Spirit in Action

Tom Walz - Wild Bill/Extend A Dream

Tom Walz may be the tireless force behind Iowa City's alternative cultural experience, Uptown Bill's Small Mall, but the work of the mall is the legacy of an amazing mentally retarded man, Bill Sachter. Because of his experience with Bill, Tom found his life's work, helping people with disabilities own and run their own businesses.

Broadcast on:: 24 Feb 2008
Audio Format:: other

I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep I have no arms but yours with which to hold The ones grown weary from the struggle and weak from growing old I have no hands but yours with which to see To let my children know that I am up and up is everything I have no way to feed the hungry souls No clothes to give and make, give the ragged and the morn So be my heart, my hand, my tongue Through you I will be done The fingers have I none to help and die The tangled knocks and twisted chains The strangled fearful minds Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands Being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life I have no way to open people's eyes Except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind Tom Walz may be the tireless force behind Iowa City's alternative cultural experience, uptown bills, small mall But the work of the mall is the legacy of an amazing mentally retarded man, Bill Sactor Because of his experience with Bill, Tom found his life's work helping people with disabilities own and run their own businesses Tom's life has been fruitful and full of service, inspired by the Catholic teachings of his childhood He was a Peace Corps director in Central America, taught social work at the University and is a Gandhi scholar But it is no exaggeration to say that his friendship with Bill Sactor changed the lives of Tom and many others Bill entered the Fairbow Institution for epileptics and idiots at the age of 7 and spent 45 years there being released in the mid-1960s He so inspired the admiration of those around him that his life became the subject of two award-winning movies Garnering both Golden Globe and Emmy Awards, as well as a book by Tom, The Unlikely Celebrity Tom's retirement at age 74 includes weeks of 70+ hours of his labor of love with the "Extend a Dream" Foundation If you're in Iowa City, you can visit the small mall at 401 South Gilbert Street and you'll have a delightful time there Good afternoon, Tom, welcome to Spirit in Action Yeah, thank you Mark I ran into an article about you and the whole history of Uptown Bill's small mall and the coffee shop and all this I was so impressed, tell us about the history of Wild Bill, how you got here Just give us a background to tell us about this kind of miniature miracle Well, whatever has happened really is to be credited to a man called Bill Sactor Who actually was handicapped at age 7, he was living in Minneapolis at the time, he was his third child of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family His father had died in the epidemic of 1919 and this was 1920 when Bill was starting school And he wasn't the brightest kid on the block, he actually had a diagnosis of mental retardation And they saw him as a slow learner and intelligence test had just been invented So one thing led to another and they tested him and said, well, you can't stay in regular school And they had no alternative schools other than state hospitals So they, at age 7, took him from his family or his widowed mother And placed him in Fairbolt State Hospital where he remained for the next 44 years Mama, who was a victim of race prejudice at the time or religion prejudice A lot of the second wave of immigration, as you know, was very anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish and anti-East European So she was afraid that she would have been deported so basically she snuck away And didn't come back and Bill had no idea where she was And so he lived in the institution until they decided to push him out, which they did in the mid-60s That was the time I was teaching at the University of Minnesota And by coincidence, I had a wonderful young man in my class who wasn't a social work student He was a theater student, but I became very fond of him and he was very talented So whenever I had a job, I would involve him in one way or another Well, what happens is that I will eventually come to Iowa as dean of the School of Social Work And we'll call back to Minneapolis to ask this young man who was in my class His name, by the way, is Barry Morrill, if he would come to Iowa City and basically work for me In the interim, he had met this Bill who was finally had gotten a job at the end of the 1960s Washing Pots and Pans in a country club What happens is then Bill had become an acquaintance of this young student of mine, Barry Morrill Whose wife happened to be a waitress at this restaurant where Bill was now working as a pot and pan washer So the young man, Barry was about 22-23 at the time, kind of a hippie, had his own band And he started to take Bill out around the city and involve him with his friends And one thing led to another and Barry just decided that he was going to bring Bill into his family Because Bill had never really had a family So he went and assumed the legal guardianship of Bill When I called back to Barry and asked him if he would come and work with me, you know, in my new job Because he