                       THE BRAILLE MONITOR

                          January, 1990

                    Kenneth Jernigan, Editor


     Published in inkprint, Braille, on talking-book disc, 
                        and cassette by 


              THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND 
                     MARC MAURER, PRESIDENT 
 


                         National Office
                       1800 Johnson Street
                   Baltimore, Maryland 21230 

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                National Federation of the Blind
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                   Baltimore, Maryland 21230 

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THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND IS NOT AN ORGANIZATION
SPEAKING FOR THE BLIND--IT IS THE BLIND SPEAKING FOR THEMSELVES

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                      THE BRAILLE MONITOR
       PUBLICATION OF THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

                            CONTENTS
                          JANUARY, 1990

OF RESOLUTIONS AND RETROSPECTION

SOUTH CAROLINA DIRECTOR PERMITTED TO RESIGN: 
ORGANIZED BLIND PREVAIL
  by Donald C. Capps

SWEEPING UP THE KRUMS: CALIFORNIA STATE POLICE 
INVESTIGATE THE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE PROGRAM
  by Barbara Pierce

BLIND FAITH
  by Mike Pearson

SCHOLARS ARE SOMETIMES STUMBLING BLOCKS
  by C. Edwin Vaughan, Ph.D.

STATE DEPARTMENT THINKS TWICE ABOUT 
THE WISDOM OF BREAKING FEDERAL LAW

THE BLIND SCIENTIST AT LOS ALAMOS
  by John Rowley, Ph.D.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE JOB
  by Curtis Chong

LITERACY: THE KEY TO OPPORTUNITY
  by Fred Schroeder

ETHEL INCHAUSTI: LOCAL LEADER

FROM FARCE TO SLAPSTICK: HOW MUCH LOWER 
CAN THE IOWA DEPARTMENT FOR THE BLIND SINK?

SHACKLED IMAGINATION: LITERARY ILLUSIONS ABOUT BLINDNESS
by Deborah Kent Stein

BLINDNESS: IS LITERATURE AGAINST US?
  by Kenneth Jernigan

SOCIAL SECURITY, SSI, AND MEDICARE FACTS FOR 1990

LETTER FROM A STATE DIRECTOR

WHITE CANE/GUIDE DOG SAFETY DAY

RECIPES

MONITOR MINIATURES


Copyright, National Federation of the Blind, Inc., 1990
                                 
OF RESOLUTIONS AND RETROSPECTION

 From the Editors:  We wrote it; we believe it; and we hope you
will do something about it. Here it is:
Whether you are a purist, believing that no new decade begins
until the date ends in the number 1, or whether your view is the
simpler one that, when the digit in the tens place changes, the
new decade has arrived, we can all agree that the Nineties really
are here. The National Federation of the Blind enters the last
eleven (or is it
ten) years of the century and, for that matter, of the millennium
in a much more vigorous and active position than it did the
Eighties.  Our growth since the National Center for the Blind
opened for business in February, 1979, has been meteoric. We came
from Iowa with a staff of three in the spring of 1978 and rented
an office which doubled as a bedroom. The boxes of material were
stacked so high that the spaces between them seemed more like
tunnels than pathways. When we took possession of 1800 Johnson
Street with somewhat under 10,000 square feet of office space for
our use, we thought ourselves incredibly lucky, and so we were.
But the best still lay ahead. In the almost eleven years that we
have occupied the Center, we have renovated for our own use an
additional 140,000 square feet of space, as well as remodeling
virtually all of the areas rented by our tenants. At the
same time our staff has grown more than a thousand percent. This
personnel expansion has occurred in an effort to keep pace with
the explosion of crises and challenges demanding our attention.
Luckily, with hard work and dedication on the part of committed
Federationists at every level of the organization, our income has
increased enough thus far to keep pace with the cost of our
escalating programs. In 1989 the National Federation of the Blind
raised more money than ever before in a single year. This would
be a statement worthy of rejoicing if our expenses had not
increased at a still greater rate.
We are doing what we can to conserve our resources since, unlike
the federal government, we cannot print money when we find
ourselves running a little short. But everyone will have to help
if we are to avoid slashing programs that blind people have come
to depend upon.
If you are a frequent reader of the  Braille Monitor , you will
remember reading the notice that says,  Members are invited and
non-members are requested to cover the costs of their
subscriptions.  Though the cassette and Braille editions cost
considerably more than either the print or the disc versions, we
have established $25 as the subscription rate for the  Monitor .
If you enjoy reading this periodical and truly cannot afford to
contribute the cost of your subscription, we want you to continue
to receive the publication anyway. Getting the information
included in these pages into the hands of the blind of the nation
is one of the most important services we perform. But if
remembering to send your subscription check for the  Monitor  is
one of those little tasks that keep slipping your mind, this is
the moment to drop everything and go write it. While we are
mentioning small notices that readers begin and then skip,
remember the one that starts,  If you or a friend would like to
remember the National Federation of the Blind in your will,... ? 
Have you taken the time to do something about that suggestion?
Almost all of us have a little financial worth, and even a token
remembrance will help us carry on our struggle for justice and
equality in your memory. Together we can insure that the work of
the Federation continues, but it will take all of us to
accomplish this goal.
You can help by working with your local and state affiliates to
strengthen the organization and to meet the needs of blind people
in your area.  You can recruit your friends and acquaintances as
members-at-large and invite them to become associates of the
Federation. You can also contribute whatever you can to support
our work, and you can pay for your 1990 subscription to the most
influential publication in the field of work with the blind right
now.
Together we can insure that none of our programs has to be cut
back painfully in the coming year. Happy New Year to you, and may
1990 be filled with accomplishment and prosperity for us all.SOUTH CAROLINA DIRECTOR PERMITTED TO RESIGN:  ORGANIZED BLIND
PREVAIL
                       by Donald C. Capps
As  Monitor  readers know, the National Federation of the Blind
of South Carolina has been engaged for a number of years in a
struggle
to improve the quality of service provided by the South Carolina
Commission for the Blind. (See the February, 1989,  Braille
Monitor  story about audit shenanigans and telephone abuses in
the Commission.) William James, Director of the Commission, has
never been a friend to the blind. He has refused to be
accountable to the people he serves, and beyond that, he has done
everything he could to make life difficult for the organized
blind movement.
When word began filtering out, therefore, on September 20, 1989,
that the Commission Board had permitted James to tender his
resignation provided that he clear out his desk within two days,
there was rejoicing among the blind of the state. The straw that
broke the camel's (or in this case the Commission's) back was a
nasty problem with a senior staff member who was making racial
slurs and in other ways setting a tone in which charges of racial
discrimination were rocking the agency. James did nothing
decisive to clean up the situation despite an outcry made by
virtually all the Commission's black employees.  (See the Monitor
Miniature section of the October, 1989, issue of the  Braille
Monitor .) The situation provided the excuse the Board needed to
respond to the growing pressure brought by the National
Federation of the Blind of South Carolina for the removal of the
Commissioner.  The temperature had been rising steadily on Board
members since the NFB of South Carolina's legislative banquet in
February, 1989, where legislators were given copies of a brochure
detailing the serious problems within the agency and making clear
the Federation's contention that James was ultimately
responsible.
In the two days James was given to wind things up, he apparently
intended to call a staff meeting for Friday the 22nd, but
hurricane Hugo canceled that plan. Instead James wrote a bizarre
farewell message to the staff, part of which is reprinted in this
article. It is not surprising that a man who had just been fired
should try to put the best, most cheerful face he could on the
situation, but the tone of William James's comments is peculiar,
to say the least. He is clearly a bitter man with little
judgment, who is  striving to appear to have a sense of humor.
Perhaps if he had treated the blind of South Carolina with
respect and dignity, if he had been committed to working with
them to solve their problems, he would not have found himself in
this difficult and painful situation.  Perhaps, too, his
successor will have the intelligence to learn from James's
mistakes. Let us hope so. The blind of South Carolina deserve
better than William James.
Here is the article that appeared in the Fall, 1989, edition of 
The Palmetto Blind,  the publication of the National Federation
of the Blind of South Carolina:

On Wednesday, September 20, in Executive Session the Board of
Commissioners of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind
accepted the resignation of William K. James, who had served as
commissioner of the agency since July, 1984. The resignation was
not unexpected by the NFB of South Carolina. At the August
convention of the NFB of South Carolina, the state president told
the members that the Commission was actually sitting on a powder
keg. A few days following the Federation convention a lengthy
article appeared in the [Columbia, South Carolina]  State  which
covered racial strife at the Commission caused by the racial
slurs by Paul Jones, Director of Administrative Services, who was
hired by Mr. James only a few months ago. News of Mr. James's
resignation was carried by several newspapers.  The State 
contained the following comments by Mr. James. He said that he 
felt powerless to bring about a speedy solution...[to] a serious
racial problem within the agency.   I feel that somebody can, 
James said,  I think it is very important that it be done for the
agency to continue on course.   I would like to say I have
enjoyed working for the   agency...I think it's an excellent
agency certainly one of the best in the country...I can't say
enough good things about the staff.  The September 22 edition of 
USA Today  stated the following:  William James, 58, head of
State Commission for the Blind that's been investigated since
four black workers cited bias in August, leaves office today. He
said he felt, `powerless to solve agency's racial problems.' 
One obvious thing the NFB of South Carolina believes Mr. James
could and should have done was to fire Paul Jones immediately
when his racial slurs were brought to James's attention. After
all, the Commission for the Blind has a number of black staff
members and also serves hundreds of black blind people across
South Carolina. Had Mr. Jones been immediately discharged by Mr.
James, the terrible and damaging press received by the Commission
for the Blind would have been avoided.  No doubt the concerns and
grievances of black staff members have validity and should be
fairly and effectively addressed. At the same time, the NFB of
South Carolina is concerned that the public now has the
perception that Mr. James's resignation was based entirely upon
racial strife, which of course is not the case. It is also unfair
to the black staff members to be blamed solely for the
resignation of Mr.  James as reported by the media. The NFB of
South Carolina supports graceful resignations whenever and
wherever possible, but at the same time, the affairs of the blind
are too important for the public to be given a distorted picture.
At last January's legislative dinner
the NFB of South Carolina presented brochures to all legislators
containing well-researched and documented information outlining
the very serious problems associated with the administration of
the Commission for the Blind. Copies of these brochures are still
available.

That is what  The Palmetto Blind  had to say about the exit of
William James. It is interesting to consider what Mr. James
thought it worthwhile to say to his staff upon the occasion of
his precipitous departure.

                  Memorandum from William James
                       September 22, 1989

I deeply regret having to cancel the scheduled staff meeting
because
of the pending hurricane. I wanted to have the opportunity to
personally express my appreciation to all of you for the
outstanding job that you have done and for the support which you
have given me. I also wanted to have the opportunity to  pick a
few bones  with you before I left.
First of all, you need to have a funny bone. Most of us take
ourselves too seriously but do not take life seriously enough. If
anybody wants to know why I resigned, you can tell them it was
because of illness and exhaustion. The Board said they were sick
and tired of having
me around. I want you to know that I carry a grudge against no
one I
just get even. I must admit that I do have mixed feelings about
leaving joy and ecstasy.
Next, you need to have a wishbone. That's what sets us apart from
other animals. We can catch a glimpse of how life can be better
for others, as well as ourselves. The clearer this vision is and
how our portion fits into the overall scheme of things, the more
likely we are to realize our dreams. All of you have the
opportunity to make your dreams come true. Don't let them slip
through your fingers.

The remaining portion of Mr. James's statement was the
conventional commendatory sentiment about the staff and the work
they have done.  We certainly wish Mr. James no ill, but it seems
clear to an outside observer that the South Carolina Commission
for the Blind as well as the blind of South Carolina will be
better off starting over. Let us hope that this time those
charged with searching for and selecting
a new Commissioner will avail themselves of the experience and
expertise of the organized blind movement.
                     SWEEPING UP THE KRUMS: 
 CALIFORNIA STATE POLICE INVESTIGATE 
THE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE PROGRAM
                        by Barbara Pierce
Anyone who has ever suffered an injury knows that, unless you
take great care to rehabilitate and strengthen the affected part,
you will always experience twinges of pain and weakness in the
area. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon is also frequently true
of institutions. Old habits of sloppy practice and impulses to
cut corners and blur distinctions die hard in bureaucracies. New
brooms must sweep very carefully and very zealously indeed if
they are to clean up old messes.
Early in 1977 the  San Francisco Examiner  ran a series of
articles exposing to the light of public notice a number of
unsavory problems in California's Business Enterprise Program
(BEP). Briefly, these included overpricing of equipment and
supplies, disappearance of millions of dollars of inventory, and
misappropriation of considerable amounts of the trust fund
intended to assist the vendors in the BEP. Despite
the then Director of the Division of Rehabilitation Ed Roberts's
characterization of the problems as  minor administrative and
bookkeeping  difficulties, major investigations were undertaken,
and heads rolled as a result.
One Roger Krum was brought in to head the BEP, and many thought
that he was being demoted or punished (according to his own
statement in the  Examiner ) by being handed this assignment. But
he went
on to assure the reporter that he wanted the job because he knew
that the man who could clean up this mess and did so would have
his reputation made. He allowed as how he welcomed the challenge,
or was it the opportunity.

In the light of recent events in California, it is instructive to
read the final article in the newspaper series. It appeared in
the  San Francisco Examiner  on January 14, 1977. Here it is:

                   Brown's Help to be Sought 
on Blind Mess
by Jim Wood and Larry Kramer

Senator Bill Greene, D-Los Angeles, says he will go personally to
Governor Brown in an attempt to straighten out the state's
tangled program for blind businessmen.
Greene also has called on the state auditor general's office for
a full report on the Business Enterprise Program.
Greene said he was requesting action because the Department of
Rehabilitation has never been able to present an accurate,
definitive accounting of the BEP trust funds.
 For well over 10 years requests for precise figures have been
met with evasions,  he said.
Greene also noted that there are  compelling reasons  to believe
that accepted accounting and fiscal procedures have been
violated.  He said that disbursements have been made for purposes
other than those spelled out in the state and federal laws
concerning the BEP.   Some of these have been challenged and
others have been arbitrarily continued for lack of challenge,  he
said. Greene met last week with critics of the fund's management
and with representatives of the auditor general's office to plan
the investigation.
Greene urged that particular note be taken by the auditors of
using trust funds for administrative purposes and consultants'
fees.  Calling the program a  morass of mismanagement,  he said
that the department had used single source vendors when
competitive bids could have been obtained, spot purchases made
for expediency, and obsolete equipment continued in use in the
name of economy.
 All the foregoing has been done at costs far beyond any
reasonable standards of good business practices and management, 
he said.  Greene also told the auditor general's office that 
there is no precise central inventory of BEP equipment. 
 Over the years, a considerable amount of BEP equipment has been
disposed of in one way or another,  he said.  The accounting for
this equipment, if any, is very suspect. 
At a news conference yesterday, Edward Roberts, director of
rehabilitation, said the  state auditor general has been quoted
as saying there is no scandal  in the fund.
John Williams, the state auditor general, said, however:  There
is no way I can say at this time whether allegations that have
been made are or are not true. That is the purpose of this audit. 
 We don't have any documentation at this point that indicates any
form of scandal, but we've just barely begun our field work, 
Williams said.
At the news conference, Roberts called reports in the  Examiner 
concerning the program  false and misleading  and said he fears
they may do irreparable damage to  our service for the blind
generally. 
Roberts said he was proud of the program and  regretted seeing it
bruited in the public press. 
 The program has minor administrative and bookkeeping problems. 
These have been rectified and have been corrected.  he said.  The
series, quoting from taped interviews, said that Roger Krum, the
program administrator, called the problem  mind boggling  and  an
eightball situation,  and former administrator Robert Melody said
the program faced  a hell of a serious problem. 

At the news conference Elliott Allen, deputy director for
administration, was asked whether it was possible for an
individual to misappropriate funds or property from the program.
The series had quoted a state report noting such a potential.
 The potential does exist.  Allen answered.  We are concerned
about it. That is one of the things we are working on. 
Roberts added, however, that he is convinced that  no corruption
exists, even though central inventory is not complete. 
Krum was asked if the existence or location of equipment could be
verified. He replied:
 The equipment in location can be verified. The equipment in the
warehouses, most of it, can be covered. One of the things we're
working on is a problem of having stuff not show up on a
printout, or show up two or three times. 
Roberts said that  we think of it in terms of a problem in
accounting and the inventory system. We are in the process of
rectifying these problems by establishing a new system. 

That's what the  Examiner  had to say twelve years ago. And what
it is fair to ask has happened in the intervening years to
rectify
the situation? Surely with the computer revolution an
inventory-management system has been put in place to keep track
of the materials in use and warehoused in the nation's largest BE
Program. At the very least the Trust Fund is now safe from sticky
fingers, and the administrative staff has come to work with the
BEP business people in an atmosphere of mutual respect and good
will. After all, Mr. Krum came in intending to make his
reputation for better or worse on what he could do with the
Business Enterprise Program. And so he has!
His attitude toward vendors has been clear for years. The BEP
vendors report that he refers to them as the  boys,  a term which
even the male vendors find demeaning. Mr. Krum also enjoys
putting his feet up on his desk in his office and on tables when
he is taking part in meetings in other rooms. Participants in
these gatherings report that he points the toe of one shoe at the
person whom he is addressing, particularly if he does not agree
with or respect the individual. These are small things, but
Californians find them indicative of his general attitude toward
blind people who are not willing to be subservient.
On May 5, 1989, the Vendors' Chapter of the NFB of California
conducted a seminar for interested business people with an
emphasis on issues of concern to those associated with the
Business Enterprise Program.  Jim Gashel, Director of
Governmental Affairs for the Federation, was
the keynote speaker, and the seminar was scheduled so that those
interested in attending the spring meeting of the California
Vendors Policy Committee (CVPC) could do so since both events
were taking place in Sacramento at different times on the same
day. The seminar was by all accounts
a great success, and most of the attendees went on to the CVPC
meeting.

The regulations that established the Vendors Policy Committee
stipulate that the Director of the Business Enterprise Program or
his or her designee should attend this meeting, but Roger Krum
has always brought a crowd of staffers (six were present on May
5) to participate in the meeting and, many vendors feel, to keep
the Policy Committee in line. But this time a number of CVPC
members requested that Mr. Krum or his designee stay in the room
and that the rest of the staff members leave. Instead of
complying with state regulations, Krum, his staff, and several
members of the CVPC (including Krum's hand-picked Chairmen of the
Policy Committee) walked out.
A quorum of the Committee was left, however, and John Friesen was
elected as chairman. So the group got down to work on the agenda
of the meeting. Without the usual help of the BE Program support
staff, minutes were taken, duplicated, and circulated. But Krum
has steadfastly refused to recognize the actions of the Policy
Committee taken that day, and one more festering problem has been
added to the concerns of blind people in California.
Sharon Gold, President of the NFB of California, wrote a long and
informative letter to the state's vendors on May 20, 1989. She
reviewed for them several issues and cases of general interest to
blind vendors and offered the Federation's assistance to those
who needed it. Then, in an effort to prepare the ground generally
for the dispute that
was clearly on the horizon, she raised several points for vendor
consideration.  The concluding paragraphs of her letter read as
follows:
____________________
As you know, the California Vendors Policy Committee (CVPC) is
mandated by federal and state law. The CVPC is to function
separately from the Business Enterprise Program to present the
views of the vendors
to the licensing agency and is to represent the interests of the
vendors in the policy- making decisions of the agency.
Recently, certain disputes have arisen between the CVPC and Roger
Krum, the Administrator of the Business Enterprise Program.
Throughout California vendors are being prevailed upon to pass
judgment and take sides. Information from both sides has come to
me as well, and I have considered the following:
Has the CVPC been functioning separately from the Business
Enterprise Program as mandated by federal and state law?
Have members of the CVPC been free to express their concerns
during committee meetings without a threat of reprisal?
Do vendors want a committee which is free to present the views of
vendors to the BEP administration or a committee which is
expected to transmit to the Business Enterprise Program policy
suggestions which have been planned and solicited by the BEP
administration and which rubber stamp the actions of the
administration?
Are the elected delegates taking an active part in the Vendors
Policy Committee meetings?
Does the Business Enterprise Program administrator have a moral
or legal right to declare a CVPC meeting concluded when the
delegates have not chosen to adjourn the meeting?
Should the elected delegates be required to submit to the orders
of the administrator and leave a CVPC meeting without carrying
out the business on the agenda?
To whom do the set-aside fees belong, and should the Policy
Committee or the Administrator of the Business Enterprise Program
have control over the expenditure of these funds?
Do the delegates to the CVPC have authority to choose the chair
of
the Committee, or does the chair serve at the pleasure of the
Administrator of the BEP, to be automatically accepted by the
committee?
These questions sent me to reread federal and state statutes
relevant to the Business Enterprise Program. For the Vendors
Policy Committee to function properly, it must be free to hold
its meetings and conduct its business without undue influence of
the licensing agency. It is not an accident that neither federal
nor state statutes or regulations mandate that the licensing
agency send a representative to the meetings of the Vendors.
Policy Committee Bylaws (as amended January 17, 1989) do not
mandate the presence of an agency representative but state that 
(m)eetings of the Committee may be attended by the Director
or his designated representative...  [not Directors or
representatives].  The responsibility of the Licensing Agency is
to provide to the Vendors Policy Committee such information as
may be necessary for the Committee to make reasonable and
educated decisions on behalf of the blind vendors.  Further, the
Licensing Agency must consider and respond to the recommendations
of the Vendors Policy Committee. Where a licensing agency makes
an
effort to intimidate or otherwise to control the process of the
functioning of the Vendors Policy Committee, it is almost certain
that vendors
will eventually notice the development of dissension between the
administration and the vendors.
A final note: following the May 5th CVPC meeting and under dates
of May 8th and May 9th, letters were sent to Westley Whitelaw
[the CVPC Chairman who walked out of the May 20 meeting] stating
the Department's position concerning the chair of the Vendors
Policy Committee. One letter was signed by Roger Krum,
Administrator of the Business Enterprise Program, and one was
signed by Hao Lam, Deputy Director, Program Management and
Support Division. In reading the two letters, one finds much
identical language. One also finds that the letters were prepared
by the same secretary and that they were both printed on
letterhead bearing the telephone number of the Office of the
Business Enterprise Program.
The program for blind vendors is an old and respected business
opportunity for blind persons. The National Federation of the
Blind of California stands firm in support of this program and
the California vendors who are striving to bring their program
into conformity with federal and state statutes and regulations.

