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When Louise Johnson Lake contracted polio in the summer of 1945 – she became ill while escorting the MIA girls of her St. Louis branch on a visit to Carthage, Illinois – there was little doctors could do. This returned missionary lay in the hospital for more than a year, first fighting to breathe in an iron lung, and then struggling to regain movement in her arms. Many hospitals, including Salt Lake City’s LDS Hospital, offered no rehabilitation therapy in those days – nurses put a bar above Louise’s bed, and it was entirely up to her to devise her own therapy.

In the years that followed, Louise became a rehabilitation therapist, working at LDS Hospital, where she had once lain helpless and without therapy. She became a political activist on behalf of the disabled. In 1957, she received the Outstanding Handicapped American award from the hands of President Dwight Eisenhower. In her speech that day, she called the nation “to bring to those so-called handicapped individuals a joy in life. Let’s bring them out of the attics, out of the basement rooms, into a life of productivity and joy.”

Louise went on to work at the national and international level, fighting for the removal of architectural barriers to the disabled: “Surely the Lord has no intentions for man to prohibit the disabled from entering colleges, churches, or temples because of stairways and other obstacles,” she proclaimed. While her life’s work lay outside the formal organization of the Church, Louise took the gospel with her wherever her work took her.