Mechanic? What's going on here? Just a friendly game of wheelchair football in the university armory at Champaign, Ill. "The first thing we teach them is how to fall," says Timothy Nugent, director of the university's Rehabilitation-Education Center and developer of the game (six men to a side, more passing than "running," a tackle is a two-handed tag). Surveying the mayhem, Nugent boasts, "We can strip a wheel and replace it in a minute and a half."
The 54-year-old Nugent has been improving life for handicapped students for the past three decades. The results of his long crusade against architectural barriers will become apparent next month when all colleges receiving federal funds must complete plans for making their campuses accessible to the handicapped by 1980.
Nugent's battle began in 1949 when the University of Illinois decided to close its Galesburg campus, where he was teaching health education. When no plans were made to transfer disabled students to the main Champaign-Urbana campus, Nugent rounded up 26 paraplegics and staged a wheel-in at the capitol in Springfield. It worked.
Since then Nugent has turned the University of Illinois into a model campus for the 180 disabled men and women enrolled each year. Wheelchair ramps are everywhere, and dormitories are equipped with furniture that can be used by both the able and the disabled.
Kenneth Clarke, dean of Illinois' College of Applied Life Studies, praises Nugent's vision: "He could see that the disabled would become lawyers, parents, schoolteachers. Even the handicapped did not think they should go to college. Nugent demonstrated it could be done." Today Nugent is a full professor—a rare appointment for someone without a doctorate.
One complaint is that Nugent sometimes pushes students too hard. An alum grouses: "That son of a bitch made me swim the length of the pool and I drowned three times along the way." But, Nugent points out with a grin, "He did name his child after me."
Nugent attributes his empathy for the disabled to a convalescence for a leg infection in a military hospital during World War II and to the fact that at home in Wisconsin his father was hard of hearing and one of his sisters legally blind. Determined to make the handicapped as independent as possible, Nugent realized how effective he had been when he returned from his honeymoon in 1970 with second wife Jeanette. First he found his bed in the garage. Then, with the furniture back in place and the lights out, an awful clatter arose from the street. It was overrun with Nugent's blind and crippled students banging on kettles and pans.
Confronted with this Fellini-esque scene, Tim Nugent did the only thing he could. He invited everybody in for a party.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