                                                       Cordially,
                                           Sharon Gold, President
                                National Federation of the Blind 
of California
____________________
That is what Sharon Gold wrote on May 20, in the wake of the
high-handed actions of Roger Krum and company. Life in the
Business Enterprise Program apparently went on pretty much as
usual across the summer.
Then, on September 2, the Friday of the Labor Day weekend, the
California State Police blew the whistle on what had been going
on under the table. Officers escorted Krum and three others from
their offices
and off State property, and they changed all the locks on the
warehouse doors so that no one could tamper further with the
equipment and supplies supposed to be available for vendors. A
Department of Rehabilitation spokesman repeatedly assured the 
Braille Monitor  that the disappearance of 1.2 million dollars
worth of inventory had been discovered during
an internal Department audit and not by the police. Given the
department's track record in identifying fraud, embezzlement, and
payoffs in the past, perhaps the fact that the 1989 problems were
discovered through an internal audit is worthy of commendation,
but it hardly generates confidence in the objective observer or
the vendor whose livelihood depends in significant measure upon
the honesty of the Business Enterprise Program managers.
Regardless of who discovered the discrepancy, however, the fact
of the missing material was of real importance to California's
blind vendors, so the NFB of California circulated a letter to
them that weekend. Here it is:

                                                September 2, 1989

Dear California Vendors:

An investigation has been launched in Sacramento which is of
great importance to blind vendors in the Business Enterprise
Program (BEP).  According to the  Sacramento Bee , Channel 3
News, and other informed sources, on September 1, 1989, four
executives of the Business Enterprise Program were escorted from
the Department of Rehabilitation BEP Office by State Police after
an internal audit revealed that part of the Program's
multi-million dollar equipment inventory is missing.  While the
news reports did not cite names, informants have identified the
officials as Roger Krum, BEP Administrator; Jim Flint, Assistant
Administrator; Joe Parlio, Supervising Business Enterprise
Consultant (SBEC); and Tony Budmark, Property Manager. The four
officials were placed on administrative leave until State Police
can complete their investigation. During the investigation Hao
Lam, Deputy Director,
Program Management and Support Division of the Department of
Rehabilitation, is serving as Acting Administrator of the
Business Enterprise Program.  The investigation reportedly
involves 1.2 million dollars worth of allegedly missing BEP
equipment equipment purchased with California Vendor Trust Fund
monies. The National Federation of the Blind of California has
received anonymously a copy of the Conference Notes concerning
the missing equipment, which outlines eight findings concerning
BEP equipment:

1. Physical Inventories
2. Correction Documents
3. Decal Tagging
4. Surveys and Dispositions
5. Transfers to Outside State Agencies
6. Lack of Monthly Reconciliation
7. Volunteer in Los Angeles Office
8. Notification of Alleged Theft of
Equipment

For your information a copy of the Conference Notes is included
herewith.  All five Business Enterprise Program equipment
warehouses have been searched, and State Police have changed the
locks on each warehouse
to prevent tampering. The Department has announced that the BEP
officials have been notified not to return to their BEP offices
until further advised, not to go to BEP locations, and not to
communicate with BEP staff, vendors, and contractors.
A similar situation was discovered in 1976, shortly before Roger
Krum became Administrator. During the week of January 10, 1977, a
series
of articles which revealed much about the 1976 investigation was
published in the  San Francisco Examiner . For your information,
the 1977 series of articles is included with this letter. It is
amazing how easily one could shift the date from 1977 to 1989 and
have the content of the articles apply to the many problems which
continue to plague the Business Enterprise Program today.
For some time there has been rising dissension throughout the
Business Enterprise Program between the vendors and the
administrator. Blind vendors throughout the state have expressed
concern about the unwillingness by the BEP Administration to
disclose information relevant to the Vendors Trust Fund, into
which each blind vendor pays the monthly six percent set-aside
fee. An increasing number of vendors have been speaking out about
irregularities and unfair practices in the Selection Committee
process used to assign vendors to locations.
The California Vendors Policy Committee Bylaws (as amended
January 17, 1989) do not mandate the presence of an agency
representative but state that  meetings of the Committee may be
attended by the Director or his designated representative...  
(not Directors or representatives). Therefore at the May
California Vendors Policy Committee meeting, the delegates
insisted that the Bylaws of the Committee be followed and invited
Mr. Krum or his designee to remain in the meeting and instructed
that the remaining six staff members leave in the past there have
been as many as 8 staff members present at a given CVPC meeting
for which there are 14 elected delegates. When Roger Krum tried
to cancel the meeting, an intimidated few Policy Committee
delegates followed Mr. Krum's orders and left the meeting,
leaving behind a quorum to conduct the May business of the CVPC.
Since the Committee meeting, Roger Krum has failed to recognize
the CVPC's selection of its new Chairman, John Friesen. He has
refused to address the new Chair or to recognize the other
Committee-elected officers.
This is a critical time for the Business Enterprise Program. If
there was ever a time for vendors to unite, it is now! Inquiry
should be made as to the management of the Vendor Trust Fund
monies and the management of the equipment purchased with these
monies. If a new administrator is to be chosen, vendors should
insure that they play
a role in the selection process. Some vendors have suggested the
establishment of an Escrow Account to handle Vendor Trust Fund
monies until the completion of the current investigation and
until vendors receive assurances from the Department of
Rehabilitation that proper audit controls are established for the
Vendor Trust Fund and the equipment purchased from the Fund.
Vendors wishing to join the Merchants Chapter of the National
Federation of the Blind of California or to make a donation to
help with the distribution of these materials may send $10.00
annual dues and/or donations to Nick Medina, Treasurer, Merchants
Chapter, NFB of California, 2018 Newton Way, Concord, CA 94518.
Vendors may also contact Frank Rompal, Jr., President of the
Merchants Chapter of the NFB of California, at 415-236-3800.

                                                       Cordially,
                                           Sharon Gold, President
                                National Federation of the Blind 
of California
____________________
That was the news that the NFB of California communicated to the
vendors around the state the day after the police escorted Roger
Krum and his minions off State property. Federationists were
pleased to know that state government was prepared to hunt for
the missing inventory and assign responsibility for the
disappearances, but there were very real fears that the trouble
ran still deeper. As in the late Seventies there was worry about
the trust fund. Vendors pay a monthly charge (six percent of net
proceeds in the case of California). This is called a set-aside,
and out of this pool the Department of Rehabilitation pays
certain costs of conducting the Business Enterprise Program.
With so much else going wrong in the BEP, Vendors were naturally
worried about the safety of the trust fund. Blind people began
asking whether it wouldn't be prudent to appoint a conservator to
manage the trust fund until the investigation was completed.
Sharon Gold approached Congressman Robert Matsui's staff with our
concerns, and they too were alarmed. As a result, on September 11
Congressman Matsui's office asked the Attorney General of
California to appoint a conservator, and he agreed to do so
within ten days.

Meanwhile, the NFB called a meeting of all interested parties for
September 22 so that vendors could hear from everyone involved
and
make up their own minds about what was happening. A staffer from
Congressman Matsui's Sacramento office came, as did Sharon Gold
and other Federationists; John Friesen, the newly elected
chairman of the California Vendors Policy Committee; and
concerned vendors approximately fifty in all. Some of these were
concerned about Department practices, and some (about ten in
number) were there to cause trouble and stir up ill-feeling any
way they could. The one group that was conspicuous by its absence
was the Department of Rehabilitation. Neither Hao Lam nor those
whom he appointed to administer the Business Enterprise Program
during the crisis were available to explain things to the vendors
or reassure desperately worried people that the Department wanted
to preserve their livelihoods perhaps no one in the Department
was prepared to give such comfort.
An attorney representing the Department of Rehabilitation did try
to slip in unobserved, but he was forced to introduce himself and
admit who he was and whom he represented. According to Federation
participants, at one point during the meeting the Matsui staffer
said to the Department's attorney that he was glad that the
attorney had come because he had a message he wanted carried back
to the Department.  He said that he, as Congressman Matsui's
representative, found it  outrageous  that members of the
Department of Rehabilitation staff were not present, and he then
announced that the Attorney General had indicated that he
intended to appoint a conservator for the trust fund very soon.
This article is being completed in late October. The California
Attorney General has changed his mind about appointing a
conservator, having decided (with who knows how much
externally-applied encouragement)
that, since the Department of Rehabilitation is undergoing an
investigation, he will wait until it is completed before
determining whether or not a conservator is necessary. There is
no way of telling how long the investigation will take. The State
Police recently told Sharon Gold that it would probably be eight
months to two years, during which time the trust fund continues
to be vulnerable. And in the meantime, the people of California
will pay Roger Krum's salary and those of his cronies sharing his
administrative leave. No one can know with certainty whether the
trust fund is safe, and no one is looking into the question of
whether funds have disappeared from it in recent months or years.
But Roger Krum is keeping busy despite his paid leave from state
employment.  Again this year he is the director of a local jazz
festival, for which he receives a hefty salary of some $43,000,
according to sources in the community. It is comforting to know
that his cultural work this year runs no risk of interfering with
his state job. In the past some people have expressed concern
that a man who was holding down two full-time jobs might be
tempted to short-change one employer or both, but the festival
people, at least, seem satisfied with Roger Krum's performance.
In many ways the saga of the California Business Enterprise
Program
is a disturbing story. It is far from over, and the vendors of
California are very far from being able to count on their state
agency to help them or protect their interests. The good news is
that the National Federation of the Blind is still on the job,
working with the State Police, attempting to persuade the
Attorney General to protect the trust fund, and informing vendors
about what is happening and what their rights are.
In the midst of all this, the affiliate goes right on doing all
the other things that Federationists should be doing week in and
week out. In September the state organization contacted Governor
Deukmejian to request his annual proclamation of October 15 as
White Cane Safety Day. The Governor wrote the proclamation, but
he also wrote a letter to the NFB of California. It is clear that
the work of the organized blind movement is not going unnoticed,
and it is good to know also that at some levels of state
government our efforts are receiving the recognition they
deserve. Here is what the Governor of California spontaneously
and without solicitation wrote:
____________________
                                                  October 4, 1989

TO: National Federation of the Blind
of California

On behalf of the citizens of California, I would like to commend
your dedicated efforts to provide services and programs to meet
the special needs of visually impaired citizens throughout our
state.
Visually impaired citizens rely on organizations such as the
National Federation of the Blind of California to provide
counseling and support, job training, and employment
opportunities so that they may realize a greater sense of
independence and self-sufficiency. As October 15, 1989, is White
Cane Safety Day in California, I would like to join in this
celebration by honoring your many contributions to the health and
productivity of blind and visually impaired citizens throughout
our state.
Your efforts are most commendable and have earned the respect and
appreciation of all Californians. Please accept my best wishes
for every future success.

                                                  Most cordially,
                                                George Deukmejian
                                           Governor of California
                           BLIND FAITH
                         by Mike Pearson
From the Associate Editor: On July 2, 1989, just as delegates to
the convention of the National Federation of the Blind were
beginning to gather in Denver, the  Rocky Mountain News  Sunday
Magazine printed a feature article about the technical
rock-climbing course offered to the students at the Colorado
Center for the Blind. The pictures were breath-taking, and the
story (reprinted here by permission) was positive and well done.
For those of us who had signed up to go rock-climbing with a
group the next day or one a week later, it was
also sobering. I, for example, began to doubt whether I had the
necessary strength to haul myself up rock faces as sheer as the
ones described by the writer. Judy Nichols, the secretary of the
Public Relations Committee, realized for the first time that her
fear of heights might be a problem since she was not going to be
scrambling over rocks as she had assumed.
Reports circulated through the convention that the group who went
climbing on July 3 had had a wonderful time. Those of us who
gathered out front of the Radisson Hotel early on the morning of
July 10 were excited and a little nervous. We were all bone-weary
after the stimulation of the convention. Several admitted to
feeling some anticipatory fear, but I did not worry at all about
danger. Our instructors were climbers who had tackled cliffs all
over the world, and they said that we could trust the ropes, so I
was prepared to believe them.
Everyone talks about the beauty of the Rockies, but somehow I was
unprepared for it when we arrived at the International Alpine
School.  We were fitted with climbing boots, harnesses, and hard
hats. Stowing this equipment, our water bottles, and lunches in
our backpacks, we began hiking. The air was incredibly clear, and
though it was hot, the shade was cool and the breeze
invigorating. There were thousands
of birds who had had the good sense to take up residence in this
ruggedly beautiful country, and not many insects. Much of the way
we were accompanied by a noisy little stream rushing over rocks
and generally adding a great deal to our appreciation of the
place.
The guides had been busy before our arrival placing ropes at
several points on rock faces for us to climb. As far as I could
gather, this entailed someone's climbing without the protection
of a rope to the top of the rock to fix an anchor into the
ground, through which the rope was then passed. When one of us
decided to try a particular climb, an experienced climber would
sit down at the bottom and control one end of the rope. The other
end was passed through the special loops
on the novice climber's harness and tied securely and quite
mysteriously.  We were shown how to tie these knots, but I, for
one, was happy to
let the experts do the job for me. Then, with the rope securely
connecting climber to stationary belayer by way of the anchor at
the top of the rock, one began to climb. The early rock faces had
obvious hand and foot holds as well as some slant. These were
steeper scrambles than I had ever tried before, but with a rope
and climbing boots, they were physically taxing but not hard.
Then came an all but vertical rock face with a few a very few
cracks in it. The people from the climbing school protested that
these were not very challenging, but they seemed pretty
formidable to us. The October, 1989, issue of the  Braille
Monitor  includes a picture of me walking backwards down this
climb a process which requires the climber to lean backwards
until he or she is perpendicular to the rock face. The rope holds
the climber in this position, enabling him or her to walk
backwards down the distance that has so laboriously been crawled
up. My grin in that picture is a measure of the exhilaration one
feels after having pitted oneself against the rock and won. 
Those of us who wanted to try something even more difficult were
then directed to a small cliff I use the word advisedly. As
President Maurer commented incredulously,  it was absolutely
vertical, and there was almost nothing to stand on.  He was the
first one to pit himself against that rock, and he made it
further than any of the rest of us who were new at the game. When
it was my turn, I began to understand what he had been talking
about.
I did not get more than ten or twelve feet off the ground, though
at the time that seemed quite an accomplishment. My undoing came
while I was sprawled across the rock. My left foot was more or
less anchored in a shallow hollow in the rock, and my hands were
spread wide far above my head, clinging to outcrops that were no
wider than a quarter of an inch. The guide who was holding my
rope said in a calm (not
to say placid) voice,  Now find a place to put your right foot, 
(which was, as I remember it, flailing around in a frantic effort
to do just that). She told me to look higher, that there was a
nice hold about two feet above my out-thrust foot. Eventually, I
found what she was talking about. It is no exaggeration to say
that the crack in question was at the level of my right shoulder.
When I got my foot up there, it felt like it was above my head.
Then the guide said,  Now, just transfer your weight to your
right foot. 
She was so calm about it, as if such a thing could be done. I
suggested that she had better begin singing  Climb Every
Mountain,  and several folks obligingly began doing so. This was
the point at which the absurdity of the situation made me begin
to laugh, and I peeled off the rock and hung there, helpless with
laughter.
My guide told me to rest before trying again. I did so, but by
this time my limbs were shaking with fatigue, and eventually I
asked her to lower me to the ground.
If I had been a member of a real class, however, I would not have
been able to get off so easily.  For the only time that day I was
glad that I was not engaged in a real rock- climbing course. 
This entire experience is a small jewel in my personal collection
of memories. Beauty; the camaraderie of adventure shared with
good friends; the encouragement and help of warm, calm, and
unsentimental experts; and the exhilaration of testing myself
against a formidable challenge: these things set that day apart
in my memory. I can readily understand how valuable a whole
course of rock-climbing would be as
a part of a rehabilitation program. One emerges from such an
experience more confident and self-assured. This is the very
essence of rehabilitation.

One word must be said about the International Alpine School and
its staff. Joanne Yankovich, the Director of the Blind Program,
and Alison Sheets, who works with her, are dedicated to providing
climbing experience to blind people. They and their other
instructors are wonderful people to work with. They begin with
the premise that all climbers can benefit from experience on the
rocks. They are unflappable and very encouraging without being at
all supercilious, but above all, they are inspiring climbers, who
believe that there is no reason why blind people can't learn to
climb well too.
Climbing programs can be established for any organizations that
are interested. For more information about the International
Alpine School contact: Alison Sheets, International Alpine
School, Boulder Mountain Guides, Inc., Box 3037, Eldorado
Springs, CO  80025, (303) 494-4904.
Here is the story that was printed in the Sunday Magazine of the 
Rocky Mountain News  on July 2, 1989:

 F aith and fear are fraternal twins born a heartbeat apart.  On
a cold May morning at the tail end of sunrise, the twins lie in
wait in a canyon in Eldorado Springs. They watch silently as a
group of seven students disembark a bus and prepare for their
first climb up a jagged rock wall.
Muscular, cheerful instructors from the International Alpine
School
scurry around untangling ropes, threading harnesses, handing out
soft-soled shoes. The students are a bit more tentative in their
enthusiasm.
The scent of a challenge hangs heavy in the air, and casual
conversation masks their apprehension.
The idea of scrambling up the face of a 200-foot-high rock would
take most mortals aback. Falling is not a pleasant concept. But
these mortals, armed with backpacks and water bottles and guts,
are more extraordinary than most.
They're from the Colorado Center for the Blind in Denver, and on
this morning they will defy the conventional wisdom of the
sighted and stalk the mountain sky.
As instructors make last-minute adjustments to equipment and
brief their charges on the quarter-mile hike up the canyon, Diane
McGeorge stands off to one side smiling as though she has just
won an Academy Award. As director of the Center for the Blind,
McGeorge has accompanied two previous groups of students through
the six-week program. She is a veteran mountain tamer, no less
fierce for her lack of sight, with unshakable praise for the
program.
 This has really been great for our students,  she says, a hint
of anticipation in her voice.  One of the neatest things it's
done for blind students is challenge their self-discipline. It's
also been a great way of teaching team travel and building
confidence in skills they don't get an opportunity to use in the
city. Sure, the students are worried. All of us come here with a
lot of fear and a lot of misgivings. 
 But perhaps the most important part of the program is that it
teaches us that we can reach way down inside and do a lot of the
things we didn't think we could do. We can overcome our fears
physical, mental, and emotional. 
The best way to undermine a stereotype is to confront it head-on,
she says pointedly. Don't argue the absurdity of the notion that
blind people should be shuttled off to schools and quietly cared
for. Prove it wrong.
 I really believe this program dispels stereotypes,  she says.  
People say, `How can you do that when you're blind?' They don't
expect blind people to be out tramping around in the wilderness
using their white canes. They think of us on a hike as having to
hang onto a sighted guide or use a bell. Well, we are using our
canes to see what's in front of us to give us that freedom. 
 One of the most common things I hear people say is, `It's
probably easier for you because you don't have to worry about the
fear of looking down.' I tell them everybody has fears, and it
doesn't have anything to do with being blind.
 If you're climbing and you realize, `My God, I'm 100 feet in the
air,' or you hear the river rushing way down below, you really
learn the meaning of trust. This is an extremely safe sport, or
we wouldn't be doing it. But fear is inside you all the time. If
you're afraid, you're afraid whether you're sighted or not. And
you have to conquer that fear every day. 
The sun has finally burned off the morning mist as the caravan
starts down the trail into the canyon. The students can't see the
sheer beauty of their surroundings, the angry curve of the rock,
the sliver of sky that forms a canopy as they hike farther along
the trail. But they can hear and smell and touch the world around
them. The chatter of birds, the thrashing of a swollen stream are
as vivid as any colors known to man. As the wind brushes by with
a soothing sigh, they know the adventure has just begun.
In the summer of 1983 Paul DiBello was working with handicapped
youths in North Conway, New Hampshire, when he thought of
teaching them rock climbing.
 People immediately thought it was a great idea; it was just a
little surprising because you don't normally expect blind people
to participate in a program like that,  he recalled.
 But I got together with some other climbers, and we took seven
kids out to White Horse Ledge with the idea of having them do
rappelling:  nothing very strenuous or dangerous. It was a
two-day program where
we taught the history of rock climbing and some of the basic
mechanics.   At the end of the first day, the other climbers and
I realized that the kids were adapting to being on the rocks
faster than anyone had expected. We thought they could probably
handle climbing up, rather than just rappelling down. So the next
day we scrapped our original plan and took them to the first
pitch of a standard ridge, and they completed it. The instructors
and kids were equally elated. 
That was the first and only time the program was run in New
Hampshire.  Yes, it was a success. But it was temporary an
exciting, one-time occurrence. Nobody imagined or even suggested
that it could be done on a regular basis and provide more than
esthetic thrills. No one saw it as a tool for teaching mobility.
Still, DiBello knew there was more potential to the program than
the first group of students had realized. They had spent only two
days on the rocks. What if a group of blind students were to
spend a week, even eight days, climbing?
By 1984, after DiBello moved to Winter Park and became director
of
the Handicapped Competition Program, the concept of blind rock
climbers became an obsessive pursuit mild but persistent. He
joined forces with Paul Sibley and Sandy East, who owned the
International Alpine School in Eldorado Springs, and they made a
video guide for those interested in leading blind rock climbers.
A year later DiBello met Homer Page, a blind Boulder County
commissioner who was toying with the idea of opening a school for
the blind in Denver, a school of limited enrollment with a
curriculum that stressed self-reliance.
The meeting occurred in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Page had
gone to cover the ski competition for  The Handicapped Coloradan
, a newsletter he runs when he's not teaching experiential
education at the University of Colorado.
 When Paul told me that he'd been trying to get a rock-climbing
program started for the blind, I said: `That sounds really
interesting, but I'm not interested,'  Page recalled.  Why should
I want to go out and kill myself when I've got a lot of life left
to live?
 Paul said, `I think blind people can do this, but all these
professionals tell me that they can't.' Immediately that changed
my position. While I hadn't thought much about climbing, the idea
that blind people can't climb was insulting. So I said, `Let's do
it.' I got two of my students, and the three of us climbed with
Paul. 
Convinced of the sport's benefits, Page made the rock-climbing
class mandatory when he launched the Colorado Center for the
Blind in January, 1988. Students would learn to read Braille.
They'd learn how to travel independently, cook for themselves,
and live on their own. And they'd learn to climb rocks.
The most recent class was the third to complete the course (it's
offered in the spring and fall). About 20 students have
participated in the program, the only one of its kind in the
country, and so far no one has been seriously hurt.
 Most blind children growing up today don't receive the kind of
education, positive attitudes,  and skills needed to become solid
adults,  Page said.  In most cases, families love the children,
but they don't really know how to relate to a blind child. They
tend to protect them, and they don't understand that a blind
person can be a competitive part of society. They try to make
life easier rather than making it realistic. 
Students at the Colorado Center for the Blind will spend six to
12 months learning to cope with life in an urban environment. By
the time they graduate (each course is individualized), they are
prepared to go to college or enter the job market.
Page believes rock climbing forces blind students to confront
their fears.
 Some of them never do like it, whereas others want to continue
climbing for years,  he said.  You can tell people that blind
people aren't limited by lack of sight, and it goes in one ear
and out the other. It's just not the same as going out and
tackling a tough physical challenge. We want them to come away
with a feeling that they can do many things they never imagined.
They don't have to quit. They don't have to be afraid of life. 
 I t's high noon on a sweltering June day in Gregory Canyon on
the outskirts of Boulder. The sun bleeds sweat from the pale pink
rock, banishing shadows to the safety of an occasional crack.
This
is the fabled amphitheater, where the last class of each session
takes place.
And today is graduation day.
The group's composition has changed somewhat. A few of those who
started six weeks earlier are gone. In their place are some new
faces. Eager.  Anxious. Unbowed.
The objective is for students to top-rope it up this unforgiving
rock and rappel back down. By this final day, the instructor's
primary role is to offer encouragement from below. It will be a
test of blind faith. Courage and commitment.
Yet, unlike the first day of class, when anxiety was the
prevalent emotion, today the talk is boisterous, the laughter
common, and the energy level high.
For 40-year-old James Wolcott, the six-week span has brought a
big change.
 This is the first time I've ever taken a class like this, and I
think it's great,  he said, lightly stepping over a carpet of
broken rocks.  It's definitely been a challenge. The hardest part
has been forcing myself beyond what I thought I could do. Society
probably doesn't understand what we're doing here. They probably
don't think something like this is possible, but I know it's very
possible.  I'm scared every time I climb up there. But afterward
I feel really great. 
For group leader Joanne Yankovich, who has been leading the class
since its inception, such an endorsement makes the long hours and
tiring regimen including a couple of 3-mile  death marches  to
condition the students worthwhile.
 The funny thing is how much I learn about myself through this
class,  she said, securing a top rope for the first of the
students.   The climbing issues are the same as any other class
fear, athletic self-doubt, and learning to trust your equipment
and your partner. But the fact that these are people who don't
have sight brings up special issues, especially social
stereotypes about what they can or can't do. Whenever I tell
(sighted) people about this class, they're surprised. They've
just never considered a blind person's being able to climb a
rock, or even wanting to.
 Of course, the school's main objective is mobility. If they can
get through this, it gives them a lot of confidence to try other
things.  This is probably the most complicated set of mobility
problems you can give anybody, blind or sighted. I mean, in an
urban environment everything is normally square or rectangular.
When you're climbing a rock wall, a cane isn't of much use. 
Every challenge provides an opportunity for growth.
 It's about assuming responsibility for one's self in an age when
people are more and more willing to abdicate that,  she said.  
Yes, there is risk involved. But it's like anything else: if you
want to test your limits it can be hard. But ultimately, it is
also rewarding. 
For Tom Anderson, 36, who teaches typing and Braille at the
Center for the Blind, there's nothing quite like the thrill of a
climb.
 I think a person goes through different feelings when climbing, 
he said of his third time in the class.  At first, it's kind of
scary because a person may not be sure where the footholds and
handholds are. But as one gains more confidence, the feeling
changes from one of being really scared to one of exhilaration.
It's reminiscent of when I was a kid and used to climb around on
things. Some climbs are
plain hard work, but once you make it, there is a real sense of
accomplishment.   There is also a valid practicality to the
course,  he added.   If you can climb a rock, crossing Broadway
and Evans in Denver isn't so scary,  he said.  Something like
this gives you a sense of perspective. 
  SCHOLARS ARE SOMETIMES STUMBLING BLOCKS by C. Edwin Vaughan,
Ph.D.
In his presidential address to the 49th Annual Convention of the
National Federation of the Blind, July 1989, President Marc
Maurer focused on the importance of language to the future of the
blind. One of the major purposes of this largest consumer
organization of blind persons
is to change the meaning of blindness in this society. Images of
blindness carried in our popular culture, earned from
advertising, humor, newspaper accounts, etc., provide the symbols
which prospective employers, new friends, or strangers use to
guide their behavior toward and treatment of blind people. Maurer
noted,  If the language is positive, our prospects will be
correspondingly bright. If the words used to describe the
condition of the blind are dismal, we will find that our chances
for equality are equally bleak. 
In addition to folk or popular images of blindness existing in a
society are the images or symbols created by the intellectuals or
experts
who make careers out of studying the peculiar conditions of the
blind.  Symbols, created by experts, frequently guide or at least
are a part of public policy decisions about programs for the
blind. Scientific protocol, the creation of complex new
constructs to further explain the problems of blind people, and
the frequent use of mathematical manipulation of newly created
data all lend heightened status to the images of blindness
created by professionals. This article will examine one such
academic effort to explain the concept of self-esteem as
it applies to the development of the self-concept of blind people
a book by Professor Dean Tuttle of the University of Northern
Colorado entitled  Self-Esteem and Adjusting with Blindness. 
This book attempts to interpret self-esteem and the development
of the self of blind persons using a wide array of concepts from
the history of developmental psychology ranging from William
James to contemporary writers. Tuttle also analyzes problems
encountered in adjusting to the trauma of blindness. Using trauma
either as a medical or psychological concept, the book describes
a severe condition requiring significant intervention and often
having lasting or permanent consequences.
At four different places in the book, Professor Tuttle briefly
mentions that no special psychological principles are necessary
to understand blind people. He notes that personality traits are
as variable among the visually impaired as among the sighted
(Page 38). After his brief statements about no new psychological
principles being required he goes on to write a 300-page book
describing the special and peculiar problems blind people
encounter as they experience self-development.  To support or
illustrate his arguments he uses quotations from more than fifty
biographical and autobiographical works of blind individuals.  A
social scientist and educator in the field of blindness and a
blind person as well would presumably present a fair balance and
evenhanded approach as he described the peculiar and special
situations of blind people. I will analyze several aspects of
this book to illustrate
how supposedly scientific and scholarly work can contribute
unnecessarily to negative images about blindness. I will also
show how the narrow focus displayed by this book can create an
artificial and restricted picture of the world in which blind
people are socialized.
He supports his argument by more than 250 quotations from the
approximately 50 biographical and autobiographical books and
articles cited in his text. These biographies and autobiographies
usually describe the lives of fairly successful, and sometimes
quite successful, blind people who have published their life
stories for sale to the general public.  Most of these life
stories reflect successful adaptations to blindness.  Whether one
is illustrating the concept of self- esteem, relationships to
significant others, or any other of the dozens of psychological
concepts illustrated by Professor Tuttle, one could have
selected, at least, one half of the illustrative citations which
would have reflected positive or successful adaptations. When I
first read Professor Tuttle's book, I was so struck by the
pervasiveness of the negative language about blindness reflected
in these biographical quotes that I re-read the text. Of his more
than 250 quotations, less than 25 reflect positive images of
blindness. Another 20 could be called neutral with respect to
positive or negative images about blindness, while approximately
200 portray negative or dismal images about blind people.  The
following are three examples of quotations of the type I judge to
be negative:
 I got along the pavement as best I could and that is another
frightening experience difficult to describe to anyone who has
not been blind, because though you are surrounded by noise, you
have no coherent mental picture of what is around you.... I
walked along in an enclosed gray little world a two-foot-square
box of sounds around me.  p. 22),  No other day in my life stands
out quite so clearly or so horribly as the day on which I got the
verdict. His manner had kept full realization at bay until I was
out in the street, then it struck with such force as to make it
touch and go whether
I did not go raving and screaming through the heart of Melbourne. 
(p. 161), and  ... A numbing terror fastened itself upon me when
I was thus brought to realize that I was doomed to live the rest
of
my life in complete darkness. There was an agonizing feeling of
helplessness
and dismay at the thought of going through day after day without
eyesight...  (p. 175).
I am not arguing that any scholar should necessarily present a
positive interpretation about blindness, although it would be
refreshing. I do suggest that the overwhelming preponderance of
negative imagery reflects an unrecognized bias on the part of
Professor Tuttle.  Despite his claim to a sociological
perspective on self- development, Mr. Tuttle also completely
ignores the organized blind as a source
of influence on blind people being socialized in our society. In
discussing significant others and reference groups, he advises
that a blind person should be introduced to a teacher, school
superintendent, counselor, friend, etc., and at one point he goes
so far as to suggest meeting another blind person to learn some
practical strategies.  However there is a time when the
credibility of a message is much stronger coming from another
blind person. The professional may want to arrange for a
competent blind person to meet with the individual who is
mourning.  Areas of concern to be discussed with the recently
blinded might include some `tricks of the trade' or some quickly
and easily learned adaptive techniques  (pp. 179-8O). He does not
suggest that it would be useful for a blind person to encounter
groups of blind people who
have positive images about blindness and who are committed to
assisting themselves and others in the development of their human
potentials.  Richard Scott and Father Caroll made this same
mistake that of ignoring the organized blind in their major works
about blindness.  However, I would have hoped that by 1984 a
specialist in the field
of blindness such as Mr. Tuttle would have been aware of the
sociological importance for images about blindness and for the
importance that the organized blind movement has been in the
lives of a great many blind people. He seems almost to go out of
his way to interpret the influence of high technology gadgetry as
a potential influence on the lives of blind people, but he has
not a single quote from Jacobus tenBroek and Kenneth Jernigan or
countless hundreds of other people who have published successful
stories of adaptation in the  Braille Monitor  or other
periodicals about blindness. In fact, after he departs from the
mainstream of literature about self-development, most of his 
scientific  material about blindness comes from a very narrow
range of publication outlets usually associated directly or
indirectly with the American Foundation for the Blind.  How are
we to explain the negative imagery that characterizes this text
and the lack of attention to a major positive influence in the
lives of many blind people as well as the general public? This
book
is just one more example of the self serving nature of much that
passes for scientific research about blindness it provides, to
the true believer, much additional evidence about the special and
peculiar problems that blind people encounter and which require
the exclusive attention and assistance of especially trained
professionals. Professionals are needed in the education of blind
persons, just as they are for anyone else, but they, as a minimum
requirement, must be knowledgeable about the organized blind. In
his dozens of pages of advice to professionals he neglects to
instruct them to learn about the positive philosophies, programs,
and legislative successes of the several consumer organizations
that should be a part of the professionals' understanding as he
or she approaches rehabilitative relationships. Positive
attitudes and images on the part of rehabilitation workers and
educators can make a major contribution to the developing
self-understanding of a blind person.
It is an example of professional ideology in the sense described
by Carl Mannheim in his book  Ideology and Utopia.   Thus, it is
not men in general who think, or even isolated individuals who
do the thinking, but men in certain groups who have developed a
particular style of thought in an endless series of responses to
certain typical situations characterizing their common position. 
He analyses the relationships between the intellectual point of
view held and
the social position occupied. Sociologically and historically he
clarifies how the interests and purposes of certain social groups
come to find expression in certain theories, doctrines, and
intellectual movements.  My interpretation of Mannheim's work
would locate Professor Tuttle's effort as one more example of the
creation of images about blindness that serve the self-interests
of a social network of professionals and academicians who are
making careers out of the study of and care of blind people.
It is also an example of the narrowness and departmentalization
of the social sciences that leads scholars to focus narrowly on
some aspects of self- development while being oblivious to major
social movements that are changing the conditions in which blind
people live.  It is a shame that the vast resources represented
by the agencies and professionals are so irrelevant, sometimes
even harmful, to the education and rehabilitation of many blind
people. These vast resources will be better used when agencies
and their employees drop defensive posturing and educate
themselves in the positive views and aspirations reflected in the
organized efforts of blind people themselves.