was just so talented and I had, you know, some ideas what I wanted him to do He said he would come, but because he assumed guardianship of Bill, he had to bring Bill Or he wanted to bring Bill and I'd have to give Bill a job So Bill shows up with Barry in 1974, I had the job for Barry doing our audio visual And I just had Bill do a coffee shop Well, actually, just make coffee But that quickly became a coffee shop In the ensuing years, we developed this coffee shop that he chooses to call wild bills And it becomes very popular because this man, the handicap man, Bill Sacher was the most incredible human being I've ever met He was the best example of our species that I've ever known in my 74 years And I've been around smart people and dumb people and handicapped people and abled people But he stood out from all of them And the world could recognize this, the people around him were just attracted to him And by the end of the 70s, he became virtually legendary in Iowa City You have lived such a gentle life upon this earth that I am stunned by your sight If I could give but a token of the love you have Then I might not be this lonely tonight Let them have their smug and their cool Confined by fashion and peer I love you for your courage In this frightened atmosphere I love you for your courage In this frightened atmosphere There are so few brave ones like you Need I explain Never wondering what to do What to venture, what to gain And you have loved In a total way, from flesh to soul you speak Without coir, without poison Your eyes can see That the emperor has lost his clothes And what's more you'll tell the whole world what he stole Let them have their fad and their fix Confined by fashion and peer I love you for your courage In this frightened atmosphere I love you for your courage In this frightened atmosphere It was at that point that Barry and I talked about telling this story beyond Iowa City because he was such a metaphor for the best in humanity We decided we were going to do a documentary, can't raise the money, serendipity steps in Next thing I know, we're talking to some people from CBS And Bill's life will eventually be told in two movies A movie in 1981 that becomes the movie of the year Shown to 40 million people on a Saturday night And another sequel to it in 1983 called Bill on his own Well that's the important seeds, I mean part of the seed I think is you doing social work You having students that you're nurturing Obviously something about the way you nurtured Barry and encouraged him was passed on So the story doesn't stop with Bill, I think that the story of Bill ends up being seeds for further gifts for the race If you want to follow serendipity, I'll really share this with you The legacy of Bill probably is much more interesting than the life of Bill Although the life of Bill was richly beautiful But Bill affected a lot of people's lives Like myself, I've chosen to work until I die Doing what we'd originally done with Bill Which is to provide employment to a man with a disability And find him a place where the world could really discover what a great human being He was when I say the world, I mean a lot of the abled community Which sort of shies away from people with disability That led to what I'm doing now running this complicated project Sponsored by an organization that we have called Extend the Dream Foundation But really we speak of it in terms of uptown Bill's projects Various kinds of uptown Bill projects The impact of those projects on a community And on the people that are involved with them is really just very remarkable And so the legacy has been fun and interesting But I was going to tell you this way in which all of this works You know how these things come back to haunt you a little bit Or to make you feel very good about the impact of a mentally retarded man on the world We had the situation where Bill's movie was to be told And Barry and I were out there advocating for its telling Well the next thing we know Barry is the screenwriter And he will write a movie that becomes the movie of the year And he will become the Emmy award winning screenwriter of 1981 Even though he never wrote anything before in his life That will lead him to the west coast in Hollywood The next full-length feature film that he will write Was The Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman Which was a Academy Award winning film And Barry won an Academy Award for a best screenwriter And he's written, I know he's written over 30 films And you know half of them have been made So there's that story, well anyway Staying with Barry as screenwriter When Bill was still alive and we were spending one summer Doing a little project, educating other Many retired junior high school students How to refinish furniture because that was one of our avocational interests And there was a young poet from the writer's workshop Here, the famous writer's workshop Black kid from Waterloo Who kind of got interested in this whole Bill's coffee shop and Bill and everything This is still back in the 70s His name was Ray Grant Ray would join us in teaching those kids that summer Even though he didn't know anything about refinishing furniture He was funny and interesting to have around So he kind of falls in love with Bill Because everybody did And thought Bill was just the greatest Well Bill will die in 1983 About the time of the second