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Roger E. Martin

My name is Roger Esmond Martin and my date of birth is April 5, 1936. I was

born in Rockford, Illinois, but grew up in Mt. Morris, Illinois, which is a town of about

2,400 people and it’s built around the publishing and printing business, and still is pretty

much so today. It’s not as active as it was at one time, but at that time, Kegal Brothers

Printing was there and it was the fourth largest printing company in the world. My Dad

didn’t work there. He worked for Kegal News, which was a magazine and book

distributing company and he was the Vice-President there and he was a U of I graduate.

He graduated in Commerce at the U of I in 193. His name was Robert Baer Martin, his

middle name was his mother’s maiden name, and he was born in 1906. My mother’s full

name was Vivian Esmond Martin and she must have been born in 1906 too. I have a

brother that’s younger than me by two years. Mt. Morris is the second highest point in

Illinois, that’s why it’s called Mt. Morris. Lord only knows how many feet above sea

level. I don’t have any idea, but we were known as the Mounders, our High School, and

in about 2,400 people, I was in a high school graduating class of about 35. It was a very

good high school and the state of living in the town was very good because of these large

printing companies, publishing companies. There was Y Publishing also that’s still there.

Well, actually, they’ve just moved to Rockford, so the town is sort of losing some of its

previous business. Mt. Morris was also the site of a Brethren College. The Brethren is a

religious group and my Dad went to school there for, oh, I’d say, two years anyway, then

to a business college out in Iowa, and then he went to the University of Illinois and

finished up his last two years there. But it was a good school. Two of the people in my

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high school graduating class were valedictorians of their college classes. I didn’t have

that distinction, but they did. I would call it an idyllic upbringing. I really enjoyed it. It

was small enough and everybody knew everybody. It was small enough so you could do

everything. There was a mixed chorus, a boy’s chorus, the band, football, basketball,

track, golf, I mean, so it was a, you know, we had a great life and it was in the country, so

you know, we did a lot of fishing and hunting and skiing, and all those outdoor activities,

and I’m still doing it so it had a big influence on my life I’m sure.

I graduated from high school in 1954, and decided to go to the University of

Illinois. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I wanted to do, but I had worked with a

Veterinarian a little bit in Polo, Illinois, so I decided well, I’ll go into Pre-Veterinary

Medicine. If you go into pre-veterinary medicine, there are only about maybe 26 schools

of Veterinary Medicine in the country and they will all tell you to go your home state and

don’t bother us. So I didn’t want to because it’s such a crush at the U of I and so they

made it just accepting residents, and usually that’s what they were doing, certainly at that

time and that hasn’t changed too much. The U of I has a very good veterinary school, but

you know, that was only accredited maybe in the last 15 years. When I was thinking

about it, it was not accredited, but the school was there because later I started working as

a consultant to the AVMA, American Veterinary Medical Association, and at that time,

we were accredited so that was, you know, maybe 15 years ago or so. I didn’t choose to

go to U of I because my father did, it was because I wanted to go into vet med and the

only place I could go was here. Well, and of course, my Dad had some influence, you

know, he loved the place and when I was in high school, grade school, he always went to

Homecoming and he was an active alumnus. So, I went down there and Dennis

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___________ had open admissions at the U of I and an introduction of the ____________

and this was in 1954. The Professor said, “Well, look to your left, look to your right,

____________________________.” So I started out in Pre-Veterinary Medicine, hated

Chemistry, so I got through my freshman year and then I decided to, I went through

summer school in Boulder, Colorado, and took Physics. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen

the mountains, but it was the first time I really got to enjoy the mountains, and I was

taking Physics at that time. The University of Colorado is a great place, totally different

atmosphere, most friendly atmosphere I’ve ever been in, friendlier than the U of I, and

the people are much more open than the U of I. You know, I’d go the bookstore and

three or four girls came up and said, “What are you doing here with _______________?”