References:


Mannheim, Karl.  Ideology and Utopia.  Harcourt Brace, 1936.

Tuttle, Dean W.  Self-Esteem and Adjusting  with Blindness .
Charles C. Thomas,
Publisher. 1984.
                 STATE DEPARTMENT THINKS TWICE 
ABOUT THE WISDOM OF BREAKING FEDERAL LAW
At its annual banquet on July 8, 1989, the National Federation of
the Blind presented its Newel Perry Award to Congressman Gerry
Sikorski of Minnesota for his outstanding service to the blind of
the nation in championing our struggle to establish the right of
blind citizens to serve in the United States Foreign Service.
During his address to the convention (see the December, 1989,
issue of the  Braille Monitor ) Mr. Sikorski pledged that he
would continue this fight for justice until the State Department
changed its policy.
Sikorski has been as good as his word. In mid-October he and
Congressman Merwin Dymally arranged a joint hearing before their
respective committees:  the Sub-Committee on Civil Service of the
Post Office and Civil Service Committee and the Sub-Committee on
International Operations of the Foreign Relations Committee.
On October 12 the Undersecretary for Management of the Department
of State, Ivan Selin, was called to testify before the two
committees at their hearing. There he announced that the
Department had reversed its earlier decision to prohibit blind
applicants from taking its written and oral examinations using
Braille or human readers and notetakers.  He went on to say that
the Department of State had also abandoned its opposition to the
concept of employing blind foreign service officers and would
soon make a job offer to a qualified blind candidate.  It was
soon clear that the qualified candidate was Rami Rabby, whose
case triggered the most recent round of controversy between the
Federation and the State Department over its policy of
discrimination against the blind.
Within the week Mr. Rabby was contacted and offered a contract
for his consideration. Already a diplomatist with all of the
requisite negotiating skill, Rabby countered with alternative
language that more clearly delineated his specific requirements
for reader and computer support. Before these negotiations could
be completed, however, Rabby was required to leave the country
for a number of weeks on business.  But assuming that all goes
well and one can never be certain that it will he will return to
begin two months of intensive training and ongoing talks about an
appropriate assignment in the Foreign Service.  In an interview
with Congressman Sikorski the Associate Editor of the  Braille
Monitor  asked him why he thought that the Department of State
had changed its policy concerning the blind. He replied that he
believed that Department of State officials were eventually
convinced that  they were going to have to deal with an irate
Polish Congressman from Minnesota,  and that  I was in it for the
long haul.  He also pointed out that the Department was in an
embarrassing position.  The National Federation of the Blind had
made it look bad, and public officials do not like to be on the
short end of the public relations stick.
When asked whether he thought that the State Department was
serious about its decision to hire blind foreign service
officers, Mr. Sikorski said,  I don't care whether they think
they're serious or not; they're going to be serious. The door is
now open, and it's not going to close, ever. 
So there it is. Whether or not the Department of State yet
recognizes the fact, the day is past when it can pretend that the
laws prohibiting discrimination against the disabled by the
federal government do not apply to it. Here is the press release
circulated by the National Federation of the Blind on the day
following Undersecretary Selin's history-making announcement:

                 Foreign Service Open to Blind: 
State Department Says

Baltimore, October 13/PRNewswire/ In a dramatic (180 degree)
turnaround Undersecretary of State Ivan Selin has announced that
his agency will begin to offer positions in the Foreign Service
to qualified blind persons. Selin's announcement came Thursday
during a hearing on Capitol Hill.
Congressman Gerry Sikorski, who chairs a House civil service
panel, has been pressing the State Department to employ qualified
blind people in overseas posts. Selin told Sikorski, Thursday, 
We have considered your objections to our former policy and
decided that we agree with you. You are right. 
One year ago, the State Department decided that its Foreign
Service qualifying examinations could not be taken by blind
persons who were unable to read the printed tests by themselves.
At that time, and for several years before, State Department
officials had come under fire from the National Federation of the
Blind for  pursuing discriminatory hiring practices,  Federation
leaders said. Marc Maurer, President of the 50,000-member Blind
Federation, hailed Thursday's announcement as a  Victory for
equal rights and human rights. Blindness should not be a barrier
to service in foreign lands,  Maurer said.  The Federation
President cited the case of Mr. Avraham Rabby, a blind applicant
already found qualified for the Foreign Service. Rabby's case
caught national attention last year when State Department
officials refused to allow him to have a sighted person present
to read printed documents during a test. Rabby had previously
passed identical tests and had been designated as qualified for
the Foreign Service. Under pressure from Congress at the time,
State Department officials admitted that Rabby's blindness was
considered to be a barrier to any overseas assignment. Maurer
said of Thursday's change in policy:  The State Department would
now show its good faith and a true change of its policy if Mr.
Rabby is offered a job to serve our country abroad. 

That's what the press release said, and the story was picked up
all over the country. The Cable News Network conducted a lengthy
interview with Rami Rabby about the change of events, and their
coverage of the story included a good bit of footage showing
Rabby walking around Washington, D.C., and discussing the
competence of blind people.  And still people ask why the
National Federation of the Blind? What does it do for blind
people? The answer is clear and unequivocal.  Without the
National Federation of the Blind the Department of State would
still be discriminating against blind applicants and calling it
common sense. Tomorrow's corps of Foreign Service officers will
be stronger and more effective because of the work of the
Federation.  The United States of America has established for
itself a little more integrity now that its international pleas
for human rights are no longer being made by those whose agency
refuses to admit or respect the qualifications of its country's
blind citizens. Make no mistake about it: the National Federation
of the Blind is responsible for what has happened. And we will
continue to fight for the right of every blind person to
demonstrate his or her individual capacity to contribute to the
well-being of this nation. This victory is one more reason for
the National Federation of the Blind.
                THE BLIND SCIENTIST AT LOS ALAMOS
                      by John Rowley, Ph.D.
From the Associate Editor: We in the National Federation of the
Blind remind ourselves often that we are changing what it means
to be blind in America, and it is most certainly true. But some
things seem to take more time to alter than others. We
successfully work for the passage of a law, and the conditions
affected by that law change relatively swiftly. We persuade one
educator teaching blind children of the importance of early
Braille and cane instruction, and those youngsters are
immediately better off. We establish one training center that
bases its instruction on a sound philosophy of blindness, and
suddenly the blind of the entire area receive a new lease on
life.
But some things take a very long time indeed to change. When
attitudes are involved, when an individual or a family must
struggle to find the private courage to take a difficult course
of action, then we are reminded just how slowly progress is made.
Nearly fifty years ago Dr. Jernigan was told by his
rehabilitation counselor that his ambition to be an attorney was
not feasible. Twenty-five years ago I was told that Advanced
Placement high school English would be too difficult for me.
Fifteen years ago a Federationist in Ohio, who did not then know
about the NFB, was denied enrollment in an advanced college
chemistry course which she needed for a pre-med major. And it
still happens every day all across this country.
Experts, friends, family, and blind people themselves conduct
well-intentioned campaigns to protect blind youngsters from the
strain and stretch of serious challenge. Social work, teaching
blind children, rehabilitation:  these are today's safe
occupations the ones that make sense for blind people. In fact
some people are gifted in these areas, and some such individuals
happen to be blind. But it is no accident that most of the blind
engineering and science majors who have applied for Federation
scholarships in recent years have had a good bit of residual
sight.

It is desperately important that we not close off the options for
blind children before they have a chance to determine for
themselves whether or not they have what it takes in the
vocational fields they find attractive, whatever they are. Dr.
John Rowley, who addressed the 1989 convention of the National
Federation of the Blind on Saturday afternoon, July 8, made this
point very clearly when he said that anyone interested in science
had better want to do science and be prepared to work hard at it,
but that he saw no reason why blind students should not pursue
such careers if they had the dedication to do so.  He knows what
he is talking about.
A scientist and engineer for many years before the onset of
blindness, John Rowley returned to the Los Alamos Laboratory
after completing several months of hard work at the Louisiana
Center for the Blind in October of 1988. He was given his choice
of several projects and chose one that required his special
combination of scientific and engineering skills. He was charged
with moving to Las Vegas, Nevada, for about two years to
establish and strengthen the management office for the High Level
Waste Project conducted by the University of California Los
Alamos National Laboratory on the west side of the Nevada test
site. The Department of Energy's project here is supported by the
University of California, and Dr. Rowley's task is to hire staff,
establish the office, compile large technical documents, and
generally bring to bear his expertise to get the project started
efficiently.  When he finishes this project late in 1990, he will
be assigned another trouble- shooting job. Here is what he had to
say about his work as a blind scientist:

 W hat I want to talk about I have titled Reflections at the
Interfaces. There are really two interfaces I want to talk about. 
One is the type of science I practiced for a third of a century
(well, actually, forty years is probably closer), and the second
one, of course, is the interface between sight and blindness.
I'll try to touch on two other questions in the meantime. Should
young blind people consider a career in science, and is blindness
an important issue in studying for being a scientist? I will
assert the answer to those two now, and then I'll try to convince
you, through my example, that indeed I would encourage young
blind people to go into science, but only under certain
conditions. You must really want to practice science.  You must
prepare yourself thoroughly, and you must be prepared to work
very hard. I don't believe and I think I can speak from
experience that blindness is a very important issue at all in
practicing science.  Here I must be very careful because I've
only been practicing science for about a year as a blind person.
Actually I think it's added a little bit of spice to the game.
Some people might say challenge, but science is enough challenge
already, so I think really spice might be a better term.
The first interface I want to talk about had to do with the type
of science I practiced. Probably it's true that scientists and
engineers (and I'm both) do as many different things as there are
individuals.  By the way, there aren't many of us scientists. I
think there are only a half a million or so (maybe a little more)
in the country.  It's a pretty specialized trade. One of the
things that I tried to do when I was young was to learn
everything there was about science.  My parents just thought I
couldn't make up my mind, which actually was the truth. You know,
many young people can't decide exactly what it is they want to
do. But I hid that very nicely by studying chemistry and
mathematics and chemical engineering and physics and I've
forgotten what all else. As a graduate student I worked on many
applied projects.  I found applications of science that is,
engineering quite fascinating. So I really trained myself in a
lot of areas during that process of not being able to make up my
mind.
When the time came to look for a job, I found it very difficult
because it turns out the job market in physics, chemistry, and
many other fields of engineering is really very narrow, and that
wasn't my game.  So I looked around the country (this was in
about 1955), and I found a place which takes concepts, ideas,
findings, discoveries that
is, the research aspects of science and converts them into
hardware prototypes, working models. That happened to be the Los
Alamos National Laboratory.
I've practiced that interface between the two areas that is,
research discovery (findings if you will) and the application of
these for a third of a century.
Now I'd like to talk about the other interface, which is a more
recent one the interface between blindness and sight. I perhaps
was quite fortunate. When I was a teen-ager before the second
world war, I had an ophthalmologist who very carefully explained
to me the risk factors to my vision. I was very, very near
sighted, and I used an alternative technique all those years. I
used glasses  refraction, you know.  And I actually had no
problem. My retinas did not detach, which was one of the risks.
And I did not avoid all the things he said not to do. I enjoyed
football, parachuting, and a number of other activities.  But he
also mentioned that maybe, later on in life, the retinal material
would deteriorate, although he suggested (and the literature I
read at that time suggested) that I might outlive all that or die
before it happened. And so I really didn't ignore it; I think I
was forewarned and prepared.
However, in 1982 I noticed my right eye was clearly starting down
hill, and I lost my peripheral vision. By 1984 I believe I was
essentially blind. The testing was a little nominal, but I gave
up driving at that time. And soon thereafter, I had to start
making a decision.  At first I thought it was simple. In my
laboratory, as far as I'm able to determine, everyone who was
blinded or had gone blind before had retired. It turns out that
our laboratory has a very generous medical retirement program
and, quite frankly, has a very, very tough safety program. Ours
is a very hazardous workplace. By the way, we're also extremely
safe people. The two go hand in hand, I might add.  So everyone
else prior to my case (I use the word lightly, although my view
of it was a little tougher than that) had retired. So I thought I
would retire. Maybe that was the alternative to take.  But you
know, I really liked work. In fact, I wasn't really bothered by
the second interface although I was having a little trouble
getting to work, and my productivity was dropping. I found myself
doing different kinds of work still interesting, still productive
in some ways, but certainly not with the amount of reading and
writing that I was used to. So what did we do?
Well, my wife Mary and I went to a nice retirement seminar two
days delightfully done by our laboratory. At the end of those two
days, I was totally convinced I didn't want to retire.
Now, how does one manage?  What is the tactic?  Well I started
getting books out of the library on blindness. I opened a
notebook on retirement on the one hand; I opened another notebook
on blindness on the other hand. And I found you can learn
Braille. So I signed up for a correspondence course. I got hold
of the New Mexico Commission for the Blind. An itinerant teacher
came up and said,  Why you know, there's orientation and
mobility.  (You see, I got the buzz words right away, too, and I
got a white cane.) By the way, I got some literature about the
National Federation of the Blind at the same time, I might add. I
went down to the drugstore and got a pair of sleepshades because,
even now, I have a little bit of vision in my left eye, and I
started practicing. After a few months of that, I figured that it
might take five years if I worked rather diligently at it, and I
was starting to work quite diligently. So clearly that wasn't a
very good way to get from where I was across this interface. I
wanted to be a working scientist, but how to do it?
Well, pretty soon my supervisor got worried, and with good
reason.  I was bumping into things, particularly in unfamiliar
areas. I was having trouble in low-light conditions. My
productivity in reading and writing (even though I tried to
divert some of my activities away from that) was getting lower.
Fortunately, he brought up the issue of safety. I was clearly a
safety hazard to my laboratory. What was to be done?
I must say I was a little bit upset about that, but on the other
hand, I realized they really were talking about liability
(although, of course, that issue never really came up). However,
I thought, there must be a way around this. Then it dawned on me
that our laboratory has a policy that will pay for safety
training. I don't believe they're allowed to pay for
rehabilitation training access, accommodation, all kinds of
things, but not rehabilitation. So I explored the possibility of
getting orientation and mobility training at the laboratory. I
thought, well I'll take a month or two off, I'll get somebody
good in here. They'll take me all over the lab and my home area
all that. And I'll be safe. I started calling around the country,
and I was very, very fortunate in contacting, among other people,
Mary Ellen Reihing (at that time) on the staff at NFB
Headquarters. And she said,  It's an interesting idea. I'll try
to find you an O&M instructor. 
How lucky I was that she didn't find one! She also said in her
own very persuasive (well, not too subtle but very persuasive)
way,  Really you need six to nine months or perhaps a year of
good rehabilitation training if you're going to do what you want
to do.  I was convinced.  I admit that I think I was very
receptive. I have never in my life believed that blind people
couldn't do what they wanted to do. I find out now there are many
people who do. I was fortunate, so what to do next? I made many
phone calls, talked to many institutions, and finally I heard
about the Louisiana Center for the Blind. To make a long story
short, I called Joanne Fernandes. In November of 1987 we visited
the Center around Thanksgiving time, and I'm very thankful I
might add. We found it precisely as described.
One of the criteria that I established at that time was that I
wanted instructors who were blind. I was anxious for that. I've
trained myself in many, many areas before. I've also trained many
other people. And I'm firmly convinced that's the absolute best
way to go. I found the Center to be exactly as represented. I
felt it would totally satisfy my needs. It did, absolutely. I
spent from January to July last year, 1988, at the Center; and I
believe I graduated with some honors. I really enjoyed that
experience. I've heard it called a boot camp.  Now let me tell
you that if you do go through a boot camp, you're going to know
precisely what it is you want to do along with being able to do
it. So, if you have any hesitation about one of the centers,
please come and speak to one of the graduates. I assure you that
this has changed my life because I think I probably would have
had to retire had I not gone to that center.
What happened when I returned to my laboratory?  Well there is
some indication you can be a nice senior science advisor you
know, kind of a soft nice job demanding in a way, but not too
taxing.  After a few months, however, they offered me a position
in Las Vegas to solve a very tough problem. I couldn't resist. I
have solved lots of problems in the last third of a century from
my laboratory. But what a delightful challenge this was, what a
blessing. Here I had to do all those things that Joanne and her
staff had taught me. I had to find an apartment. I had to cook
for myself,  and the cane travel! I must confess, I've tried to
reach as far out into Las Vegas as I can. The strip is a thing
you wouldn't believe. I must say, I could tell you a few stories
well never mind. That's a fascinating thing to do. I've been able
to extend every one of my skills and use it. The only one I'm
deficient in still is Braille, and I'm going to get back at that.
But I suspect it's going to take me perhaps another year to
complete solving this problem. We've hired a number of people,
got the office set up, and the projects moving. We're starting to
produce deliverables.  The science is coming together. The people
are coming together. And soon, I think, we'll close this one.
Could I have done that without the NFB?  No way! There is no way. 
I've looked back and said,  Oh, I could have learned all that.  
There is no way. And I certainly want to thank you all.
I want to share in closing one small bit of philosophy that I
think we share in common: scientists and the NFB. That is the
old, time- honored phrase:  You shall know the truth, and the
truth will set you free.  Thank you.
                     TECHNOLOGY AND THE JOB
                         by Curtis Chong
 As  Monitor  readers know, Curtis Chong is the President of the
National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science (the NFB's
computer science division) and an active member of the NFB
Research and Development Committee. In recent months he has been
asked to address groups of potential employers of the blind in
conjunction with Job Opportunities for the Blind seminars
sponsored by several state affiliates.  The following article is
drawn from these speeches. Mr. Chong's expertise and solid common
sense make his remarks valuable to everyone who is interested in
the subject of technology and the blind. Here is what he has been
saying to employers about technology and the blind:  