movie And Ray Grant will write two powerful poems To eulogize him at his funeral Anyway, Ray Grant graduates And he goes off and I don't hear from again We'd been good friends, we'd actually played basketball together He goes off, I don't know where, he's going to be a songwriter He said or something And about ten years later I hear from him And he tells me that he's become a stand-up comedian in Atlanta But he's so bad they want to throw him out of town Well apparently what will happen And I don't know this at the time because I'm at the point where he's not doing well That he is so bad that he becomes an Atlanta celebrity And he parlays this into a position of influence in the entertainment world And so he's able to earn a very good living Doing that and gain a lot of attention Anyway, I kept in touch with Barry Morrow The screenwriter all through these years When I started this project in 2001 of uptown bills We're now moving off the campus into the community And planning to do all kinds of little We're going to have them all of businesses owned and operated by people with disability So I kept in touch with Barry, put them on our board Talked to him from time to time, got him to come over to Iowa City every once in a while And do his little talk as a celebrity And all of that, one of my ideas was when we opened up the small mall This program that is the uptown bills program Was to really tell the bills story which should be told as a documentary featuring Bill We happen to have 11 hours of old footage accumulated over the years Don't ask me how it all got together other than there's a guiding hand in all of this that's leading us Leading Bill back to the world and back to the contemporary world To tell them how to discover peace and justice in the world I'm convinced that we've got to have a real documentary So I find a documentarian in town who will oddly win an Emmy award himself For best documentary writer in 2005 And he takes on the project and we get him all of the material and all of that Only it cost a lot of money to have a professional filmmaker do this And so I'm out there raising money and we eventually raised the first 80,000 without too much trouble But we need another 50 in it So I went back to Barry and I said why don't you give us the 50 and be the executive producer He says well I don't have it at the moment, my money is all tied up in developing a film Well the film he's developing is the story of Bob Marley the reggae king deceased reggae star who impacted the world with his music And Barry says oh by the way my partner in this is Ray Grant Ray somehow had a connection in Jamaica to you know anyway it's all coming back I think Barry's gonna sell the Bob Marley story if he does he's giving us the final 50,000 dollars to finish the film It's serendipity, it's you know where the legacy just won't quit It just keeps going and going and going and going You mentioned the guiding hand, there's a guiding hand leading us to peace and justice Can you talk a little bit about your roots? I know you went to St. John's up there in Minnesota As did one of my very good friends in Eau Claire Well I'm one of those boring Roman Catholics that really had my taste of it sort of in the catechism side And it had an impact on me, I don't know, ever since I can remember my felt my life should be dedicated to service That's the only thing that made any sense that human beings if they're alive and healthy ought to be serving each other And not you know sort of pursuing their own little accumulation of wealth and you know all that stuff It just didn't fit my philosophy of life even as a kid So St. John's was a natural stepping stone to having that deepened into my head and soul And so you know I took my career as a social worker Which supposedly was used to serve people and I matured in that and had the good fortune to have a lot of things happen to me You know lots of opportunities directing Peace Corps in Honduras and becoming a Gandhi scholar By having an Indian friend of mine name in his last will and testament to dispose of his writings Then end up making trips to India and ending up at a university Gandhi founded and all of that And it all kind of reinforced beliefs and during one visit to India I get to see Mother Teresa Because this guy used to live in Calcutta and so I went there You know so these things for a kid from northern Minnesota town of 87 This is pretty exotic stuff for me but it all fit into this philosophy of whatever you want to call it You know this questioning why this aggressive materialism Why this kind of capitalist system we live in with giant money machines out there Called Walmart and this one and that one It's a kind of bizarre world in so many ways And then you load it with the invention of all these arms and spread them around the world When you have all of this crazy religious hatred and jihads And all of the rest that you sometimes say is there any hope at all for human beings And I think back to Bill and I just said you know he's our answer A simple man who really only wanted to provide a little love and kindness in the world ♪♪♪ ♪ Where the butterflies go when it rains ♪♪♪ ♪ Who goes around and tucks in the trees ♪♪♪ ♪ What makes a teddy bear like to sleep ♪♪♪ ♪ Why do we all make promises ♪♪♪ ♪ Or we can't keep ♪♪♪ ♪ Where the puppet dogs go in their sand ♪♪♪ ♪ And what the elephants say when