              Who Are the Blind Who Lead the Blind
                          INTRODUCTION

     The National Federation of the Blind has become by far the
most significant force in the affairs of the blind today, and its
actions have had an impact on many other groups and programs. The
Federation's President, Marc Maurer, radiates confidence and
persuasiveness. He says,  If I can find twenty people who care
about a thing, then we can get it done. And if there are two
hundred, two thousand, or twenty thousand well, that's even better. 
The National Federation of the Blind is a civil rights movement
with all that the term implies.

     President Maurer says,  You can't expect to obtain freedom by
having somebody else hand it to you. You have to do the job
yourself. The French could not have won the American Revolution for
us. That would merely have shifted the governing authority from one
colonial power to another. So, too, we the blind are the only ones
who can win freedom for the blind, which is both frightening and
reassuring. If we don't get out and do what we must, there is no
one to blame but ourselves. We have control of the essential
elements. 

     Although there are in the United States at the present time
many organizations and agencies <MI>for  the blind, there is only
one National Federation of the blind. This organization was
established in 1940 when the blind of seven states Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and California
sent delegates to its first convention at Wilkes- Barre,
Pennsylvania. Since that time progress has been rapid and steady.
The Federation is recognized by blind men and women throughout the
entire country as their primary means of joint expression; and
today, with active affiliates in every state and the District of
Columbia, it is the primary voice of the nation's blind.

     To explain this spectacular growth, three questions must be
asked and answered: (1) What are the conditions in the general
environment of the blind which have impelled them to organize? (2)
What are the purpose, the belief, the philosophy of the National
Federation of the Blind? (3) Who are its leaders, and what are
their qualifications to understand and solve the problems of
blindness? Even a brief answer to these questions is instructive.

     When the Federation came into being in 1940, the outlook for
the blind was certainly not bright. The nation's welfare system was
so discouraging to individual initiative that those who were forced
to accept public assistance had little hope of ever achieving
self-support again, and those who sought competitive employment in
regular industry or the professions found most of the doors barred
against them. The universal goodwill expressed toward the blind was
not the wholesome goodwill of respect felt toward an equal; it was
the misguided goodwill of pity felt toward an inferior. In effect
the system said to the blind,  Sit on the sidelines of life. This
game is not for you. If you have creative talents, we are sorry,
but we cannot use them.  The Federation came into being to combat
these expressions of discrimination and to promote new ways of
thought concerning blindness, and although great progress has been
made toward the achievement of these goals, much still remains to
be done.

     The Federation believes that blind people are essentially
normal and that blindness in itself is not a mental or
psychological handicap. It can be reduced to the level of a mere
physical nuisance. Legal, economic, and social discrimination based
upon the false assumption that the blind are somehow different from
the sighted must be abolished, and equality of opportunity made
available to blind people. Because of their personal experience
with blindness, the blind themselves are best qualified to lead the
way in solving their own problems, but the general public should be
asked to participate in finding solutions. Upon these fundamentals
the National Federation of the Blind predicates its philosophy.

     As for the leadership of the organization, all of the officers
and members of the Board of Directors are blind, and all give
generously of their time and resources in promoting the work of the
Federation. The Board consists of seventeen elected members, five
of whom are the constitutional officers of the organization. These
members of the Board of Directors represent a wide cross section of
the blind population of the United States. Their backgrounds are
different, and their experiences vary widely; but they are drawn
together by the common bond of having met blindness individually
and successfully in their own lives and by their united desire to
see other blind people have the opportunity to do likewise. A
profile of the leadership of the organization shows why it is so
effective and demonstrates the progress made by blind people during
the past half- century for in the story of the lives of these
leaders can be found the greatest test of the Federation's
philosophy. The cumulative record of their individual achievements
is an overwhelming proof, leading to an inescapable conclusion.

                      DR. JACOBUS tenBROEK 
Author, Jurist, Professor, Founder of the National Federation of
the Blind

     The moving force in the founding of the National Federation of
the Blind (and its spiritual and intellectual father) was Jacobus
tenBroek. Born in 1911, young tenBroek (the son of a prairie
homesteader in Canada) lost the sight of one eye as the result of
a bow-and-arrow accident at the age of seven. His remaining
eyesight deteriorated until at the age of fourteen he was totally
blind. Shortly afterward he and his family traveled to Berkeley so
that he could attend the California School for the Blind. Within
three years he was an active part of the local organization of the
blind.

     By 1934 he had joined with Dr. Newel Perry and others to form
the California Council of the Blind, which later became the the
National Federation of the Blind of California. This organization
was a prototype for the nationwide federation that tenBroek would
form six years later.

     Even a cursory glance at his professional career showed the
absurdity of the idea that blindness means incapacity. The same
year the Federation was founded (1940) Jacobus tenBroek received
his doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of California,
completed a year as Brandeis Research Fellow at Harvard Law School,
and was appointed to the faculty of the University of Chicago Law
School.

     Two years later he began his teaching career at the University
of California at Berkeley, moving steadily up through the ranks to
become full professor in 1953 and chairman of the department of
speech in 1955. In 1963 he accepted an appointment as professor of
political science.

     During this period Professor tenBroek published several books
and more than fifty articles and monographs in the fields of
welfare, government, and law establishing a reputation as one of
the nation's foremost scholars on matters of constitutional law.
One of his books, Prejudice, War, and the Constitution, won the
Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association
in 1955 as the best book of the year on government and democracy.
Other books are California's Dual System of Family Law (1964), Hope
Deferred: Public Welfare and the Blind (1959), and The Antislavery
Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment (1951) revised and republished
in 1965 as Equal Under Law.

     In the course of his academic career Professor tenBroek was a
fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
at Palo Alto and was twice the recipient of fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation. In 1947 he earned the degree of S.J.D. from
Harvard Law School. In addition, he was awarded honorary degrees by
two institutions of higher learning.

     Dr. tenBroek's lifelong companion was his devoted wife Hazel.
Together they raised three children and worked inseparably on
research, writing, and academic and Federation concerns. Mrs.
tenBroek still continues as an active member of the organized blind
movement.

     In 1950 Dr. tenBroek was made a member of the California State
Board of Social Welfare by Governor Earl Warren. Later reappointed
to the board three times, he was elected its chairman in 1960 and
served in that capacity until 1963.

     The brilliance of Jacobus tenBroek's career led some skeptics
to suggest that his achievements were beyond the reach of what they
called the  ordinary blind person.  What tenBroek recognized in
himself was not that he was exceptional, but that he was normal
that his blindness had nothing to do with whether he could be a
successful husband and father, do scholarly research, write a book,
make a speech, guide students engaged in social action movements
and causes, or otherwise lead a productive life.
     In any case, the skeptics' theory has been refuted by the
success of the thousands of blind men and women who have put this
philosophy of normality to work in their own lives during the past
fifty years.

     Jacobus tenBroek died of cancer at the age of fifty-six in
1968. His successor, Kenneth Jernigan, in a memorial address, said
truly of him:  The relationship of this man to the organized blind
movement, which he brought into being in the United States and
around the world, was such that it would be equally accurate to say
that the man was the embodiment of the movement or that the
movement was the expression of the man.
 
     For tens of thousands of blind Americans over more than a
quarter of a century, he was leader, mentor, spokesman, and
philosopher. He gave to the organized blind movement the force of
his intellect and the shape of his dreams. He made it the symbol of
a cause barely imagined before his coming: the cause of self-
expression, self-direction, and self- sufficiency on the part of
blind people. Step by step, year by year, action by action, he made
that cause succeed. 

                        KENNETH JERNIGAN 
                 Teacher, Writer, Administrator

     Kenneth Jernigan has been a leader in the National Federation
of the Blind for more than thirty-five years. He was President
(with one brief interruption) from 1968 until July of 1986.
Although Jernigan is no longer President of the Federation, he
continues to be one of its principal leaders. He works closely with
the President, and he continues to be loved and respected by tens
of thousands members and non-members of the Federation, both blind
and sighted.

     Born in 1926, Kenneth Jernigan grew up on a farm in central
Tennessee. He received his elementary and secondary education at
the school for the blind in Nashville. After high school Jernigan
managed a furniture shop in Beech Grove, Tennessee, making all
furniture and operating the business.

     In the fall of 1945 Jernigan matriculated at Tennessee
Technological University in Cookeville. Active in campus affairs
from the outset, he was soon elected to office in his class and to
important positions in other student organizations. Jernigan
graduated with honors in 1948 with a B.S. degree in Social Science.
In 1949 he received a master's degree in English from Peabody
College in Nashville, where he subsequently completed additional
graduate study. While at Peabody he was a staff writer for the
school newspaper, co-founder of an independent literary magazine,
and a member of the Writers Club. In 1949 he received the Captain
Charles W. Browne Award, at that time presented annually by the
American Foundation for the Blind to the nation's outstanding blind
student.

