Bill Sackter
| William Sackter | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 13, 1913 St. Paul, Minnesota |
| Died | June 16, 1983 (aged 70) Iowa City, Iowa |
William "Bill" Sackter (April 13, 1913 – June 16, 1983) was a mentally disabled American man whose fame as the subject of two television movies and a feature-length documentary helped change national attitudes on persons with disabilities.
Bill Sackter was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1913, the son of Sam and Mary Sackter, Russian Jewish immigrants who ran a grocery store. When Sackter was 7 years old, his father died from complications of the Spanish Flu. It was 1920, and Bill was having difficulty learning in school, and after taking a mandatory intelligence test, he was classified as "subnormal". The State of Minnesota determined that he would be a "burden on society" so he was placed in the Faribault State School for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic. Sackter never saw his mother or two older sisters, Sarah and Alice, again, remaining there for the next 44 years. He was diagnosed as intellectually disabled, although diagnoses performed decades later would prove his intelligence was near normal. He was never taught to read or write or even how to use a telephone.
In 1964, when new light was being shed on the treatment of the mentally ill and disabled, Sackter was moved to a halfway house and worked odd jobs to support himself. He became a handyman at a country club, where Barry Morrow, a filmmaker, and his wife Bev, befriended him. Morrow began slowly to make life a bit more comfortable for Bill, getting him new dentures and becoming his friend. Morrow became his guardian, and when he took a post at the University of Iowa, Sackter followed him to Iowa City, and became the sole proprietor of Wild Bill's Coffee Shop on the campus, in which he excelled.
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