They said, “Why don’t you come over and we’ll go have a beer,” and so we did and

that’s the way the summer started, and there were people, the thing that was interesting

about it was there were people from every part of the country there and so you got to

meet all these people from different backgrounds, whereas at Illinois, you’re talking 90%

Illinois and 85% from Chicago, you know, so it’s totally different. So, anyway, I had a

good time there and then I came back and started into quantitative analysis, went to Lab

maybe two Saturdays and sweated through that and could not stand it. It must have been

my sophomore year probably. I took quantitative analysis because I had to take it as this

was a Chemistry course. The qualified __________________ who were in pre-veterinary

medicine had to take all these courses. The first semester I had something like 22 hours

of courses and I was in a fraternity, and so it was really terrible. I mean it was a really

bad semester. So sat out the second year and got in through three weeks and I thought,

I’m not going to do this, I don’t really want to do this, you know, so I went into the

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Dean’s office and in all essence said I wanted a transfer my major to English from pre-

Vet Med, which is also in Liberal Arts & Sciences. The Dean said, “Well, you know, this

is three weeks into the semester. How can you do that?,” and this was still in my

sophomore year, but I decided I was going into Geology once too before that so maybe it

was my junior year then. So anyway, I decided I can’t handle this and so I said, “I’m

going to transfer into English,” and he said, “Well, I don’t see how you can do that. It’s

three weeks into the semester,” and I said, “I think I can do it,” and he said, “Well, if you

can talk the Professors into it, you can do it.” So I went in and they said, “Well, we don’t

think you’re going to make it, but if you want to, you can do it.” So I said okay, so I

think I got, I don’t know, I don’t think I got quite straight A’s that semester, but almost,

and it seemed I really loved it so that’s why I graduated in English. I had two or three

courses in Geology and then found out that I was also required to take a lot of Chemistry.

Then I went to Colorado to summer school, then I came back as a junior and then I went

into English.

I graduated in English in 1958, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with my

degree in English, so I decided I would automatically go to grad school. So I applied at a

number of grad schools and I was accepted at Illinois, and I went through grad school

there on an assistantship, and I had a 2/3-time assistantship where you taught two courses

and nobody wanted to teach what they called “Bombay English.” At that time, there

were all these students coming in who couldn’t pass the test. You had to take a test in

English when you came to the University, a writing test, and then all those papers were

checked and if you were below a certain level, you had to take this course for no credit,

which was the median language. So I was teaching that. I liked it; I didn’t mind teaching

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that and I taught that for the rest of my time I was in grad school, and then I got my

Master’s in English Literature and I was teaching Rhetoric. I didn’t really have any focus

in literature as I recall. I was just in it to _____________, and then I switched to teaching

of English because I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll become a high school English teacher,”

so I switched to the College of Education and finished up and got a Master’s degree while

I was there. That would have been about 1960.

So while I was in the College of Education, I was taking a course with a

gentleman, Professor Nicholas Hook, who was the Executive Director of the National

Council of Teachers of English when it was in Champaign, and I disagreed with him on a

lot of points that he made in class and I thought he didn’t like me very much because he

would say some things that were really kind of outlandish and we _________________

on purpose, but at any rate, one day he said, “Well, how would you like to come to work

for us at the National Council of Teachers of English?,” and I said, “Well, what’s the job

all about?,” and he said, “Well, you’d become the Advertising Manager and we have 5

journalists and we sell advertising, and ____________________, and then you’d also be

responsible for working with publishers at our conventions and helping set those up, and

it’s located in Champaign. They have a big operation. In fact, it’s the largest association

of its kind in the country. I mean, English teachers are _______________ than Math

teachers. So I said, “Can I still go to school?,” and he said, “Oh, you can still go to

school part-time and finish up,” and so I did that and went to work for them and I was

there for a short time and the Business Manager left. This was about the time that our

records were on an old ___________________ machine and we switched to IBM and the

Business Manager didn’t want any part of IBM, so I learned that and I became the

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Business Manager and the Circulation Manager, and the Advertising Manager, the whole

deal, and I was there for three years, from about 1961-1964, and then the Dean in the

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences asked me if I’d like to come over there as Assistant to

the Dean, and before he became the Dean, he was the Head of the English Department, so

he knew me both as an undergraduate and graduate student. His name was Robert

Rogers and his wife, Elizabeth, taught Chemistry at the U of I and she’s still there. Bob

has since died.

So I went to work for him and then I became before I was Assistant to the Dean

and Assistant Dean and he wanted me to work with space, in that the College had a

tremendous amount of space. It was a huge college and most of it was in pretty bad

shape, an old building, old ___________________, classrooms were in bad shape, they

didn’t really have any organized building program, and so I started working in that area

and put together a program working with all the departments on it and went out and

looked at everybody’s space and started them thinking about what they really needed

because at the time, the Provost at the University level had a large pot of money and this

money would be given out to people to do remodeling, but of course, you had to have a

project all defined and be ready to go and I found out when I went to the first meeting

that we didn’t have any projects, and the guys in Engineering had all the projects and

they were getting all the money, so I started working with the Professors to put those

together in the Office of Space Utilization at that time, and we put projects together and

then we started giving them a lot of money, doing a lot of remodeling in Lincoln Hall and

Gregg Hall and some of the old houses we had and so forth, and then the Psychology

Building was built during that time, the one at Daniel & Sixth Streets, and just before that

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the Foreign Language Building, just as I left, the Foreign Language Building was built.

