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- Dr. Louis Bowers
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Louis Bowers
AH: It sounds like, too, that you furnished a lot of help to the community that way by all these people doing internships and going to these schools and learning, but at the same time, providing some help, too.
LB: Yes, that was a big factor. Of course, it also helped the students in that once they were known and seen by the schools in Hillsborough or Pinellas County, because we weren’t limited just to Hillsborough, it was easier to hire them. You knew what they could do for you by that point.
AH: Was there any connection with Special Olympics at all, over time?
LB: Yes. For many years, the state Special Olympics was held here on campus. During that time, our students took an active part, usually under the supervision of Tony Jonaitis, who directed the games and the Special Olympics on campus for many years. The games moved to Gainesville for a while, and I think recently maybe came back to Tampa. They decided to spread it out around the state to include more volunteers. There were other types of activities, as well. There were local wheelchair games, the Pan American Games for the Disabled, and others that our students participated in. We had, I’m sure, the first graduates of both our undergraduate and master’s degree program, Karen Jacobs and George Murray, who were wheelchair marathon runners and participated in other distance races. They enrolled in our undergraduate program and both graduated in two years. Karen stayed on for her master’s degree and then went on to Tampa General Hospital to develop their first sports program for persons with disabilities. She did a fine job with that until she passed away prematurely. George took a semester off to be the first person to push his wheelchair from Los Angeles across the country to his hometown in Maine, along with Phil Carpenter, another wheelchair athlete. He returned to finish his degree after being away for part of the semester.
AH: It sounds like it would take much of the semester to make it across the country.
LB: It took quite a while. He wanted to do it while it was cool, but not cold, so he started in the spring as I recall. Sometime, later in early summer he finished it. I think he missed a summer semester. He had his picture on a box of Wheaties, the first wheelchair athlete to accomplish that.
AH: Then he came back and finished his degree?
LB: Yes. He didn’t go into teaching. By then, he had become so involved in designing faster wheelchairs for athletes that he formed his own company and was manufacturing and selling customized designed racing chairs very successfully. AH: Is he still in business today, do you know?
LB: No, he sold it to a Belgium company a few years ago. Last time I talked to him he was state chess camp. He had gone from racing to intellectual competition in chess.
AH: That sounds like quite an alumnus there. We talked about your time as chair. We talked about some of the challenges during the course of those years. You became a department chair during a more simple time with fewer forms to fill out and such. Was there anything else from your time as chair that you’d like to share?
LB: I was chair the first time for three years. A number of years later, I came back and did four years. I let the faculty talk me into doing one more year, which I think was a mistake, but I did that. That was a total of seven years. The following time I was chair after we became the School of Physical Education, Wellness, and Sports Studies about ten years ago. I started as chair and somehow we had lost sight of the rotation principle, and I stayed for ten years until my retirement. I think maybe being in that position for ten years kind of hastened my retirement. I was teaching full-time, I had one or two grants going each semester, and I was a full-time administrator. I guess if I had any regrets, it’s that I didn’t take any sabbatical leave or time off during my thirty-three years here that may have refreshed me during the process. I enjoyed every minute of it.