 T here is no question that with the advent of so-called high
technology, more jobs have been opened up to blind people. What
kind of jobs are we talking about? Consider these for starters:
electrical engineer, computer programmer, systems analyst,
software developer and marketer, airline reservationist, customer
service representative, technical consultant the list could go on
and on. Just as technology has created jobs for the sighted and
eliminated others, so it is with the blind. It seems, however,
that in the latter case technology has come to be regarded with
an almost unhealthy fascination. Part of the reason for this lies
in the lack of information about what technology can really do
for a blind person. The other part is closely related to
society's basic notions about blindness and what we believe blind
people are capable of doing.
Here are some of the more useful devices that technology has
spawned:  the talking clock; the talking calculator; the talking
scale; the talking cash register; the Braille 'n Speak; the
VersaBraille; the Braille Blazer; the Speaqualizer; the Kurzweil
Personal Reader; the Optacon; the Romeo Brailler; the Thiel
Braille embosser; the speech synthesizer; talking programs for
the Apple computer; Grade 2 Braille translation systems; optical
character recognition systems; and a tremendous variety of
speech, Braille, and large print screen reading systems for the
IBM Personal Computer (PC). In fact, when viewed in perspective,
technology can also be said to have brought us the slate and
stylus, the long white cane, the Braille writer, the Braille
watch, the cassette recorder, and every other mechanical or
electronic device that blind people have found useful.
You may be surprised to know that two of the most valuable assets
in my job as a systems programmer are my Perkins Braille Writer
and my sighted reader, and they have nothing to do with
technology. Yes, I have access to a variety of talking computers
and a Braille embosser.  I can even connect to my employer's
mainframe from anywhere in the country to access my electronic
mail and diagnose some network problems.  However, my Braille
writer enables me to take notes without electricity, and my
sighted reader allows me to visit any office in the company to
assist users who are having trouble with one or more of their
terminals or PC's.
Let's examine some of the technology that has resulted from the
so-called computer age. The Braille 'n Speak, a portable talking
note taker, has captured the imagination of a lot of blind
people. It is the one piece of technology that appeals even to
the person who classifies him or herself as a computer
illiterate. For about a thousand dollars a blind person can
purchase his or her very own Braille 'n Speak, including clock,
stopwatch, and four-function calculator.  What can a user do with
it? It's easy to take notes; store names and addresses; perform
some basic text editing functions; transmit data to and receive
it from a computer; and carry around the equivalent of 180
Braille pages of information in a single portable unit. The
Braille 'n Speak can be attached to a Braille embosser; and if
the notes have been entered in Grade 2 Braille, they can be
embossed that way. The Braille 'n Speak can even be hooked up to
a standard printer in order to print the material entered.
What are some of this device's limitations? For those of us who
have used commercial, off-the-shelf word processors such as
WordPerfect or WordStar, the Braille 'n Speak simply cannot
compete nor is it meant to. The Braille 'n Speak cannot run
commercial programs written for other computers. Proficient
Braille readers might well have difficulty studying for final
exams with their notes stored only in the Braille 'n Speak.
Without a Braille printer, the only way of reviewing what has
been entered is to use the built-in synthetic speech. The Braille
'n Speak has a limited amount of storage: about 180 Braille
pages.  A typical college student will fill that up in less than
a week.  How does the Braille 'n Speak compare to the good old
slate and stylus?  To put some perspective on the matter, let me
say that I still carry around a slate and stylus everywhere I go.
Although I find that the Braille 'n Speak is much more convenient
for taking notes in bulk, I also find that I cannot do without
the slate and stylus for communicating information to other blind
people and for providing a backup system for note-taking when the
Braille 'n Speak fails, as any piece of technology will. I firmly
believe that, before anyone acquires a Braille 'n Speak, he or
she should be a competent slate and stylus user not to mention
being proficient in the reading and writing of Braille.  The
Apple computer is an interesting and useful piece of technology
for those blind people who can't be bothered with screen layouts
and disk operating systems but who still require the power of a
full-fledged computer. A whole series of talking programs for the
blind have been developed to run on the Apple II series of
computers. These programs are significant in that one need not
learn anything about a screen review system. They are designed to
talk when they are supposed to.  The user doesn't have to move a
review cursor around the screen to hear what the computer has to
say. If the goal is to acquire a working system that will bring
the user into the computer age and if there is no need to run
software that sighted people use, check out the Apple computer.
Particularly, check out Raised Dot Computing, located in Madison,
Wisconsin, and Computer Aids Corporation, located in Fort Wayne,
Indiana, to see what kind of talking programs they market. 
Speaking of the microcomputer, I think we can safely say that no
one type of computer has played as significant a role in our
entrance into the computer age as has the IBM PC and related
compatibles. A tremendous variety of speech, Braille, and large
print mechanisms now exist which permit blind people to have
independent access to most text-based programs that a PC can run
programs such as word processors, spreadsheets, database systems,
and terminal emulators.  Consider these popular software
packages: WordPerfect, WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, DBASE III, PROCOMM,
QMODEM, Attachmate Extra!, IBM 3270 Entry Level Program, and
Novell. With the proper combination of hardware and software,
every single one of these packages can be used by the blind
without the assistance of a sighted reader, and this list is far
from complete.
Beyond the programs themselves, there are the systems and
networks to which they provide access. Using PROCOMM, for
example, a blind person can dial into a variety of mainframe
systems and, using the proper terminal emulation facilities of
PROCOMM, can work with just about any mainframe online
application. Even more exciting to blind people is the very real
ability to have that information converted into Braille, simply
by attaching a Braille embosser to one of the computer's
communication ports.
Using the Novell network operating system, a blind person can
share information over a local area network with colleagues in
the office and can do so with the same programs that everybody
else uses.  With a 3270 emulation system a blind person can
independently access text applications on just about any IBM
mainframe. This hitherto impossible task has tremendous potential
benefit for the blind when one considers the widespread use of
IBM equipment in this country.
What impact does this have on the world of work? Consider that,
with the IBM PC and the proper screen reading mechanisms, chances
are very high that the blind person will be able to use the same
software as his or her sighted co-workers. The blind secretary is
now in an excellent position to use the same word processor as
others in the office. The blind programmer or engineer has access
to most of the mainframe applications, even to the point of
putting up with the annoying flood of notes, messages, and
documents occasioned by electronic mail systems. Consider the
blind executive whose sighted secretary regularly uses a word
processor to type memos and reports. Technology now exists that
enables the secretary to convert those memos and reports into
Braille without having to know anything about the Braille code
itself. Or consider the blind secretary who is required to
proofread documents before printing them in final form. With a
word processor, a Braille translation program, and a Braille
embosser, this task is a snap.
In my office everyone uses IBM's Display Write 4 word processors
to produce memos and reports that are eventually printed on
paper. I sometimes ask my coworkers to furnish me with a diskette
containing their documents. I can then feed them into the PC on
my desk. From there it is a simple matter to convert the document
into Braille or to read it using synthetic speech. Let me hasten
to point out, however, that in most cases I find that a sighted
reader is far more efficient to handle the mountain of paperwork
that comes across my desk. I find the technology useful when it
is necessary for me to lift passages from someone else's work for
inclusion in a report that I am preparing.  The blind themselves,
through the National Federation of the Blind, are taking a hand
in helping to shape the technology that is being developed. When
it became clear that the IBM PC would play a significant role in
today's industry, the Federation embarked upon the development of
a hardware-based screen-reading speech-output system for the IBM
PC and compatibles. We searched long and hard to come up with a
name for this system, and it was our own Rami Rabby who proposed
the name Speaqualizer. The Speaqualizer can be obtained from the
American Printing House for the Blind for about $800 and works
with more programs than any software- based screen reading system
for the PC.  Recently the National Federation of the Blind, in
cooperation with officials from the Discover Card Company,
developed a talking card-verification system that can be used by
blind retail clerks to check on credit cards. The actual
development consisted of attaching a speech synthesizer to an
already-existing credit card checking computer and slightly
modifying the system software in order to send verbal prompts to
the synthesizer. It is important to note that the Discover Card
Company wisely chose to discuss the project with the people whom
it was designed to benefit namely, the blind, themselves.
Consequently, the system that has emerged is one that is truly
useful to blind people across the country.
Any time one considers applying technology to solve a problem
involving a blind person, it is important to keep in mind that
the technological solution may represent a long and painful road
fraught with many obstacles and problems. Not all screen reading
systems for the IBM PC are equally flexible, and not all screen
reading systems for the IBM PC work with all programs that need
to be used in the office. In other words, one must consider the
issue of compatibility. For example, I know from personal
experience that if a blind person needs to use a 3270 emulation
system, a great deal of care needs to be exercised in the
selection of a screen reading system for the PC. I also happen to
know that people wishing to use Microsoft Word as their word
processor are likely to experience problems with its relationship
to their screen-reading software. Consider, too, that only
recently has the Apple Macintosh computer become accessible, even
partially, to the blind. The problem is to find the right person
who has all of the information about what works with what all in
all, a rather difficult task.
Some of you may have heard about optical character recognition
systems and reading machines that supposedly convert printed
information into speech or electronic digital media that can be
processed by a computer.  It is true that equipment (costing
anywhere from five to ten thousand dollars) is available to
convert print into a form that can be used by a blind person.
However, this technology still has a number of significant
limitations. For one thing, although it can read a lot of printed
information, it can't handle handwriting or poor-quality print.
For another, reading machines and optical character recognition
systems lend themselves to sequential reading that is, reading a
document from cover to cover. They are not at all useful to a
blind person who has to read small amounts of information
scattered across a large number of pages that are not arranged in
sequence. In my job, I am often placed in a position where I have
to glean information from three or four computer manuals at a
time. I am often forced to scan each manual repeatedly, lifting a
bit of information from, say, page 150, going back to page 50 to
look at something else, and then turning to another book to page
45 to round out my research. This task would be extremely
cumbersome and time-consuming with an optical character
recognition system.
We must be careful, I think, not to fall into the trap of trying
to solve every problem with a piece of technology. Recently, in
my home state of Minnesota, I heard a story about a blind person
who, after four months, was in danger of losing his position as a
programmer because some technology had failed to arrive. Simply
put, the problem was that the blind programmer did not have
independent access to the company's mainframe system. Further
investigation revealed that no one not even the blind person had
considered the possibility of hiring a sighted reader while
waiting for the technology to arrive.  In other words, the blind
person did virtually nothing for four months.  If the programmer,
the employer, and the rehabilitation agency had not been lulled
into a false sense of security because of the availability of
technology, the short- term solution for the problem would have
been apparent early on.
Many employers do not really believe that the blind can be just
as productive, mobile, and competent as their sighted peers. They
are too quick to accept the notion that the technology is the
determining factor when it comes to productivity. For example, it
never occurs to many of them that in order for a writer to use a
word processor effectively, that person must, first and foremost,
be a decent writer.  It never occurs to some of them that a fancy
computer terminal does not a programmer make. And I would bet you
that a lot of employers never even knew that thousands of blind
people held professional, high-paying jobs long before the
Braille or talking microcomputer was invented.
Is technology the total answer when we are considering the
employment of the blind? I don't believe so. Although technology
can help a lot of blind people to better their lives and has done
so and although technology has opened up some jobs for the blind,
it can in no way be viewed as the total answer to the problem of
the seventy-percent unemployment rate that now plagues blind
Americans of working age.  Employers still require information
and education about the competence and innate normality of the
blind. Rehabilitation officials need to stop regarding technology
as a panacea for the blind and recognize it for the tool that it
is. Sure, technology can be a tremendous help.  But more
important than any technology are acceptance; equal treatment; a
positive attitude toward blindness and blind people; and a belief
on everyone's part that we, the blind, are just as capable as the
sighted of living normal productive lives and getting the job
done.           LITERACY: THE KEY TO OPPORTUNITY
                        by Fred Schroeder
 On February 3, 1989, Fred Schroeder (member of the Board of
Directors of the National Federation of the Blind, Director of
the New Mexico Commission for the Blind, and authority on the
education of blind children) addressed the Josephine Taylor
Leadership Seminar, sponsored by the American Foundation for the
Blind. The seminar was held in Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Schroeder's
remarks were insightful and very much to the point, so we have
decided to print his entire text. Here it is: 

 I n today's information age there can be no question that
literacy represents the primary tool by which individuals
compete.  Literacy unlike other skills is not an end in itself,
but rather the means to a virtually unlimited variety of ends. It
is the very key to prosperity since literacy opens the way to
information by tearing down barriers of myth and ignorance.
Blind people have come to value Braille, recognizing its role as
the primary means to literacy for the blind. Dr. Abraham Nemeth
has described Braille as having  liberated a whole class of
people from a condition of illiteracy and dependency and given
them the means for self-fulfillment and enrichment. 
Nevertheless, large numbers of blind people do not know Braille
and, therefore, find themselves in a state of functional
illiteracy. As a result, blind people have lacked many of the
fundamental opportunities which enable them to become
self-supporting, contributing members of society.
It is estimated that seventy percent of working-age blind people
are unemployed. Those who are employed are frequently
under-employed or trapped in entry level jobs. While it would not
be fair to say that the staggeringly high unemployment rate among
the blind is due solely to lack of Braille literacy, Dr. Nemeth
observes that,  Braille makes it possible for a blind person to
assume a role of equality in modern society, and it can unlock
the potential within him to become a contributing member of his
community on a par with his sighted fellows.  Many professionals
have sought to explain away the low level of Braille literacy
through claims that Braille is too complicated and difficult to
learn, too bulky and costly to produce, and made obsolete by
tapes and speech technology. In addition, they argue that many of
today's blind children are multi-handicapped and therefore cannot
be expected to master Braille reading. Finally, modern pedagogy
has asserted that many blind people, given appropriate low vision
aids, can become competent print readers, thereby rendering
Braille unnecessary.
Yet, alternatives to Braille frequently come with problems of
their own. Tapes, while helpful for reading large quantities of
text, do nothing to enhance spelling or teach a child about
punctuation or format. Similarly, while tapes may be relatively
compact and inexpensive, it is difficult to skim a tape or turn
readily to a specific section of the text. In terms of writing,
unlike tapes, Braille allows the individual a portable means of
making notes, keeping name and address files, making grocery
lists, keeping recipes, and so on. This is not to say that tapes
have no place. My point is simply that their role is not to
replace Braille. Other alternatives, such as low vision aids,
often reduce reading speed and comprehension by virtue of
diminishing the amount of material that can be seen at one time.
Still other low vision aids (the closed circuit television, for
example) are certainly large and cumbersome. Nevertheless, as
with the use of tapes, low vision aids have an important
function, provided that their use is kept in perspective.
Braille, tapes, low vision aids, and speech technology comprise a
cadre of techniques which, when applied correctly, enables the
blind person to function on terms of real equality.
The small number of blind people using Braille is a problem
receiving increasingly sharp attention from the National
Federation of the Blind.  We believe that, given proper training
and opportunity, blind people can compete on terms of equality
with the sighted. Central to this conviction is the understanding
that true equality is a product of having the skills necessary to
compete and the confidence to put those skills into practice. It
is our conviction that, while blind people need training,
training alone is not sufficient. For it to be effective, the
blind person must believe that it is respectable to be blind and
that he or she possesses the capacity to compete on an equal
footing with his or her sighted peers. As with many other issues
facing the blind in education and rehabilitation, blind people
and professionals often have strikingly different views
concerning the cause of this problem.
The profession tends to view problems from the perspective of the
technocrat. Declining Braille literacy indicates a flaw in the
code, a problem of cost, or proof that Braille is antiquated.
Similarly, the profession may acknowledge a lack of skilled
personnel, summing up the Braille literacy problem as merely a
training issue. Given
this orientation, the solutions proposed by the profession are
predictable provide more money for teacher preparation, simplify
the Braille code, or
replace Braille with low vision aids or speech technology.  The
blind, however, believe that the real cause of Braille illiteracy
is rooted in societal beliefs and misconceptions about blindness. 
What professionals believe about blindness has direct bearing on
both their methodology and their expectations. As a result, if a
teacher does not believe that a blind child can truly compete on
terms of equality, the teacher will settle for and even praise
inferior performance.  The teacher's conception of blindness
becomes the yardstick by which performance is measured.
Professional judgments become clouded and are ultimately shaped
by age- old myths and misconceptions about the abilities of the
blind. Dr. Kenneth Jernigan, Executive Director of the National
Federation of the Blind, observed that  Many of the very people
who administer and work in the governmental and private agencies
established to provide services to the blind have all of the
misconceptions and false notions about blindness possessed by the
public at large.  If a teacher harbors negative attitudes about
blindness, then he or she may wish to avoid dealing directly with
blindness and, therefore, avoid the teaching of Braille. As a
result, parents and educators find themselves increasingly at
odds over the question of which children should be taught to read
print and which should be taught to read Braille.
A case in point concerns a young blind child who possesses a fair
quantity of residual vision. When this child began kindergarten
the school he was attending felt that his vision was not adequate
for all of his reading needs and, therefore, began the process of
teaching the child to read Braille. In the first grade his family
moved to another state. Being convinced of the importance of
Braille they sought Braille instruction from the new school
district in which their child was enrolled. The new district
agreed and continued Braille instruction throughout first,
second, and third grade.
Beginning in fourth grade the family again moved, enrolling their
child in yet another school district. This one conducted its own
educational assessment and determined that Braille instruction
was not needed.  If the story were to end here, it could be
written off as nothing more than a lack of precision in generally
accepted assessment criteria.  However, the story does not end
here. The district in question not only refused to teach Braille,
but launched a vicious attack against the parents, accusing them
of treating their child as if he were blind, thereby causing him
significant emotional and educational damage.  The district
asserted that a child could not be taught to learn both print and
Braille. To do so (they alleged) would result in the child's
functioning poorly in both reading media. When the parents
pointed out that their son would never be a fully competent print
reader because of his impaired vision, the district argued that
they were wrong, pointing to the fact that their son was reading
print at grade level at least for short periods of time.
This shows the first in a long series of ensuing contradictions.
If the child was reading at grade level in the fourth grade and
yet had received both print and Braille instruction from
kindergarten through third grade, then what evidence is there to
show that simultaneous instruction in print and Braille will
reduce efficiency in both?  The parents, concerned for their
son's future, sought three independent evaluations by qualified
professionals to determine whether their son should, in fact,
receive instruction in Braille reading and writing.  I conducted
one of the evaluations in November of 1987. I hold a master's
degree in the education of blind children from San Francisco
State University and have worked as a teacher of blind children
and as a special education administrator responsible for programs
for blind children in the Albuquerque Public Schools. The other
two evaluators were similarly qualified, experienced teachers of
blind children.  Although each of the evaluations was done
independently, all three of us agreed that this child should be
instructed in Braille.  The basis of our findings was not a
wild-eyed fanaticism that all children, regardless of degree of
visual functioning, should be taught Braille. Instead, our
conclusions were based on experience and direct observation of
the child's visual functioning. For my own part I considered such
factors as the child's suffering eye fatigue after a period of
only 20 to 30 minutes of reading. In addition, the child had
great difficulty copying material and was virtually unable to
read back his own handwriting. He was unable to read small print
such as a conventional dictionary and was not helped by low
vision aids. Large print was not beneficial since this child's
eye condition includes a field restriction.  Large print simply
reduced the number of words or letters he could see at a time,
reducing his reading efficiency. Again, because of his particular
eye condition, glare was a problem making him highly dependent on
particular lighting conditions. In short, I concluded that this
child needed Braille both as a reading and writing system.  Armed
with three independent evaluations and a renewed conviction that
their child needed Braille, the parents again approached the
district. Nevertheless, the district persisted in its refusal to
teach Braille, resulting in the matter's being brought to a
hearing. The hearing officer, appointed by the district,
concluded that the district was correct in refusing to teach the
child Braille. In spite of the fact that the child had received
Braille instruction for four years and in spite of the fact that
three qualified evaluators had independently arrived at a
recommendation for Braille instruction, the hearing officer
brushed the evidence aside and concluded that the district was
correct in refusing Braille instruction. To add insult to injury,
the hearing officer dismissed my evaluation by saying that since
I knew the parents through my affiliation with the National
Federation of the Blind, my report contained  the smell of doubt, 
thereby discounting its validity.
At this point, fourth grade had drawn to a close. The child had
lost an entire year of critical instruction. Last August, in a
final attempt to secure Braille instruction, the parents arranged
for a hearing before a panel representing the State Board of
Education. At that hearing the parents presented all of the
relevant documentation, including the three independent
evaluations which they had secured. The district, presumably
operating on the  smell of doubt  principle, stated that the
evaluations were not independent. In particular they discounted
my evaluation as being suspect because of my affiliation with the
National Federation of the Blind. The district's representative
stated that the National Federation of the Blind believed that
any visually impaired child regardless of circumstance should
automatically receive Braille instruction.
The district asserted that it had alternatively proposed its own
impartial evaluation which the parents had refused. It came out
that the district had given the parents a list of names prepared
by the district and had offered to allow the parents to select
any name they chose from the list. As could be anticipated, the
parents questioned whether this process would truly yield an
independent, impartial evaluation.  It was finally agreed that
the parents and the county would jointly select an individual to
conduct the evaluation. The individual selected was perhaps the
most renowned expert in Braille instruction in the United States.
The parents hoped that by employing a professional of her caliber
the question of Braille instruction could be settled once and for
all. It looked promising since the district agreed during the
hearing to accept the findings of this expert as representing a
truly independent evaluation. In late September, 1988, the
evaluation was conducted and shortly thereafter the report
received. It contained a recommendation for a minimum of
three-forty minute periods of Braille instruction each week. Was
it finally over? No.
In November, the district proposed an Individualized Education
Program (IEP) that included a grudging provision for including
Braille in the curriculum. Rather than recognizing the validity
of Braille as a reading system and the need for Braille for this
particular student, the district characterized Braille as a
subordinate, substandard, laborious method only to be used as a
last ditch alternative. One of the short term instructional
objectives identified in the proposed IEP was that  to alleviate
fatigue,  the child  will use his existing Braille skills when
occasionally appropriate.  Regardless of the technical
inadequacies of this instructional objective, the tone is very
clear. The district, in a cloud of bitterness and professional
arrogance, persists in its conviction that Braille is nothing
more than a second-class reading medium, connoting inferiority. 
It is interesting to observe that, while the district accused the
National Federation of the Blind of holding an arbitrary view
that all visually impaired children be taught Braille, the
district, on the other hand, seemed unshakably rooted to the
equally arbitrary albeit opposite point of view that a low vision
child, regardless of need, should be taught print to the
exclusion of Braille.  It is not difficult to understand what
drives this kind of thinking.  To the district and to many others
in society, Braille equates to blindness while print equates to
sight, and on an emotional level, be it conscious or unconscious,
the attitude persists that to be sighted is the be normal while
to be blind is to be dependent and inferior.  This thinking, not
learned research and educational theory, drives the
decision-making process of selecting which children will be print
readers and which will be Braille readers. Dr. Kenneth Jernigan
tells the story of visiting a classroom of blind children and
being told by the teacher:  This little girl reads print. This
little girl has to read Braille. 
The development of negative attitudes toward Braille can be
traced back to the instruction provided in some of our nation's
teacher preparation programs. Many teacher preparation programs
regard the slate and stylus as a relic of bygone days, assuming
that they are mentioned at all.  Throughout the nation it is not
unusual to see blind children using Braille writers for taking
notes in class. As recently as a generation ago, teachers of the
blind would have thought it ridiculous to use Braille writers in
class. Braille writers are awkward and heavy to carry around, not
to mention noisy and disruptive to others.  The truth of my
assertion can be seen in the marketing strategies being used by
manufacturers of portable Braille note taking devices.  They
point out that these high tech, portable Braille writers are
smaller and quieter than Braille writers, making them superior to
Braille writers for note taking. While I cannot disagree that
many high tech devices offer advantages over lugging a Braille
writer from class to class, it strikes me as significant that the
profession does not automatically recognize the important role
that the slate and
stylus play in personal note-taking. The slate is certainly more
economical $10.00 as compared to $1,000.00 or more and is still
the smallest and
most portable note-taking device. The battery never gives out and
I have never known a slate to  crash.  I do not mean to suggest
that high tech devices do not offer real advantages in specific
situations.  Instead I believe it is necessary to understand that
for a blind person the slate and stylus is equivalent to the
sighted person's pen or pencil. The sighted, as well as the
blind, are finding laptop computers convenient and efficient, yet
use of the pen and pencil is not a vanishing skill for the
sighted.
Why then is use of the slate and stylus virtually a lost art? I
believe it is because today's teachers of blind children have
never worked with a slate long enough to become comfortable with
it and thereby convinced of its usefulness. Instead, I am
frequently told that the slate is too difficult because children
have to learn to  write backward. 
Problems with teacher preparation are not limited to the slate
and stylus. In a very real sense teachers of blind children
receive only nominal instruction in reading and writing Braille.
Poor mastery of Braille coupled with prevailing social attitudes
about blindness combine to lead teachers to seek alternatives to
Braille. In my professional life I started as a teacher of blind
children. I have observed children using print in situations and
under conditions which defy reason.  In particular I can vividly
remember watching a child being instructed in print using a
closed circuit television at full magnification.  This child
could not see well if there was any glare in the room, so before
he started reading, the blinds were closed. To complicate matters
further, this child could not read letters that were at all
stylized. Therefore, the teacher would first retype all of the
child's material, using a sans serif, large print typewriter,
which made very plain typewritten letters. After the teacher had
retyped the child's material, closed the venetian blinds, and
turned the CCTV to full magnification, this child was able to
read a few letters at a time with excruciating slowness. In
another case, after a dispute with parents, a teacher was
compelled to instruct a young blind child in Braille. The teacher 
attempted to comply with the order in a way which would seem
laughable if it were not so painfully tragic.  The child had
almost no sight. Yet she tried to teach him Braille by using
flash cards with large print representations of Braille dots.  I
do not wish my comments to be construed as an attack on all
professionals in the field of work with the blind. There are many
professionals who have devoted their lives and talents in the
fields of education and rehabilitation. It is not simply lip
service to say that dedicated professionals have made significant
contributions to the advancement of work with the blind and
specifically in the area of Braille instruction.  Were the
problems not so widespread it would be enough to say that all
chains have their weak links and that the good work of the many
should not be overlooked because of the failings of a few.
Unfortunately, the problem of Braille literacy is not isolated to
a few poorly trained individuals. It is for this reason that the
profession finds itself at odds with blind adults and parents of
blind children over the question of Braille instruction.
Many parent organizations throughout the nation have sought
introduction of  Braille bills  in their respective states. These
Braille bills have been viewed by the profession as an attack
against the role of professionals in identifying which children
should receive instruction in Braille. As a result, opposition to
various Braille bills has been widespread and intense. I believe
the introduction of Braille bills is perhaps the best example of
the gulf that exists between modern educational thinking and the
desire of parents to prepare their children for a complex and
competitive future. Each of the Braille bills with which I am
familiar holds as its primary purpose to make Braille instruction
available to any legally blind child upon the request of the
child's parents. Opponents of Braille bills invariably argue that
these bills would require that all visually impaired children,
regardless of need, would be forced to learn Braille, often
against their will, resulting in educational and psychological
harm. They argue that the decision to teach Braille must, as a
matter of law, be decided individually through the IEP process.
They argue that the IEP is collaborative between teachers and
parents. In the case previously described it is not hard to
understand why parents might feel that the IEP process is only
collaborative when parents agree with the recommendations of
professionals.
No Braille bill that I have seen requires Braille to be forced on
visually impaired children. In fact, Braille bills do not even
require that all legally blind children be taught Braille.
Instead, they simply provide that a legally blind child, as a
matter of right, have available Braille instruction upon the
parent's request.
Why should such a simple and eminently reasonable provision be
fought so forcefully? What should have ever brought us to the
point where parents of blind children would feel it necessary to
take the decision of Braille instruction out of the hands of the
IEP process? The answer is simple. There clearly exists a large
segment of parents who cannot get their local school districts to
provide Braille instruction to their children. As in the case
discussed earlier, many parents are frustrated by the lost time
and wasted energy of pursuing lengthy hearing processes to obtain
simple literacy for their children.  If the problem were isolated
or limited only to the views of a few radicals, then it would not
be receiving the concerted action reflected in the introduction
of numerous Braille bills. Instead, the problem is widespread.
Today, adult rehabilitation centers throughout the nation are
teaching Braille not only to the newly blinded, but to young
adults who grew up as legally blind children. Many of these young
adults attended public school programs for the visually impaired
and others are graduates of schools for the blind, yet they never
received instruction in Braille reading and writing. As a
consequence they find themselves functionally illiterate and
unable to pursue meaningful careers. The Braille bills represent
a commitment to seizing opportunity for blind children of today.
As Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the
Blind, has said,  We have come to understand the importance
(indeed, the necessity) of knowing when to refuse to wait, when
to reject patience, when to say no to delay the courage and
judgment to insist that freedom and opportunity must be now, not
tomorrow! 
A parent wishing to have his or her child read print, no matter
how slowly or inefficiently, is routinely encouraged in this
conviction.  On the other hand, a parent wishing to have his or
her child be instructed in Braille is accused of causing
psychological damage by treating the child as if he or she is
blind and threatened with being responsible for educational harm
on the grounds that Braille and print reading taught together
will cause a child to be deficient in both.  A number of years
ago a leading professional organization circulated a proposed
position paper prepared by a nationally recognized expert in the
field of education of blind children. This expert, who heads up a
teacher preparation program, proposed that if a child could read
print at a minimum of ten words per minute, then that child
should be taught to read print to the exclusion of Braille. The
message is clear. Use of vision, regardless of efficiency, is
preferable to techniques associated with blindness. Last May, a
parent of a blind child attended an awards ceremony at a
residential school for the blind. One of the awards given was a 
mobility award.  The parent expected that the award  would have
something to do with improvement in on-campus travel.  Instead,
the mobility award was given to a student who had  demonstrated
the most advancement in the use of his residual vision. 
Astounding as it may be, the school offered no award for Braille
reading.
When we as blind people seek to change the conception of
blindness held by professionals and by society at large, we meet
resistance founded in the belief that it is the professional who
knows what is best for the blind. Never mind high unemployment
and lost opportunity we are asked to accept that the training and
technology with which we are plied are the best that can be
offered. Never mind that many of us lack the basic dignity that
comes from true literacy. As Dr. Jernigan puts it,  For all the
good will beamed at us by public opinion; for all the aids and
services, boosts and assists, props and prosthetics pressed upon
us, we, the blind people of this great society, are not yet
really free not yet fully independent not yet truly equal.  What
bars us from first-class status is not inferiority inherent in
blindness, but rather the tacit acceptance of a diminished role
with minimal expectations and minimal opportunity for full
participation.  The message I wish to bring is not one of
bitterness or hopelessness.  Instead, it is my conviction that
out of strife and conflict can emerge a new image of the blind as
able to compete on terms of equality.  To do this we must have
available the tools to make it possible. We must develop an
attitude that it is respectable to be blind and that the tools
associated with blindness constitute the very foundation on which
first-class status can be based. It is the negative conditioning
of society which leads us to believe that blindness constitutes
inferiority and that the tools of blindness likewise equate to
inferiority. When we rid ourselves of this false doctrine, then
we  will  be able to free ourselves from
the failure concept associated with Braille a concept which
promotes the idea that Braille is a last alternative only to be
used when all else fails.
Braille has been proven time and time again to be the way to
literacy for the blind. It can be produced more easily and more
cheaply than ever before in history. With Braille and the other
skills of blindness, we as blind people can fulfill our potential
and take our true place
as contributing, participating, taxpaying members of society. To
achieve this goal will take concerted and collective action. As
Mr. Maurer has said,  The blind of this nation (organized in the
National Federation of the Blind) are committed to achieving
equality and first-class citizenship. We regret that there is
apparently a certain amount of conflict built into the transition
from second- to first-class status.  But we know that blind
individuals, blind people as a group, and our entire society will
benefit if the worth we represent is recognized and given its
proper place. 
                                 