Those were two of the big projects that we had. I was Assistant to the Dean of Liberal

Arts & Sciences from 1964 for, I must have been there for maybe three years and in that

period I became an Assistant Dean, and then in 1967, when the campus administration

opened up because of it’s reorganization that brought Jack Peltason in, and Jack, of

course, had been Dean of Liberal Arts & Sciences earlier, and the Head of Chemistry,

Professor Herb Carter was his name, became the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

and he took the job. He said the only way he would take it was if that Vice Chancellor

could have the budget, to be responsible for the budget, the campus’s budget. So they

said yes and he was a wonderful person. The guy, you know, you go sit in meetings and

he was the one who spoke with wisdom. So I was real enthusiastic to come to work for

him and I was really pleased to go there and start work in the Vice Chancellor’s Office.

There was the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, the Vice Chancellor for

Administrative Affairs, and the Vice Chancellor for Student affairs, that was it. So there

were three Vice Chancellors. It’s just amazing and it’s unbelievable how the

administration has grown. So I went to work there and again, probably my main

responsibility was in building and putting together the operating budget with requests that

went to the state every year, so I became the Budget Officer for the University. We had

the budget there and I loved the way he worked because every morning we met at 7:30.

His staff would meet and he would give us a little lecture in the morning for maybe about

ten minutes, then he’d go around the table and everybody would say what they wanted

and I did all of his correspondence. I knew what he wanted to do and he would tell me

and then I wrote all the letters for him, and I had this wonderful secretary whose husband

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was a Professor in the English Department and she was a pianist and she never made a

mistake. I mean, we’d knock out 95 letters a day easily, you know, because I could

dictate on a typewriter and she was amazing. So I worked with space and did the

operating budget, put all that together and then, of course, we allocated all the money.

The only time I heard anything much about DRES was when I was in Liberal Arts

& Sciences as an Assistant to the Dean and because I liked to work with students, they

had me do that, and I remember one time we had a young woman who was in a

wheelchair who was having problems and she expected some special accommodations,

that would have been in 1965, and I didn’t really even talk to her, but it was interesting in

that she was complaining about something and she wanted some special accommodation

and the Associate Dean in the office had talked to Tim about it and Tim said, “We don’t

provide special accommodations, you shouldn’t do anything special for these people, you

know, they’ve got to learn how to live in society like everybody else so that’s just the

way it is,” you know. I don’t remember what the special accommodation was. It was

something she wanted us to, you know, her grade wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t the kind of

thing where she was expecting some less work because she had this problem and Tim

said, “No way, you don’t do that.” It was something beyond a ramp. Tim worked with

the Space Office, I’m sure he did. Tim nixed it and that was the first time I ever heard of

him, you know, and he was just saying that, you know, we can’t change someone’s grade

just because they’re in a wheelchair, or something like that. One of the problems was

that he found that students who had recent accidents, and she had been in a car accident

and had not been in a wheelchair for a long period of time. He said, “Those are the

people who are expecting more than the people who grow up in a wheelchair,” and so she

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was just getting used to it, you know. So that’s the first time I ever got involved in that. I

think it’s probably a manner of accommodating to the condition, you know. I mean, I

have an artificial knee and it’s taken me a while to accommodate for that, you know.

So then I was over in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs as

Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. That was in 1967, when they started

the, I started right in when it opened up, when the campus administration started. Now,

at that time, we had a $10 million dollar reserve, can you imagine that, and so people

would come all the time with projects and we were able to fund them and help them out

with whatever they did. I don’t know how many University Professors there were at that

time or the size of the student population, but the total was probably right around 32,000,

including graduate students. So it was a good time to be there, I mean, because we could

help a lot of people do a lot of things, but as the time went on, through the first five year

period, usually the Vice Chancellors only lasted five years because the job is so

demanding, so now this is from 1967-1972, and that particular Vice Chancellor said,

“After five years, this isn’t much fun anymore,” because our $10 million dollar reserve

went, you know, down the tank. We had to spend it all, we were cutting everywhere, and

I remember having to go out and tell people, you know, we’re going to have to cut and

everybody looked at you like you’re crazy, but we did, and so we didn’t have much

choice. Probably in 1971 to 1972, somewhere in there, we really had to start cutting

costs and he retired. He must have been about 65, went to the University of Arizona

where he became Vice Chancellor for Research, and he’d been at the U of I for, who

knows, 30 some years. He went back there and became a Vice President for Research

and at one period, they lost their, I think it was Biochemistry, it involved Chemistry and

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he was Head of Biochemistry for a short time while they looked for someone else and

then he, he still had an office in his 90’s there and he just died last year I think, at 97 or

something, great guy, led a full life.

