If they haven’t already, they’ll soon be putting up a big tent in front of Cottonwood Inc., for a memorial service Wednesday afternoon. The service will pay tribute to one of Cottonwood’s founders, Bryona Wiley, who died Feb. 11.

The service is open to the public. I’m guessing a couple hundred people will be there.

There ought to be a thousand. No, make that 10,000.

I say that because every family that has ever had a son or daughter, brother, sister or cousin with a developmental disability is indebted to Wiley because she, more than anyone else, made Cottonwood happen at a time when families were expected to keep their “retarded kids” forever in their homes or, worse, put them in a state hospital.

Wiley and her husband, Lyman, sent their son, Ted, to Parsons State Hospital in 1963. At the time, Ted was 6 years old.

“It was gut-wrenching,” Lyman Wiley said when I talked with him Sunday. “Every weekend, we’d get up early and drive down there.”

Within a few months, Ted was back with his parents in Lawrence.

The Wileys were one of nine families that started the Douglas County Association for Retarded Citizens, which got the school board to start a special education class and later launched the Bess Stone Center, a day program for adults.

In 1972, the Bess Stone Center, 745 Ohio, became what now is Cottonwood.

I was one of Cottonwood’s first employees, trailing, of course, the three saints: George Ann Stevens, Mary Jean Sneegas and Gary Condra.

I remember “Dr. Condra,” as I called him, sending me to now-closed Norton State Hospital in, I’m guessing, 1973 to meet with residents who might fit in at Cottonwood. The place was packed with people — many of them quite high-functioning — who were there only because they or their families had no place else to go. The scene was as pitiful as it was infuriating.

Here in Lawrence, most of us now recognize the unspeakable trauma American Indian families experienced when their children were shipped off to Haskell Institute in the 1880s. You don’t hear about it as much, but I’ve had more than a few parents assure me that taking their child to a state hospital far away was every bit as soul-crushing.

I also remember school districts across the state — Lawrence being an exception — howling at the prospect of having to create programs for mentally retarded children.

To most, it seemed ridiculous, which, I guess, explains why at least one Kansas school board saw nothing wrong with putting its special education class in an old storage room beneath one of the junior-high gyms. The fact that the noise from the bouncing balls and stomping feet was truly deafening was, for a time, quite acceptable.

Today, all this seems so cruel, so obviously wrong — as wrong as segregation. Clearly, things have changed for the better.

But it didn’t happen in a vacuum. And it wasn’t because government wanted to do the right thing.

It happened because people like Bryona Wiley made it happen. Bless her, bless them.

The memorial service starts at 4:30 p.m. at Cottonwood, 2801 W 31st St. In case of bad weather, it will be moved inside.