they're mad ♪♪♪ ♪ What do you tell if you don't have a friend ♪♪♪ ♪ Why do we open our mouth ♪♪♪ ♪ The cross that I put in ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ These are the things that bother me ♪♪♪ ♪ Not a lot of things across some sea ♪♪♪ I don't even have a Mr. Land, I guess that I am just a simple land. ♪♪♪ ♪ Tell me where the rockin' sleep on the road ♪ ♪ And how can a little land carry that load ♪ ♪ Why write words that we have to erase ♪ ♪ Why does everyone count on only one face? ♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ These are the things that bother me ♪ ♪ Not a lot of things across some scene ♪ ♪ I don't even have a Mr. Land, I guess that I am just a simple land ♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ A positive moment ♪ I wrote a book about his life called The Unlikely Celebrity. And in the research and in thinking this thing through, I realized the kind of role that a man like Bill would play as a model of peace and justice. You know, he certainly wasn't somebody with the intelligence to go into the United Nations and, you know, into big peace networks and activists. He was just a man at a primary level who could live his life exemplifying what is a spiritual, healthy life for a human being. And, you know, essentially that's what he did. And so my struggle has been, how do we keep that story alive? How do we get it back to this society? You know, I am so sick of the crap that we see on television and the junk that fills, you know, just playing off, periodly off all of the violence and filling the little children with it. You know, it just, it's so bizarre, you know. It just doesn't make any sense at all that, you know, being gifted with this little planet that is really very beautiful and basically pretty benign to chew it up and to tear it up for a bunch of plastic crap. And even in the area you work in, you know, computers and all the rest, this sort of instant communication, this sort of all of this helter-skelter of rewiring the world so that we can talk to each other immediately. There's no room left for peace, quiet meditation. You know, I'm getting to be an old man, so I can remember when a walk in the woods was a walk in the woods. Now maybe there is no way to walk in the woods with six billion people, I don't know. Bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more. Give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts. It's time we learn to say, enough is enough. We had a week's vacation to take a trip of West. We went real fast past everything so we could see the rest. We went ten thousand miles, but I don't know where we were. 'Cause when we got back home, all I remember was a blur. Bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more. Give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts. It's time we learn to say, enough is enough. Mama made it pie, the best I ever ate. She handed me a piece, but I took the whole plate. My face is turning green, I'm gonna lose it. Press my sword, the whole delicious pie is going down the toilet bowl. Bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more. Give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts. It's time we learn to say, enough is enough. Sporty built a car, clever little thing. He was so pleased he said, "Hey, let's do it again." Now you go Sunday driving to see the scenery. And all their cars are the cars are the cars are the cars are the cars. As far as you can see, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more. Give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts. It's time we learn to say, enough is enough. Now I wrote 20 verses into this little song. But every time I sang them all, everybody I want to play. I whittled and I fiddled, and I don't remember how I cut it down to four. I hope you let it down. Bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more, more. Give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts. It's time we learn to say, enough is enough, is enough, is enough, is enough, is enough. You worked as social worker and teaching social work, I believe, for a number of years. I've known a number of people who got involved in social work and then got up because they didn't feel like they could do real good stuff in it. Evidently you found a way to do your work, your soul work while doing your job. Can you talk a little bit about how that worked for you and within the field of social work? Yeah, I think most social critics really have to begin with the professions to criticize, you know. They're just capitalists who are one way or another. They got a little trying to get a little corner on the market, a little monopoly and parlaying it into some wealth. And social work is no different than the rest, just like law purports to pursue justice, we pursue service. Yeah, it's true and it's untrue. But to me, social work was never, Bill was the best social worker I knew in our program. Barry might have been the second best, had nothing to do with who was sitting in the classroom and who'd walk out of the program with an MSW. I've never had any particular respect for degrees. I know they're good ones and I know they're bad ones. And so I look at the human being and what they do with their life and who they are and they can be people without any education at all. I was grateful that somebody would give me enough of a living that