     Jernigan then spent four years as a teacher of English at the
Tennessee School for the Blind. During this period he became active
in the Tennessee Association of the Blind (now the National
Federation of the Blind of Tennessee). He was elected to the vice
presidency of the organization in 1950 and to the presidency in
1951. In that position he planned the 1952 annual convention of the
National Federation of the Blind, which was held in Nashville, and
he has been planning national conventions for the Federation ever
since. It was in 1952 that Jernigan was first elected to the NFB
Board of Directors.

     In 1953 he was appointed to the faculty of the California
Orientation Center for the Blind in Oakland, where he played a
major role in developing the best program of its kind then in
existence.

     From 1958 until 1978, he served as Director of the Iowa State
Commission for the Blind. In this capacity he was responsible for
administering state programs of rehabilitation, home teaching, home
industries, an orientation and adjustment center, and library
services for the blind and physically handicapped. The improvements
made in services to the blind of Iowa under the Jernigan
administration have never before or since been equaled anywhere in
the country.

     In 1960 the Federation presented Jernigan with its Newel Perry
Award for outstanding accomplishment in services for the blind. In
1968 Jernigan was given a Special Citation by the President of the
United States. Harold Russell, the chairman of the President's
Committee on Employment of the Handicapped, came to Des Moines to
present the award. He said:  If a person must be blind, it is
better to be blind in Iowa than anywhere else in the nation or in
the world. This statement,  the citation went on to say,  sums up
the story of the Iowa Commission for the Blind during the Jernigan
years and more pertinently of its Director, Kenneth Jernigan. That
narrative is much more than a success story. It is the story of
high aspiration magnificently accomplished of an impossible dream
become reality. 

     Jernigan has received too many honors and awards to enumerate
individually, including honorary doctorates from three institutions
of higher education. He has also been asked to serve as a special
consultant to or member of numerous boards and advisory bodies. The
most notable among these are: member of the National Advisory
Committee on Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
(appointed by the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare),
special consultant on Services for the Blind (appointed by the
Federal Commissioner of Rehabilitation), advisor on museum programs
for blind visitors to the Smithsonian Institution, and special
advisor to the White House Conference on Library and Information
Services (appointed by President Gerald Ford).

     Kenneth Jernigan's writings and speeches on blindness are
better known and have touched more lives than those of any other
individual writing today. On July 23, 1975, he spoke before the
National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and his address was
broadcast live throughout the nation on National Public Radio.
Through the years he has appeared repeatedly on network radio and
television interview programs including the  Today Show,  the 
Tomorrow Show,  and the  Larry King Show. 

     In 1978 Jernigan moved to Baltimore to become Executive
Director of the American Brotherhood for the Blind and Director of
the National Center for the Blind. As President of the National
Federation of the Blind at that time, he led the organization
through the most impressive period of growth in its history. The
creation and development of the National Center for the Blind and
the expansion of the NFB into the position of being the most
influential voice and force in the affairs of the blind stand as
the culmination of Kenneth Jernigan's lifework and a tribute to his
brilliance and commitment to the blind of this nation.

     Jernigan's dynamic wife Mary Ellen is an active member of the
Federation. Although sighted, she works with dedication in the
movement and is known and loved by thousands of Federationists
throughout the country.

     Speaking at a convention of the National Federation of the
Blind, Jernigan said of the organization and its philosophy (and
also of his own philosophy):  As we look ahead, the world holds
more hope than gloom for us and, best of all, the future is in our
own hands. For the first time in history we can be our own masters
and do with our lives what we will; and the sighted (as they learn
who we are and what we are) can and will work with us as equals and
partners. In other words we are capable of full membership in
society, and the sighted are capable of accepting us as such and,
for the most part, they want to.

     We want no Uncle Toms no sellouts, no apologists, no
rationalizers; but we also want no militant hellraisers or
unbudging radicals. One will hurt our cause as much as the other.
We must win true equality in society, but we must not dehumanize
ourselves in the process; and we must not forget the graces and
amenities, the compassions and courtesies which comprise
civilization itself and distinguish people from animals and life
from existence.

     Let people call us what they will and say what they please
about our motives and our movement. There is only one way for the
blind to achieve first-class citizenship and true equality. It must
be done through collective action and concerted effort; and that
means the National Federation of the Blind. There is no other way,
and those who say otherwise are either uninformed or unwilling to
face the facts. We are the strongest force in the affairs of the
blind today, and we must also recognize the responsibilities of
power and the fact that we must build a world that is worth living
when the war is over and, for that matter, while we are fighting
it. In short, we must use both love and a club, and we must have
sense enough to know when to do which long on compassion, short on
hatred; and, above all, not using our philosophy as a cop-out for
cowardice or inaction or rationalization. We know who we are and
what we must do and we will never go back. The public is not
against us. Our determination proclaims it; our gains confirm it;
our humanity demands it.

                          MARC MAURER 
                     Attorney and Executive

     Born in 1951, Marc Maurer was the second in a family of six
children. His blindness was caused by overexposure to oxygen after
his premature birth, but he and his parents were determined that
this should not prevent him from living a full and normal life.

     He began his education at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving
School, where he became an avid Braille reader. In the fifth grade
he returned home to Boone, Iowa, where he attended parochial
schools. During high school (having taken all the courses in the
curriculum) he simultaneously took classes at the junior college.
Maurer ran three different businesses before finishing high school:
a paper route, a lawn care business, and an enterprise producing
and marketing maternity garter belts designed by his mother. This
last venture was so successful that his younger brother took over
the business when Maurer left home.

     In the summer of 1969, after graduating from high school,
Maurer enrolled as a student at the Orientation and Adjustment
Center of the Iowa Commission for the Blind and attended his first
convention of the NFB. He was delighted to discover in both places
that blind people and what they thought mattered. This was a new
phenomenon in his experience, and it changed his life. Kenneth
Jernigan was Director of the Iowa Commission for the Blind at the
time, and Maurer soon grew to admire and respect him. When Maurer
expressed an interest in overhauling a car engine, the Commission
for the Blind purchased the necessary equipment. Maurer completed
that project and actually worked for a time as an automobile
mechanic. He believes today that mastering engine repair played an
important part in changing his attitudes about blindness.

     Maurer graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame
in 1974. As an undergraduate he took an active part in campus life,
including election to the Honor Society. Then he enrolled at the
University of Indiana School of Law, where he received his Doctor
of Jurisprudence in 1977.

     Marc Maurer was elected President of the Student Division of
the National Federation of the Blind in 1971 and re-elected in 1973
and 1975. Also in 1971 (at the age of twenty) he was elected Vice
President of the National Federation of the Blind of Indiana. He
was elected President in 1973 and re- elected in 1975.

     During law school Maurer worked summers for the office of the
Secretary of State of Indiana. After graduation he moved to Toledo,
Ohio, to accept a position as the Director of the Senior Legal
Assistance Project operated by ABLE (Advocates for Basic Legal
Equality).

     In 1978 Maurer moved to Washington, D.C., to become an
attorney with the Rates and Routes Division in the office of the
General Counsel of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Initially he worked
on rates cases but soon advanced to dealing with international
matters and then to doing research and writing opinions on
constitutional issues and Board action. He wrote opinions for the
Chairman and made appearances before the full Board to discuss
those opinions.

     In 1981 he went into private practice in Baltimore, Maryland,
where he specialized in civil litigation and property matters. But
increasingly he concentrated on representing blind individuals and
groups in the courts. He has now become one of the most experienced
and knowledgeable attorneys in the country regarding the laws,
precedents, and administrative rulings concerning civil rights and
discrimination against the blind. He is a member of the Bar in
Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, and Maryland; and he is a member of the Bar of
the Supreme Court of the United States.

     Maurer has always been active in civic and political affairs,
having run for public office in Baltimore and having been elected
to the board of directors of the Tenants Association in his
apartment complex shortly after his arrival. Later he was elected
to the board of his community association when he became a home
owner. From 1984 until 1986 he served with distinction as President
of the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland.

     An important companion in Maurer's activities (and a leader in
her own right) is his wife Patricia. The Maurers were married in
1973, and they have two children David Patrick, born March 10,
1984, and Diana Marie, born July 12, 1987.

     At the 1985 convention in Louisville, Kentucky, Dr. Kenneth
Jernigan announced that he would not stand for re-election as
President of the National Federation of the Blind the following
year, and he recommended Marc Maurer as his successor. In Kansas
City in 1986, the convention elected Maurer by resounding
acclamation, and he has capably served as President ever since.

                         DIANE MCGEORGE 
              Medical Secretary and Agency Director

     Diane McGeorge was born in 1932 and grew up in Nebraska. She
was blinded by meningitis at age two. She says that she was 
slightly educated  at the Nebraska School for the Blind. Upon
graduating she learned that no blind person regardless of how
well-qualified has an easy time in the job market. She enrolled in
a Denver business college to learn typing and transcribing before
going on to the University of Colorado to train as a medical
secretary, her profession for a number of years, with time away to
raise her family.

