In 1982, with his fame growing in disability circles because he had traveled to the Soviet Union and returned home to Texas to found the short-lived International Spinal Cord Research Foundation, he was appointed to the National Council by President Ronald Reagan. on the Handicapped. Mr. Waldrep eventually became vice chairman of the board, a federal agency that reviews laws and programs that affect people with disabilities. (It was renamed the National Council for the Disabled in 1988.)
Robert L. Burgdorf Jr., a disability rights scholar who served as the council’s attorney, recalled Mr. Waldrep in reviewing and proposing changes to the draft of what became the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. He said in an email that Mr. Waldrep mentioned the legislation in a 1985 memo suggesting that “all new legislation would be packaged under one title, such as ‘The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1986’.”
“In this way,” wrote Mr. Waldrep, “I think the recommended legislative changes can be marketed much more effectively.”
Alvis Kent Waldrep Jr. was born on March 2, 1954 in Austin, Texas. His father was a banker. His mother was a housewife who later worked at an aircraft repair station owned by her husband.
Kent was an all-district and all-county who dropped out of high school in Alvin, Texas, and received a TCU scholarship. He was a reserve in 1973, and although he had started the first game of the 1974 season, he had just finished recovered from a bruised sternum before the Horned Frogs traveled to Birmingham to play Alabama.
Years after the game, he thought about what he could have done to avoid injury.
“I used to think: why didn’t I cut in earlier?” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1989. “Why didn’t I turn the field?” He added: “You can’t rationalize it in any way. You can drive yourself crazy if you think about it.”
He founded the Kent Waldrep National Paralysis Foundation in 1985, and in 1994 he and the Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas at Dallas established the Kent Waldrep Foundation Center for Basic Research on Nerve Growth and Regeneration. It was endowed with over $10 million raised by Mr. Waldrep’s foundation, primarily from an annual black tie dinner.