image taken from Iowa Now.
Bill Sackter was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1913, born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. His father passed when he was 7 due to the Spanish flu, and the same year Sackter struggled in school. After taking a mandatory intelligence test, the state sentenced a verdict that placed him in the Faribault State School for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic. He stayed there for 44 years.
In 1964, when new treatments were being introduced for people with disabilities, Sackter was moved to a halfway house where he worked to support himself, and made friends with filmmaker Barry Morrow and his wife. As their friendship evolved, Marrow became Sackter's guardian, and when Marrow got a job at the University of Iowa, Sackter followed him to Iowa City where he became the proprietor of Wild Bill's Coffee shop.
image taken from The Iowa Source
Wild Bill's Coffee Shop -- The late Tom Walz, a former director and professor in the UI School of Social work, created Wild Bill's Coffee Shop in 1975 to provide work for Sackter. Walz put him in charge of running the small coffee service located in North Hall. The coffee shop employed individuals with disabilities and served as both a job site for them and a learning lab for social work students.
In 2021, 46 years of service, the shop determined that because other coffee shops and kiosks in the area were hiring individuals with disabilities, that they would close down the coffee shop and instead make the now renamed "Wild Bill's" into a "community space, makers' space, and classroom" and that the space will still "collaborate with the disabilities community to include people with disabilities in the schoolās social justice advocacy, and carry on the legacy of innovative social work faculty who came before."
Apart from the coffee shop, Bill Sackter was busy working with media groups that were interested in his life. Walz created a written biography about him, while Marrow co-wrote a movie about his life titled Bill (1981). That movie did so well it earned a sequel: Bill on His Own (1983). From the movie Bill, here at UIowa we have the Emmy and the Emmy Award video that the movie won. We also have the documentary that was made about Sackter's life titled "A Friend Indeed ā The Bill Sackter Story."
Dennis Quaid (actor), Sactker, and Morrow accepting Golden Globe from the Iowa Digital Library.
More about Bill Sackter and the history of Wild Bill's Coffee Shop can be found here and here on our Iowa Digital Library!
Morrow & Sacktner, image taken from Kickstarter.
We also have other collections relating to disability and disability activism, which can be found by searching here.
that according to the CDC, 1 in 4 adults in the US have some type of disability, 1 in 4 adults (45-64) have not had a routine check-up in the past year, 1 in 3 (18-44) adults with disabilities have an unmet healthcare need because of costs, don't have a usual health care provider, and that many individuals with disabilities are unable to get married without losing their benefits? Learn more from activists Alice Wong, Haben Girma, and the late Evelyne Jobe Villines.
At the University of Iowa, we also have services at the student level [UI Students for Disability Advocacy & Awareness (UISDAA)] and institutional level [Student Disability Services (SDS)].
Happy Disability Pride Month!
-Matrice Y., Special Collections, Olson Graduate Assistant.
