Strong on UT

"Dreaming is the easy thing," Terry wrote in a 1976 diary entry. Since his time as a doctoral student at UT in the 1960s, he'd been dreaming of a way to preserve the books, magazines, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence and other materials that comprised the history of physical culture around the world and of varsity athletics at UT.

Terry used one such collection, owned by vaudeville strongman, author and collector Ottley Coulter, to write his dissertation. When Coulter died in 1975, Terry was offered the chance to purchase it. "He said, 'If I don't do it, I'll feel bad for the rest of my life. We have to save it,'" Jan recalls.

They did, and Jan and Terry kept collecting, imagining that someday their materials would become the foundation of a research library at a major university like UT.