I could raise six kids and have a family and be able to talk about the things that are a joy to talk about. I was never someone who would rise very high on the established side of social work because I was as great as critic or at least Orthodox member. And that was okay because I had enough talent to do what I had to do and I wrote a lot of interesting things. They tolerated me and that was fine. I got to live out my life in the university and I have enough of a retirement that I don't live very high off the hog but I live simply but comfortably, gondi-like and I can do exactly what I want to do and I don't have to take a dime from the world anymore. So I run this enterprise which is pretty substantial. It's a pretty big enterprise really for our community. I don't make a dime and I probably have to actually pay a little money to have the privilege of being a volunteer. But it's worth it. It really has been a wonderful opportunity. You made comment about the giant money machines and one of the things that caught my eye when I first saw the article that led me to you was the whole idea of the small mall, the one that's human sized. I'm so captivated by the idea. Tell me what's in the small mall. Tell me about the people who are part of the small mall. First of all, the small mall is listed under the malls in the phone book in Iowa City. The other two of course are the giant malls but it was meant to be a bit facetious by saying small mall. You know, gondi, one of his principles is swaddishi. That's the Sanskrit word for really small as beautiful. Gondi felt that we ought to always organize a world in terms of face-to-face communication and indirect human contact which makes our computer virtual communication a little bit dangerous. As a result of that, it just seemed to me that we needed to demonstrate something to the community. And so this was our version of a mall. We had at one time six businesses in here. We now have four because we've bought a building and relocated several other businesses. We have nine businesses all together. Now our businesses are owned as well as operated by people with disability. And there really were all low-income people with disability who've been given an opportunity, the man at the counter in the coffee shop that you got your malted milk from today. I'm telling your readers, you know, that's why he's a little pudgy. The guy behind the counter has chronic mental illness. He's been mentally ill for a long time. The woman that just walked through where we're interviewing runs a vintage store, a beautiful vintage store, the nicest antique store in town, vintage clothing and all that. She also has chronic mental illness and she was 20, but she's educated. She has a college degree and some others. The lady that runs the bookstore where we're doing our interview for your listeners, we're in a small mall in a building in the downtown area of Iowa City. The front part of it is a ice cream bar and coffee shop or ice cream and coffee bar. The middle two rooms are a beautiful little bookstore. We call it the best little bookstore in Iowa. The back room where in about an hour we will have a wonderful concert on Irish music is our music venue. It's called the Mad Hatter Room. The Mad Hatter himself would make us all look thin. These 452 pounds of Vietnam vet who got a little bit shell shocked and struggles with the serious case of diabetes. But he's a wonderful man and he runs the music and then we have another little shop that does super graphics, business cards, flyers, posters. A man with cerebral palsy whose wheelchair bound comes in with his knarled hands and very bright, very capable master chess player in Iowa ranked chess player. He runs that little business. It's not just what you've always, it's what you choose to bear. It's not how big a share is, but how much you can share. And it's not the fights you dreamed of, but those you really fought. It's not what you've been given, it's what you do with what you've got. You must know someone like him, he was tall and strong and lean, with a body like a greyhound and a mind so sharp and keen. But his heart's just like a laurel, grew twisted round itself, till almost everything he did caused pain to someone else. It's not just what you've always, it's what you choose to bear. It's not how big a share is, but how much you can share. And it's not the fights you dreamed of, but those you really fought. It's not what you've been given, it's what you do with what you've got. And what's the good of two strong legs, if you only run away? And what do you say is the finest voice, if you've nothing good to say? What good is strength and muscle, if you only push and shove? And what's the use of two goodies, if you can't hear those you love? It's not just what you've always, it's what you choose to bear. It's not how big a share is, but how much you can share. And it's not the fights you dreamed of, but those you really fought. It's not what you've been given, it's what you do with what you've got. Between those who use the neighbours, and those who use the cane, between those in constant power, and those in constant pain, between those who run to evil, and those who cannot run, tell me which ones are the cripples, and which ones touch the sun. It's not just what you're born with, it's what you choose to bear. It's not how big a share is, but how much you can