Bill Hurd: Eyes on Equality

Bill Hurd came to Notre Dame in autumn 1965 from Memphis. He majored in electrical engineering and was a world class sprinter on the track team and a jazz saxophone virtuoso. After graduation, he became a businessman and a physician.

This installment of Signed, the Irish is part of a yearlong celebration in honor of Thompson’s legacy and the extraordinary contributions by our Black student-athletes.

By the time I was a senior at Memphis’ all-Black Manassas High School in 1965, I had run the 100-yard dash in 9.3 seconds, then an unofficial national high school record. 

I had won consecutive citywide math contests, completed two advanced placement courses, been elected senior class president, and become the cadet lieutenant colonel/battalion commander of the National Defense Cadet Corps, similar to Junior ROTC. 

I graduated fourth in a senior class of 367. The valedictorian and salutatorian positions were held by Carol and Cathryn Branham, the twin daughters of my dad’s sister. 

Their story and mine made the cover of the popular JET magazine in 1965. I had long had my mind set on MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for college. 

My SAT scores were just average on the verbal section, but near perfect on the math section and on the Advanced Placement calculus test. 

So I was all set to attend MIT on a full academic scholarship However, because of my athletic performance, I had begun receiving recruitment letters from major universities. Ultimately, I received more than fifty such letters and was courted by the likes of West Point; UCLA, where alumnus and 1960 Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson recruited me; and Villanova, a track and field powerhouse in the 1960s and 1970s that had Frank Budd, a former world-class sprinter, recruit me personally. 

And then there was Notre Dame. The Notre Dame track coach was Alex Wilson, a 1928 Canadian Olympic silver medalist in the 4×400-meter relay. He was a very intelligent, soft-spoken, whitehaired, tea-drinking gentleman, who knew all the nuances of coaching. And he personally came to Memphis to watch me run in a track meet and recruit me. 

I was very impressed that a head track coach would travel all the way from Notre Dame just to see me compete. Ultimately the choice was easy. My two sisters and brother all had gone to college on my dad’s salary from the US Post Office.

By accepting a full athletic scholarship to Notre Dame, I knew that I would be lessening the financial burden on my family while getting the benefit of a university with a nice mixture of high academic standards and national athletic prominence. 

As a Southern Black kid, I had spent all my formative years in the segregated environment of Memphis, except for summers, which my siblings and I would spend in Kansas City, Missouri, at the home of my grandmother, Avar Pipkin. 

So at first, Notre Dame was somewhat of a culture shock. Looking back, I concluded that the Notre Dame housing staff had purposely selected as my freshman roommate a student who had had limited dealings with Black folk. 

Mike Holtzapfel was from Ironton, Ohio, a small town on the Kentucky-Ohio border, and was on the football team. Mike preferred to sleep with the window open in the dead of the winter and would have his radio blasting with what sounded to me like hillbilly music. By the end of the first semester, he was listening to Marvin Gaye and I, with the window still open, had become acclimated to the cold South Bend winters. 

There were a couple of white student-athletes from Memphis who were upperclassmen and whom I perceived as not wanting to acknowledge me, even if our paths crossed on campus. Because I entered Notre Dame as a highly recruited athlete, there was a lot of fanfare and also a lot of expectation. 

I really felt like there was some degree of discomfort or resentment of all this among my fellow Memphians. There were a dozen or so Black students in my 1965 freshman class of 1,600. 

As we got to know each other, I became intrigued with the stories told by the Black students who grew up in New York City, where their exposure to more worldly and sophisticated events and activities exceeded mine both in volume and variety. 

But coming from all-Black Manassas, I had nothing to be ashamed of. I felt just as prepared to succeed at Notre Dame as anyone else—maybe more so. 

The first evidence of this was my being able to skip Calculus I, the content of which I had already covered in an AP course at Manassas. I have many fond memories from my first two years at Notre Dame, and three Black upperclassmen stand out in them. 

Frank Yates (Class of 1967) was a senior from Memphis’s Father Bertrand High School who donated to me his notes from previous courses in differential equations and physics. Frank was always there to lend his support and encouragement. Upon graduation from Notre Dame with a near-perfect grade point average, he was selected a Fulbright Scholar. He subsequently received his doctorate in statistical psychology at the University of Michigan and became a tenured professor there. 