     McGeorge spent eight years as a full-time homemaker and
mother, including stints as den mother, Sunday school teacher, and
PTA officer. Throughout these years she was a passive member of the
Federation. She served on committees and prepared refreshments, but
she did not consider that she had any part in the struggle of the
blind against discrimination. Her husband Ray was much more active
in the Federation. She ignored or overlooked the instances when she
had been turned down by landlords or barred from restaurants
because of her dog guide, describing her actions as  looking on the
bright side. 

     However, McGeorge attended the 1973 NFB convention in New York
City and discovered for herself the power and commitment that
derive from shared experience and determination to alter the status
quo. From that moment her life began to change. This is the way she
tells it: One bitterly cold day in December, Ray and I stopped at
a run-down coffee shop. It was the only warm place available, or we
wouldn't have set foot in it. We did so, however, and when we did,
the proprietor told us we couldn't bring my dog in. I was so
furious I almost burst into tears. I walked out, but I thought and
thought about that experience and I said, deep in my heart, that
nobody was ever going to make me feel that way again. I had been a
coward to let it happen.

      About six months later we attempted to go to a movie, and the
manager said we couldn't bring the dog into the theater. I was
well-acquainted with Colorado's White Cane Law, so we had what
turned out to be a two-hour battle over the issue. I came away from
there not feeling cowardly or guilty or as if I were not quite as
good as the manager because he could see and I couldn't. 

     In 1976 Diane McGeorge assumed the state presidency of the NFB
of Colorado, and she has been returned to office in every election
since. Under her leadership the NFB of Colorado has become one of
the strongest state affiliates in the Federation. Recently the NFB
of Colorado took a giant step forward in serving the blind of the
state. In January of 1988 the Colorado Center for the Blind with
Diane McGeorge as Executive Director opened its doors for business.
Four students enrolled initially, and the numbers have been growing
ever since. These students learn the skills of blindness from
teachers who believe in the fundamental competence of the blind.
But even more important, they learn positive attitudes about
blindness.

     In 1977 McGeorge was elected to the Board of Directors of the
National Federation of the Blind, and in 1984 she was chosen as the
organization's First Vice President. In 1982 Diane and Ray McGeorge
were presented with the Jacobus tenBroek Award for their work in
improving the lives of the blind of the nation.

     McGeorge says of her life since 1973,  These years have been
more stimulating and rewarding than any previous period in my life.
I don't wish to imply that I was unhappy prior to my becoming
active in the Federation quite the contrary. I was busy, and the
things I was doing were important. But they were not as important
as the Federation's agenda. Each thing the NFB does affects tens of
thousands of people. Part of what I have learned is that what I do
matters.

     I suppose,  she says,  it is a commentary on the way I used to
feel about myself; but until the last few years, it never occurred
to me that anyone could do what I am now doing let alone that <MI>I 
could. I would have been astonished to learn that thousands of
blind people could and would work together to make real changes
that affect all of us profoundly.
 
                          PEGGY PINDER 
              Attorney, City Councilman, Politician

     Born in 1953 and raised in Grinnell, Iowa, Peggy Pinder
attended regular schools until the middle of the ninth grade. When
her eye condition was diagnosed as irreversible decline into total
blindness, her father cried for the first and only time in her life
at least, as far as she knows.

     Pinder then spent what she characterizes as two and a half
unhappy years at the Iowa school for the blind. Academically she
learned nothing that she had not already been taught in public
schools. The students were discouraged from learning to use the
white cane and were never allowed off campus unless they were
accompanied by a sighted person. But most soul-destroying of all,
the students were discouraged from aspiring to success or from
setting themselves challenging goals. Pinder resisted the stifling
atmosphere and drew down upon herself the wrath of the school
administration, which refused to permit her to complete high school
there, forcing her to go back to public school.

     Knowing that she was not prepared to make this transition, she
and her parents sought help from Dr. Kenneth Jernigan, then
Director of the Iowa Commission for the Blind. Pinder enrolled at
the Orientation and Adjustment Center, where she mastered the
skills of blindness and explored for the first time the healthy and
positive philosophy of blindness that has subsequently directed her
life.

     Pinder went on to Iowa's Cornell College, where she achieved
an excellent academic record and edited the Cornellian, the school
newspaper. She then completed law school at Yale University,
receiving her J.D. Degree in 1979.

     After graduation from law school, Pinder passed the Iowa Bar
in January, 1980. She then began a difficult job search. Although
her academic standing at Yale was better than that of most of her
classmates, she did not receive a single job offer as a result of
the intensive interviewing she had done during her final year of
law school. Virtually all Yale-trained attorneys leave the
university with offers in hand. The inference was inescapable:
employers were discriminating against Pinder because of her
blindness. She eventually was hired as Assistant County Attorney
for Woodbury County in Sioux City, Iowa, where she prosecuted
defendants on behalf of the people.

     Pinder's lifetime interest in helping to improve the world
around her has been expressed in politics as well as in Federation
activity. In 1976 she was a delegate to the Republican National
Convention in Kansas City. During the Convention she appeared on
national television and in a national news magazine, taking the
occasion to acquaint the public with the philosophy of the National
Federation of the Blind and the real needs of blind people. At the
end of the convention, she was chosen to second the nomination of
Senator Robert Dole to be the candidate of the Republican Party for
the Vice Presidency of the United States.

     In 1986 she completed a campaign for the Iowa State Senate in
District 27 (East-Central Iowa) on the Republican ticket. She won
the Primary and campaigned hard in a district eighty by thirty
miles in size and containing about 60,000 residents, a distinct
minority of whom are Republican. From April through November she
made hundreds of public appearances and managed an efficient
campaign. Like many candidates, Pinder was not elected in her first
bid for public office, but she made a very strong showing and is
often asked when she will run again. Her interest in participating
in her community continues today through her service on the
Grinnell City Council and in other community organizations.

     Pinder's work in the National Federation of the Blind has been
as impressive as her professional career. She held office in the
NFB Student Divisions in Iowa and Connecticut, and then served as
President of the national Student Division from 1977 to 1979. In
1981 she was elected President of the National Federation of the
Blind of Iowa, an office which she continues to hold. Pinder was
first elected to serve on the NFB Board of Directors in 1977, and
in 1984 she was elected Second Vice President.

     For the past several years Pinder, a 1976 winner herself, has
chaired the Scholarship Committee of the National Federation of the
Blind. Every year approximately twenty- five scholarships, ranging
in value from $1,800 to $10,000, are presented to the best blind
college students in the nation.

                         JOYCE SCANLAN 
                   Teacher and Agency Director

     Joyce Scanlan was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1939. She
received her elementary and secondary education at the North Dakota
School for the Blind. Having a strong love of reading and theater,
she went on to earn a B.A. in English and History and a master's
degree in English at the University of North Dakota.

     For the next five years she taught these subjects, along with
social studies and Latin, in high schools in North Dakota and
Montana. Then glaucoma took the rest of her vision, and Scanlan
lost her self-confidence. She says,  I quickly fled from the job
because I had never known a blind teacher in a public school, and
I had had such a struggle those last few weeks in the classroom
that I was positive no blind person could ever teach sighted
children.

     She had trouble finding another job, but as she points out,
her own attitudes were as bad as those of her prospective
employers. She told a counselor who visited her in the hospital: 
I've never seen a blind person amount to anything yet, so there's
no reason to think I can. 

     In 1970 the National Federation of the Blind convention was in
Minneapolis, and Scanlan attended the meeting of the NFB Teachers
Division. She says:  I met many teachers there who were blind. In
fact, I met blind people from all over the country who were engaged
in a great variety of occupations. I learned what the NFB was all
about and realized what blind people working together could do.  At
that convention she also met Tom Scanlan, whom she married four
years later.

     Joyce Scanlan became active in the NFB in Minnesota. In 1971
she organized a statewide student division. In 1972 she was elected
vice president of the NFB of Minnesota and president in 1973. That
same year she was appointed to a newly created Minnesota Council on
Disabilities the only representative of a consumer organization on
the Commission. Until 1988 she served on the advisory council to
State Services for the Blind, a body established in large measure
because of the work of the NFB of Minnesota.

     The most exciting undertaking of the NFB of Minnesota,
however, has been the establishment of its own rehabilitation
center for the adult blind, with Joyce Scanlan serving as its
executive director. BLIND, Inc. (Blindness: Learning In New
Dimensions) admitted its first class, consisting of two students,
in January of 1988. This center is establishing a new standard for
rehabilitation services in the Midwest. It is easy to understand
why the National Federation of the Blind of Minnesota enjoys both
respect and prestige. It is also easy to understand why Joyce
Scanlan is regarded as able, tough, and determined.