ETHEL INCHAUSTI: LOCAL LEADER
 From the Editor:  The Federation has many strengths, but one of
the greatest is its growing corps of local leaders. They build
the chapters, make the telephone calls, and carry on the daily
activities.  They constitute the base of power, the foundation of
strength upon which our movement is built.
 Here (as reported in the Fall, 1989,  Gem State Milestones,  the
publication of the National Federation of the Blind of Idaho) is
a profile of one of these local leaders, Ethel Inchausti. Of such
as Ethel Inchausti is the Federation made, and the future is in
good hands. 

 I f Ethel had time, she could tell us many stories about Idaho
sixty years ago or more. She has been independent and resourceful
all her life. At eighty-one she still is. Elected president of
the Magic Valley Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind
of Idaho last spring, Ethel Inchausti is part of the reason the
membership
of that chapter has multiplied several times during the last six
months.  Someone told her she looks younger than she did five
years ago, and Ethel wasn't surprised.
Five years ago Ethel was struggling with blindness which seemed
almost overwhelming. Cooking, dialing the telephone, and many
other activities had become complicated or frightening. Ethel
didn't know where to go for help.
One day John Cheadle and Ramona Walhof, part of an organizing
team for the NFB in the Magic Valley, knocked on Ethel's door.
She told them of her concern, and they told her about the
National Federation of the Blind. They also told her of other
services. Ethel says that was a turning point for her. Within a
few months she had enrolled at the Orientation Center of the
Idaho Commission for the Blind. She made friends with blind
people who were members of the Federation, and she attended her
first national convention in Denver, Colorado, in 1989.
In 1926 Ethel moved from Norwich, Kansas, to Twin Falls, Idaho,
bringing her three-year-old son with her. Since then she has
worked as a cook
for the Wells Sheep Ranch; she managed the Green Spot Cafe in
Castleford, Idaho; and she sorted beans and did a variety of jobs
that women did in rural Idaho.
Shortly after arriving in Idaho, Ethel married her husband of
more than thirty years (now deceased), who was a farm worker. In
addition to her son, Robert, Ethel and her husband had a
daughter, Billie Rae.  Now Ethel has seven grandchildren, fifteen
great grandchildren, and two great great grandchildren.
Ethel remembers when Blue Lakes Boulevard had no businesses, only
houses along it.  When you stop to think of it,  she says,  it is
hard to believe the change! I got lost every time I went
to town. Twin Falls was little then. Now I know my way
everywhere.  And she does. Traveling with a white cane, directing
a driver, or catching the bus Ethel Inchausti goes wherever she
wants.
She thinks maybe she talks on the phone as much as anything.  I
spend a lot of time talking to blind people. I know what they can
do for themselves. I threatened to quit calling one lady if she
didn't come out to a meeting, which I knew would be good for her.
Of course, I wouldn't have quit calling, but she came and was
glad she did.  Ethel Inchausti local leader, woman of strength.
                    FROM FARCE TO SLAPSTICK: 
 HOW MUCH LOWER CAN THE 
IOWA DEPARTMENT FOR THE BLIND SINK?
The Iowa Commission for the Blind was the focus of worldwide
attention and admiration during the years when Dr. Jernigan was
its director, blazing a new trail for services to the blind.
Today, people who have never even heard of Dr. Jernigan model
their library services after the program he established.
Orientation and job placement workers
are all aware of the high standard he set in Iowa a standard
which has drawn them all a little closer to real service and a
little further away from lip service. Dr. Jernigan left Iowa to
devote his full-time effort to leading the entire national
movement of blind people to
its current flourishing state. Some Iowans, too timid or too
lethargic, failed to expand their horizons with him, but they
continued to yearn for importance and still today believe that
Iowa has never once moved from center stage. The blind of the
nation know better.
In one sense the Iowa agency continues to occupy the center of
the stage, but it is now a stage on which most agencies would not
choose to star. It is instructive to check on the Iowa agency
every year
or so to learn what new arena of poor judgment, misconduct, or
malfeasance it has stumbled into. One year, the director figured
out a way to be her own boss in defiance of both state and
federal provisions.  Another, the hiring pattern made it clear
that no blind people need apply for jobs at the Department for
the Blind. This year the focus of public attention is theft.
During Dr. Jernigan's administration both federal and state
audits
of the agency's basic fiscal operations were always filled with
glowing praises of the thoroughness and accuracy of fiscal
management and detail. After he left, the audits changed, and now
the simple rule of probity has changed, too.
The chief accountant, one Terry Pepper, has given indication for
some years of poor judgment and unscrupulousness. At the close of
the 1984 fiscal year, he discovered that the agency would have
surplus funds.  He therefore decided independently that he would
order new office chairs for members of the staff. Moreover, he
arbitrarily established a pecking order among his colleagues
awarding increasingly elegant chairs to staff members according
to his estimation of their importance.  It wasn't long before the
employees realized what he was doing and began bartering their
chairs for other perquisites. The chaos that ensued was ludicrous
and embarrassingly unprofessional.
Several years later someone noticed that a number of long
distance telephone calls had popped up on the phone as having
been made from Terry Pepper's office. Since a number of these
were to South Dakota and others to Switzerland, and since to no
one's knowledge was the agency doing business with entities in
either location, Pepper was asked for an explanation. He
explained that his finger had slipped, and instead of dialing 0
as he had intended, he had inadvertently dialed a 1. Apparently
the agency director concluded that it was a mistake that anyone
could have made because Pepper was allowed to pay for the calls
and then forget about the intellectual (or, perhaps more
accurately, the ethical) lapse.
But let us return to the most recent adventure in the accounting
department.  It seems that, back in August, 1989, Pepper
deposited a check into his own personal account in excess of
$346,000 made out to the agency.  While few details have emerged,
it is rumored that this was a big chunk of the agency's federal
money. An alert bank official, noticing an agency check going
into a personal account, called the director, who called Pepper,
who said he was sorry and that it had all been
a mistake. Eventually that check found its way into the correct
account.  Then, two weeks later, the same thing happened again,
this time with
a check worth $12,000 generated by the sale of equipment from a
vending facility. The check was apparently deposited by Pepper
into his personal account on the same day it was written. This
means that Pepper must have handled the transaction entirely on
his own, driving to the sale so that he could be sure of picking
up the check in person. It is most unusual for the accountant to
handle matters belonging to the Business Enterprise Program, let
alone driving from Des Moines to a small outlying town to get his
hands personally on a check.
Now, six weeks later, another check has been found in the wrong
place, this one in the amount of $49,000, donated by an Iowa
citizen to assist blind Iowans. This bequest check, it seems, was
also deposited by
Pepper into his personal account. Internal and external audits
stretching over several months are reportedly under way, with
officials privately skeptical that the actual loss can ever be
determined. Two of the three checks that have been publicly
discussed came to the agency from outside the rehabilitation
system, making it easy for anyone so inclined simply to
obliterate all traces of the check in official records and take
off with the money. Talk around the agency now suggests that the
proven loss tops $80,000 and that unknown additional losses will
never be traced.
Here is what the  Des Moines Register  had to say on October 26,
1989, while the magnitude of the story was still unfolding:

                   Amount Raised in Theft Case
                          by Lou Ortiz

Prosecutors have increased the amount of money a former
administrator for the Iowa Department for the Blind is accused of
stealing from the agency.
Terry G. Pepper pleaded innocent Wednesday to two counts of
first-degree theft in the disappearance of more than $61,000 from
the department.  Pepper, 40, originally was charged last month
with stealing $12,000.  But prosecutors now also accuse Pepper of
stealing $49,346 in May, 1987, court records show. His trial is
scheduled for Jan. 16.
Pepper, of 1100 50th Street in West Des Moines, was the agency's
senior program administrator.
Records show that R. Creig Slayton, the department's director,
was contacted on August 28 by a representative of Valley National
Bank and informed that a check to the department for $346,145 had
been deposited in Pepper's personal account.
 When Mr. Slayton confronted the defendant, the defendant
admitted that it was his checking account,  records show. But he
told Slayton,  a big mistake had been made,  and the money was
returned.  On September 12 Slayton learned that a check for
$12,000 also had
been deposited in Pepper's account. According to records, Pepper
admitted taking the $12,000 check.
Pepper told Slayton  he felt sorry about the incident and desired
to make restitution,  records show.
Slayton said Pepper resigned when it became apparent charges
would be filed. If found guilty of the theft charges, Pepper
faces up to 20 years in prison.

That's what the  Register  had to say, and it is all pretty
routine, grubby, everyday theft, you say. True enough. But the
reaction of
one of the agency's commissioners provides the instructive
counterpoint.  In a meeting shortly after the fate of the second
and third checks had been revealed, Commissioner Bob Martin had
something to say on the subject. Martin is a legally blind
accountant who has worked at the federal government's arsenal in
Rock Island, Illinois, for a number of years.  Martin and the
other commissioners oversee agency policy, including fiscal
policy, for which they bear statutory responsibility.  In
addition Martin, during his tenure on the Commission, had made
a point of closeting himself with Pepper before meetings and of
offering opinions and analysis on the financial statements
presented at public meetings. His comments were usually
restricted to fulsome praise for Pepper's hard work and
high-quality product along with strong assurances to his
non-accountant colleagues on the Commission that the financial
statements, reviewed personally by him, were splendid.  At the
recent Commission meeting, with stories of the three checks on
the table and audits still vigorously under way, Commissioner
Martin told his colleagues and the members of the public in the
audience that he wanted everyone to know that he was  fond  of
Pepper and had  respect for his work.   He also wanted everyone
to know that he cared about what happened to Pepper and planned
to call him periodically to check on his situation.
How do you go about explaining reality to a person like that? How
do you convey that he, along with the other two commissioners and
the director, bear responsibility for effectively supervising
agency activity and that such supervision includes preventing
employees from stealing money? How do you convince such a man
that his  respect  for Pepper's work is respect for a man who has
admitted that he stole at the very least $12,000?  And how do you
explain that a little less  respect  for fawning staff members
and a little more respect for blind people could improve the
agency's performance in serving
the blind? But, never mind. Explanations are the last thing the
Department for the Blind wants. All we can say is:  Tune in next
year to find out what new shenanigans or chicanery the Iowa
Department for the Blind has gotten itself into.
                     SHACKLED IMAGINATION: 
 LITERARY ILLUSIONS ABOUT BLINDNESS
                      by Deborah Kent Stein
To the members of the Chicago Chapter of the National Federation
of
the Blind of Illinois, she is known as Debby Stein, but to the
thousands of fans of her dozen books for young adults, she is
Deborah Kent, an author who understands what it's like growing up
in the 1980s.  In addition to her fiction Deborah Kent has
written thoughtfully and with insight about blindness and
disability in general as well as authoring several in a series of
children's books about the states of the Union.
After earning a master's of social work from Smith College, Debby
Stein worked for several years in community mental health. Then,
in 1975, she decided to spend a year in a writers' colony in San
Miguel de Allende, Mexico, learning whether or not she could make
it as a writer. Her year stretched into five, and the answer to
her question was a resounding yes. Her first book,  Belonging ,
was published in 1978. It is an exploration of the struggles of a
blind teenager to fit into her high school. Four of Ms. Kent's
books are part of the National Library Service collection: 
Belonging, Te Amo Means I Love You, Heartwaves,  and  Jody .  One
Step At a Time , published in September, 1989, is the story of a
teenage girl who learns that she has retinitis pigmentosa. It may
soon become part of the
NLS collection as well. Deborah Kent lives in Chicago with her
husband, Dick Stein, and their six-year-old daughter Janna. She
is an active member of the National Federation of the Blind.
The following is an expanded version of a paper presented in
February, 1988, at the Second International Symposium on Vision
Loss sponsored jointly by the American Foundation for the Blind
and the Foundation for the Junior Blind. One hundred eighty
speakers were brought to the Beverly Hills Hilton in Los Angeles,
California, to take part in the five-day-long program. Ms. Kent's
analysis of the literary handling of blind characters down
through the ages and particularly today is both penetrating and
accurate. It seems useful to print this successful blind author's
assessment of historic and current literary treatment of blind
characters. Here it is:

  T here isn't much to tell,  says Hester when asked to describe
herself.  When you're blind it's all inside.  ...People wait on
me. They have to. And I think a lot, listen to music, I'm fond of
flowers.  (Sontag, 1967, p. 45).
Hester, in Susan Sontag's novel,  Death Kit , has many of the
traits commonly found in literary representations of people who
are blind. She is almost helpless, she does not contribute to
society,
and she is miserable beneath her tranquil veneer. Sontag depicts
Hester here as inhabiting a world of darkness akin to a living
death.
In his study,  The Meaning of Blindness  (1973), Michael Monbeck
identifies 15 traits frequently ascribed to blind characters in
literature through the ages. Nearly all these traits are
negative, reflecting
the low social status blind people are usually accorded. These
fictional blind characters are miserable, helpless, useless,
maladjusted, mysterious, evil, or pitiful. They may be fools or
beggars. On the one hand, they live in a terrifying, death-like
world of darkness, are being punished for past sins (often sexual
in nature), and are to be feared and avoided.  On the other hand,
they may possess superhuman powers and insights, to compensate
for their blindness, or they are morally superior to sighted
people because they are not tarnished by the shallowness of the
visual world (Monbeck, 1973, p. 25).
Other traits can be added to Monbeck's list. Blind characters are
asexual or not allowed to express their sexuality because of
their disability. They are bitter about their condition and
envious of sighted people. When they are cheerful and
well-adjusted, they are merely concealing a profound depression.
Contradictions abound in these lists. Blind characters may be
diabolically evil or sublimely good: blindness may be divine
punishment or it may be compensated for with heavenly gifts. But
whether the blind character is inferior or extraordinary, she or
he is set apart; to most writers, as well as to the general
public, blind people are a unique class because they are blind.
Regardless of gender, age, or social origin, blind people are
thought to have much in common with one another and little in
common with anyone else.
Some blind people do reflect the popular literary image, failing
to adjust to vision loss and remaining helpless and miserable. A
few are beggars, and some like a number of sighted people are
fools. But most of the traits possessed by blind characters have
no factual basis. Blind people do not have extraordinary powers,
and
they fall prey to the same vices that sighted people do. After a
period of adjustment lack of sight is not comparable to darkness,
and it is not connected to death. In short, fiction's blind
characters have little to do with real blind people. Blind people
comprise a random sampling of individuals with all the diversity
of the general population.  It is ironic that writers creative
people who pride themselves on their powers of observation and
their insight have embraced
such commonly held beliefs about people who are blind. Leonard
Kriegel's remarks about the writer's concept of the cripple are
equally true for the writer's concept of the blind person:
 Writers, by and large, view the world from the vantage point of
the  normals.  Writers like to think of themselves as rebels, but
the rebellions they are interested in usually reinforce society's
concepts of what is and what is not desirable. And most writers
look at the cripple...with the same suspicion and distaste that
are found in other  normals. ...The world of the crippled and
disabled is strange and dark, and it is held up to judgment by
those who live in fear of it  (Kriegel, 1987, p. 33).
Perhaps one reason writers insist upon such views of blindness is
that their experience with blind people is limited. Blind people
have always constituted a tiny minority, about one percent of the
total population (Twersky, 1955, p. 10).  Deafness, orthopedic
disabilities,
and a host of other handicaps are far more common. Yet blindness
especially fascinates the public, perhaps because of a primordial
dread of the dark and the conviction that blind people live in a
world of perpetual gloom. Writers choose to portray blindness
more often than any other disability.
The blind character can be a shortcut to pathos or horror or
both.  Blindness is also a rich mine for metaphor: it can
represent  blind  prejudice; it may stand for purity or for
freedom from the tainted, physically viewed world; or, it, as it
does for Sontag,  can symbolize forces of darkness and death.
Writers' imaginations are shackled to notions about blindness
that they have accepted as literary fact, despite all evidence to
the contrary.
Several scholars (Twersky, 1955; Kirtley, 1975; Monbeck, 1973)
have analyzed hundreds of works in which blind characters appear.
The period of these works ranges from Classical Greece to modern
times. A few
of their findings are offered here, before some recent works are
discussed.  In these contemporary representations the use of old
themes, as well as interesting new trends in the portrayal of
blind characters, are examined.
A well-known early depiction of a blind man appears in Sophocles' 
Oedipus at Colonus . Oedipus, who put out his eyes when he
discovered that he had murdered his father and married his
mother, wanders for
20 years, scorned and pathetic, unable to care for himself, and
depending on his daughter, who must lead him everywhere. Here
blindness is seen as a fate worse than death.
In  Antigone , Tiresias' sight is destroyed by the gods, but
he is granted the gift of prophecy in recompense, and he is also
able to travel because he has a magic staff to guide him.
The image of the helpless blind person reappears in Elizabethan
English literature. Shakespeare, ordinarily the master
interpreter of the human condition, presents the Earl of
Gloucester, blinded as punishment for adultery and led about by
his son, Edgar. Blindness renders Gloucester so unaware of his
surroundings that Edgar convinces him that they
are climbing a hill overlooking the sea, when in fact they are
crossing level ground inland. Wishing to die, Gloucester attempts
to leap to his death. Edgar persuades him that he has fallen a
great distance.  By the nineteenth century, the pioneering era in
the education of blind children, at least one author has a
different attitude. Elizabeth Maclure, in Sir Walter Scott's  Old
Mortality , is an elderly blind woman who operates a successful
boardinghouse, assisted only by her twelve-year-old
granddaughter. Another Scott character, Old Alice, in  The Bride
of Lammermoor , supports herself by keeping bees. Though both
characters are idealized and are held up to the
reader as examples of what can be accomplished through faith and
perseverance, they are a vast improvement over Oedipus and
Gloucester.
Such portrayals of competent blind people, functioning in society
through the use of their ears and hands, and through common
sense, are all the more remarkable because they are so rare.
Through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth,
blindness remains synonymous with pathos. In Lord Bulwer-Lytton's 
The Last Days
of Pompeii  (1834; reissued by Dodd Mead in 1946), the blind
flower seller Nydia travels throughout the city. A fairly complex
character, torn between love and jealousy, she is always called
the poor blind girl. Rejected by the man she loves, who cannot
comprehend that a blind girl could entertain romantic feelings,
she commits suicide.  The association of blindness with death is
demonstrated in Nydia's song to prospective customers:

 Ye have a world of light,
 Where love in the loved rejoices; 
 But the blind girl's home is the House of Night,   And its
beings are empty voices. ...   Hark! How the sweet [flowers] sigh
(for they  have a voice like ours), 
 The breath of the blind girl closes   The leaves of the
saddening roses-   We are tender, we sons of light.   We shrink
from this child of night. 
 From the grasp of the blind girl free us    We yearn for the
eyes that see us...                         (Bulwer-Lytton, p. 6)