Ron Homer (Class of 1968), who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, was the kind of guy you’d just love to hang out with. He was one of those New Yorkers who seemed to have all the answers. Ron started out as a pre-med major but transferred to psychology, got an MBA, and eventually became a bank president in Boston. 

The third Black upperclassman was Alan Page, an All-American defensive end at Notre Dame and my designated barber. He was one of the first Black athletes to sport a shaven head. Alan graduated to NFL stardom with the Minnesota Vikings and, after his retirement, was elected to the NFL Hall of Fame. After law school he became the Honorable Alan Page, the first Black justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. 

I started out as a math major but switched to electrical engineering. I managed to organize my study schedule, be an important part of the track team, and continue performing music. 

In 1965, the NCAA still prohibited freshmen from intercollegiate competition, so Coach Wilson scheduled me to run in a select number of high-profile Amateur Athletic Union invitational track meets. 

On one occasion, I placed second in the 60-yard dash in the Milrose Games at Madison Square Garden. It was my first trip ever to New York City. 

I recall another trip that involved the entire Notre Dame track team. In the spring of 1967, the team was traveling by bus from South Bend to Williamsburg, Virginia, where the College of William & Mary hosted the William & Mary Relays, a meet where I eventually would receive the Most Outstanding Performer award. 

Because of the lengthy bus ride, we stopped overnight in rural Virginia. I was the only Black team member on this trip. The bus pulled up to a small motel and all fifteen or so of us gathered in the small lobby as Coach Wilson engaged the desk clerk. The clerk’s eyes scanned our faces and his gaze seemed to focus on mine a bit longer than on any of the others. 

After a moment of silence, the clerk announced that “the Negro” couldn’t stay there. 

Coach Wilson quickly replied, “If he cannot stay, no one will stay.” 

In the end we went to another motel with no problems.

One of the great by-products of the college experience is lifelong friendships. Bob Cann, from the Bronx, New York, was the only other Black electrical engineering major in my class and he is, to this day, one of my best friends. He also is the godfather of my older son, Bill Jr. 

In addition to getting our bachelor’s degrees together from Notre Dame in 1969, Bill and I got our master’s degrees from MIT’s Sloan School of Management together in 1972. He and I both are physicians, but we each started medical school without knowing the other was going to apply. 

I can proudly say that I played football at Notre Dame, even if for only one season. I hadn’t played high school football because my dad was concerned about my safety. He figured that, because I was the city’s fastest athlete, there would be competition to injure me. 

Similarly, at Notre Dame, Coach Wilson was not thrilled at the thought of my suffering an injury just before the beginning of the indoor track season. 

One evening, during a spring 1967 training workout in the Athletic and Convocation Center, where the track and football teams worked out in close proximity, football coach Ara Parseghian approached me. 

After introducing himself—as if I didn’t already know who he was—he proceeded to ask me if I’d like to be a part of the Notre Dame football team. 

Without hesitation I said yes. 

He told me to enjoy an abbreviated summer and report early to campus before the fall semester. It seemed like every guy on the team was six-feet, four-inches tall and 240 pounds, and the only advantage I had was my speed. 

My jersey number was 14, and I played wide receiver. 

I didn’t get a lot of playing time because I was on the second team, behind the starting wide receiver, All-American Jim Seymour. 

Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed being a small part of the mystical Notre Dame football history. 

It was an amazing feeling to run through the tunnel onto the Notre Dame Stadium playing field with my teammates amid the gameday atmosphere. Besides Seymour, other notable teammates were Bob “Rocky” Bleier, Terry Hanratty, and Bob Kuechenberg, all of whom went on to brilliant NFL careers. 

Social life at Notre Dame for me was out of the ordinary. 

I was often treated like royalty, being a star athlete in a school where star athletes are worshiped and plentiful. 

Notre Dame did not become coed until I left, but Saint Mary’s College provided opportunities to meet girls for those inclined. There were many unsuccessful attempts to be set up for blind dates with girls from Saint Mary’s who wanted a date with a star athlete. 

I was not comfortable dating white girls because of the way I had grown up in segregated Memphis society, where interracial dating was viewed negatively. Besides, I would have more time to focus on my studies, track and field, and music. But undoubtedly, all of this attention was a huge ego boost. 