So he left and then, of course, we got new Vice Chancellors. I’m still in the office

and I became Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and I was that until, I

think, when Richard came in, no, no, Larry Crawford became Vice Chancellor for

Academic Affairs and they made him Provost instead of Vice Chancellor for Academic

Affairs. I guess the Provost holds more power and so I became Associate Provost at that

time. That would have been about five years before Richard started, so that would have

been about 1993, and then before him we had Ned Goldwasser was right

after_______________. He’s a great guy and I saw him the last time I was in

Champaign, and then Bob Bruno was there too. Bob was a history graduate from the U

of I, who came back and then he became President of the University of Texas, and then

he went to Berkeley, and he was a wonderful guy too. I stayed in the Associate Vice

Chancellor position from 1972 until I retired in 1999, for 27 years. I was sort of the

continuity in the office with an institutional memory. I started out in Illini Towers, if you

can imagine that, the residence hall, and the Chancellor was in the English building. We

were scattered all over the place. Then we moved to Coble Hall, and I can still remember

because we had a, the Head of Life Sciences at the time was in a wheelchair. I can see

him, but I can’t remember his name. He had been there quite a while. We had a lot of

Heads of Life Sciences. It must have been about the 1980’s, I would imagine, and he had

a permanent disability and he was in a car accident, and was an adult male, and so I set

up a meeting in Coble Hall and he was coming to the meeting, but there was no way to

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get into Coble Hall, there was no way. I’m not sure how many years we were in Coble

Hall. See, the Swanlund building’s about twenty years old probably, so it would have

been just before that, just before it was completed and opened, probably somewhere

around 1988, but there was no way for him to get into Coble Hall, so he says, “Well, we

can’t get to you,” so we went out there and carried him up the front steps, you know, in

the wheelchair, and that made quite an impression on me, as you might imagine, and so

from then on, we became much more sensitive to his disability and then, of course, we

had meetings at Allerton and I’ve been out there with him a couple of times, and there

was no access, there were no ramps there and they had to carry him in and out of the

meeting place, and we had, I think it was at the time, LAS maybe had a retreat out there,

and of course he couldn’t, and the restrooms were down a couple of stairs and it was

really tough on him. So we became much more sensitive to solve his problem when

you’re right there with him like that.

I resumed working with Tim at DRES, was, you know, since I was a budget

officer, people were always coming to me with problems about they needed money for

this, they needed money for that. The next time I heard from them I think was with

regard to their athletic teams, the wheelchair basketball teams. I remember coming down

in high school and seeing the Gizz Kids play basketball and they were playing basketball

in the Armory at the time in wheelchairs, and it was Homecoming. It must have been in

1952, when I was a sophomore in high school, so I remember seeing them play. Well,

anyway, the first thing I think I remember coming in was they had a problem because

they were going to these basketball games and they didn’t play other schools usually.

There were other teams that were put together usually of vets, you know, that were in

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different cities like, I don’t remember the names of the teams, but the Minneapolis

Rollers, and so on, so they’d have to go to these games with literally nothing and they

didn’t have any way to get there. They certainly didn’t have a budget to fly or anything

like that, so what they would do is they would take vans, University vans and trailers, and

drive all the way up there and drive all the way back and they didn’t have gas money,

they didn’t have anything, so we tried to help them out with that. Now, DRES is part of

the University’s budget. I mean, when I worked with them they were. So that was one of

their problems. The other problem, one of their other problems, was they didn’t have any

buses and, I don’t remember when he got his first buses, but those buses pooped out and I

remember they came back again, of course, and we got them the buses they’ve got now,

the ones that drive around campus, and from time to time for money to help them to get

their teams back and forth to different places.

Then, after I got my degree in English, when I was Vice Chancellor still, off and

on people were coming in. I couldn’t tell you the years when people were coming in, but

the next time I really got involved was I also have a degree in Recreation Leisure Studies.