     Scanlan was elected to the NFB Board of Directors in 1974 and
has continued to serve in that capacity ever since. In 1988 she was
elected Secretary of the organization. She says:  The Federation
has made a great difference in my life. I still try to spend time
attending the theater and reading, but I want to give as much time
as possible to working in the NFB. I wish I had known about it
before 1970. I want to be sure every blind person I ever meet hears
all about the Federation. If I have any skill as a teacher, I'll
use it to benefit the Federation. 


                          ALLEN HARRIS 
                   Teacher and Wrestling Coach

     Allen Harris of Dearborn, Michigan, was elected to the Board
of Directors of the National Federation of the Blind in 1981. In
1985 he became Secretary, and in 1988 he was elected Treasurer. He
says,  I take some satisfaction in many of the things I have
accomplished in my life, but nothing has given me more pleasure and
reward than my work in the Federation. 

     Harris may well take satisfaction in his accomplishments.
Blind since birth in 1945, he completed high school at the Michigan
School for the Blind in Lansing. He says of this period,  The two
most valuable things I learned in high school were wrestling and
typing. Although I could have used some other things, these two
skills have served me well ever since.  Allen Harris was a
championship wrestler throughout high school and college. He was
also a champion debater at Wayne State University and graduated
magna cum laude in 1967.

     Harris then began looking for a teaching position and enrolled
in graduate school. At that time high school teachers were much in
demand. He sent out 167 applications and went to 96 interviews
without receiving a single job offer. After a year of futile search
Harris was depressed, and his friends were outraged. One friend
went to a meeting of the school board of the Dearborn Public School
System. She spoke openly about the blind applicant for a teaching
position who was so well qualified, yet was being ignored by scores
of school districts.

     The tactic worked. Officials of the school district said that
they were unaware of Harris's candidacy although he had submitted
an application. He was called for an interview and hired to teach
social studies. In addition to a full-time teaching schedule, he
coached high school wrestling, as well as swimming and wrestling
for boys from age five to fourteen. He has coached at least six
high school wrestling teams that have won league championships and
one high school state championship team. His age group swimming
teams have won five state conference championships, and his age
group wrestling teams have won six. Harris also worked for several
years in the administration of the age group program, and the
Dearborn teams continued to excel.

     In 1982 Allen Harris became a social studies teacher at Edsel
Ford High School in Dearborn. He became head of the social studies
department in 1984. Because of limited time, he gave up the head
coaching job and now works only with ninth graders, who have not
lost since he has been their coach. In 1985 Harris was selected by
the National Council of Social Studies as one of two outstanding
teachers of social studies in the state of Michigan.

     Harris says that he was aware of some Federation materials at
the time he was looking for his first teaching position and that he
found them helpful, but his real knowledge of and involvement in
the Federation began in 1969 when an organizing team came to his
door to pay a visit. They told him there was to be a state
convention of the Federation that weekend in Lansing and that he
should go. He did, and he was elected secretary of the NFB of
Michigan. He served as president of the Detroit chapter of the NFB
from 1970 to 1975 and has been the president of the NFB of Michigan
since 1976.

     During the years of Allen Harris's presidency, services to the
blind in Michigan have been consolidated into a single and separate
commission for the blind, a major victory indeed. In 1983 Harris
was appointed by the governor to the board of the Michigan
Commission for the Blind, and he was reappointed in 1985 and 1988.
He serves as Vice Chairman of the Board.

                       STEPHEN O. BENSON 
      Teacher, Rehabilitation Specialist, and Administrator

     President of the National Federation of the Blind of Illinois,
Stephen O. Benson was born in Kewanee, Illinois, in 1941. Blind
from birth, he attended the Chicago Public Schools using large
print books through the first four grades. He was not excited about
attending Braille classes the next year, but he did so and for the
first time in his life learned to read well. He also began to learn
the other skills of blindness, which he found more efficient than
using sight. In high school Benson was barred from taking physical
education although he would have liked to do so. He found this
prohibition disturbing and nonsensical since he was permitted to
take the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) course, swimming in
the same pool that the physical education classes used. In fact, in
Boy Scouts he was able to earn his swimming merit badge and took
life saving. Benson found ROTC a positive experience and enjoyed
scouting, but he never could understand why regular physical
education classes were off limits.

     In 1965 Benson graduated from De Paul University with a major
in English and a minor in education. Before he decided to
specialize in English, he had intended to major in psychology. The
state rehabilitation agency for the blind threatened to cut off
financial assistance to him because of his change in plans.
According to the experts, blind people could not teach in public
schools, and as a result, the rehabilitation officials refused to
finance such an absurd major. Benson remembers that his attitude at
the time was  I dare you to try to stop me!  and the government
agency backed down.

     After graduation he prepared himself for the usually difficult
task of job-hunting. Surprisingly, he found employment rather
quickly, however, as a tenth-grade teacher of honors English at
Gordon Technical High School in Chicago. But teaching was not
satisfying to Benson. In 1968 he sold insurance while looking for
another job. He took one in 1969 with the Veterans Administration
Hospital in Hines, Illinois, teaching Braille and techniques of
daily living. His title was Rehabilitation Specialist. He continued
to work at Hines Blind Rehabilitation Center, Veterans
Administration Hospital, until 1983. In 1984 he became assistant
director of the Guild for the Blind in Chicago.

     Benson married Margaret (Peggy) Gull in 1984. They have one
child, Patrick Owen, born in 1985.

     Benson first joined the National Federation of the Blind in
1968 when a new affiliate was being formed in Illinois. He was
immediately elected to the state board of directors. From 1974 to
1978 he served as President of the Chicago chapter, after which he
became President of the NFB of Illinois, a post which he has held
ever since. He was first elected to the Board of Directors of the
National Federation of the Blind in 1982.

     Benson has received many honors and appointments. In 1963 and
'64 he was president of Lambda Tau Lambda fraternity. From 1976 to
1981 he served on the governing board of the State Division of
Vocational Rehabilitation in Illinois. He has served on the
Advisory Board of the Illinois State Library for the Blind and
Physically Handicapped and on the Advisory Board to the Attorney
General's Advocacy for the Handicapped Division.

      Although I have had good blindness skills for many years, 
Benson says, my involvement in the NFB has imbued me with
confidence and perspective on life and blindness that have focused
my activities and energized my efforts on my own behalf as well as
for other blind people. 

                        CHARLES S. BROWN 
                  Attorney and Federal Official

     With a Bachelor's Degree from Harvard and a law degree from
Northwestern, Charles Brown should have found the job market both
exciting and receptive in 1970, a year of expanded economy and
bright prospects, but this was not the case. He had impressive
credentials and good grades, but he didn't. He was blind. It was
not the first time he had observed adverse and extraordinary
treatment of the blind, but it was the first time he had personally
faced such serious discrimination. It took him an entire year and
more than a hundred interviews before he found a job.

     In 1971 Brown became a staff attorney for the U.S. Department
of Labor (DOL), and he has received regular promotions ever since.
Today he is Counsel for Special Legal Services in the Office of the
Solicitor at DOL. The Department has presented Brown with
achievement awards five times in 1979, 1985, twice in 1986, and
1987. In 1982 he was presented with the Distinguished Career
Service Award, one of DOL's highest honors often presented at the
time of retirement. But Attorney Brown was chosen for this honor
after only eleven years of service.

     Born blind in 1944 with congenital cataracts, Charlie Brown
entered a family that expected success from its members, and he met
the expectation. He attended Perkins School for the Blind until the
eighth grade. Brown then attended Wellesley Senior High School in
Wellesley, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1963, going immediately
on to Harvard. When he applied to Northwestern Law School,
questions were raised about blindness. He answered them
satisfactorily and believes he was one of the first blind law
students ever to study there.

     During summer jobs in 1966, 1967, and 1968 at agencies serving
the blind in Chicago, Brown learned firsthand of the abuses of the
sheltered workshop system for the blind in this country. It was
also at that time that he met Dr. Kenneth Jernigan and made his
initial contact with the National Federation of the Blind. Jernigan
was speaking at a national conference, which (among other things)
was considering ways of improving methods of instruction and
increasing the availability of Braille. After the meeting Brown
talked with Jernigan and began to subscribe to the Braille Monitor,
the Federation's magazine. It was not until 1973, however, when
Brown received a personal invitation from a chapter member in
Northern Virginia, that he went to a Federation meeting.

     Through a chapter in Northern Virginia Brown officially joined
the Federation in 1974 and later that year was elected to office.
In 1978 he became president of the National Federation of the Blind
of Virginia and has been re-elected to that position for successive
two-year terms ever since. He was first elected to the Board of
Directors of the National Federation of the Blind in 1984.

