Doctor: Grudge may have sparked graffiti spree
'Rowlow' has been appearing on walls in years since spat
By Don Lehman
dlehman@poststar.com
Updated: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 1:21 AM EDT

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It was 15 or so years ago that the phrase "rowlow" began appearing on bathroom walls at Glens Falls Hospital.

A number of people remarked to Dr. Frank Rollo, then the head of the hospital's anesthesiology department, that the phrase was pronounced the same way as his name.

A few years later, Rollo saw the word written in spray paint on the side of a medical building near Glens Falls Hospital.

A while after that, it was painted on a fence on Bay Street, on a Northway road sign and at one point on the hood of a car owned by another doctor at Glens Falls Hospital, Rollo said. He also received reports of the phrase on a wall at the Sagamore Resort's Trillium restaurant years ago.

"People would come to me all the time and say, 'Guess where I saw it?'" Rollo recalled.

Over the years, he and others affiliated with the hospital became convinced that Rollo was the person to whom the graffiti artist was referring. And Rollo suspected he knew who the spray-painter was.

Rollo long believed the culprit to be Dr. Kenneth Hopper, a local ophthalmologist who had practiced at Glens Falls Hospital for decades.

Rollo said he and Hopper clashed about 20 years ago, when Hopper sought to have his own nurse anesthetist assigned to him and only him at the hospital. Rollo denied the request, and Hopper appealed the denial to the hospital's medical executive committee but was denied there as well.

A short time afterward, the word "rowlow" began appearing around the hospital and around town, and Rollo thought it was Hopper's way of trying to embarrass him.

At one point, after the phrase was painted in big letters on a Glens Falls fence, Rollo called Glens Falls Police, but officers said there was little they could do without catching the person in the act.