Blind characters as special beings blessed by God appear
frequently
in nineteenth-century literature. In  The Man Who Laughed ,
Victor Hugo writes of the blind girl Dea:
 [She was] absorbed by that kind of ecstasy peculiar to the
blind, which seems at times to give them a song to listen to in
their souls and to make up to them for the light they lack by
some strain of ideal music. Blindness is a cavern to which
reaches the deep harmony of the Eternal  (Hugo, quoted by
Twersky, 1955, p. 32).
Also in the nineteenth century are some first examples of the
blind character as evil. The pirate Pew in Robert Louis
Stevenson's  Treasure Island , the villain Stagg in Charles
Dickens'  Barnaby Rudge , and malevolent Captain Wolf Larsen in
Jack London's  The Sea Wolf  are superbly competent as they
pursue their evil goals. Their agility renders them particularly
horrifying, as though they were aided by Satan himself.
This image of the blind character (usually male) as evil survives
deep into the twentieth century. In Thomas Wolfe's  You Can't Go
Home Again  (1940), George is chilled by his encounter with the
wicked Judge Rumford Bland:
 At the corners of the mouth he thought he also caught the shadow
of a smile faint, evil, ghostly and at the sight of it a sudden
and unreasoning terror seized him.... He just sat quietly,... the
sightless eyes fixed in vacancy, the thin and sunken face
listening with that terrible intense stillness that only the
blind know; and around the mouth hovered that faint suggestion of
a smile which...had in it a kind of terrible vitality and the
mercurial attractiveness of a ruined angel  (Wolfe, p. 60).
Sinister blind characters appeared at a time when blind people
were becoming educated, participating members of society. It's as
though authors believed God intended blind people to remain
helpless but pure. While they stayed in their place they could be
pitied and given charity, or even admired for their innocence.
But if they entered the real world to compete on equal terms with
sighted people, then perhaps they came as disciples of the devil.
All the stereotyped notions described here persisted well into
the 1950s. However, one might hope to find some improvements
during the 1960s and 1970s. During these crucial decades minority
groups, including disabled people, became a political force and
demanded equal access to education, employment, housing, and
other amenities. In a growing body of work, minority authors
spoke with new voices about issues
and feelings long suppressed and previously considered too
inconsequential or too offbeat for literary treatment. Blacks,
Native Americans, women, and gays molded their life stories into
fiction and drama.
As shown by the blind characters discussed so far, the public has
long held negative stereotypes about blind people stereotypes
that have helped to keep blind people from realizing their full
potential.  Though in every historical period some blind people
have been assimilated, the blind, generally, have been subject to
discrimination. Blocked by protective parents, skeptical
teachers, and employers who refuse
to accept their credentials, blind people know about the dream
deferred.  Blind people and others with disabilities often spend
a lifetime searching for their niche in society, for good
feelings about themselves.
A host of articles and personal essays written by people who are
blind and directed at a blind audience emphasize again and again
that public prejudice is the most relentlessly difficult aspect
of being unable to see. An era obsessed with political and
personal liberation should afford a perfect opportunity for blind
writers to channel their experiences into fiction aimed at the
public at large. The actual experiences
of blind people, rather than assumptions about what those
experiences must be, might even spark the imagination of a
sighted writer or two.  Keeping these possibilities in mind, I
will examine the portrayal of blind characters in a number of
works, both popular and serious, which appeared between the mid
1960s and late 1980s.
The blind character as evil has nearly disappeared in
contemporary fiction. The only such character who comes to mind
is Margaret Durie
in Stanley Ellin's suspense novel,  Very Old Money  (1985).
Margaret is helpless, depressed, and sinister. After losing her
sight at the age of eighteen, she retires to her room for 50
years to brood before taking horrifying revenge on the woman who
caused her blindness.
The sweet, innocent blind girl, blessedly removed from an impure
world, is alive and well in Charlton Ogburn's novel,  Winespring
Mountain  (1973). Raised in rural West Virginia, Letty is at home
among the birds and flowers, but has had little contact with
people outside her family. Wick Carter, a young man from the
city, is stunned by her beauty when he sees her from a distance.
But when he realizes
that she is blind, he rejects her as a romantic partner. Their
platonic friendship does not blossom into true love until Letty's
sight is miraculously restored. Then Letty is deluged with
invitations from people who never paid her the slightest
attention when she was blind.  No one in the novel expresses a
glimmer of resentment at such treatment, and seemingly Ogburn
never questions it himself. Blindness made Letty an outcast;
sight made her acceptable to society.
This novel notwithstanding, recent fiction has carried blind
characters a long way toward full participation in society.
Sexuality is one
realm that reflects a change in attitude. Once treated as almost
neuter, blind characters have benefited from the sexual
revolution. Letty is one of the few fictional characters in the
past two decades who while blind is denied sexual expression.
If anything, contemporary authors are inclined to endow blind
characters with extraordinary sexual prowess and sometimes tilt
toward the ancient theme that blind people are amoral. Even the
helpless, passive Hester in Sontag's  Death Kit , described at
the opening of this article, is not only sexually active, but
also aggressive and uninhibited.  Within half an hour of meeting
Dalton on a train, she leads him into an empty washroom for a
scene of passion.
Hester's sexuality is a metaphorical land mine. Rather than
establishing her as a bona fide woman, it allows Sontag to
explore an underlying theme the psychic and spiritual connection
between sex and death.  Hester's blindness, we are told, is a
suffocating darkness that gradually extinguishes Dalton's life
force.
Several other works break free of the tragic image, fostered by
Bulwer-Lytton's rejected Nydia, of the isolated blind woman who
is destined never
to be loved by a man. In  Blind Love  (1975), Paul Cauvin
recounts the summer affair between Jacques, a quiet French
schoolteacher, and Laura, his blind love. Jacques accepts Laura
without reservation at once, but it is Laura who objects to their
relationship. Her adventurous spirit masks a profound depression
over the loss of her sight, a loss she says she never forgets. In
one scene Laura puts on dark glasses and gets out the white cane
she normally refuses to use, trying to shock her lover with  the
insignia of her infirmity.  Convinced that she would only be a
burden to him, she warns him that he is not cut out to play
nursemaid for the rest of his life. Laura never breaks free of
this self-loathing, and the novel never examines the social
landscape that brought it into being.
Two best-selling authors, Irving Wallace and Fred Mustard
Stewart, also depict attractive, desirable blind women. In
Stewart's  Ellis Island  (1983), Georgie O'Donnell's lover,
Marco, rejects her not because she is blind but because he
succumbs to another woman's wealth and prestige. Devastated,
Georgie prepares to spend the rest of her life alone. Stewart
makes it clear, however, that she has other options.  Her family
wants to introduce her to suitable men, but Georgie takes no
interest in them. Then, after years of unhappy marriage, Marco is
widowed; and he and Georgie are reunited. Georgie proves to be
an ideal mother; and when Marco is elected to the Senate, she is
perfect in the role of senator's wife. Though this novel is
superficial, it does present a blind woman who is not an outcast,
but rather fulfills the feminine role as it is idealized in
popular fiction.  Wallace's portrayal of Nataly Rinaldi in  The
Miracle  (1984) relies more heavily on conventional devices.
Nataly, a beautiful actress who lost her sight three years
earlier, hastens to Lourdes when the Pope announces that the
Virgin Mary will reappear to effect a cure.  She promptly wins
the love of a young man staying at her hotel but does not suspect
that her lover is a Basque terrorist intent upon dynamiting the
shrine. At last the Virgin appears to her and restores her sight.
The would-be terrorist is also redeemed, and the two go off
together, in the standard happy ending.
Nearly all these fictional blind women, though attractive to men,
are passive and helpless. Only Georgie O'Donnell in  Ellis Island 
learns even minimal travel skills. The use of a cane is generally
pictured as degrading. These women are easily victimized, too,
and in need of help and protection. On the night of their first
meeting, Nataly's soon-to-be lover rescues her from a would-be
rapist.
The depiction of these blind women as sexual beings marks an
enormous stride from the portrayal of Nydia. It is interesting,
however, that blind women are cast as romantic leads at a time
when women in general are increasingly independent. Even in
romantic fiction, female characters are in control of their
lives. Perhaps the perceived helplessness of blind women appeals
to writers and readers who feel uneasy with today's liberated
woman.
Blind men, too, are sexual beings in contemporary novels.
Mitchell Ashley, in Robert O'Neill Bristow's  Laughter in
Darkness  (1974), scandalizes his landlady by entertaining a
stream of female readers
and housekeepers. His lover Georgia, though hurt and outraged by
Mitchell's conduct, cannot bring herself to leave him, for no
other man has ever
so gratified her. And rerunning the myth that blind people are
compensated with extraordinary insight, she  wondered if God had
given him a sense, and he was seeing her as no man would ever see
her, deep, deep inside where there were no lies.  (Bristow, 1974,
p. 114).
Though Mitchell's competence in bed is well established, he is
astonishingly helpless in nearly every other activity. Unlike the
female characters described above, Mitchell insists on being
allowed to do things for himself. In the novel's opening scene,
he drops several bags of groceries on the sidewalk. Though a
friend offers to assist him, Mitchell refuses all help as he
proceeds to step on the bread and slither about in the eggs.
Later, Mitchell forces his friend to stand silently by as he
attempts to make himself a sandwich. He first slathers the bread
with horseradish, believing he is using mayonnaise. When he
realizes his mistake, he gets a fresh slice of bread and daubs it
with bacon grease. Even in his own apartment, Mitchell cannot
move about freely without the help of his dog guide.
Nevertheless, despite its misrepresentations,  Laughter in
Darkness  depicts blindness with a refreshing twist of humor.
There is an adolescent quality to much of Mitchell's behavior he
rewards his guide dog
with slurps of beer and boasts of his involvement in a barroom
fight but he also has a genuine sense of wonder and adventure.
Central to Mitchell's story and to several other recent works
portraying blind characters is the theme of independence. After
Mitchell loses his sight, his mother begs him to move back home,
but he is determined to make his own way in the world. He trains
with a dog guide and lands a teaching job at a small college. Yet
he still finds:
 people preconditioned to serve him and the only way, unless one
surrendered, was to fight for independence. Because he suspected
at first and knew later that surrender was like, exactly like the
loss of his sight, gradual, more and more, and if he let them,
they would feel virtuous, close to God while they destroyed him 
(Bristow, 1974, p. 67).
Writing at the height of the  Me Generation,  Bristow tries to
demonstrate that no man is an island, that all human beings need
love and support. Unfortunately, however, Mitchell's need for
closeness is tied to his blindness. His pleas for independence
are absurd when he is clearly unable to handle responsibility and
to care for himself.  At last, after a cathartic LSD trip during
which he imagines that he can see again, Mitchell is reconciled
to his blindness and to his need for Georgia's love. When he
invites her to live with him, he tells her he needs her to help
grade student papers as well as to share his bed. In the end
Bristow indicates that Mitchell must bow to his limitations by
living with a woman who will nurture him.
The theme of independence pervades the Broadway play  Butterflies
Are Free , by Leonard Gershe (1969). Don Baker, a young blind
man, has been coddled by his clinging, domineering mother, but he
finally persuades her to let him rent an apartment in Greenwich
Village on a two-month trial basis. As the play opens, he meets
Jill Tanner, his next-door neighbor a free spirit. After some
light banter and a picnic of apples and cheese on the floor, Jill
seduces Don, and he looks forward to an ongoing relationship.
When Don's mother warns her about his needs and limitations,
however, Jill is frightened away. Don is so depressed by this
that he is ready to abandon his dreams of independence, and he
implores his mother to take him home again. It is Mrs. Baker,
however, who insists that he accept life's disappointments and
learn to survive on his own.  Jill learns an essential lesson as
well. In a confrontation, Don tells her that she needs him as
much as he needs her, and she joins him for another picnic.
This work, too, avoids depicting blindness as a tragedy, and
injects some humor into the story. Yet the premise seems to be
that for Don, as for Mitchell, independence is an illusion. After
a month in his apartment, he must leave his door unlocked so that
visitors can let themselves in, since it would take him too long
to answer the door himself. In his neighborhood he has learned
only to travel to the delicatessen and the laundromat, and this
only by counting steps.  Tutored at home, he has no experience of
the world, no training that would equip him to hold a job. Don's
only salvation is a link with a woman who will tend to his needs.
Preposterously, Gershe implies
that Jill, whose greatest commitment to date has been a six-day
marriage, must and will become that woman.
The old theme of blindness as retribution surfaces in Jonathan
Penner's novel of guilt and atonement,  Going Blind  (1977).
While his
close friend August is slowly dying of cancer, Paul Held becomes
sexually involved with August's wife, Ruth. Like Oedipus, Paul
brings about his own blindness through an automobile accident
caused by his own carelessness. Again, blindness is compared with
death. Having lost the vision of his right eye, Paul ponders:
 And my Ruth?...How could she marry a Cyclops,...or any man less
than whole after her life with August? If something happened to
my remaining eye, she would be worse off with me than she had
been with him  (Penner, pp. 29-30).
For a time Paul manages to conceal the gradual loss of vision in
his remaining eye. As expected, Ruth is aghast when she learns of
his impending blindness and tearfully leaves him. Paul also faces
the loss of his college teaching position, and he again hides his
visual loss. Only when his tenure is secured does he admit his
disability.  News of his tenure brings Ruth back into his life,
and when she becomes pregnant they joyfully plan to marry.
By the novel's close, Paul has learned Braille and can travel
with
a cane. After his months of anguish, blindness is no longer an
obstacle in his professional or personal life. He emerges, a man
restored after a sojourn in purgatory. But he never even thinks
to challenge the attitudes of Ruth, the college, or the world.
The problems lie not
in society but rather in Paul himself. He feels that it is only
natural that he be rejected because of his blindness.
James Dickey's novel,  Alnilam  (1987), offers a different
perspective on a blind character's relationship to society. A
loner most of his life, Frank Cahill feels that he has tacit
permission to live outside the law when be becomes blind. In the
opening scene Frank is unable to find the bathroom while spending
the night at a rooming house.  Without compunction he makes his
way outside and relieves himself in the yard. Later he reflects, 
[Blindness] placed him beyond
or to one side of the law. He knew that everyone who came into
contact with him...would sense this to be the case. It was
provable and he was living it  (Dickey, p. 26).
Blindness, according to Dickey, also gives Frank a unique window
on the truth. A doctor tells him:
 ... you're headed for the big dark, the solution to the
universal puzzle...You'll be seeing in other ways now....Your
other senses will become far more acute. You'll be able to hear a
baby cry through a stone wall. Music, any music, will have so
many levels it'll be like whole buildings, floors or sounds. And
your nose...is going to be an entirely new implement. Whatever's
in the wind or in the air of a room, you'll know and the others
won't.  (Dickey, p. 16).
To heighten the sense that Frank is privy to special knowledge,
Dickey frequently divides the pages of the book into two columns,
DARK and LIGHT. In the LIGHT column the narrator recounts events
as they occur; in the DARK, Frank himself interprets these
events.
Before the novel opens, Frank had received a telegram that his
son Joel had died in a training accident at an Air Corps base.
Though he had never seen his son, since his wife had left him
before Joel was born, out of curiosity he begins an odyssey to
learn what he can of Joel.
At the training base Frank gradually unravels the truth about his
son that he had inspired a secret cadet society, Alnilam, bent
on the spread of anarchy. The members of Alnilam's inner circle
perceive Frank as a seeker and bearer of truth and revere him as
a being free of the constraints of law. After they cause a fatal
flying accident, the cadets are triumphant, telling Frank that he
has become the symbol they will carry with them forever.
 Alnilam  offers a complex portrait of a blind character. Frank
Cahill, often abrasive and self-indulgent, has moments of
gentleness and sensitivity as well. With no close connections to
other people,
he nonetheless is intensely interested in everyone around him. A
seeker of truth, he is also a master of deception as the owner of
an Atlanta carnival.
Frank's almost egotistical self-confidence helps him adapt
quickly to his blindness, rarely regarding it as an impediment
but rather taking each situation in stride. Blindness is a loss
but not a tragedy; it simply requires that he learn new
techniques for such activities as traveling and carpentry. But
this realistic portrait is distorted by Dickey's conviction that
blind people, as a class, have a direct line to truth. Even in
his exploration of Frank's relationship to law and anarchy,
Dickey never perceives him as a member of a minority group
forcibly excluded from society.
Most of these works concentrate on the individual's adjustment to
vision loss, as though once she or he has come to terms with
blindness on a personal level, there are no more issues with
which to grapple.  Even Don Baker in  Butterflies Are Free ,
though he has been blind all his life, is entering the adjustment
process as he tries
for the first time to survive on his own. This emphasis on the
adjustment period keeps blindness at center stage in most of
these works. It is seldom allowed to recede into the background,
to blend in with the other aspects of a character's life and
situation.
All of the works I have discussed so far have been written from
the outside, by sighted authors trying to depict the experiences
of people who are blind. In many cases the author does not even
try to enter the blind character's world but conveys it
indirectly, through the perceptions of sighted people in the
story. To my knowledge only two authors who are themselves blind,
Gary Adelman and Jacob Twersky, have written adult novels which
involve blind characters.
In  Honey Out of Stone  (1970), Adelman recounts the inner
journey of Ben Storch, who lost his sight from diabetic
retinopathy. Ben, a poet and a professor of literature, at the
opening of the book is in prison for aiding draft resisters
during the Vietnam War. Through intricate flashbacks and poems,
Adelman braids together the many strands of Ben's past and
present his loves and friendships and his political convictions
and artistic passion. Blindness brings no mystical compensation;
he is neither better nor worse than other people. After an
initial period of mourning, he resumes his life where it had left
off.  Yet, as in Penner's  Going Blind , the loss of sight
becomes a metaphor for death, and Ben's adjustment to blindness a
kind of resurrection. In his opening paragraph Adelman writes:  I
would describe this place. I am blind, yes, but that coffin had
its key.  (Adelman, 1970, p. 1).
The other novel by a writer who is blind is  The Face of the Deep 
by Jacob Twersky (1953). It precedes the period under discussion
by more than a decade, yet it is the only novel written in any
era which focuses squarely upon the issue most crucial to people
who are blind:  the struggle for genuine equality. Twersky tells
the interlocking stories of five blind men and women from
childhood to adulthood. Through many vivid incidents the reader
is shown blind children rejected by their families and educated
by teachers who regard them as inferior and unable to compete in
the world. Twersky recounts the patronizing remarks of strangers
on the street and shows the devastating rejections of would-be
employers. Yet this novel is far more than a tract about negative
attitudes, for its main purpose is to explore the effects of
prejudice upon blind people themselves.
Though all these characters Rosie, Ken, Fred, Clare, and Joe
perceive themselves as stigmatized, they respond in a variety of
ways. Rosie and Ken cling to the blindness system, cultivating
only blind friends, and working in sheltered shops; they never
attempt to find a place
in broader society. Fred, on the other hand, tries to dissociate
himself from his blindness to prove that he is superior to
ordinary blind people. Clare pretends to be the sweet bringer of
sunshine most sighted people want and expect her to be.
The most powerful theme here is the divisiveness of self-hatred.
Fred and Clare dream of finding sighted partners, and their
deepening love for each other is destroyed because neither of
them wants a blind mate. Fred, who has entered his father's
business, refuses to give Ken a job when he is out of work,
fearing that his colleagues will not respect him if he is
supervising only blind workers. Ken also represents everything
Fred despises about blindness. In the novel's closing scene Ken
stands on a corner with a tin cup, the victim of another blind
man's prejudice and contempt.
The novel's last blind character is Joe, who earns a doctorate in
history and, after a series of rejections because of his
disability, obtains a teaching position. He also marries one of
his readers. Despite his success Joe continues to feel a profound
kinship with other blind people. Contemplating the good things in
his life, he realizes how easily he might not have had any of
them. Joe describes himself as a man at a banquet, surrounded by
starving people.
Blindness is never a tragedy in  The Face of the Deep , but the
discrimination that blind people encounter is shown to have
devastating consequences.
As this brief sampling shows, the blind characters in Western
literature of the past two decades are more competent, mobile,
attractive, and well-rounded than ever before. Nevertheless, the
old stereotypes flourish.  Ironically, such popular authors as
Fred Mustard Stewart seem best able to avoid stereotyped images.
Georgie O'Donnell is neither a saint nor a villain, neither a
bearer of truth nor a harbinger of death.
A young Irish immigrant, disappointed in love, she happens to be
blind.  Writers of serious fiction, however, almost inevitably
write about their blind characters using all the old images and
ideas, in part because serious fiction is founded upon metaphor.
Thus such writers as Sontag, Penner, and Dickey included their
blind characters for their metaphorical value. Yet serious
literature is learning new ways to interpret what it means to be
black or female. It is time for writers to question their
hackneyed notions about blindness and to discover new ways for
blind characters to function within a literary context.  One of
the most serious problems in depicting blind characters is the
tendency of both author and reader to assume that a particular
character is a blind  Everyman,  though there are novels, such as 
The Face of the Deep , which present more than one blind
character and thus convey the diversity of the blind population.
However, if an author takes the trouble to become educated about
blindness, and has a sincerely positive attitude, even the
portrait of a single depressed, helpless blind person need not
stand for all blind people.  White-Eye Ramford, a minor character
in Anne Tyler's novel,  Searching for Caleb  (1976), is a blind
street musician in New Orleans. In  The String-Tail Blues,  he
laments his life of dependence:   Once I walked proud, once I
pranced up and down/Now I holds to a string and they leads me
around  (p. 278).
But Tyler does not accept this helplessness as inevitable. She
explains,  He had lost his sight at twelve, or maybe twenty, his
stories differed; and by the time he reached middle age he should
have learned how to navigate but he hadn't. He was hopeless.  In
two sentences, Tyler shows that Ramford's life could have been
different, that not every blind person sings  The String-Tail
Blues.  Ramford is resigned to hopelessness, but he does not
speak for the millions of other blind people who walk the earth.
If  writers come to follow Tyler's example, they might break the
shackles of stereotype and free themselves to portray blind
people as the diverse collection of individuals they truly are.

POSTSCRIPT: Since I wrote this article in 1988, several new
novels which include characters who are blind have appeared on
the scene.   Blindsight  by Michael Stewart is based on the
notion that blindness is a fate worse than death. Stewart's
protagonist submits to a series of painful, life-threatening
experimental treatments which may restore his sight, though major
brain damage is a possible side effect. This novel perpetuates
some of the worst and most bizarre notions about blindness
Stewart even has his hero cut his toast diagonally, because it is
easier for him to angle it into his mouth point first.  Overall,
however, the most recent books veer away from the tragic mode,
portraying blind people who are self-assured, inventive, and
adventurous. In  Loving Little Egypt  by Thomas A. McMahon, a
brilliant student at a school for the blind sabotages the
telephone system and triggers a series of madcap escapades across
the country.  In Peggy Payne's  Revelation , a twelve-year-old
boy adjusts
to the loss of his sight after he meets a group of active blind
children his age. John Moon in Joanne Greenberg's powerful novel 
Of Such Small Differences  is a deaf-blind poet who struggles for
dignity in a world which would prefer to keep him out of sight.
Greenberg exposes the custodialism of sheltered workshops and the
misconceptions of the general public and depicts some acutely
painful moments between John and his guilt-ridden family.
These books seem to be setting an encouraging new trend,
portraying people who are blind more honestly than ever before.
Let us hope that the trend will continue as we carry on the work
of educating the public about the realities of blindness.
                                 
               BLINDNESS: IS LITERATURE AGAINST US

                     AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BY
                        KENNETH JERNIGAN
          President, National Federation of the Blind 

AT THE BANQUET OF THE ANNUAL CONVENTION 
                 Chicago, Illinois, July 3, 1974

From the Editors:  In view of the article in this issue by
Deborah Kent Stein we thought it might be appropriate to reprint
the 1974 banquet speech, which deals with the same subject and
which is as timely now as it was then so here it is. 