     Brown has always taken an active part in the life of the
United Church of Christ. He teaches Sunday school and serves
energetically on committees at the Rock Spring Congregational
Church and has served generously at the Church's national level. In
1979 he was elected a corporate member of the United Church Board
of Homeland Ministries (the body that oversees the missions work of
the United Church of Christ). Within two years he was named
Chairman of the prestigious Policy and Planning Committee and a
member of the Executive Committee, both positions that he filled
with distinction for four years.

     Brown met his wife Jacqueline during law school, and the
couple now has two sons, Richard (born in 1974) and Stephen (born
in 1978).

     Brown says:  I used to believe that one had to overcome
blindness in order to be successful, but I have come to realize
that it is respectable to be blind. Our challenge as Federationists
is to persuade society of this truth. 

                        DONALD C. CAPPS 
              Insurance Executive and Civic Leader

     Few more compelling examples of personal independence and
social contribution can be found among either sighted or blind
Americans than Donald C. Capps of Columbia, South Carolina. Since
the inception of the National Federation of the Blind of South
Carolina in 1956, he has served nine two-year terms as president
and presently holds that office. Capps was elected to the second
vice presidency of the National Federation of the Blind in 1959 and
served in that capacity until 1968. In that year he was elected
First Vice President and served with distinction in that position
until 1984 when, for health reasons, he asked that his name not be
placed in nomination. In 1985 Capps (restored in health) was again
enthusiastically and unanimously elected to membership on the Board
of Directors of the National Federation of the Blind.

     Born in 1928, Capps was educated at the South Carolina School
for the Blind and later in public schools. Following his graduation
from high school he enrolled in Draughon's Business College in
Columbia and, upon receiving his diploma, joined the Colonial Life
and Accident Insurance Company of Columbia as a claims examiner
trainee. By the time of his retirement, he had risen to the
position of Staff Manager of the Claims Department.

     Capps first became interested in the organized blind movement
in 1953 and by the following year had been elected president of the
Columbia Chapter of the Aurora Club of the Blind (now the NFB of
South Carolina), which he headed for two years before assuming the
presidency of the state organization. Under Capps's energetic
leadership the NFB of South Carolina has successfully backed
twenty-three pieces of legislation concerning the blind in the
state, including establishment of a separate agency serving the
blind. Capps edits the Palmetto Blind, the quarterly publication of
the NFB of South Carolina, articles from which are frequently
reprinted in national journals for the blind. In 1960 Capps
directed a campaign which led to construction of the National
Federation of the Blind of South Carolina's $250,000 education and
recreation center, which was expanded in 1970, and again in 1978.
He now serves as a member of its Board of Trustees. In this role he
has been instrumental in establishing full-time daily operation of
the Federation Center. In addition, Capps has served for more than
thirty years as the successful fundraising chairman of the Columbia
Chapter. In 1963 Capps was appointed to the Governor's Committee on
the Employment of the Physically Handicapped.

     In December, 1972, the Colonial Life and Accident Insurance
Company presented Capps with an award for  twenty-five years of
efficient, faithful, and loyal service  in his managerial capacity.
In 1984 Don Capps retired from the Colonial Life and Accident
Insurance Company after thirty-eight years of service.

     In 1965 Donald Capps was honored as Handicapped Man of the
Year, both by his city of Columbia and by his state. In 1967 he was
appointed to the Governor's Statewide Planning Committee on
Rehabilitation Needs of the Disabled. Capps was elected president
of the Rotary Club of Forest Acres of Columbia in 1974. In 1977 he
was elected Vice Chairman of the South Carolina Commission for the
Blind Consumer Advisory Committee. Also in 1977, at the annual
convention of the National Federation of the Blind, Don Capps
received the highest honor that can be bestowed by the organized
blind movement, the Jacobus tenBroek Award.

     Honor and recognition continue to come to Donald Capps. In
1981 he was appointed by the Governor of South Carolina to
membership on the Board of Commissioners of the South Carolina
School for the Blind, a body on which he now serves as Vice
Chairman. In September, 1988, Donald Capps was a member of the NFB
delegation to the Second General Assembly of the World Blind Union
held in Madrid, Spain.

     Betty Capps has been an active Federationist as long as her
husband has. The Cappses have two grown children, Craig and Beth,
and two grandchildren. Although Donald Capps has retired from
business, he continues to be as active and effective as ever in the
Federation, exemplifying leadership and confidence. His ongoing
dedication to the National Federation of the Blind provides
inspiration and encouragement to his many colleagues and friends
within and outside the Federation.

                          GLENN CROSBY 
                Businessman and Community Leader

     The President of the National Federation of the Blind of Texas
is Glenn Crosby of Houston. He was first elected to that position
in 1968 and served until 1970. He was again elected in 1978. Crosby
is a successful restaurant owner and manager, having opened his
first snack bar in 1968. During the past twenty years he has owned
food service businesses at five separate locations, usually two or
three at a time. He has served on the school board of All Saints
Elementary Catholic School, been a director of the Houston Heights
Little League, and been active in several city and county political
campaigns.

     On April 15, 1989, Glenn Crosby and Norma Beathard were
married. Norma is the capable President of the National Federation
of the Blind of Houston.

     Born in 1945, Glenn Crosby was blinded at the age of three by
an accident. He was educated at the Texas School for the Blind. He
says that there were so many restrictive rules at that school that
the students learned to defy them.  It was the only way to survive, 
he says.  We learned (for better or worse) to take risks when we
were still young. 

     The only dating permitted was expeditions to school socials.
Students could leave the campus only in groups and only on Saturday
afternoons twice a month unless they had specific parental
permission for additional trips. Crosby graduated in 1963. The
preceding year half the senior class was not graduated because they
had left campus a few days before the ceremony for a celebration.
The message to the Class of '63 was perhaps not what school
officials had intended. The students did not forego their party;
they merely took pains to insure that they were not caught.
Crosby's assessment of the school's curriculum is that the classes
were not bad but that the courses that would have allowed admission
to the best colleges and universities were not available. He earned
state championships in wrestling and was offered the opportunity to
compete for the Olympics in 1964. Crosby believes that blindness
was the reason he was not offered a wrestling scholarship at a
prestigious school.

     Poor as his education was, Crosby is grateful that he was
among the relative handful of blind Texans who were educated at all
at the time. Many blind youngsters were sent to the school for the
blind as teenagers to learn a trade if they could, and most of
these people are now employed in the state's thirteen sheltered
workshops, frequently earning painfully low wages. It is not hard
to understand why Glenn Crosby devotes a large part of his time and
energy to the National Federation of the Blind the consumer
organization working to improve the lives and prospects of blind
people.

     Crosby's first job was with the Poverty Program. The only
blind people he knew who earned a decent living worked in food
service under the Randolph-Shepherd Program. His parents had been
in business and had done some fast food service. Crosby did not
want a business run by the state commission for the blind. He
believed that he had had enough experience with state bureaucracy
at the School for the Blind. Besides, he had learned to take risks
young. Crosby does not doubt today that he made the right decision.

      If I had not seen it for myself, it would be hard for me to
believe that the blind have made as much progress as we have since
I have been a part of the Federation a little more than twenty
years. There are still thousands of blind people in Texas (and I am
sure even more throughout the country) who have never had much of
an education or much constructive help. The quality of their lives
is poor. One day at a time I try to do my part to help improve the
quality of life for all of us who are blind. 

                       ROBERT M. ESCHBACH 
           Clergyman, Social Worker, and Administrator

     In 1932 Robert Eschbach was born in the Philippines, the son
of missionary parents. He spent much of his childhood traveling
around the world, returning to the United States in 1941 to settle
in Michigan. Two years later he lost his sight.

     He attended public school in Detroit before entering the Ohio
State School for the Blind in the ninth grade. He graduated from
Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, with majors in theoretical
music and English; and in 1958 he received a Master of Divinity
degree from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.

     The Reverend Eschbach served for nine years in the parish
ministry. Then, in 1966, he accepted a fellowship in the Division
of Religion and Psychology at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka,
Kansas. The experience persuaded him to begin a career in social
work, and he remained in Topeka to earn an M.S.W. degree at the
University of Kansas before returning to Dayton in 1969. Eschbach
then accepted a job as a therapist at the Eastway Community Mental
Health Center in Dayton. His responsibilities were gradually
increased until he became community services director. When the
character and scope of the agency changed, Eschbach decided to
return to the ministry. He and his wife Pat served two churches
before he was appointed in 1985 to the position of assistant
director of the Ohio Bureau of Services for the Visually Impaired.