By my senior year, I had been selected Notre Dame Athlete of the Year 1968; become the track team captain; held the American record in the indoor 300-yard dash; held several Notre Dame track records, two of which still stand today (100 meters in 10.1 seconds and 200 meters in 20.3 seconds); and won the outstanding saxophone soloist award at the 1967 Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival. 

There were other honors as well. 

Notre Dame President Father Theodore Hesburgh nominated me to be a Rhodes Scholar. I recall going to meet him in his office in the Administration Building under the famous Golden Dome to get prepped for the national Rhodes Scholar selection process. I vividly recall flying home to Memphis and my dad driving me to Sewanee College in Sewanee, Tennessee, for the final interview. 

About a year after graduating from Notre Dame, I ended up at the school I had dreamed of attending as a teenager. 

My wife, Rhynette, and I were married in June of 1970, and that fall I enrolled at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. 

By May 1972, I would earn my master’s degree from MIT, Rhynette would receive her MAT from Harvard, and our first son, Bill Jr., would be born at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Brighton near Boston. We didn’t have lots of money, but we were happy grad school grads and proud young new parents. 

We wanted to move to a warmer climate, so I accepted a consulting job in Nashville, with a requirement that I teach management courses in the business department at Tennessee State University, and Rhynette accepted a position in the English department at Fisk University. 

I also got involved with the incubation of minority business ventures in Nashville. Many of my clients were in the healthcare field, including several Black physicians. One outcome of this was the establishment of a minority–owned and operated medical center. 

I was a co-founder and investor in this venture, which eventually generated enough income to help finance my medical school education. The idea of becoming a physician came from several motivations. I wanted to be my own boss and move at my own pace. I also had seen how physicians were able to use their training and skills to heal sick people and make them better. 

I was constantly searching for a discipline that could hold my interest but would still allow me to think analytically like the engineer that I was. I entered Meharry Medical College in the fall of 1976 at age twenty-nine. Because of previous investments and business ventures I did not have to worry about income, so I could focus on med school. I also worked as an adjunct professor for Fisk University and had a steady income from frequent music gigs. 

Otherwise, med school consumed most of my waking hours. It was an exciting and fulfilling time in my life. There was a feeling of learning something new every day. I could see parallels between functions of the human body and specific engineering principles. 

At med school graduation in 1980, I was matched with the University of Tennessee ophthalmology program in Memphis, becoming one of the first Blacks admitted to that residency program. 

I had been to Notre Dame, MIT, and Meharry, but the University of Tennessee experience turned out to be the most difficult one, in part because of isolated efforts to make life hard for me. I was constantly dealing with racial issues, primarily generated by white, Southern physicians not accustomed to working with Black physicians of equal education, training, and skills. 

Nevertheless, before completing my residency I was able to finish the design and construction of a device that measures certain inner parts of the human eye. I secured US and foreign patents on this device, the slit-lamp mountable intraocular biometer. 

In 1982, while I was a resident physician under the guidance of the renowned Dr. Jerre Freeman, I began participating in medical missions to medically underserved countries. Our first trip, to Ometepec in southern Mexico, was the beginning of a long series of mission projects in Mexico, Brazil, China, South Africa, Senegal, and Madagascar. 

Over almost twenty years—until safety concerns following the 9/11 terror attacks brought them to a halt—I and my mission colleagues restored sight to thousands of patients, and shared and exchanged knowledge of surgical techniques and medical diagnostic and therapeutic procedures with foreign host physicians. 

In 1982, our second son, Ryan, was born. In 2005, Ryan also became a Notre Dame alumnus, graduating with a double major in computer science and Japanese, with honors. Now thirty, he has secured his dream job as a visual effects artist and computer animator for Digital Domain in Los Angeles, after having worked in Bejing and Tokyo for four years. 

Most recently, Ryan received credit as a visual effects artist on the blockbuster film Iron Man 3. In 2010, Rhynette, who not only earned a PhD in English literature at Vanderbilt but also a law degree at the University of Memphis and became a practicing lawyer, was appointed by the governor of Tennessee to replace the retiring D’Army Bailey on the Eighth Division circuit court. 

In 2012, she returned to the bench, replacing the ailing Judge Kay Robilio in the Fifth Division circuit court. After twenty-seven years in private medical practice, I have recently considered retirement. But because I still enjoy practicing ophthalmology and my surgical skills have not diminished, I have compromised by working shorter hours. This allows more time for golf and for my favorite pastime, music.