by Malcolm Butler
Wally Watson is a numbers guy.
He always has been.
The retired Louisiana Tech math professor spent 32 years molding the minds of tomorrow as a mainstay in the university’s math department.
And although he retired in 1998, he hasn’t slowed down.
Now just months away from turning 94 in January, Watson is turning heads.
Why?
Because at 93 years young, Watson can still be spotted pedaling his bicycle along the streets of Ruston.
And that’s nothing new.
Watson’s relationship with two-wheel transportation dates back nearly five decades to the administration of President Jimmy Carter and the energy crisis of the late 1970s.
With gasoline shortages and Americans being encouraged to conserve fuel, Watson decided there was another way to make the short trip from his home to his office in George T. Madison at Louisiana Tech.
He bought a bicycle.
“I think it was a combination of the two,” Watson said of saving fuel and getting exercise. “I enjoyed riding a bicycle, and it was good exercise. And I could get there quicker on a bike than I could in a car.
“I could leave here, and five minutes later, I could be up in the classroom. I could come home for lunch and eat lunch and be back in 30 minutes.”
There was another advantage. No searching for a parking spot. So what began partly as an effort to save gasoline became a way of life.
Watson, a Fort Worth, Texas, native and Texas A&M graduate, came to Louisiana Tech in 1966. Before arriving in Ruston, he worked for IBM on the Gemini space program.
But Watson realized early in his professional career that he wanted to teach, and Louisiana Tech provided that opportunity.
Ruston became home. So did the bicycle.
Watson said he never considered himself a serious cyclist. He didn’t race. He didn’t enter competitions. He didn’t embark on 50- or 100-mile rides.
He simply rode.
“I think probably as far as I’ve ever ridden is maybe about 12 miles at one stretch,” Watson said.
These days, the distances aren’t quite as long, but Watson still gets on his bike regularly.
Three days a week, he makes the trip to meet his coffee-drinking buddies. When temperatures cool, he’ll sometimes head to the Rock Island Greenway for a ride of four or five miles.
Watson believes all those years on two wheels have paid dividends as he’s aged.
“Oh, no doubt it’s helped,” he said.
One of the biggest benefits, Watson said, is balance — something that can become increasingly difficult with age.
“Balance is really a challenge as you get older,” he said. “I think it helps a lot to maintain that. When you get on a bike, you don’t think about what you’re doing. You just step on and go.
“All of those muscles are there that tend to wear out as you get older if you don’t use them.”
Watson has also watched Ruston become a more bicycle-friendly community over the years. He points specifically to the Rock Island Greenway, which allows him to travel across town while largely avoiding busy streets.
“The biggest thing is that Rock Island Greenway,” Watson said. “That’s really great. The sidewalks have gotten a whole lot better. I can get on my bike and go across campus and get on the greenway over by Walmart, and I’m not on any busy roads.”
That’s not to say Watson’s decades of riding have been without a few bumps and bruises.
Or worse.
At 85 years old, Watson was riding home from coffee when he encountered a pickup truck. Watson said he had slowed at an intersection rather than coming to a complete stop when he suddenly saw the vehicle.
He grabbed the brakes. Hard. Watson went forward, flipping over the handlebars.
The crash left him with seven broken ribs, a fractured pelvis and a punctured lung. He spent two or three days in the hospital.
“The biggest thing was the punctured lung,” Watson said. “They had to reinflate my lung.”
Even that wasn’t enough to keep him off the bicycle for good. He recovered. Then he started riding again.
His four children — Lori, Marki, Sam and Joe — have expressed their concerns over the years, particularly after the accident. But they’ve also come to understand that their father is going to ride.
“They’re pretty accepting of it,” Watson said. “They were concerned then, but since then I’ve been back riding, and they just remind me to be careful and that sort of thing.”
His wife, Mary, worries, too.
But apparently the bicycle isn’t the only thing that gives her reason for concern. Watson still gets on the roof of his house with a leaf blower. At 93.
During a recent conversation about getting older, Watson said he told Mary he figured a stroke might eventually be what gets him.
Mary’s prediction was different.
“She said, ‘No, the most likely thing is you’ll fall off the house and kill yourself,'” Watson recalled.
Perhaps that’s the best evidence that Watson hasn’t spent much time worrying about the number attached to his birth certificate.
His current bicycle isn’t anything fancy. Watson estimates he bought it at a neighbor’s garage sale 12 to 15 years ago. But it still gets him where he wants to go.
Just as bicycles have been doing for him since the Carter administration.
Watson turns 94 on Jan. 6.
It doesn’t matter. Chances are Ruston motorists will continue to see the retired math professor doing what he’s done for nearly half a century. Pedaling along.
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