     Bob Eschbach became acquainted with the Federation in 1969
when he was invited to join the Dayton Chapter. He immediately
concluded that he had discovered an entirely new way of approaching
blindness. He became progressively more involved and committed in
his local chapter, and in 1972 he attended the NFB convention in
Chicago. It was his first exposure to the national movement, and he
returned to Dayton feeling he had discovered the place where he
wanted to be. He served as president of the NFB of Ohio from 1973
until 1984. During those years the state affiliate made great
strides in unity and achieving progress for the blind. Bob Eschbach
has served as a member of the NFB Board of Directors since 1974. He
has chaired several committees and currently is President of the
National Association of Dog Guide Users, the dog guide division of
the NFB.

     Other appointments include: member of the Consumer Advisory
Council to Rehabilitation Services Administration of the State of
Ohio; member of the Task Force on Disabilities for the Ohio West
Conference of the United Methodist Church; and member of the
Disabilities Task Force for the Ohio Council of Churches. Bob
Eschbach is also an active member in Lions International, and he
and his wife Pat have each participated in the Columbus, Ohio, Area
Leadership Program. In 1982 Eschbach chaired the Citizens With
Disabilities for Celeste Campaign for Governor.

     Eschbach says:  The National Federation of the Blind is an
important part of my life. Being part of an organization which is
concerned about what happens to blind people has demonstrated to me
the way service ought to be given and responsibilities shared. It
is an easy and natural follow- through to my personal faith. 

                        JOANNE FERNANDES 
                   Teacher and Agency Director

     Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1946, Joanne Ziehan Fernandes
moved with her parents to Webster City, Iowa, when she was seven.
When she was 3, doctors had discovered that she had Retinitis
Pigmentosa. She remembers everyone's attitude toward her poor
eyesight. No one regarded her as blind, but everyone knew her eye
condition could lead to blindness, a fact which friends and family
did not want to confront. The whispers taught Fernandes that this
being  blind  was a dreadful thing. She learned to pretend she
could see to avoid the pity that would follow if she could not. And
she learned to avoid thinking about blindness. It was too awful.
Never once can Fernandes remember discussing blindness with a
teacher or friend at school. She never met a single blind person.
All she knew was that she did not want to be blind or think about
it. Being blind wasn't respectable.

     After Fernandes graduated from high school, she enrolled in a
junior college. At that time the Iowa Commission for the Blind
conducted a career day for blind students, which she attended. For
the first time she met blind people. They were confident and
capable. She decided that at the end of her second year of junior
college she would take time out to attend the Orientation and
Adjustment Center. Those nine months she describes as  the most
exciting time of my life. I found freedom, and it wasn't always
easy. 

     In 1969 Joanne Fernandes graduated with honor from Iowa State
University, where she received a B.S. in Elementary Education.
During one quarter she was selected as a Merrill Palmer Scholar to
do advanced work in education in Detroit, Michigan.

     For the next four years, Fernandes taught elementary school
(second and fourth grades) in the Ames, Iowa, public school system.
In 1971 she received a Master's degree in Guidance and Counseling.
During this time Fernandes helped to organize the North Central
Iowa Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind, and she
served for several years as its president. From 1977 to 1979 she
was first vice president of the National Federation of the Blind of
Iowa.

     In 1973, Fernandes had stopped teaching to begin a family. She
is now the mother of 5 children ages 5 to 15. In 1979 she and her
husband moved to Louisiana, and here she continued her Federation
work. In 1981, Fernandes led the formation of a new NFB chapter in
her hometown of Ruston, Louisiana, and forty people attended the
first meeting. It was the eighth chapter in the state. Today in
Louisiana there are twenty-one chapters.

     Joanne Fernandes was elected President of the NFB of Louisiana
in 1983 and has been elected for successive two-year terms ever
since. In 1985, Governor Edwin Edwards recommended to the State
Legislature that money be appropriated directly to the NFB of
Louisiana for a training center for blind adults, and the prestige
and reputation of the organization were such that the legislature
responded affirmatively.

     The Louisiana Center for the Blind opened in October of 1985
with Joanne Fernandes as its director, and the program which has
been built is rapidly coming to be recognized throughout the nation
as a model. More than a hundred students have now enrolled in the
program, and they graduate ready for competition in the mainstream
of society and they graduate not only believing but knowing that it
is respectable to be blind.

                        PRISCILLA FERRIS 
  Homemaker, Girl Scout Administrator, and Community Volunteer

     In 1938 Priscilla Pacheco Ferris was born in Dighton,
Massachusetts. From the time she was a small child, she knew she
had weak eyesight, but she and her family did not know that the
condition, Retinitis Pigmentosa, would deteriorate into total
blindness. During her early school years Ferris used print, but
three years later, when her brother (who had the same eye
condition) entered school, the staff refused to teach two blind
children. So the Pacheco youngsters enrolled in the Perkins School
for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts.

     When Ferris entered Perkins, she was beginning the fourth
grade, and she was expected to learn Braille immediately even
though she could still read large print. She remembers that it took
her about a month. She didn't feel put upon; it was simply a
challenge. Today she recalls this when she must deal with debates
about whether a blind child should read Braille or print.  Teach
both,  Ferris says unequivocally.  Low-vision children were not too
stupid to learn both when I was a kid, and things haven't changed
that much since. 

     After high school graduation in 1956, Priscilla Pacheco worked
in a curtain factory for a year. She would have liked to go to
college but did not have the money. Then she worked for five years
in a cookie factory, doing whatever needed to be done, including
assembly line work, packaging, and packing. She married Jack Ferris
in 1961, and in 1963 she resigned to begin a family. The Ferrises
now have two grown daughters.

     In 1977, Priscilla Ferris finally had an opportunity to attend
business school, where she earned a degree and graduated with
distinction. Then she found a job as secretary for the Fall River
Public Schools. By the time funding cuts eliminated her position,
she was too busy with community activities and work for the
Federation to look for another job.

     Ferris led her first Girl Scout troop while working at the
cookie factory in the 1950's. From that time until her own
daughters were in Scouts she led troops from time to time. In 1974
she began fourteen years as town Administrator for the Girl Scouts
in Somerset, Massachusetts, a job in which she was responsible for
the entire scouting program for the city. She quips that, not only
can she light a fire in the rain, raise a tent in a storm, and dig
a latrine almost anywhere, but she can teach anyone else to. In
1986 she was elected to the Board of Directors of the Girl Scout
Council of Plymouth Bay, and she has recently been elected to
another three-year term. Ferris's contribution to scouting was
recognized by the Council when it presented her with an award as
the Outstanding Adult in 1986.

     Ferris first heard of the National Federation of the Blind
when a new chapter was formed in her area in 1961. She was mildly
interested, but she did not join the Federation until 1974, shortly
before losing the remainder of her eyesight. In 1976 Ferris was
elected president of the Greater Fall River Chapter of the NFB of
Massachusetts. She has been re-elected president every year from
that time until the present.

     In 1977, Ferris was elected second vice president of the NFB
of Massachusetts and in 1981 first vice president. In 1985, she was
elected President of the National Federation of the Blind of
Massachusetts, and she has been re-elected for succeeding two- year
terms ever since. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the
National Federation of the Blind in July of 1987.

                           FRANK LEE 
                            Minister

     In Huntsville, Alabama, the pastor of Lakeside United
Methodist Church is the Reverend Frank Lee. Lakeside claims one of
the best-educated congregations of United Methodist churches in
Alabama. The Reverend Lee has experienced far more discrimination
and misunderstanding within the church and outside it because of
his blindness than because of his race. When he first became an
ordained minister ready for assignment to a church, the conference
leadership planned that he would be a conference evangelist serving
without salary. He objected because the church to which he hoped to
be assigned was being left without a minister. There was no
escaping the conclusion that the conference leaders believed a
blind person could not handle the responsibilities of a church
pastor. Church members in all but one of the churches to which the
Reverend Lee has been assigned have also objected at first to
having a blind minister, but Lee has always won their love and
respect in short order.

     In the United Methodist Church in the mid-seventies it was not
customary for the pastor to request a particular church. Rather,
the conference bishop and district superintendents conferred with
local churches to make assignments. The Reverend Lee found that he
must depart from this practice and make the request. As a young
minister, he had to challenge the decisions of his superiors,
something not calculated ordinarily to gain their confidence and
respect, but it was necessary. Winning the trust and affection of
church leaders and parishioners has taken time, but Lee has done
it.

     Frank Lee was born in Semmes, Alabama, in 1942. Soon
afterward, his family moved to Dothan. He found himself in the
middle of a farm family of fifteen children. When he was six, one
eye was injured in an accident. The medicine available to the Lees
at the time could not prevent infection from spreading to the other
eye, causing total blindness within a few months.

     Lee feels fortunate that his family learned about the school
for the blind in Talladega, and he went there a year later. He
remembers crying when he had to leave home and return to school. He
also remembers that it was the only way for him to get an
education. The academic curriculum was quite good. Lee participated
in many sports, including baseball and volleyball, as well as
singing in the choir from elementary through high school.

