TECH HISTORY
FRIENDS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKBONE
HOW TIM ANDREWS GRADUATED FROM TECH BEFORE THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT
BY: ANN W. HOEVEL, STC 98
Tim Andrews, ARCH 74 was smart enough to get into Georgia Tech in 1969. The only real question for his parents and his doctors was, could he do it?
Andrews used a wheelchair because of complications from hemophilia damage to his joints, but mostly to his left knee. Advancements in medication and surgical options helped him walk later in life, but as a freshman, he used a wheelchair.
“When I told my parents I wanted to go to Georgia Tech, their response was, understandably, ‘I don’t know if you can do that in a wheelchair and not get pressured’,” Andrews says. “So we talked to my doctors, and their response was, ‘You can’t succeed doing that, there’s no way.’”
“So, I don’t know, I think that made me more determined,” he says with a chuckle.
After Andrews applied and got accepted, he went with his parents to meet Frank Roper, Georgia Tech’s registrar. “He was the one person at Georgia Tech who said, ‘Let’s let him try.’” Roper arranged for two students to help Andrews get from class to class for the first quarter of the school year.
But Andrews gives credit for the next four years— and the fact that he graduated— entirely to four friends who helped him get to class, rented apartments with him, and kept him in good spirits when finals occasionally went bad.
John White, MCP 79, ARCH 75, Robert Hauch, IE 73, Bio 77, Joe Steed, BC 74, and Ken Bryson, ARCH 75, were always there for him, Andrews says.
“If it wasn’t for these guys stepping up, I might have given up,” he says. “I owe my degree to them.” Andrews calls his friends’ help “heroic,” and wants to share their story with the Georgia Tech community.
“John, Ken, and Joe would often help me get up and down the stairs of the architecture building,” Andrews says, by carrying his wheelchair up as he used the handrail to pull himself up, or, if they were really late, carrying him up the stairs.
Hauch was not only a great friend to Andrews, they worked together in the mail room of the library and later shared an off-campus apartment. “At any time, he was willing to throw the wheelchair in the trunk of his car and we would be off.”
White was one of the students Roper asked to help Andrews. “You will not find a better person on the planet than John White,” Andrews says. “John helped me from the first day of classes to the last day that I went to a class. The whole time.”
The Campus Gauntlet
During his freshman year, Andrews lived at home with his parents. They would drop him off at North Avenue and Ferst Drive, by the foreign languages building.
He would wheel his chair to the library, take the elevator down to the basement, exit the building through the mail room, and then travel through the classroom building where industrial management was housed. Andrews would then take the elevator in that building to get to the level of the physics building—at least a 12-foot elevation rise from where he started on North Avenue.
Bear in mind, that’s just going from point A to point B.
What Tech grad can forget cross campus dashes between classes in the heat of August and September? Or wading through rushing water when the storm drains failed during springtime downpours? The sidewalks he used didn’t have curb cuts in them until they were required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed in 1990.
Now imagine the obstacle course Andrews and his friends had to complete, pushing or carrying a wheelchair, just to fulfill the basic first year course load.
Once in the architecture building, things were easily manageable for his freshman studio classes. “Once I got onto the floor of the classroom, there really weren’t any barriers,” he says. “Back then you had design lab for three hours. So I slung myself out of the wheelchair and onto the drafting stool to work at the drafting table.”
Whereas the architecture building had classrooms with big drafting tables, taking a structural engineering final wasn’t as comfortable, Andrews says. “I had enough mobility to move myself out of the wheelchair and into a student desk,” he says. “It would have been nice if I didn’t have to do that because obviously it’s a risk of falling. But, you’re not going to take a three-hour final [in a wheelchair] with the paper on your knee.”
Things got more challenging as Andrews progressed through the
architecture program. Sophomore classes were on the second floor, and junior and senior classes on the third floor.
“John, Ken, or Joe would wait for me at the bottom of the stairs. And they would carry my wheelchair up. Sometimes they walked me up the stairs using brute force.”
Stephen Sprigle teaches an industrial design class about assistive technologies
Sprigle researches accessible technologies for people living with disabilities, and specifically he works with seating, posture assistance, and wheelchairs. He often rides around campus in a wheelchair, surrounded by students, testing their latest prototypes.