I mean, I was going to school all the time and I also have a MBA in Executive

_______________, and I was also going to school when I was 54 for that, so it’s hard to

tell what all the years were, but I got to know the colleges very well so I have a degree

from LAS, Education, Business, which was ALS at that time, and Commerce. I was

going to start in May, but I never got around to that. So anyway, I got to know, I was on

a search committee for the Dean in ALS when Mike Ellis came. He was there before

Sonja, just before her, and when he came in, Paul Leung was the Director of DRES. I

don’t know if you, well, Paul was probably the foremost researcher in the area in

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disabilities. He was very good and he was a, I don’t know, he had some problems with

the administration, just, you know, administrating the unit, and by then, of course, we had

Beckwith, and Beckwith was having financial problems, and we were having problems

with Beckwith, so they came to us again because they were having financial problems

because we had to have twenty students in there, it had to be full, you know, to make it

pay for itself. So we’d start out the semester with twenty students and maybe five or six

would have to go home because of their condition and then some of them got very ill and

they just couldn’t stay on, so we’d lose money every semester, and so I was over there all

the time. They were, DRES was wanting this housing unit, you know, and they wanted

this elevator in this housing unit, you know, Housing was supposed to do that, and that

was my contention so I tried to get Housing to take it over and, of course, they didn’t

want any part of it because they knew there was a deficit occurring in their budget, and

they didn’t want, you know, even though we’d give them some money from their other

budget to help take care of it, but they knew they’d still be losing. So the Chancellor

made a decree, or the Provost made a decree that this would happen, so it didn’t happen.

At the same time, everybody was worried about Beckwith and whether it was

doing what it should, and so we had a committee come in, experts, we brought in some

consultants and I worked with them and they interviewed everyone and put it into

operation. So I brought these consultants in to look at Beckwith and this was somewhere

around 4-5 years after it opened, and the experts said, “Well, you’re warehousing

students, you’re putting them all together, all these people with disabilities, you’re

putting them all in one building, you know, you’re not letting them interact with all the

other students and that was one of their big criticisms. They also felt that they should

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move into regular housing and so on, so I mean, I didn’t agree with it, so I went and I

said, “Well, who’d you ask? Did you ask the students? See what they think about that,”

and so I just went to them and I met with them at Beckwith and said, “Well, you know,

this is what’s been recommended. What do you think?,” and they said, “No, we don’t

agree with that at all.” They said, “We could move to a residence hall anytime we want

to, but because a lot of us have to have special aid, we would rather be here and then we

could do whatever we want to and we can operate out of here. If at some time, we feel

ready for that, we’ll do it.” So, there we are, we’re still with Beckwith and there were

problems with the building, you know, it’s a wood frame building and everybody was

worried about it catching on fire or something like that, getting everybody out. We had

problems finding a Director, someone to actually direct the place, and we had problems

with some of the aides that were hired. The theory was that each student should hire his

or her own aide because after all, they’d be doing that after they got out of school, so they

should have that experience so that when they graduated, they’d have to do the same

thing anyway. Well, we got some people who came in and I can remember one instance

where someone had to go to bed and they said, “You’ll have to give me five dollars extra

if you want to get to bed tonight,” and things like that. So you had those kinds of

problems to worry about too, and then there was providing of food and having a cook

there all the time and getting the buses there. Finally, we hired one of the young women

who graduated. She was such a frail little person, I remember, but she did a good job,

you know. I was just surprised that she could do it physically because she was so small.

So yeah, that worked out well, and at the same time, we were looking for a new Director

for DRES and we interviewed a number of people and they had finally decided that Brad

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would be the best person. He’s been there, oh, he was probably there must have been

1994, or somewhere in there, and I had been in class with him in recreation, a couple of

recreation classes and I worked with him a lot. He’s a good person.

So at the same time, I’m in the Provost’s office and I’m working with all these

people who have special disabilities or special problems and they would show up in my

office, some, this was about the time when they started finding students who were

determined that they had ADD and they had never known it before. So now, you know,

the question was they would have to go to DRES and get the letter, okay. Several people

who were going there weren’t convinced that they were. The evaluation at DRES was a

very good evaluation. There was no one more using it and even faculty members. We

had faculty members who were coming up to their sixth year and they were getting

evaluated and, you know, so I’m seeing all these new things happening all the time and

then, you know, who is capable of making an evaluation and can you trust the

evaluation? Now, many faculty members said, “There’s nothing wrong with you. I’m

looking at you and you’re perfectly fine. Don’t tell me you have a disability,” and at the

same time, I’m saying, “She was evaluated by the DRES unit and she does have a

disability. You will give her as much time as she needs on the exam,” and they’re telling

me they aren’t too happy with that, as you can imagine, you know. If I had to get into it,

it was a problem because the student, they would just tell the student, I mean, I had some

terrible experiences with some of the faculty members. I mean, where they just ignored

the disabilities and, you know, we couldn’t put up with that so we just had to get tougher

on it, and I had to work with the Deans to make sure people followed through, so some of

the situations were really bad and some of the faculty were very unsympathetic.

