, Michigan.
She is survived by her parents, Don and Merilyn Cross, of Bayfield; and brother, Don J. Cross, of Dale City, Virginia.
“I was so proud of her,” Merilyn Cross said. “She was a really beautiful girl.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