share. And it's not the fights you dreamed of, but those you really fought. It's not what you've been given, it's what you do with what you've got. So that's the small, small, and it is small. It's designed to be accommodating. Unlike come and go at the corner, our convenience store, we say we're come and stay, you know, the sofas and the soft chairs, whatever people want to come in and just get out of the heat or the cold or whatever the day brings. You started out Catholic, and you were clearly inspired by part of that. It fed you, and obviously your connection to Mother Teresa was something that's inspirational for you, because I read that you at one point thought about retiring there to go work for the Sisters of Charity. Are you still Catholic? What part of those beliefs are still fueling your life at this point? I think I am more Catholic than I ever was, but I don't want to turn your listeners off. The truth of the matter is I have a hard time with the institutional churches. Many, many people have had in their lives. And it's not just because a few priests have gotten themselves into deep do-do with their own sexuality, but much more the institutions over time have a real problem. But their origins, if you look at the central beliefs and the underlying philosophy or underlying theology are wonderful. And so I think I'm even more of a Catholic today than I ever was, even though you'll find me on Sunday morning cleaning apartment buildings, raising money for our organization rather than running off to mass. And I don't mean to turn that off to anybody whose belief system is, that's important. What's important is that one lives Catholic, not Catholic, that makes it a sect. One of the things that I've learned having studied Gandhi and teaching Gandhi and reading immense amounts of things are that like Gandhi, I believe that there were a tremendous number of very inspiring prophets in the world. And they had a lot to say and they had a lot of good role modeling. You have to recognize that these were great, great people who had a lot in common. It's bringing all of that together that really raises you to the high point of spirituality. It's sad when we become sort of conventional knee-jerk, this or that and just get caught up in ritual and get caught up with a few do's and don'ts. I'm beyond that. When you mentioned before that you're retired, I had a hard time not laughing because it doesn't seem to me that you've retired very much, pulled back from things that seems like you've got your feet and hands in things more than ever. You mentioned to me earlier that you lectured sometimes, even at Scattergood Friends School where I was just the other night before Quaker Gathering. You mentioned you lectured there and other places about Gandhi, is that a circuit you're still doing? Yeah, they still tolerate me over at the university. When you get to be what they call a professor emeritus, the world quickly forgets about you and makes an assumption that you're destined to play golf the rest of your life. To me, retirement is really being freed from earning a living and being able then to do what's worth doing. What's worth doing for me is to pour everything I have into service because I was coming out of a tradition of working around. Disability was natural that I'd take that although I could have easily gone to the Mother Teresa thing except that I didn't want to be in India when my grandchildren were growing up, so this gave me a little opportunity. But this is an incredible job. It's 70-80 hours a week. It's seven days a week every day of the year, but it means, of course, I'm never bored. Some people think it's sort of silly that I'm over cleaning apartment buildings, but we have a contract. It's one of our small businesses. I just go out and work with handicapped people and help them get through the day and give them a little leadership or inspiration, and I don't have to pay myself, so that money goes into paying the overhead of our small mall and everything else we have to pay. This downtown rent is a killer, you know, but it's nothing. By the time I get through doing the other half of this duplex, I'll be, you know, I had to change shirts at midday and I'll be exhausted tonight, but it's a healthy kind of exhaustion. I've seen it with a lot of old people, you know, who just thrive on what they've always thrived on, and I think they get to live a fuller life. And most of us had to do jobs for income that had some negative parts of it, and now I define the job, so, you know, do what I want to do. Anyway, that's my definition of retirement. I haven't been a gerontologist, so I go out and talk about what they call it, reverse retirement. Once you retire, there's a chance to go to work and do some real work that's worthwhile. I want to trace a little bit about the course of your history to better understand other influences on you. One of them is you did this work with the Peace Corps, and I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the late '70s. You're a Peace Corps director back then. Were you connected at all to this kind of '60s revolution, too, was this part of what fueled you? You know, I'd answer that yes and no. I was, well, I got actually invited to be director of Peace Corps in Honduras, Central America, and because I had four kids, you know, I couldn't have been a volunteer, then those days you couldn't have