Media

Over 2 million people saw this prime-time intimate portrait of Greg and his family and career on PBS in 2005.  For a limited time, you can watch it here!

It’s not that race has never affected Greg Smith’s family. His father, Jim, who grew up in Mississippi, was accepted to medical school until the people who ran things discovered he was black. Once, when the family moved to a new house, an F.B.I. agent went to interrogate him, the elder Mr. Smith says, because it was considered suspicious for a black man to have “a boat, a riding lawn mower and a new car – two cars.” But Joanne Caputo’s documentary “On a Roll,” which has its premiere tonight on PBS’s “Independent Lens” series, is not about race…

“And now, occupying the best parking space in syndicated radio, the wheelchair dude with attitude, the hip crip who gives you tips: ‘On A Roll’ radios’s host and founder, Greg Smith!

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio — The opening rant for his weekly radio show concluded, Greg Smith leans into the microphone, a Velcro harness securing his 65 pound frame into his wheelchair. In a bass voice in sharp contrast to his frail body, he introduces the show’s topic: entrepreneurship and disability.

Like so many others, Greg Smith, a 41-year-old father of three, was displaced by Hurricane Katrina. His family lost everything to the storm, including his stat-of-the-art red wheelchair he used to live an active life in the face of muscular dystrophy.