In September 2001 Dr. Tom Walz saw a long-standing dream come to fruition with the opening of Uptown Bill's Small Mall, a collection of small businesses owned and operated by people with disabilities and volunteers. Tom is both the visionary behind this project and its Executive Director, a volunteer position which involves over seventy hours a week of work. It is this current vocation for which Tom is nominated; and yet the story of the Small Mall and Tom's commitment to the disabled really began twenty-nine years before, when Tom met a man named Bill Sackter.
Bill was a mentally retarded man who was institutionalized by the state of Minnesota at the age of seven. He was not released until 1964, when he was fifty-four. Without connections on the outside, Bill was at loose ends until he struck up an unlikely friendship with a young man named Barry Morrow. Eventually, to prevent Bill from being reinstitutionalized, Barry became Bill's legal guardian. Barry later moved to Iowa City to take a position working for Dr. Walz, who was Dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Iowa.
As Tom puts it with a wink, "I knew if I wanted the young man, I would have to find something for the old man to do." So, after a few failed experiments, Tom inaugurated Wild Bill's Coffee Shop in an old classroom, and Bill found a place behind the counter serving coffee. And then a transformation took place: the man who'd spent his life isolated from society became one of Iowa City's best-loved citizens, and he did it, according to Tom, through "pure kindness." People of all ages and backgrounds sought Bill out for a joke, a word of comfort, or a rendition of the "Too Fat Polka" on the harmonica he kept in his back pocket.
With Tom's help, various disability organizations came to recognize Bill's extraordinary role in the community. In 1977, Bill was named Handicapped Iowan of the Year. Bill truly came to national prominence, however, in 1980 with the premiere of the television movie "Bill", written by his old friend Barry Morrow. The movie, which starred Mickey Rooney as Bill, was seen by 40 million viewers and won an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
Bill died on June 16, 1983, but Tom was determined his friend's legacy would live on. He helped convince the university that Wild Bill's Coffee Shop should remain open permanently and employ people with disabilities.
By 2000, Wild Bill's was beginning to outgrow its university confines. Within the small coffee shop, a man with cerebral palsy, Edmond Gaines, was operating a fledgling computer graphics business, while Leslie O' Leary, a woman with a brain injury, was selling antiques. Tom had just retired as a full-time professor, and a new dream began to take shape in his mind: a place where disabled individuals could have the freedom to develop their own businesses.
Tom set up the Extend the Dream Foundation to fund this dream - and due to his efforts, "Uptown Bill's Small Mall" finally opened on September 8, 2001.
A year and a half later, this experiment, while facing many challenges, is proving remarkably successful. There are five disabled business owners at Uptown Bill's and six small businesses staffed by over sixty volunteers from all walks of life, with and without diagnosed disabilities.
In a world which is increasingly profit-driven and conglomerated, Uptown Bill?s demonstrates that smaller can be better and that business can be centered on people -- a management concept Tom calls "humanocracy". It is a mentally freeing experience to walk into a place where the volunteers are homeless and mentally ill, where a person in a wheelchair waits on you. And for the individuals who serve in this way, it affords a meaning and affirmation of worth which is often life-changing.
Tom is a person who finds fulfillment in work, but who is totally unmotivated by money. He receives one dollar a year for the over seventy hours a week he gives. The Small Mall is not his job but his life. On Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's he was here, serving dinner to those who had no other family to celebrate with. He is willing to get up in the middle of the night to talk to someone in recovery from addiction; he never gives up on anyone.
Read More Hero Stories >