families. So that was a great opportunity. My wife was willing to go. She was the daughter of a missionary in Chile, so, you know, it was not a foreign idea to her, and she spoke fluent Spanish and all that. So, you know, it was just kind of fun to do. I don't really remember much about the '60s. I had been in service, military service, come back and go into graduate school, spend a year in a doctoral program, got sort of invited to do the Peace Corps thing. Being a parent with all those kids and coming back from the third world and seeing the world the way it was, and, you know, I mean, I was radical. I had no question about it. You know, if you wanted to see a true left-winger, I was left-wing. I was upset at the U.S. exploitation of Honduras. I was very angry at what would eventually follow with playing those military games down there in the name of anti-communism. And just having been there, you know how much all of this stuff is just a political game and an economic game. And the losers usually are those poor third world people who can't fight back and don't have the press to share it. [MUSIC PLAYING] It's snowing in the valley, ice-chokes the river's mouth, but the air is still and silent in the mountains to the south. And you're the fire in the cook-stove, drives the winters chill away, while the silent southern centuries pass the watchful hours till day. And from the mountains of Virginia, to the hills of Salvador, the mothers and the fathers and their children off the war. And the hand had rolled the plow, was on the trigger in the night, killing other sons and daughters, fighting someone else's fight. No must, no more, shout the hills of Salvador. Echo the mountains of Virginia, we cry out, no must, no more. No must, no more, shout the hills of Salvador. Compeñeros, compeñeros, we cry out, no must, no more. [MUSIC PLAYING] As the government of Poland looks to Moscow for its keen, so the hunter turns to Washington to work behind the scenes. While the white hand of the death squads, the rumble of the tanks keeps the coffee on our tables and the money in our banks. No must, no more, shout the hills of Salvador. Echo the mountains of Virginia, we cry out, no must, no more. No must, no more, shout the hills of Salvador. Compeñeros, compeñeros, we cry out, no must, no more. [MUSIC PLAYING] No sore shelter to plow chairs, till the land is theirs to plow. Till the name is on the palate that rots in the prison now. And the weapons of the victory shall be schools and food and jobs and a song from every mountain top is fuzzy. [MUSIC PLAYING] No must, no more, shout the hills of Salvador. In Guatemala, Nicaragua, we cry out, no must, no more. No must, no more, shout the hills of Salvador. Compeñeros, compeñeros, we cry out, no must, no more. [MUSIC PLAYING] Pretoria, Santiago, Beirut, San Salvador, our silence buys the paddles, let us cry. No must, no more, no must, no more. No must, no more, no must, no more. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] No, I don't think I ever, you know, somebody was asking me today, have you ever had any experience with marijuana or drugs? I couldn't even tell you, I've never tasted any of it. I don't even know what it is, and I'm not particularly interested in finding out. That's not where I want to do my experimentations in life. I'd rather try to figure out how to get rid of the big box economy or something. The extended dream foundation opened up another building recently. Can you tell me some of the stories of the people in that building and what you're doing over there? Yeah, we call it the e-commerce center. It really is kind of an organic development out of the small mall. We were having a real hard time in the small mall, getting enough foot traffic to eventually pay our rent. We had a little subsidy for a while for part of it. And how were we going to do it? We have a beautiful bookstore, but you've got to have walk-in traffic. As you can see, we've sat here for an hour, nobody's come in. You know, we may sell $30, $40 a day. That's not going to do it. So we had to find a way of solving that problem, and we had a board member who taught us how to buy and sell on the Internet. So we became Internet salespeople, and book scouts, and what have you, and staying with it, we're getting pretty good. We make enough money to pay the rent. That also created the idea that, gee, one of the things that we could do, because the people buying and selling on the Internet were a couple of people around here who have disabilities. Well, why don't we teach people with disabilities how to be Internet buyers and sellers and be able to work out of their own home? Because a lot of them can't get conventional jobs because they look too funny or they move too slow or they talk too weird, or their illness is such that they could never get up at eight every morning and, you know, work till four, because they never know what their night's going to be like with the nature of their diseases. And so it seemed to me that if we could train people how to do this, it would be a way of really expanding employment for people with disability. And that's what we've started to do, and we needed really a location to do it. We just didn't have any more space. We are a small mall. So I went over and figured out a way to buy a building. So we have a building in which we have low income apartments on the top that