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So, yeah, I got to know quite a few of the students at Beckwith when I worked

over there and I used to go out for lunch with some of them, and I found out that, indeed,

this one young man who had been in a diving accident, he was in Engineering, was a

good student, graduated, and he’s back there the next semester. I said, “I thought you’d

be out of here by now,” and he said, “No, I’m working on my Master’s degree. I didn’t

get any, no one interviewed me,” and I said, “What, nobody interviewed you?,” and he

said, “no.” So I called Engineering. I have a good friend who’s an Assistant Dean over

there and we got on the case of the guy who was setting up the interviews and the next

year he got three or four interviews. I don’t know why he didn’t get any interviews

before, but the next year he got interviewed and then, one of the problems was that they

didn’t have any money to go off-campus to visit the company. So I said, “Okay, we’ll

pay for that,” and that would have been in the 1990’s probably before I retired, so I said,

“If you’ve got a problem, come and see me and we’ll take care of you,” and we did and

he got a job with a big company that was just starting up in Harvard, Illinois, and since

then, the whole thing went down the tubes, the whole company. At least they had

installation of the company, but I don’t even remember his name. I can see his face, he

was a tall kid, he had a power wheelchair and he really couldn’t eat with his hands. I

think he had something that helped him use his arm to eat with. He had a straw, which he

used. He was a quadriplegic and he was in bad shape, and the thing that was disturbing

was that every time I’d see him, you know, he was atrophied some more, you know, the

muscles because he couldn’t use them. And I got some people from, oh my friend from

Engineering, I got him to go out for lunch with us a couple of times so he could see how,

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you know, what a sharp guy this was and he was just going to waste. I mean, they’re

really missing out on, but there were a lot of great kids over there at Beckwith.

One of the other things we got into was I had two women that were signers.

Okay, so they came to me and they had all these complaints. They were not the people

who were hearing impaired, they were the people who were doing the signing and they

were fluent in signing, but they said, you know, “You aren’t providing us with enough

money, the University isn’t,” and they would be in classes and they would sign for their

student. Say I’m taking Chem 103 and she’d get up and sign so I’d know what was going

on. “We don’t have an office on campus, we don’t have any parking places, we go home,

we get to come back, and then we have to hunt for a parking space around this thing.”

That was about the same period, 1995, somewhere in there. So I said, “Okay, well, I

think we can take care of all those problems. I just wish you’d come to me sooner. I

can’t take care of the salary. I don’t set the salary,” but we got them parking stickers. I

don’t remember why they got to me. I think, no Brad wasn’t the Director then. Paul

Leung was and I don’t know if they didn’t get satisfaction there or what, but anyway,

they got to me. So we took care of that and it got to be close to finals time and some

student came in and said, “One of these women told me that, you know, they might not

be there for the final,” and I said, “What?,” and these are professional people, you know,

and I really got upset about that one. I don’t think she thought the student should make

up the difference, or whether they were twisting my arm or what was going on, but so I

called Springfield because there is an agency in Springfield that does control this and the

woman said, “That is not the way people are supposed to operate,” and I said, “Well, I

didn’t think so either, but,” I said, “I certainly am not, this is not my field,” and she said,

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“I’ll tell you what. I’ll come over there and meet with these people and with you,” and

she straightened them out right away, and you know, I was trying to do the best I could

for them, but they wanted even more and so we got that straightened out. So there were

things like that all along the line. I felt for a while like I was almost, you know, I was

over there a lot at DRES, and then when Brad took over, then I didn’t have as many

problems and everything started to work out and we got back on. Well, I think he, that

was his sole concern. When the other person was in charge, I think he was probably

more interested in his research than he was in directing the unit.