     The school Lee attended was the Alabama Institute for the Deaf
and Blind, which consisted of four separate schools: the white
deaf, the white blind, the black deaf, and the black blind. The
campus for the black blind was very small, and it was separated
from all the others.

     Frank Lee remembers things that were exciting opportunities to
him at the time. In 1952 he was the first child in his part of the
school to use the Perkins Braille Writer. In 1962 he was in the
third class to graduate from the black blind school. Prior to 1959
there were so few black blind high school students that they took
courses in a public school in Talladega, receiving high school
diplomas there. While most schools for the blind in the 1950's and
early 1960's were just getting a good start at integrating blind
youngsters into public school classes, Lee's school was just
getting enough blind students to offer a complete high school
curriculum. Integration of the races was still almost a decade
away.

     Between 1962 and 1966 Frank Lee spent twenty-one months
operating a vending facility under the Randolph-Sheppard program,
but he wanted to go to college. He had earned good grades, but not
until 1966 could he convince the state rehabilitation agency for
the blind to help him. In 1970 he earned a bachelor's degree in
psychology from Talladega College. During these years Lee worked
periodically as a camp counselor and in vending facilities. He was
also active in church work. He had been singing in church choirs
for years, and in 1962 he preached his first sermon. In 1973 he
completed studies at the Interdenominational Theological Center in
Atlanta. He also studied at Colgate Rochester Divinity School in
Rochester, New York.

     In 1976 Frank Lee married Frankie Boyd, whom he met in
college.

     Lee joined the National Federation of the Blind in 1982 and
was elected Treasurer of the NFB of Alabama in 1985. In 1986 he was
elected to the National Board of Directors and re-elected in 1988.

                         BETTY NICELEY 
         Rehabilitation Instructor and Outreach Educator

     Born in 1934, Betty Niceley was largely raised by her
grandparents, who managed a series of country stores in Kentucky.
She remembers three of these, each one larger than the one before.
The family lived beside the stores, doing whatever needed to be
done. It was all part of the family lifestyle stocking shelves,
filling orders, cashiering and it was good experience for a blind
child who might have had trouble finding work elsewhere.

     At the age of nine, Betty Niceley left home to attend the
Kentucky School for the Blind in Louisville. There she believes she
got a reasonably good education. However, she transferred back home
to Bell County High School, where she graduated. Her senior class
chose her queen and the person most likely to succeed.

      Niceley attended Georgetown College in central Kentucky where
she received a Bachelor's degree in English and a secondary
teaching certificate. It was at this time that she met her husband
Charles. The Niceleys now have a daughter and two grandsons.

     Her first real job after graduating from college was with the
American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville. She did public
relations and development work as well as filling in wherever
Braille expertise, poise, or common sense were needed. After
thirteen years at the Printing House, she changed jobs and began
teaching Braille at the Rehabilitation Center operated by the
Kentucky Department for the Blind. When the state's Independent
Living Center opened in the fall of 1980, she joined the staff and
again found herself doing whatever needed to be done. She teaches
people of all ages Braille, techniques of daily living, and
rudimentary travel skills. She also does virtually all the outreach
education for groups who need instruction about blindness and
dealing with blind people.

     Betty Niceley first joined the Federation in 1968, although
she had known about it for a long time without, as she puts it, 
finding the time to get involved.  Then, she joined and it was not
long before her commitment and performance were such that she was
elected Secretary of the National Federation of the Blind of
Kentucky. At about this time she was also President of the Greater
Louisville Chapter, a position she held until 1975. Niceley has
served as President of the National Federation of the Blind of
Kentucky since 1979.

     In 1977 the State of Kentucky created a separate Department
for the Blind, responsible directly to the Governor. Niceley points
to this as one of the NFB of Kentucky's many accomplishments of
which she is especially proud.  When my poor vision worsened and I
became totally blind in my senior year of college, I had little
trouble adjusting. I had learned to read and write Braille as a
child and kept up both skills. That is one of the reasons I have
been so excited about the National Association to Promote the Use
of Braille (NAPUB).  Betty Niceley was elected its first president,
a position which she still holds. She was elected to the Board of
Directors of the National Federation of the Blind in 1985 and
re-elected in 1987 and 1989.

                         FRED SCHROEDER 
         Teacher, Administrator, and Government Official

     Fred Schroeder, the youngest member of the Board of Directors
of the National Federation of the Blind, was born in 1957 in Lima,
Peru. His parents decided that he and his brother (six years older)
would have better opportunities growing up in the United States, so
they took steps to make it happen. By the time he was two, Fred had
been adopted by Florence Schroeder of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

     When he was seven, Schroeder developed an obscure little-known
disorder known as Stephens-Johnson's Syndrome, which caused a
gradual deterioration of eyesight and other serious physical
problems. By the time he was sixteen, he was totally blind.

     In order to do his school work during junior high and high
school, he used a combination of taped materials, live readers, and
simply not doing homework. He was able to take extra courses during
these years and still maintain above-average grades. In spite of
worsening eyesight, he resisted the idea of learning to read and
write Braille. By the time he was a senior in high school, however,
he had changed his mind and taught himself to read and write it. He
used Braille constantly throughout college.

     Schroeder received a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1977
from San Francisco State UniversIty. In 1978 he earned a master's
in elementary education and qualified for a California teaching
certificate. He had then just turned twenty-one.

     By 1977 Fred Schroeder had attended several conventions of the
National Federation of the Blind of California, and in that year he
was elected president of the Student Division in that state. He
attended his first national convention in Baltimore during July of
1978. While there, he was offered a job as travel instructor at the
Orientation and Adjustment Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. Initially
Schroeder turned the job down, preferring to teach children. By the
time he received his master's in August, however, he had decided to
take the job and move to Nebraska, where he worked for two years.
During this time he met Cathlene Nusser, a leader in the NFB of
Nebraska, and the two were married in January of 1981.

     Also during these Nebraska years, Schroeder took course work
at San Francisco State University to strengthen his credentials as
an instructor in orientation and mobility.

     In September of 1980 Schroeder moved back to Albuquerque, New
Mexico, where he became an itinerant teacher of blind children for
the Albuquerque Public Schools. He worked for a year in this job
before being promoted to the position of Coordinator of Low-
Incidence Programs for the Albuquerque Public School System, a job
he held with distinction for five years.

     In 1986 he was appointed director of the newly-established New
Mexico Commission for the Blind. In that position he has earned a
nationwide reputation as one of the most dynamic and innovative
administrators in the field of work with the blind. Schroeder has
completed course work for a Ph.D. in educational administration
from the University of New Mexico. He is currently writing his
dissertation on teacher evaluation.

     Schroeder has served his community and state in a number of
positions. He was a member of the Braille Authority of North
America from 1982 to 1986 and served as Vice Chairman during part
of that time. He served on the governing board of the Registry of
Interpreters for the Deaf in New Mexico beginning in 1984.
Schroeder represented the Braille Authority of North America and
the National Federation of the Blind at the International
Conference on English Literary Braille in London, England, in 1988.
Since 1987 he has served on the New Mexico Governor's Committee on
Concerns of the Handicapped.

     In 1980 Schroeder was elected to the Board of Directors of the
National Federation of the Blind of New Mexico and in 1982 became
the president of the organization, a position he held until 1986.
In 1984 Schroeder was elected to the Board of Directors of the
National Federation of the Blind. From 1983 to 1989 he served as
president of the National Association of Blind Educators.

     Schroeder remembers:  In 1978 I was getting a master's degree
in the education of blind children, a field in which there was a
nationwide shortage. After thirty-five or forty interviews, I
didn't have a single job offer. I had to deal first-hand with the
very real fact of discrimination against the blind. It is hard to
keep an experience like that from eroding your self-confidence. It
makes you question whether as a blind person you can compete in
society, whether you can get past people's expectations and
prejudices to show them what you can really do. The National
Federation of the Blind makes the difference. It provides a way for
blind people to give each other moral support, encouragement, and
meaningful information. It helps people who are coming along to
have advantages we didn't and in the very act of encouraging and
supporting others, we sustain and nurture our own morale and
self-belief. 

                         RAMONA WALHOF 
          Business Woman and Public Relations Executive

     Born in 1944, Ramona Willoughby Walhof was the second in a
family of three blind children, but the word  blind  was never used
when they were small, especially by the ophthalmologists.
Nevertheless, even the large print books ordered for the children
by the schools did not make reading possible. In the competitive
world of the classroom the truth could not be avoided they were
blind. So they were packed up and taken more than two hundred miles
away from home to enroll in the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving
School. Walhof remembers that her parents found facing this
alternative easier than struggling with a public school system that
could not find a way to teach three bright youngsters who could not
see print. A school for the blind was better than a school that
didn't educate.