pay for the running part on the bottom. I don't have the headaches I have with this downtown small mall paying the rent. And then stood to reason that we would kind of develop our vintage store because we're selling vintage items, you know, mainly antiques and collectibles on the Internet. So why don't we have a vintage store next to our classroom? So the bottom area has a nice classroom and a very nice vintage store. So, you know, we take our metronome or whatever it is that we want to sell and walk it over to the training center and sell it on the Internet. And at the same time, we're training people to be able to develop the skill to do it. And hopefully we'll be able to follow through and help them know how to get inventory and how to carry through the whole business side, because it's complicated, shipping, handling, postage. There's a lot to learn. But we've just finished a class and started a second class. Now these are not large classes because we have four computer banks. We can do about six people at a time. That's what we're doing. Then we happen to have another building that we're leasing. Partly again, we build our services or sort of they develop around a person or personality who needs support. We have a man who fell off a roof, was in a body cast for six, well, actually for years, had been the best mason in Iowa City. Now he's developing into a very quality furniture refinisher and et cetera. And we have a little furniture refinishing shop there, not a little one, but a big one. And it houses also a lawn and garden care company. And of course then we do our own antiques that go over to the antique mall, go out on the internet, you know. Somebody laughs at me and says, "Well, for a Gandhi and you're a pretty big capitalist." But I guess the purpose is not to just exploit the world and fill the world with junk, but recycle a few products, it makes sense. I notice something as you speak. You don't seem to tiptoe around the words. There's a political correctness philosophy that says you can't talk, you can't even point out someone mentally ill or someone like that. And I find too much of that in the world. It's kind of refreshing to hear you talk. It feels to me like the way you talk is more respectful rather than trying to pretend things aren't there. If you knew me during the day or saw me, you know, everybody knows if you've got a mental illness like, "Oh, you're crazy." And, you know, I mean, we joke, and, you know, they call me free Alzheimer or whatever. It is respectful. This political correctness of mentally challenged. You know, my son's retarded. Retarded in the sense that he cannot read and write and conceptually think like you can. Whatever you want to call that doesn't mean he's not a nice person, a great person. He's one of the loveliest kids that I know. He's 38 years old. I call him a kid. But I get by with that language. I don't know why, but nobody seems to be bothered except if I'd go to a meeting or something. And the social workers would get after you. I'm too old to care about it anymore. You can call me politically incorrect and I'll thank you very much, kiss your hand, and go on and do my life the way I believe it should be done. Tom, I'm just so happy that I stumbled on this place, stumbled on the news of you because I think that these are the kind of things that make a city special. If people up in Eau Claire want to take their vacation instead of going to the big tourist sites, want to come down and see the small mall, want to connect here, or if they want to become patrons of your e-commerce center or do some book buying and all that kind of thing, how do they get a hold of you? How do they find where you are? Well, I'm going to say this very slowly to your listeners. We have a wonderful website called uptownbills.org. And if you go into uptownbills.org, there's going to be links to everything if you're into the computer language and computer awareness. Otherwise, I'd encourage you to look for the book, the unlikely celebrity, get your bookstore to order it. That's a wonderful story of Bill and a little bit of the legacy. Be aware of the fact that we will have a major documentary coming out in early 2007. It will probably be on network television somewhere. And if you come to Iowa City, be sure to just look us up. We're easy to find. Check the phone book, etc. If you want to write, it's Thomas Dash Walls at uiowa.edu's, the email address, or 401 South Gilbert, Iowa City Iowa 52240 for the small mall. Thanks for your time, taking out time from cleaning those apartments, and thanks for keeping up the good work. Thank you, Mark. You've been listening to an interview with Tom Walls of the extended dream foundation and uptownbills small mall. You can hear this program again via my website, northernspiritradio.org, where you can find useful links about this program and other programs. Music featured on this program has included "You Have Lived" by Don McLean, "A Simple Man" by Lobo, "What You Do With What You've Got." It's a song by Sycon, performed here by Taggartin Wright, "Bigger Bigger Bigger" by Carol Johnson, and "No Moss" by John McCutchen. The theme music for Spirit in Action is "I Have No Hands but Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. I have no higher call for you than this to love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. Music playing. Music playing.