So things started to work a lot better there and I did things like, of course, when

the Disabilities Act went through, the ADA, they re-hired a special person in the Office

of Space Utilization and she was responsible for responding to anything now. If, as Tim

said, he put her in a different classroom or whatever, she made sure that there wasn’t a

conflict, that we changed the doors, that we put in a ramp, that we did whatever was

required to get that student into class. The whole office is gone now. I wouldn’t say

there’s no longer a need for it, but it was incorporated with the O & M Division as I

understand it after I left, and so maybe there’s still someone who does that, and Brad

would know I would think. I heard Beckwith was being phased out and Housing’s going

to take it over I understand. Well, I think it’s a good move and it will be good for

everybody.

I didn’t have a lot of extensive interaction with Tim Nugent because Tim was

gone pretty much. I knew Tim well, he knew me, but he was always around and he was

still over there. I’d see him occasionally and knew him well, but I can’t tell you much

more about him. I guess the only thing that interested me was this ADD thing. I’ve

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heard it’s coming up more all the time and as I left, I’m thinking this is going to be a real

problem because people have to evaluate this and, you know, and you’ve got to convince

the faculty that this person really does have a problem, and we had one young lady who

was in Commerce who didn’t pass her prelim finals for her Ph.D. She had a Ph.D. in

Recreation and she was a, she just criticized everything, nothing was ever right. She was

in my office crying half the time and there was an Associate Dean in Commerce who was

sympathetic, but the faculty members were not. She had been diagnosed with ADD. I

don’t think she was, she was very bright, but she was also very, I don’t know how to say,

ornery about it, you know, she just. A friend of mine in the office next to me went and

gives a lecture to some graduate students, they asked him to come over and all she did, he

said, “There’s this woman there who just attacked me all the time.” He said, “I don’t

know what I did to her, but,” and she was like that, so her big problem in the College of

Commerce was, she didn’t want to follow the curriculum. She wanted everything

special. She wanted to take this course, that course, and this course, and they said no,

you have to follow the curriculum. Well, when she didn’t pass her prelims, which are, I

think, the exams that qualifies you to do the dissertation. Okay, so she didn’t pass, now

whether they, you know, whether they were legitimate or not, I don’t know, but when she

didn’t pass, then of course, she said, we suggested, or the Associate Dean really

suggested she consider transferring somewhere else. She wanted us to get her into

Harvard at that point, and I said, “Well, I don’t think I’m going to be able to get you into

Harvard.” This was about five years before I retired, so about the mid-‘90s. So, I think

she went to some institution in Oklahoma. She wasn’t there more than two months and

we started getting calls, “She doesn’t want to follow the curriculum.” It was the same

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thing all over again, and I don’t know how it all turned out, but she claimed she had ADD

long before the preliminaries. I think when she first went in there she claimed that and

she was tested and they concurred that she had a problem, but, at the same time, she was

tested, all she could do was criticize the people who tested her and they told her that she

did have ADD, you know, that’s the way she was. She just was not happy with anybody.

She was from here in Illinois and she was very unhappy, and made a lot of other people

unhappy too, but you know, one of the things they did with the students was they would

give people so much money to ride in a wheelchair all day, just to see what it was like,

you know, so I did it, and that’s quite an experience and it certainly changes your

perspective. That must have been about 1996, somewhere around there and I had a

manual chair. Well, I don’t know that it really changed my perspective, but it, you know,

it’s much more difficult to get around, of course, and by that time, we were changed,

making big changes on the campus, even though we were ahead of many other campuses,

you know, we were putting ramps everywhere. I’m trying to think, I think the girls, the

woman who was in charge her name was Jonelle something. I can’t remember what her

last name is, but they were identifying all the restaurants that had to be changed, they

were doing all that, systematically putting curb cuts in, trying to get ramps into all the

buildings, and the other thing that I did while I was there was that when faculty members

started showing up with problems like, well, they determined if they had ADD or

fibromyalgia or, you know, you look at somebody and they say they have fibromyalgia,

well, when they don’t look like it, but when the poor Professor has to lie down on the

floor during class if the pain gets so bad, you know, things like that. We had people like

that, so I put together a whole committee that included most of those people so we could

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get all that together and look at the student problems and the faculty problems all at one

time, and when I left, that committee was still functioning. I think Brian was on the

committee, Brian McMurray. I got to know him quite well and he’s an amazing guy.

What amazed me, he used to be a wrestler and he goes to all the wrestling matches and

highly enjoys a wrestling match. Well, the only place I’ve ever heard anything like this, I

came up here and they announce on the radio, they announce the wrestling matches on

the radio and they’re describing this, you know, I’m thinking this is ridiculous, you know,

you can’t because, my being a wrestler, I could not get the picture in my mind in a

million years, but I guess he does because he goes to all the matches and he really gets

enthused about it.