History, we are told, is the record of what human being have 
done ; literature, the record of what they have  thought . Last
year I examined with you the place of the blind in history not
just what we have done but what the historians have remembered
and said we have done. The two, as we found, are vastly
different.
This year I would like to talk with you about the place of the
blind in literature. How have we been perceived? What has been
our role?  How have the poets and novelists, the essayists and
dramatists seen us? Have they  told it like it is,  or merely
liked it as they've told it?
With history there is at least a supposed foundation of fact.
Whatever the twisting or omission or misinterpretation or
downright falsehood, that foundation presumably remains a tether
and a touchstone, always subject to re-examination and new proof.
Not so with literature.  The author is free to cut through facts
to the essence, to dream and soar and surmise. Going deeper than
history, the myths and feelings of a people are enshrined in its
literature. Literary culture in all
its forms constitutes possibly the main transmission belt of our
society's beliefs and values more important even than the
schools, the churches, the news media, or the family. How, then,
have we fared in literature?  The literary record reveals no
single theme or unitary view of the
life of the blind. Instead, it displays a bewildering variety of
images often conflicting and contradictory, not only as between
different ages
or cultures, or among the works of various writers, but even
within the pages of a single book.
Yet, upon closer examination the principal themes and motifs of
literature and popular culture are nine in number and may be
summarized as follows:   blindness as compensatory or miraculous
power; blindness as total tragedy; blindness as foolishness and
helplessness; blindness as unrelieved wickedness and evil;
blindness as perfect virtue; blindness as punishment for sin;
blindness as abnormality or dehumanization; blindness as
purification; and blindness as symbol or parable. 
Let us begin with blindness and compensatory powers. Suppose one
of you should ask me whether I think there is any advantage in
being blind; and suppose I should answer like this:  Not an
advantage perhaps: still it has compensations that one might not
think of. A new world to explore, new experiences, new powers
awakening; strange new perceptions; life in the fourth dimension.
1 How would you react to that? You would, I suspect, laugh me out
of the room. I doubt that a single person here would buy such
stereotyped stupidity. You and I know from firsthand experience
that there is no  fourth dimension  to blindness no miraculous
new powers awakening, no strange new perceptions, no brave new
worlds to explore. Yet, the words I have quoted are those of a
blind character in a popular novel of some time back. (I don't
know whether the term has significance, but a blind  private eye, 
no less.)
The association of blindness with compensatory powers,
illustrated by the blind detective I have just mentioned,
represents a venerable tradition, reaching back to classical
mythology. A favorite method
of punishment among the gods of ancient Greece was blinding
regarded apparently as a fate worse than death following which,
more often than not, the gods so pitied the blinded victim that
they relented
and conferred upon him extraordinary gifts, usually the power of
prophecy or some other exceptional skill. Thus, Homer was widely
regarded as having been compensated by the gift of poetry. In the
same way Tiresias, who wandered through the plays of Sophocles,
received for his blindness the gift of prophecy.
The theme of divine compensation following divine retribution
survived the passage of the ages and the decline of the pagan
religions. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (one of the most eminent
novelists of the last century, and the creator of Sherlock
Holmes) conjured up a blind character with something of Holmes's
sleuthing talents, in a book entitled  Sir Nigel . This figure is
introduced as one who has the mysterious ability to detect by
hearing a hidden tunnel, which runs beneath the besieged castle.
His compensatory powers are described in a conversation between
two other people in the novel:
 This man was once rich and of good repute [says one], but he was
beggared by this robber lord who afterwards put out his eyes, so
that he has lived for many years in darkness at the charity of
others. 
 How can he help in our enterprise if he be indeed blind?  [asks
his companion.]
 It is for that very reason, fair Lord, that he can be of greater
service than any other man. For it often happens that when a man
has lost a sense, the good God will strengthen those that remain.
Hence it is that Andreas has such ears that he can hear the sap
in the trees or the cheep of the mouse in its burrow... 2
The great nineteenth-century novelist Victor Hugo, in  The Man
Who Laughs , reflected the view of a host of modern writers that
blindness carries with it a certain purity and ecstasy, which
somehow makes up for the loss of sight. His blind heroine, Dea,
is portrayed as  absorbed by that kind of ecstasy peculiar to the
blind, which seems at times to give them a song to listen to in
their souls and to make up to them for the light which they lack
by some strain of ideal music. Blindness,  says Hugo,  is a
cavern to which reaches the deep harmony of the Eternal. 3
Probably it is this mystical notion of a  sixth sense 
accompanying blindness that accounts for the rash of blind
detectives and investigators in popular fiction. Max Carrados,
the man who talked of living in the  fourth dimension,  first
appeared in 1914 and went on
to survive a number of superhuman escapades through the nineteen
twenties.  In 1915 came another sightless sleuth the remarkable
Damon Gaunt, who  never lost a case. 4 So it is with  Thomley
Colton, Blind Detective,  the brainchild of Clinton H. Stagg; and
so it is with the most illustrious of all the private eyes
without eyes, Captain Duncan Maclain, whose special qualities are
set forth in the deathless prose of a dust jacket:  Shooting to
kill by sound, playing chess with fantastic precision, and, of
course, quickening the hearts of the opposite sex, Captain
Maclain has won the unreserved admiration of reviewers. 5
Even the author is carried away with the genius of his hero: 
There were moments,  he writes,  when powers slightly greater
than those possessed by ordinary mortals seemed bestowed on
Duncan Maclain.  Such moments worried him. 6
They might worry us, as well; for all of this mumbo jumbo about
abnormal or supernatural powers doesn't lessen the stereotype of
the blind person as alien and different, unnatural and peculiar.
It makes it worse.
Not only is it untrue, but it is also a profound disservice to
the blind; for it suggests that whatever a blind person may
accomplish is not due to his own ability but to some magic
inherent in blindness itself. This assumption of compensatory
powers removes the blind person at a stroke of the pen from the
realm of the normal the ordinary, everyday world of plain people
and places him in a limbo of abnormality.  Whether supernormal or
subnormal does not matter he is without responsibility, without
rights, and without society. We have been conned into this view
of second-class status long enough. The play is over. We want no
more of magic powers and compensations. We want our rights as
citizens and human beings and we intend to have them!
It is significant that, for all his supposed charm and talent,
Maclain never gets the girl or any girl. The author plainly
regards him as ineligible for such normal human relationships as
love, sex, and marriage. Max Carrados put it this way in replying
to an acquaintance who expressed great comfort in his presence: 
Blindness invites confidence,  he says.  We are out of the
running for us human rivalry ceases to exist. 7
This notion of compensatory powers the doctrine that blindness is
its own reward is no compliment but an insult. It robs us of
all credit for our achievements and all responsibility for our
failings.  It neatly relieves society of any obligation to
equalize conditions or provide opportunities or help us help
ourselves. It leaves us in
the end without the capacity to lead a regular, competitive, and
participating life in the community around us. The blind, in
short, may (according to this view) be extraordinary, but we can
never be ordinary. Don't you believe it! We are normal people
neither especially blessed nor especially cursed and the fiction
to the contrary must come to an end! It is not mumbo jumbo we
want, or magical powers but our rights as free people, our
responsibilities as citizens, and our dignity as human beings.
Negative as it is, this image of compensatory powers is less
vicious and destructive than some others which run through the
literature of fiction and fantasy. The most damaging of all is
also the oldest and most persistent: namely, the theme of
blindness as total tragedy, the image summed up in the ancient
Hebrew saying,  The blind man is as one dead.  The Oedipus cycle
of Greek tragic plays pressed
the death-in-life stereotype to its farthest extreme. Thus, in 
Oedipus Rex , in which the king puts out his own eyes, the
statement occurs:   Thou art better off dead than living blind. 
It remained, however, for an Englishman, blind himself, to write
the last word (what today would be called  the bottom line ) on
blindness as total disaster. John Milton says in Samson
Agonistes:

 Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,  Dungeon, or beggary,
or decrepit age!...    Inferior to the vilest now become 
 Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me,   They creep, yet see;
I, dark in light, exposed   To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and
wrong,   Within doors, or without, still as a fool,   In power of
others, never in my own;   Scarce half I seem to live, 
 Dead more than half...a moving grave, 8

What is most striking about this epic poem is not the presence of
the disaster concept (that might have been expected) but the fact
that Milton of all people was the author. His greatest writing
(including  Paradise Lost ) was done after his blindness. Then
why did he do it? The answer is simple: We the blind tend to see
ourselves as others see us. Even when we know to the contrary, we
tend to accept
the public view of our limitations. Thus, we help make those
limitations a reality. Betrayed by the forces of literature and
tradition, Milton (in his turn) betrayed himself and all others
who are blind. In fact, he actually strengthened and reinforced
the stereotype and he did it in spite of his own personal
experience to the contrary. The force of literature is strong,
indeed!
The disaster concept of blindness did not stop with Milton. 
William Tell , the eighteenth-century play by Schiller, shows us
an old man, blinded and forced to become a beggar. His son says:
 Oh, the eye's light, of all the gifts of Heaven the dearest,
best!...  And he must drag on through all his days in endless
darkness!...  To die is nothing. But to have life, and not have
sight Oh, that is misery indeed! 9
A century later the disaster concept was as popular as ever. In
Kipling's book,  The Light That Failed , no opportunity is lost
to tell us that blindness is worse than death. The hero, Dick
Heldar, upon learning that he is to become blind, remarks:  It's
the living death.... We're to be shut up in the dark .and we
shan't see anybody, and we shall never have anything we want, not
though we live to be a hundred. 10  Later in the book, he rages
against the whole world  because it was alive and could see,
while he, Dick, was dead in the death of the blind, who, at the
best, are only burdens upon their associates. 11  And when this
self-pitying character finally manages to get himself killed (to
the relief of all concerned), the best Kipling can say of him is
that  his luck had held till the last, even to the crowning mercy
of a kindly bullet through his head. 12
Joseph Conrad, in  The End of the Tether , kills off Captain
Whalley by drowning, as a fate much preferable to remaining alive
without sight. In D.H. Lawrence's  The Blind Man , there is a
war-blinded casualty named Maurice, whose total despair and
misery are unrelieved by any hint of future hope; and Rosamond
Lehmann, in
her novel  Invitation to the Waltz , goes Lawrence one better or,
rather, one worse.  Her  war-blinded hero, although he appears to
be living a respectable life, is portrayed as if for all
practical purposes he were a walking corpse. He leads, we are
told,  a counterfeit of life bred from his murdered youth.  And
when he brings himself somehow to dance with a former sweetheart,
it is a sorry spectacle:   She danced with him,  says the author, 
in love and sorrow.  He held her close to him, and he was far
away from her, far from the
music, buried and indifferent. She danced with his youth and his
death. 13 For writers such as these, the supposed tragedy of
blindness is so unbearable that only two solutions can be
imagined: either the victim must be cured or he must be killed. A
typical illustration is Susan Glaspell's  The Glory of the
Conquered , of which an unkind critic has written:  It is a
rather easy solution of the problem to make her hero die at the
end of the book, but probably the author did not know what else
to do with him. 14
Let us now leave tragedy and move to foolishness and
helplessness.  The blind man as a figure of fun and the butt of
ridicule is no doubt as old as farce and slapstick. In the Middle
Ages the role was regularly acted out on festive holidays when
blind beggars were rounded up and outfitted in donkey's ears,
than made to gibber and gesticulate to the delight of country
bumpkins. Reflecting this general hilarity, Chaucer (in  The
Merchant's Tale ) presents a young wife, married to an old blind
man, who deceives him by meeting her lover in a tree while taking
the husband for a walk. The Chaucerian twist
is that the old man suddenly regains his sight as the couple are
making love in the branches whereupon the quick-witted girl
explains that her amorous behavior was solely for the purpose of
restoring
his sight. Shakespeare is just as bad. He makes the blinded
Gloucester in  King Lear  so thoroughly confused and helpless
that he can be persuaded of anything and deceived by any trick.
Isaac, in the Old Testament, is duped by his son Jacob, who
masquerades as Esau, disguising himself in goatskins, and
substituting kid meat for the venison his father craves all
without a glimmer of recognition on the part of the old man, who
must have taken leave of the rest of his senses as well as his
sense of sight.
An unusually harsh example of the duping of blind people is found
in the sixteenth-century play  Der Eulenspiegel mit den Blinden . 
The hero meets three blind beggars and promises them a valuable
coin to pay for their food and lodging at a nearby inn; but when
they all reach out for the money, he gives it to none of them,
and each supposes that the others have received it. You can
imagine the so-called  funny ending.  After they go to the inn
and dine lavishly, the innkeeper demands his payment; and each of
the blind beggars thereupon accuses
the others of lying, thievery, and assorted crimes. The innkeeper
shouting  You people defraud everyone!  drives the three into his
pigsty and locks the gate, lamenting to his wife:  What shall
we do with them, let them go without punishment after they have
eaten and drunk so much, for nothing? But if we keep them, they
will spread lice and fleas and we will have to feed them. I wish
they were on the gallows. 15  The play has a  happy ending,  but
what an image persists of the character of those who are blind:
criminal and corrupt, contagious and contaminated, confounded and
confused, wandering homeless and helpless in an alien landscape.
Their book of life might well he called  Gullible's Travels. 
The helpless blind man is a universal stereotype. In
Maeterlinck's play,  The Blind , all of the characters are
portrayed as sightless in order to make a philosophical point;
but what emerges on the stage is a ridiculous tableau of groping,
groaning, and grasping at the air.
One of the very worst offenders against the truth about blindness
is the eminent French author of our own day, Andre Gide, in  La
Symphonie Pastorale.  A blind reviewer of the novel has described
it well:  The girl Gertrude at fifteen, before the pastor begins
to educate her, has all the signs of an outright idiot. This is
explained simply as the result of her blindness.... [Gide]
asserts that without physical sight one cannot really know the
truth. Gertrude lives happily in the good, pure world the pastor
creates for her.... Gertrude knows next to nothing about the evil
and pain in the actual world. As a sightless person she cannot
consciously know sin, is blissfully ignorant, like Adam and Eve
before eating of the forbidden fruit. Only when her sight is
restored does she really know evil for what it is and recognize
sin. Then, on account of the sinning she has done with the pastor
without knowing it was sinning, she is miserable and commits
suicide. 16
In literature not only is blindness depicted as stupidity but
also
as wickedness, the very incarnation of pure evil. The best-known
model is the old pirate  Blind Pew,  in Stevenson's  Treasure
Island . When the young hero, Jim Hawkins, first encounters Pew,
he feels that he  never saw a more dreadful figure  than this 
horrible, soft-spoken, eyeless creature ; and when Pew gets the
boy in his clutches, Jim observes that he  never heard a voice so
cruel, and cold, and ugly as that blind man's. 17
A much earlier version of the wicked blind man theme is seen in
the picaresque romance of the sixteenth century,  Lazarillo de
Tormes .  Lazarillo is apprenticed as a guide to an old blind
man, who is the very personification of evil.  When the blind man
told the boy to put his ear to a statue and listen for a peculiar
noise, Lazarillo obeyed. Then the old man knocked the boy's head
sharply against the stone, so his ears rang for three days.... 18
Throughout the ages the connection between blindness and meanness
has been very nearly irresistible to authors, and it has struck a
responsive note with audiences audiences already conditioned
through folklore and fable to believe that blindness brings out
the worst
in people. Given the casual cruelty with which the blind have
generally been treated, such villainous caricatures have also
provided a convenient excuse and justification. After all, if the
blind are rascals and rapscallions, they should be handled
accordingly and no pity wasted.  Alternating with the theme of
blindness as perfect evil is its exact reverse: the theme of
blindness as perfect virtue. On the surface these two popular
stereotypes appear to be contradictory; but it takes no great
psychological insight to recognize them as opposite sides of the
same counterfeit coin. What they have in common is the notion
that blindness is a  transforming  event, entirely removing the
victim from the ordinary dimensions of life and humanity.
Blindness must either be the product of sin and the devil or of
angels and halos. Of the latter type is Melody, in Laura
Richards' novel
of the same name:  The blind child,  we are told,  touched life
with her hand, and knew it. She knew every tree of the forest by
its bark; knew when it blossomed, and how.... Not a cat or dog
in the village but would leave his own master or mistress at a
single call from Melody. 19  She is not merely virtuous; she is
magical.  She rescues a baby from a burning building, cures the
sick by her singing, and redeems alcoholics from the curse of
drink.
It is passing strange, and what is strangest of all is that this
absurd creature is the invention of Laura Richards, the daughter
of Samuel Gridley Howe, a pioneer educator of the blind. Like
Milton, Mrs. Richards knew better. She was betrayed by the forces
of tradition and custom, of folklore and literature. In turn she
betrayed herself and the blind, and gave reinforcement to the
stereotype. Worst of all, she doubtless never knew what she had
done, and thought of herself as a benefactor of the blind and a
champion of their cause. Ignorance is truly the greatest of all
tragedies.
The sickest of all the romantic illusions is the pious opinion
that blindness is only a blessing in disguise. In  The Blind Girl
of Wittenberg , by John G. Morris, a young man says to the
heroine:   God has deprived you of sight but only that your heart
might be illuminated with more brilliant light.  Every blind girl
I know would have slapped his face for such insulting drivel; but
the reply of this fictional female is worse than the original
remark:   Do you not think, sir,  she says,  that we blind people
have a world within us which is perhaps more beautiful than
yours, and that we have a light within us which shines more
brilliantly than your sun? 20
So it goes with the saccharine sweet that has robbed us of
humanity and made the legend and hurt our cause. There is Caleb,
the  little blind seer  of James Ludlow's awful novel,  Deborah .
There is Bertha, Dickens' ineffably sweet and noble blind heroine
of  The Cricket on the Hearth , who comes off almost as an
imbecile. There is the self-sacrificing Nydia, in  The Last Days
of Pompeii ;
and there is Naomi, in Hall Caine's novel,  Scapegoat . But
enough!  It is sweetness without light, and literature without
enlightment.  One of the oldest and cruelest themes in the
archives of fiction is the notion of blindness as a punishment
for sin. Thus, Oedipus was blinded as a punishment for incest,
and Shakespeare's Gloucester for adultery. The theme often goes
hand in hand with the stereotype of blindness as a kind of
purification rite an act which wipes the slate clean and
transforms human character into purity and goodness.  So Amyas
Leigh, in Kingsley's  Westward Ho , having been blinded by a
stroke of lightening, is instantly converted from a crook to a
saint.
Running like an ugly stain through many of these master plots
and, perhaps, in a subtle way underlying all of them is the image
of blindness as  dehumanization , a kind of banishment from the
world of normal life and relationships. Neither Dickens' blind
Bertha, nor Bulwer-Lytton's Nydia, when they find themselves in
love, have the slightest idea that anybody could ever love them
back nor does the reader; nor, for that matter, do the other
characters in the novels. Kipling, in a story entitled  They, 
tells of a charming and apparently competent blind woman, Miss
Florence, who loves children but  of course  cannot have any of
her own.  Kipling doesn't say why she can't, but it's plain that
she is unable to imagine a blind person either married or raising
children. Miss Florence, however, is magically compensated. She
is surrounded on
her estate by the ghosts of little children who have died in the
neighborhood and have thereupon rushed to her in spirit. We are
not meant to infer that she is as crazy as a hoot owl only that
she is  blind , and therefore entitled to her spooky fantasies.
The last of the popular literary themes is that which deals with
blindness not literally but symbolically, for purposes of satire
or parable.  From folklore to film the image recurs of blindness
as a form of death or damnation, or as a symbol of other kinds of
unseeing (as in the maxim,  where there is no vision, the people
perish ). In this category would come H.G. Well's classic  The
Country of the Blind ; also,  The Planet of the Blind , by Paul
Corey; and Maeterlinck's  The Blind . In the short story by
Conrad Aiken,  Silent Snow, Secret Snow,  blindness becomes a
metaphor for schizophrenia.
In virtually all of these symbolic treatments, there is an
implied acceptance of blindness as a state of ignorance and
confusion, of the inversion of normal perceptions and values, and
of a condition equal to if not worse than death. The havoc
wrought upon the lives of blind people in ages past by these
literary traditions is done, and it cannot be undone; but the
future is yet to be determined. And that future, shaped by the
instrument of truth, will be determined
by us. Self-aware and self-reliant neither unreasonably
belligerent nor unduly self-effacing we must, in a matter-of-fact
way, take up the challenge of determining our own destiny. We
know who we are; we know what we can do; and we know how to act
in concert.
And what can we learn from this study of literature? What does it
all mean? For one thing, it places in totally new perspective the
pronouncements and writings of many of the so-called  experts 
who today hold forth in the field of work with the blind. They
tell us (these would-be  professionals,  these hirelings of the
American Foundation for the Blind and HEW, these pseudoscientists
with their government grants and lofty titles and impressive
papers) that blindness is not just the loss of sight, but a total
transformation of the person. They tell us that blindness is not
merely a loss to
the eyes, but to the personality as well that it is a  death,  a
blow to the very being of the individual. They tell us that the
eye is a sex symbol, and that the blind person cannot be a  whole
man  or, for that matter, presumably a whole woman either.  They
tell us that we have multiple  lacks and losses. 21 The American
Foundation for the Blind devises a 239-page guidebook22 for our 
personal management,  with sixteen steps to help us take a bath,
and specific techniques for clapping our hands and shaking our
heads. We are given detailed instructions for buttering our
bread, tying our shoes, and even understanding the meaning of the
words  up  and  down.  And all of this is done with federal
grants, and much insistence that it is new discovery and modern
thought.
But our study of literature gives it the lie. These are not new
concepts.  They are as unenlightened as the Middle Ages. They are
as old as Oedipus Rex. As for science, they have about as much of
it as man's ancient fear of the dark. They are not fact, but
fiction; not new truths, but medieval witchcraft, decked out in
modern garb computerized mythology. What we have bought with our
federal tax dollars and our technology and our numerous
government grants is only a restatement of the tired old fables
of primitive astrology and dread of the night.  And let us not
forget NAC (The National Accreditation Council for Agencies
Serving the Blind and Visually Handicapped). When the members of
NAC and its accredited minions try to act as our custodians and
wardens, they are only behaving in the time honored way of the
Elizabethan  keepers of the poor.  When they seek to deck us out
in donkey's ears and try to make us gibber and gesticulate, they
are only attempting what the country bumpkins of 600 years ago
did with better grace and more efficiency.
We have repudiated these false myths of our inferiority and
helplessness.  We have rejected the notion of magical powers and
special innocence and naivete. Those who would try to compel us
to live in the past would do well to look to their going. Once
people have tasted freedom, they cannot go back. We will never
again return to the ward status and second-class citizenship of
the old custodialism. There are many of us (sighted and blind
alike) who will take to the streets and fight with our bare hands
if we must before we will let it happen.
And we must never forget the power of literature. Revolutions do
not begin in the streets, but in the libraries and the
classrooms. It
has been so throughout history. In the terrible battles of the
American Civil War, for example, the writers and poets fought,
too. When the Southern armies came to Bull Run, they brought with
them Sir Walter Scott and the image of life he had taught them to
believe. Ivanhoe and brave King Richard stood in the lines with
Stonewall Jackson to hurl the Yankees back. The War would have
ended sooner except for the dreams of the poets. And when the
Northern troops went down to Richmond, through the bloody miles
that barred the way, they carried with them the Battle Hymn of
the Republic and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  It was Uncle Tom and
little Eliza who fired the shots and led the charges that broke
the Southern lines. Never mind that neither Scott nor Stowe told
it exactly as it was. What they said was believed, and believing
made it come true.
To the question IS LITERATURE AGAINST US, there can be no
unqualified response. If we consider only the past, the answer is
certainly yes.
We have had a bad press. Conventional fiction, like conventional
history, has told it like it isn't. Although there have been
notable exceptions,23the story has been monotonously and
negatively the same.
If we consider the present, the answer is mixed. There are signs
of
change, but the old stereotypes and the false images still
predominate and they are reinforced and given weight by the
writings and beliefs of many of the  experts  in our own field of
work with the blind.  If we turn to the future, the answer is
that the future in literature as in life is not predetermined but
self-determined. As we shape our lives, singly and collectively,
so will we shape our literature.  Blindness will be a tragedy
only if we see ourselves as authors see
us. The contents of the page, in the last analysis, reflect the
conscience of the age. The structure of literature is but a hall
of mirrors, giving us back (in images slightly larger or smaller
than life) exactly what we put in. The challenge for us is to
help our age raise its consciousness and reform its conscience.
We must rid our fiction of fantasy and imbue it with fact. Then
we shall have a literature to match reality, and a popular image
of blindness to match the truth, and our image of ourselves.
Poetry is the song of the spirit and the language of the soul. In
the drama of our struggle to be free in the story of our movement
and the fight to rid the blind of old custodialism and man's
ancient fear of the dark there are epics which cry to be written,
and songs which ask to be sung. The poets and novelists can write
the words, but we must create the music.
We stand at a critical time in the history of the blind. If we
falter or turn back, the tragedy of blindness will be great,
indeed. But, of course, we will not falter, and we will not turn
back. Instead, we will go forward with joy in our hearts and a
song of gladness on our lips. The future is ours, and the
novelists and the poets will record it. Come! Join me on the
barricades, and we will make it come true!

                            FOOTNOTES

1. Ernest Bramah,  Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, 
p. 6.

2. Arthur Conan Doyle,  Sir Nigel,  p. 102.  

3. Victor Hugo,  The Man Who Laughs, p. 316.  

4. Isabel Ostrander,  At One-Thirty: A Mystery , p.  6.

5. Baynard Kendrick,  Make Mine Maclain, dust jacket.  

6.  Ibid ., p. 43.

7. Bramah,  op. cit.,  p. 7.

8. John Milton,  The Portable Milton,  pp. 615-616.  

9. Friedrich Schiller,  Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller,  p.
447.

10. Rudyard Kipling,  Selected Prose and Poetry of Rudyard
Kipling , p. 131.

11.  Ibid ., p. 156.

12.  Ibid ., p. 185.

13. Rosamond Lehmann,  Invitation to the Waltz,  p.  48, quoted
in Jacob Twersky, Blindness in Literature.

14. Jessica L. Langworthy,  Blindness in Fiction: A Study of the
Attitude of Authors Towards their Blind Characters,   Journal of
Applied Psychology ,14:282, 1930.