     Walhof remembers learning to lie about what she could see. She
didn't think of it as telling falsehoods, but she says,  It made
adults happy when they thought I could see things, and at school
(even though it was supposedly a school for the blind) one had
privileges and responsibilities to the same degree one had usable
eyesight. 

     During the summer following second grade Walhof commandeered
her brother's Braille slate and stylus and taught herself to write
Braille because the school considered her too young to learn it.
She was taught to read using Braille, but she understood from the
beginning that reading print (if only she could have managed to
decipher it) was better.

     In 1962 Ramona Willoughby graduated from high school,
valedictorian of her class, but she says  with an extremely limited
education and very little experience.  Between high school and
college, she took a short course of training at the Iowa Commission
for the Blind Orientation and Adjustment Center. It was then that
she met Kenneth Jernigan, the Commission's Director. She refused to
learn much about the NFB although she now says,  The Federation had
already begun to have a profound influence on my life.  She found
college difficult, she says, because her academic background was so
weak. Nevertheless, Walhof graduated from Georgetown University in
Washington, D.C. in 1967 with a degree in Russian language.

     In 1968 Ramona Willoughby married Chuck Walhof of Boise,
Idaho. During the next several years she was busy. She and her
husband had two children, and she taught two sessions of Headstart
and one course in college Russian. She also managed two vending
facilities. After the death of her husband in 1972 she returned to
Des Moines, Iowa, first as a teacher and then as an assistant
director at the Orientation and Adjustment Center of the Iowa
Commission for the Blind.

     In 1979 Walhof moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to take a
position at the National Center for the Blind as the Assistant
Director of the Job Opportunities for the Blind Program, operated
jointly by the NFB and the U.S. Department of Labor.

     In 1982 she returned to Idaho to assume the position of
Director of the state Commission for the Blind. Her reputation for
innovative approaches and dynamic forthrightness soon reached far
beyond the borders of Idaho. In 1984 the blind of the state
recognized her achievements by giving her an award in public
ceremonies.

     Later that year she left government employment to go into
private business. Today she operates extensive multi-state public
relations and community outreach programs for the blind and other
groups.

     Ramona Walhof has written widely on topics relating to
blindness, including the following books:  Beginning Braille for
Adults, (a teaching manual);  Questions Kids Ask about Blindness;
A Handbook for Senior Citizens: Rights, Resources, and
Responsibilities; and Technical Assistance Guide for Employers.

     In 1988 Walhof became president of the National Federation of
the Blind of Idaho and was also elected to membership on the Board
of Directors of the National Federation of the Blind.

                           GARY WUNDER
     Senior Programmer Analyst and Electronics Technologist

     Gary Wunder was born three months prematurely in 1955, the
oldest of four children. His family lived in Kansas City, Missouri,
and Wunder remembers that since he was blind from birth, he managed
to persuade everyone in his family except his father to do
precisely what he wanted. It would be many years before Wunder
could appreciate his father's instinctive understanding that Gary
had to learn to do things for himself.

     Wunder tells with amusement the story of his dawning awareness
of his blindness. When he was two, his home had sliding glass doors
separating the living room from the patio. When those doors were
closed, he could not hear and therefore did not know what was
happening on the other side and assumed that no one else could
either. One day he found several soft drink bottles on the patio
and broke them. His father then opened the doors and asked if he
had broken the bottles. Gary said he had not and that he did not
know how they had been broken. His father then astonished him by
saying that both his parents had watched him break the bottles and
that his mother was now crying because she had thought surely her
baby couldn't tell a lie. Gary's response was to say,  Well, she
knows better now. 

     Wunder attended grades one through five at a Kansas City
public school. When he was ten, a boy who attended the Missouri
School for the Blind persuaded him that he was missing real life by
staying at home. At the school, his friend told him kids rode
trains and buses. They could bowl and swim and didn't have to
listen to parents. As a result, Wunder did some persuading at home
and was on hand for sixth grade and some necessary but painful
lessons about that real world.

     At the close of seventh grade Wunder returned to public
schools, having learned several vitally important lessons: He knew
the basics of using a white cane; he recognized that his father's
demands on him had sprung from strong love and eagerness for his
son to succeed; and he understood that people beyond his own family
had worth and deserved his respect. But he had also learned that
the school for the blind was not the promised land, and he was
delighted to be once more in public schools for eighth grade and
high school. He was elected to the National Honor Society his
senior year but struggled with the mechanics of getting his work
done. Braille was not readily available, and readers were hard to
recruit without the money to pay them.

     Wunder planned to attend the University of Missouri at Kansas
City in order to live with his grandmother, but after a taste of
freedom at the orientation center in Columbia, Missouri, the summer
before college he decided to enroll at the University's Columbia
campus, where everyone walked everywhere and where he could
contrive as many as three or four dates an evening if he hurried
from place to place.

     Wunder enjoys recounting the adventure which persuaded him
that a blind person should always carry a white cane:  I was having
dinner with a young woman who lived near me, so I had not brought
my cane, figuring that I wouldn't need it. To my consternation and
her distress, my plate of liver and onions slid into my lap. She
asked if I wanted her to walk me home so that I could change. I was
already so embarrassed that I assured her I would be right back and
that I did not need her assistance. The busiest intersection in
Columbia lay between me and clean slacks, and after I successfully
survived that street crossing, I swore that I would never again be
caught without my cane. 

     Wunder decided to major in political science and philosophy
because he felt compelled to avoid the science and math that he
loved but feared to take. During his sophomore year he met a
professor from Central Missouri State University who suggested that
he was ducking the challenge. Together they explored the question
of whether or not a blind person could follow schematics and read
volt-meters. The answers seemed to be yes, so Wunder transferred to
Central Missouri State, where he graduated in 1977 with a degree in
electronics technology. He had done well with the courses, but he
did not see how he could run a repair shop with its responsibility
for mastering hundreds of schematics for appliances. He could teach
electronics, but the professors from whom he had learned the most
were those who had firsthand experience. He didn't want to be the
theory-only kind of teacher.

     Wunder looked for interim jobs after graduation while he tried
to decide what to do, and he discovered the hard way that blind
job- seekers have to be better than the competition in order to be
considered at all. He vowed to become so well-trained at doing
something that would-be employers could not ignore him. Wunder
enrolled in a ten- month course in computer programming offered by
the Extension Division of the University of Missouri. No blind
person had ever entered the program before, but Wunder completed it
successfully and was hired immediately (in the fall of 1978) by the
Pathology Department of the University of Missouri Hospital and
Clinics in Columbia. Years and promotions later, Wunder is
successfully working at the hospital and is now a Senior Programmer
Analyst in the Information Services Department.

     Wunder first learned about the National Federation of the
Blind the summer before his senior year of high school. He says, 
In the beginning I thought this talk about discrimination was a
pretty good racket. No one did those things to me, and I assumed
that all this Federation talk about jobs' being denied and parents'
having children taken away from them was an effective way of
raising funds. I didn't realize that my father's name and
reputation in my hometown were protecting me from the worst of real
life. So far I had gotten what I wanted, including a motorcycle to
ride on our farm and my own horse. It was some time before I
recognized that these talented and committed blind people whom I
was getting to know in the Federation were trying to teach me about
the world that I was going to inherit. They frightened me a little,
but more and more I wanted to be like them. 

     In late 1973 (several months after Wunder started college in
Columbia, Missouri, a Federation organizing team arrived to
establish a new chapter, and he took an active part in the
preparations. Wunder was elected President, and when he transferred
to Central Missouri State two years later, he organized a chapter
in Warrensburg. In 1977 Wunder was elected First Vice President of
the NFB of Missouri, and in 1979 he became President. Except for
one two-year term, he has continued in that post ever since. Wunder
was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Federation of
the Blind in 1985.

     Wunder is a devoted family man. He is married to the former
Sue Micich, who was at the time of their marriage President of the
NFB of Wisconsin.

     Looking back reflectively over the years of his involvement
with and commitment to the Federation, Wunder says:  Of all I
learned from my parents about honor, responsibility, and the
necessity to be competent, what I could never get from them was a
sense of where blind people fit in a world composed mostly of
sighted people. Friends and loved ones had always told me how
wonderful I was (wonderful for a blind person, that is), but until
I came to know members of the National Federation of the Blind, no
one had the experience or knowledge to say how I could expect to
measure up alongside the sighted. The NFB was the first place where
I didn't get a round of applause for performing the routine
activities of life. If I wanted my Federation colleagues'
recognition and admiration, I had to merit this attention. It
sounds contradictory, but while I was learning that I wouldn't be
applauded for insignificant accomplishments, I was also learning
that I didn't have to possess special compensatory senses or
talents to make my way in the world. When you think that your only
opportunity for success lies in being a musician, when you know
that your only musical talent is in listening, and when you
suddenly find that you are capable of doing the average job in the
average place of business, your sense of freedom, hope, and
possibility know no bounds. 

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