“I know exactly the chair he was in,” Sprigle says. “It was probably an Everest & Jennings Universal, or an Everest & Jennings Premier.” It was an inefficient wheelchair with a vinyl sling seat, a vinyl sling back, solid tires, and a frame of chrome-plated steel.
“Now, we build chairs to order,” Sprigle says. “Wheelchairs are an extension of your functional being. Some people use their wheelchair—and we measured this—10, 12, 14 hours a day. You have to get one that fits.”
Liz Persaud of Tools for Life demonstrates an accessible desk at the center for Inclusive Design and Innovation
Modern wheelchairs incorporate several new technological enhancements as well, he says. “Power wheelchairs are essentially computers. We’ve developed both seat elevators and power standing chairs that can still drive when the user is standing or elevated, and that changes the dynamics for stability and safety.”
Add-on motors are a popular advancement for modern wheelchairs, allowing users to take a break from pushing wheels or move a little faster if it starts to rain. “It’s just a little wheel that sits behind your wheelchair or in front of your foot rest, and you can raise it off the ground when you don’t need it,” Sprigle says. “And it exists because we can now make really small motors that are really efficient.”
Learning about the challenges wheelchair users face is a valuable skill for industrial design students entering the workforce, Sprigle says. Wheelchair projects are difficult because most of his students haven’t experienced being in one, he says.
“You’re designing and building and struggling for something you really can’t test well, that you have no experiential base for, and that changes the design process, fundamentally. That’s one of the things that makes it both challenging and humbling.”
Stair-climbing wheelchairs are also challenging and humbling, Sprigle says.
“There have been 50 years of people trying to design stair-climbing wheelchairs, and there’s been 50 years of failure. And the reason is not because you can’t design a wheelchair to climb stairs. It’s that those wheelchairs are not good for anything else.”
For the most part, people who use wheelchairs opt for machines that help them get around on flat terrain. Thanks to the ADA, elevators are a far more convenient option than stair-climbing chairs, Sprigle says.
Fortitude and Community
“You know, the great thing about Georgia Tech, and I’ve never seen this at any other university, is that you get two degrees,” Andrews says. “You get one degree in your major, and you get another degree in psychological backbone.”
This robot, in the REARLab, measures the effort required to propel manual wheelchairs
The attitude he and his classmates shared was “Yeah, I can do that, I can turn that situation around,” he says. As a result, Andrews says Georgia Tech students didn’t hesitate to help him when he needed it. Students often opened doors for him or helped him stand up, Andrews says. One of the fraternities even volunteered to build him a ramp so he could get between buildings connected by stairs.
Liz Persaud, a program and outreach manager for the Tools for Life, Georgia’s Assistive Technology Act Program (part of the
Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation), also uses a wheelchair, and remembers getting help from passers-by before the ADA. “I was born in 1979, and growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s. When you went out, there would be lots of businesses where there was a step to get in the door, or the entrance would not be as accessible as it is today,” she says.
“And I can remember strangers asking me, ‘Can I help you?’ And it would be like an everyday conversation. I would say, ‘Oh yeah, do you mind popping my front wheel over the step?’” She doesn’t often ask for help these days. In fact, she’s the one helping others.
Persaud helps Georgia Tech students who live with disabilities navigate the experience of being a student. She uses a wheelchair because of a neuromuscular disability that includes spinal muscular atrophy.
She shows students with similar disabilities how she uses voice-controlled apps and programs to navigate her surroundings. She also shares advice for ways to use wheelchairs in social situations.
“When I am presenting as a professional, when I’m doing trainings, I elevate my chair. I can’t tell you how things changed when I got a chair that had that elevate feature on it. The way people changed how they interacted with me in social settings was wild,” she says.
“When I elevate, and I’m at eye level with other people. I also noticed that people can hear me better, since physically it’s challenging for me to project loudly,” she says.
Like Andrews, Persaud sees something very special about the Georgia Tech community.
“Everyone here is unbelievably intelligent,” she says, “and it takes intelligence to see beyond some of those weeds out there and get to the heart of things pretty quickly. Our students see that a person with a disability also has a brain, a personality, and similar interests in common.”
Persaud says it’s thanks to Tech grads like Andrews that the public conversation about disabilities is changing. “Now it’s like, ‘Who cares that they roll around instead of walk, who cares that it takes them an extra second to get their words out?
They’re valuable and they have something to say and, you know, let’s have smart, intelligent conversations about changing the world together’,” she says.