“He had a little motorized go-cart that he would get around the house in and near the end was crashing through all these walls and we used to make jokes about him being a bad race car driver. This was a little automated electrical cart. Another source of humor. Humor lost on his freshmen. But he couldn’t handle the breaks and the turns, so there were these huge gashes in the drywall of this lovely home of his where the cart had come flying around. Of course we would tease him about being Mario Andretti. “You can’t even drive the damn cart, how are you going to drive the car?”
“…this 3-wheel motorized wheelchair called “Amigo.” He would laugh his ass off and pretend he was going to run somebody down if they said something he didn’t like…
“Amigo’s a little ride-on, I think it was fairly new at that time, it was an alternative obviously to a wheelchair, to a walker, and he was driving it around the property like a madman. There was a hill in back of the house, he would run that and we were afraid he was going to fly off but he was laughing the entire time.
“He loved it. He scooted around the house with it. He then insisted he would not take a leave of absence. His voice gave out. He would be sitting on the couch with the students, 8 or 10 or 12 students sitting cross-legged on the floor, and he would have a microphone in front of him in order to be heard by the students who were sitting four feet away from him, and only that way he could make himself understood. And he taught, he taught.
Former Political Science Professor