The day I rode in the wheelchair I just did what I usually do. We were in the

Swanlund building then and I did it for a day. I was up on the third floor and there’s a

bathroom on that floor. Just getting in my office was a barrier, you know, which was

always cluttered, but the doors were wide enough and actually, I didn’t really have any

problems. I went out to lunch, the ramps were there, the curb cuts were there when I

wanted to cross the street. As I recall, I went to Panera’s, which is closed now, you

know, there’s no parking there, but it still was full, you know. Hardee’s was there before

and it didn’t make it.

The other person that I worked with that I thoroughly enjoyed was a fellow named

Bill Goodman. Bill is a wonderful guy. He worked for a unit on campus and it was a

unit that developed a teaching system that was sent out by computer all across the

country and we were losing big money on it. So I had the unhappy task of going there

and telling everybody that we’re going to close it down and we sold it to a private

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company and they picked it up, but a lot of people lost their jobs and Bill was one of the

people who worked there and he was in a wheelchair and he had a very definite speech

problem. I think it was cerebral palsy, but it may have been something else, but when he

was a boy, there’s a wonderful video that was done on him by some kid in

cinematography as a Master’s project and, you know, it talks about a day in the life of

Bill Goodman and it shows him getting up about 5:30 to get everything ready to go and,

you know, he had to do all that and the church had rebuilt his apartment for him so he put

everything lower and they made those accommodations for him in an apartment that was

off-campus and later the, he was always in a wheelchair, he had a big flag on the back

and he had his computer on there, and he came in and he wanted a new laptop computer.

Well, let’s see, first of all, we finished out the year and I was responsible for trying to

find a job for him. So I was supposed to find a job for him, along with all the other

people we were letting go, and so I told DRES, you know, I’ll give you Bill with his

salary. You can have him and well, they weren’t too happy because they didn’t know

what they were going to do with him. His expertise was computer science. So he went

out there, and I was having lunch with him regularly, and he was sort of famous around

here. I mean he would do things like, you know, if he thought things weren’t working

out, he’d go to Springfield and talk to the Governor and I don’t know, he usually got his

way too. They were together one time and he parked down in the underground garage in

Springfield and he said, “I was going down the ramp and,” he said, “the brakes didn’t

work on my wheelchair. So I decided the best way to slow down was to run into a wall

and sort of scrape along,” you know, well, he tipped out of the chair and knocked himself

out. So he wakes up in the hospital and they think something’s seriously wrong with him

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because he can’t speak properly. It took him two days to get a message through to some

of his friends in Champaign to come and get him, you know, things like that were always

happening to him. So anyway, so he went to DRES and he started to work over there,

must have been about 1990 or somewhere in there, and they were having a hard time

trying to find something for him to do. What he wanted to do was to work with parents

and students coming in who had the same problem he did so he could help them, you

know, but his speech was so difficult that it would have been hard for him to

communicate with them. Now, I could talk to him and understand him if I looked right at

him, but when I turned him over to this friend of mine who was taking my place when I

left, he didn’t get anything, you know, he couldn’t understand him. So Bill gets a, he got

a van with a lift on it, great big van, and he was driving down Springfield Avenue and he

passed out and he drove the van into a house, broke off the gas main, there’s gas leaking

out, the whole place is ready to blow up, and when he was in the hospital, they didn’t

think he’d make it. I went over to see him a couple of times, I think he was at Provena,

and his sister came and we had along discussion and she didn’t think he’d make it either,

but he pulled through and he was doing alright, except his back was really bothering him.

He thought he was going to have to have surgery and then he pulled out of that, and

everything was alright, but he died several years after that, a big wonderful guy, but in

this video he says his parents thought he was retarded so they had sent him to a special

school and their people said, “He’s not retarded, he’s a really bright guy,” so he finally

went on and he said, “B u t m y s i s t e r u s e d t o p i c k o n m e a l l t h e t i m e,

then one day I grabbed her and beat the hell out of her.” He really let it go and it was

really funny. Anyway, he was a great guy, ornery, he was working with a fellow in

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DRES who put a new computer in front of him and said, “Now Bill, don’t touch that until

I come back. I’m going to answer the phone.” I said, “So what did you do?,” knowing

exactly what he’d do, he said, “I ______________ and started to mess around with it, and

I said, “What did John say?,” and “He was really pissed off,” he said. He was a

character.

So my interaction was all based on problems and trying to resolve the problems.