15. Twersky,  op. cit.,  p. 15.

16.  Ibid.,  p. 47.

17. Robert Louis Stevenson,  Treasure Island,  p.
36.
18.  The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes,  summarized
in  Magill's Masterplots,  p. 2573.

19. Laura E. Richards,  Melody,  pp. 47-48. 

20. John G. Morris,  The Blind Girl of Wittenberg, 
p. 103.

21. Reverend Thomas J. Carroll,  Blindness: What It Is, What It
Does, and How to Live With It.  This entire book deals with the
concept of blindness as a  dying,  and with the multiple  lacks
and losses  of blindness.

22. American Foundation for the Blind, Inc., A Step-by-Step Guide
to Personal Management for Blind People. This entire book is
taken up with lists of so-called  how to  details about the
routines of daily living for blind persons.

23. There is a  tenth  theme to be found here and there on the
shelves of literature a rare and fugitive image that stands out
in the literary gloom like a light at the end of a tunnel.
This image of truth is at least as old as Charles Lamb's tale of 
Rosamund Gray,  which presents an elderly blind woman who is not
only normally competent but normally cantankerous. The image is
prominent in two of Sir Walter Scott's novels,  Old Mortality 
and  The Bride
of Lammermoor,  in both of which blind persons are depicted
realistically and unsentimentally. It is evident again, to the
extent at least of the author's knowledge and ability, in Wilkie
Collin's  Poor Miss Finch,  written after Collins had made a
serious study of Diderot's  Letter on the Blind  (a scientific
treatise not without its errors but remarkable for its
understanding). The image is manifest in Charles D. Stewart's 
Valley Waters,  in which there is an important character who is
blind and yet there is about him no
aura of miracle nor even of mystery, no brooding or mischief, no
special powers, nothing in fact but naturalness and normality.
Similarly, in a novel entitled  Far in the Forest,  H. Weir
Mitchell has drawn from life (so he tells us) a formidable but
entirely recognizable character named Philetus Richmond  who had
lost his sight at the
age of fifty but could still swing an axe with the best of the
woodsmen. 

                          BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Barreyre, Gene,  The Blind Ship,  New York, Dial, 1926.

Bramah, Ernest,  Best Max Carrados Detective Stories,  New York,
Dover, 1972.

Bronte, Charlotte,  Jane Eyre,  New York, Dutton, 1963.

Caine, Hall,  The Scapegoat,  New York, D. Appleton and Company,
1879.

Carroll, Reverend Thomas J.,  Blindness: What It Is, What It
Does, and How To Live With It,  Boston, Toronto, Little, Brown
and Company, 1961.

Chaucer, Geoffrey,  Canterbury Tales,  Garden City, translated by
J.U. Nicolson, 1936.

Collins, Wilkie,  Poor Miss Finch,  New York, Harper and
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Conrad, Joseph,  The End of the Tether,  Garden City, Doubleday,
1951.

Corey, Paul,  The Planet of the Blind,  New York, Paperback
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Craig, Dinah Mulock,  John Halifax, Gentleman,  New York, A.L.
Burt, nd.

Davis, William Sterns,  Falaise of the Blessed Voice,  New York,
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Dickens, Charles,  Barnaby Rudge,  New York, Oxford University
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,  Cricket On the Hearth,  London, Oxford University Press, 1956.

Diderot, Denis,  Lettre sur les Avengles,  Geneva,
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Doyle, Arthur Conan,  Sir Nigel,  New York, McClure,
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Gide, Andre,  La Symphonie Pastorale,  Paris, Gallimard,
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Glaspell, Susan,  The Glory of the Conquered,  New
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Hugo, Victor,  The Man Who Laughs,  New York, Grosset
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Kendrick, Baynard,  Make Mine Maclain,  New York,
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Kingsley, Charles,  Westward Ho!,  New York, J.F.  Taylor and
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Lamb, Charles,  The Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret, 
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Langworthy, Jessica L.,  Blindness in Fiction: A Study
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Lawrence, D.H.,  England, My England and Other Short Stories, 
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Lehmann, Rosamond,  Invitation to the Waltz,  New York, 1933.

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London, Jack,  The Sea Wolf,  New York, Grosset and Dunlap, 1904.

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Lytton, Bulwer,  The Last Days of Pompeii,  Garden City,
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Maeterlinck, Maurice,  The Plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, 
translated by Richard Hovey, New York, Duffield, 1908.

Marryat, Frederick,  The Little Savage,  New York, E.P. Dutton
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Milton, John,  Paradise Lost,  New York, Heritage Press, 1940.

,  The Portable Milton,  New York, Viking Press, 1949.

Mitchell, H. Weir,  Far in the Forest,  New York, Century
Company, 1899.

Morris, John G.,  The Blind Girl of Wittenberg,  Philadelphia,
Lindsay and Blakison, 1856.

Ostrander, Isabel,  At One-Thirty: A Mystery,  New York, W.J.
Watt, 1915.

Richards, Laura E.,  Melody,  Boston, Estes and Lauriat, 1897.

Sachs, Hans,  Der Eulenspiegel mit den Blinden.  

Schiller, Friedrich,  William Tell,  translated by Robert Waller
Deering, Boston, Heath, 1961.

,  Don Carlos, Infant of Spain,  translated by Charles E.
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Scott, Sir Walter,  Old Mortality,  London, Oxford University
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,  The Bride of Lammermoor,  London, Oxford University Press,
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Shakespeare, William,  King Lear,  New Haven, Yale University
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Sophocles,  Oedipus Rex,  translated by Robert Fitzgerald and
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,  Oedipus at Colonnus,  translated by Charles
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Stagg, Clinton H.,  Thornley Colton, Blind Detective, 
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Stevenson, Robert Louis,  Treasure Island,  Keith Jennison
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,  Kidnapped,  New York, A.L. Burt, 1883.  

Stewart, Charles D.,  Valley Waters,  New York, E.P.  Dutton and
Company, 1922.

Twersky, Jacob,  Blindness in Literature,  New York, American
Foundation for the Blind, 1955.

Wells, H.G.  The Country of the Blind,   Strand Magazine, 
London, 1904.

West, V. Sackville,  The Dragon in Shallow Waters,  New York,
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1922.


               SOCIAL SECURITY, SSI, AND MEDICARE 
FACTS FOR 1990

The beginning of each year brings with it certain annual
adjustments in Social Security programs. The changes include new
tax rates, higher exempt earnings amounts, Social Security and
SSI cost-of-living increases, and changes in deductible and
co-insurance requirements under Medicare.  Here are the new facts
for 1990:
 FICA (Social Security) Tax Rate:   The tax rate for employees
and their employers during 1989 was 7.51%. The rate will be 7.65%
in 1990. The maximum FICA amount to be paid by an employee during
1990 is $3,855.60, up from $3,604.80 during 1989. The increase
results from a higher ceiling on earnings subject to tax,
effective January 1, 1990. Self-employed persons will pay a
Social Security tax of 15.3% during 1990, and their maximum
Social Security contribution will be $7,711.20.
 Ceiling on Earnings Subject to Tax:   Social Security
contributions will be paid during 1990 on the first $50,400.00 of
earnings for employees and self-employed persons. This compares
to the 1989 ceiling of $48,000.00.

 Quarters of Coverage:   Eligibility for retirement, survivors,
and disability insurance benefits is based in large part on the
number of quarters of coverage earned by an individual during
periods of work. Anyone may earn up to four quarters of coverage
during a single year. During 1989 a Social Security quarter of
coverage was credited for earnings of $500.00 in any calendar
quarter. Anyone who earned $2,000.00 for the year (regardless of
when the earnings occurred during the year) was given four
quarters of coverage. In 1990 a Social Security quarter of
coverage will be credited for earnings of $520.00 for a calendar
quarter, and four quarters can be earned with annual earnings of
$2,080.00.
 Exempt Earnings:   The earnings exemption for blind people
receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits is
the same as the exempt amount for individuals age 65 through 69
who receive Social Security retirement benefits. The monthly
exempt amount in 1989 was $740.00 of gross earned income. During
1990 the exempt amount will be $780.00. Technically, this
exemption is referred to as an amount of monthly gross earnings
which does not show  substantial gainful activity.   Earnings of
$780.00 or more per month before taxes for a blind SSDI
beneficiary in 1990 will show substantial gainful activity after
subtracting any unearned (or subsidy) income and applying any
deductions for impairment-related work expenses.
 Social Security Benefit Amounts for 1990:   All Social Security
benefits, including retirement, survivors, disability, and
dependents benefits are increased by 4.7% beginning January,
1990. The exact dollar increase for any individual will depend
upon the amount being paid. Under pressure from senior citizens,
Congress has repealed the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act.
Among other things, that Act required Medicare beneficiaries to
pay additional monthly premiums. Beginning January 1, 1990, both
the benefits and the premiums resulting from the Catastrophic
Coverage Act are gone. Therefore, monthly Social Security checks
for Medicare beneficiaries will be increased to reflect lower
Medicare premiums. Beneficiaries should expect the decrease in
Medicare premiums to be reflected in Social Security checks some
time during 1990. A Medicare premium refund check should also be
sent to each beneficiary for excess premiums withheld during
1990.   Standard SSI Benefit Increase:   Beginning January, 1990,
the federal payment amounts for Supplemental Security Income
(SSI) individuals and couples are as follows:  individuals,
$386.00 per month; couples, $579.00 per month. These amounts are
increased from:  individuals, $368.00 per month; couples, $553.00
per month.
 Medicare Deductibles and Co-insurance:   Medicare Part A
coverage provides hospital insurance to most Social Security
beneficiaries.  The co-insurance payment is the charge that the
hospital makes to
a Medicare beneficiary for any hospital stay. Medicare then pays
the hospital charges above the beneficiary's co-insurance amount.
The
basic co-insurance amount for Medicare Part A was $560.00 for a
hospital stay in 1989. There was no co-insurance amount for
beneficiaries to pay for hospital stays longer than sixty days.
This was one of the benefits of the Medicare Catastrophic
Coverage Act, which became effective January 1, 1989. That Act
has now been repealed, effective January 1, 1990. As a result,
the Part A co-insurance amount for hospital
stays from sixty-one through ninety days is $148.00 a day. Each
Medicare beneficiary has sixty  reserve days  for hospital stays
longer than ninety days. The co-insurance amount to be paid
during each reserve day is $296.00.
The Medicare Part B (medical insurance) deductible remains at an
annual $75.00. The Medicare Part B basic monthly premium rate
will be reduced from $31.90 charged to each beneficiary during
1989, to $28.60 per
month during 1990. This reduction results from the repeal of the
Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act. The Part B premium is
automatically deducted from Social Security checks. The monthly
deduction for the first several months of 1990 will be $33.90.
All beneficiaries can expect to receive a refund some time during
1990 for excess Medicare premiums paid.  For anyone who pays the
basic Medicare Part B premium, the refund should be the
difference between $33.90 and $28.60, times the number of months
of higher premium payments.
                                 
LETTER FROM A STATE DIRECTOR
 From the Editor:  David Miller is the Director of State Services
for the Blind in South Dakota. For several years Karen Mayry,
President of the National Federation of the Blind of South
Dakota, has been trying to get him to attend an NFB national
convention, telling him
that he would find it both pleasant and beneficial. In 1989 he
responded.  Here is his reaction: 


                                             Pierre, South Dakota
                                                  August 14, 1989


Dear Karen:
Previously I promised to send you a letter concerning my thoughts
on attending the National Federation of the Blind national
convention this past year. In an attempt to organize my thoughts,
I have divided my observations into three areas.
The programming was outstanding. As director of a state agency
serving the blind, each year I have the opportunity to attend
several national meetings or conferences concerning issues
affecting the blind. The program at these meetings tends to be
quite specific. The program
at the National NFB convention was broad, current, and
authoritative.  It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to
listen to national leaders in government and business discuss the
issues facing blind citizens.  The opportunity to visit with so
many different individuals who are blind is rare. The informal
visits, the exchange of views, and the sharing of experiences
possibly outweighed the program in terms of personal benefit to
me. Although I am an active participant in the blind community of
our state, most of my interactions evolve around
the business of administering a state agency for the blind. The
convention gave me an opportunity to meet with consumers in their 
backyard.  Over lunch at McDonald's I gained new insights into
the needs and concerns of the elderly blind while visiting with
an 84-year-old NFB member. At dinner I discussed what goes into a
good rehabilitation center for the blind with a 24-year-old NFB
member.
I visited with people from California, Washington, Florida,
Oklahoma, Minnesota, New York, and Maryland concerning their
communities, their ideas, and their hopes for the future.
Lastly, there was a great exchange of professional information
through both formal and informal means. The exhibit area was
excellent. I
was surprised by the scope and variety of specialists in the
blindness field attending the convention. In one brief exchange
concerning computer software I gained information that assisted
me in saving several thousand dollars for a local agency. That
information alone made the cost of attending the convention a
real bargain.
In closing I would like to thank you for your dogged persistence
in encouraging me to attend the NFB national convention. It was
an excellent investment of my time all the more so in light of
the camaraderie, enthusiasm, and hospitality. I wish that all
learning could be conducted in such pleasant surroundings.

                                                       Sincerely,
                               David L. Miller, Division Director
                               Services for the Visually Impaired
                                 
WHITE CANE/GUIDE DOG SAFETY DAY

From the Editor:  Dr. Ed Eames is President of the Fresno Chapter
of the National Federation of the Blind of California. Under date
of October 23, 1989, he wrote me as follows: 

I am enclosing a copy of the proclamation signed by our mayor on
October 13, proclaiming October 15 White Cane/Guide Dog Safety
Day. I have had the feeling that our guide dogs are given short
shrift in the format of prior proclamations and hope we can put
them on an equal footing in the future by changing the language
used. The tremendous significance of language is a point noted by
you many times in the past and central to President Maurer's 1989
presidential address.

 Dr. Eames makes a point that is worth pondering. Here is the
proclamation: 

Whereas, the white cane or guide dog, which every blind citizen
of our city has the right to use, demonstrates and symbolizes his
or her ability to achieve a full and independent life and her or
his capacity to work productively in competitive employment, and
Whereas, the white cane and guide dog, by allowing every blind
person to move freely and safely from place to place, makes it
possible for him or her fully to participate in and contribute to
our society, and
Whereas, every citizen should be aware that the law requires that
motorists exercise appropriate caution when approaching a blind
person carrying a white cane or using a guide dog, and
Whereas, California law also calls upon employers, both public
and private, to be aware of and utilize the employment skills of
our blind citizens by recognizing their worth as individuals and
their productive capacities, and
Whereas, the State of California through its public agencies and
with the cooperative assistance of the National Federation of the
Blind of California can look forward to continued expansion of
employment opportunities for and greater acceptance of blind
persons in the competitive labor market.
Now, Therefore, I, Karen Humphrey, Mayor of the City of Fresno,
hereby proclaim October 15, 1989, as

                 White Cane/Guide Dog Safety Day

in the City of Fresno and call upon our schools to offer full
opportunities for training to blind persons and for employers and
the public to utilize the available skills of competent blind
persons and to open new opportunities for the blind in our
rapidly changing society, and
all citizens to recognize the white cane and the guide dog as
instruments of safety and self-help for blind pedestrians on our
streets and highways.        RECIPES 
 January is a time for recovering from the excesses of the
holiday season. Springtime begins to be on the horizon of the
mind, and taking off a few pounds in preparation for the swimsuit
season makes increasing sense. Here are a few recipes that may
help some will assist in the calorie-counting more than others.
But all are delicious.  
 LOW-CALORIE CHICKEN SALAD MOLD, MICROWAVED by Carlene McKenzie
 Carlene McKenzie is an active member of the Mountain City
Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland. 

 Ingredients: 
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
1 cup water
1 can (10 3/4 oz.) condensed cream-of-
chicken or cream-of-mushroom soup
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 can (5 ounce) boned chicken
3 hard-cooked eggs, chopped
1/2 cup diced celery
1/4 cup diced green pepper
2 tablespoons chopped pimento
2 tablespoons minced onion
crisp lettuce leaves

 Method : Soften gelatin in 1/2 cup water in medium- size glass
bowl.  Cook uncovered for 1 minute on high in microwave until
dissolved.  Blend in soup, remaining water, lemon juice, and
pepper.  Cook uncovered for 3 minutes on high in microwave,
stirring after 2 minutes. Chill slightly. Fold in chicken, eggs,
celery, green pepper, pimento, and onion. Pour into individual
1-cup molds and refrigerate until set.  Unmold and serve on
lettuce leaves. Serves 4.

                          SHRIMP SALAD
                        by Karen S. Mayry
 Karen Mayry is the energetic president of the National
Federation of the Blind of South Dakota and the Diabetics
Division of the National Federation of the Blind. She is also an
excellent cook. 

 Ingredients :
1 cup grated carrots
1/2 cup finely chopped celery
1/4 cup minced onion
2 hard-cooked eggs, chopped
2 small cans shrimp, cleaned
1 box or 1/2 9-ounce can shoestring potatoes
Mayonnaise (mixed with prepared
mustard) to moisten

 Method : Combine first 6 ingredients and blend with
mustard-flavored mayonnaise to taste. Chill.

                     LINGUINI ITALIAN SALAD
                         by Doris Sharp
 Doris Sharp of North Ft. Myers, Florida, was a loyal volunteer
for several years at the National Federation of the Blind of
South Dakota office. She has now moved to Florida to be near her
son, but she still clips articles about diabetes for the
publication of the Diabetics Division,  the Voice of the
Diabetic.

 Ingredients :
1/2 package linguini
1 10-ounce package frozen peas
1/2 Bermuda onion, sliced
1/2 pound sliced cooked ham,
cut into small pieces
1 bottle Italian dressing

 Method : Cook linguini 10 minutes in salted, boiling water or
until noodles are just barely done (al dente). Stir frequently.
Drain linguini by pouring the noodles and boiling water into a
colander containing the frozen peas. Allow colander to drain for
a few minutes.  Place linguini and peas in a large bowl. Add ham
and Bermuda onion.  Pour the entire bottle of Italian dressing
over the salad and allow it to sit for several hours. You may
substitute chicken for the ham.  

                    ORIENTAL NOODLE CASSEROLE
                         by Cherry King

 Cherry King is an active member of the Sligo Creek Chapter of
the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland. She is always
ready to put her hand to any task that needs doing, including
cooking or providing the  Monitor  with good recipes.  

 Ingredients :
2 (3-ounce) packages of oriental noodles 2 stalks celery, cut
into 1/2-inch slices 2 thinly sliced carrots
1 pound fresh mushrooms, cleaned
and sliced
1 medium onion, sliced
1 cup canned, frozen, or fresh crab meat
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1 tablespoon corn starch
1 teaspoon soy sauce

 Method : Steam vegetables in 1 cup of water until tender, adding
mushrooms 2 minutes before end of cooking time. Drain vegetables
and save liquid. Cook and drain noodles, according to label
directions, adding package of seasoning sauce which comes with
the noodles. Stir corn starch and soysauce into the reserved
liquid in which vegetables were cooked. Cook this mixture,
stirring constantly, until sauce is slightly thickened and clear.
Combine noodles, vegetables, crab meat, and almonds. Pour sauce
over mixture and toss thoroughly. Reheat briefly in microwave
before serving.

                                 
BRUNCH POTATO BAKE
                         by Arthur Segal
 Arthur Segal is one of the leaders of the National Federation of
the Blind of Maryland. He also has a well-deserved reputation as
a gourmet chef. An invitation to his holiday brunch is a prize
much treasured by his acquaintances. 

 Ingredients :
5 pounds potatoes, peeled, cubed, and boiled
8 ounces grated cheddar cheese
8 ounces butter
1 pint sour cream
4 tablespoons horseradish
1 teaspoon chives
freshly ground pepper, to taste
3 ounces grated fresh parmesan cheese

 Method : Combine all ingredients except parmesan cheese and
blend well using an electric mixer. Pour into buttered baking
pan.  Sprinkle with 3 ounces grated parmesan. Bake uncovered at
350 degrees for 35 minutes. For variety, try adding crumbled
bacon, other cheeses, or seasoning.

                       BLACKENED SWORDFISH
                         by Arthur Segal

 Method : With sweet (unsalted) butter, liberally coat 4 large,
thick fish fillets. In a small bowl mix 1 tablespoon ground red
pepper; 1 teaspoon white pepper; 1 tablespoon onion flakes;
pinches of dill, parsley flakes, fennel seed, and dry mustard.
Press mixture evenly into fish with fingers. When skillet is very
hot, melt 2 ounces sweet butter and drop the fish in. Cook 2 to 3
minutes on each side.

* * * MONITOR MINIATURES * * *  

**Salems Receive Miller Service Award:
Earl and Elaine Salems of Morris, Illinois, received the Miller
Service Award at the annual Christmas dinner of the Prairie State
Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind of Illinois. The
award was named in honor of the chapter's first president, Carl
Miller. It is given in recognition of outstanding service and
dedication. Gary Jones of Joliet, Award Chairman, made the
presentation. Since 1985 the Salems have been active in the
Prairie State Chapter. Elaine serves as Vice President and Earl
is on the Board of Directors. Their work has been outstanding in
membership and financial development. In addition to their
Federation work, they are both active in the First Presbyterian
Church of Morris, and Earl serves as Secretary of the Morris Boat
Club. They have two sons and four grandchildren. The Salems
received many tributes from Federationists in appreciation of
their outstanding contribution to the blind of Illinois and the
nation.

**New Computer Game:
We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
 There is a new computer game for IBM and IBM compatible
computers.  It is called CASINO. It actually is three games in
one: blackjack; slot machine; and a four-card poker game called
flash poker. It is fully usable with a screen-reading program and
a speech synthesizer or by a sighted person from the screen. It
has sound effects and other features. For your copy, send a check
in the sum of $15 to: Richard De Steno, 20 Meadowbrook Road,
Short Hills, New Jersey 07078; or call (201) 379-7471 for more
information. The game will be sent on a five
and a quarter inch diskette unless a three and a half inch is
requested. 

**Comptuer Aids Closes:
We have received the following letter from William L. Grimm,
President
of Computer Aids Corporation:

It is with great sadness that I must inform you of the immediate
closing of Computer Aids Corporation. Eight years of pioneering
efforts and tremendous support from the blind community just has
not been enough to make our company profitable. We all want to
offer our heartfelt apologies to anyone who may be inconvenienced
by our closing. We also want to express our warmest appreciation
to the many who have allowed us to serve.
The spirit of Computer Aids will live on through its people. Doug
Geoffray, author of most of our current software products and
Technical Support Specialist, will be continuing to sell and
support our Apple Software as well as Braille-Talk IBM through
his own independent business.  To contact Doug, you may call or
write: MicroSolutions, 5805 Breconshire Drive, Fort Wayne,
Indiana 46804; (219) 436- 4391.
Dan Weirich, our Chief Engineer, will be providing service for
Computer Aids products and other related products. He is also
interested in providing custom engineering services for your
individual needs. Dan will be acting as an independent business
person and may be contacted at: Renaissance Engineering, 1731
Graham Drive, Fort Wayne, Indiana 46818; (219) 489-2733.
Soon I hope to be able to offer a new and advanced PC screen
reader.  You may correspond with me at: William L. Grimm, Post
Office Box 150685, Altamonte Springs, Florida 32715- 0685; (407)
339-3980.

**A Wish for Leaders:
From the Editor: Recently Barbara Cheadle, Editor of  Future
Reflections,  shared the following item with me. She says it was
written by Earl Reum and that it came from the publication of the
Iowa Pilot Parents.  Whoever said it and wherever she got it, I
think it is worth passing on. It's a good way to start the new
year. Here it is:

 I sincerely wish you will have the experience of thinking up a
new idea, planning it, organizing it, and following it through to
completion, and then have it be magnificently successful. I also
hope you'll go through the same process and have something  bomb
out.   I wish you could know how it feels  to run  with all your
heart and lose...horribly! 
 I wish that you could achieve some great good for mankind, but
have nobody know about it except for you. 
 I wish you could find something so worthwhile that you deem it
worthy of investing your life within it. 
 I hope you become frustrated and challenged enough to begin to
push back the very barriers of your own personal limitations.   I
hope you make a stupid mistake and get caught redhanded and
are big enough to say   those magic words:  I was wrong.    I
hope you give so much of yourself that some days you wonder if
it's all worth the effort. 
 I wish for you a magnificent obsession that will give you reason
for living and purpose and direction in life. 
 I wish for you the worst kind of criticism for everything you
do, because that makes you fight to achieve beyond what you
normally would. 
 I wish for you the experience of leadership .

**Married:
Ellen Robertson is one of the long-time leaders of the National
Federation of the Blind of New York. We recently received the
following item in the National Office:
Ellen Robertson of Wappingers Falls, New York, was married to
Frank di Nardo of Albany, New York, on September 9, 1989, at the
chapel at Castle Point, Virginia, where Ellen worked for 13-1/2
years. The couple plan to live in Albany, and Ellen will be
looking for a job as a social worker as soon as they are settled.

**Attention Parents and Educators:
Boyd Wolfe, Chairman of the Committee on Concerns of the
Deaf-Blind, asks that we carry the following announcement:
Attention, educators and parents. We would like to know how many
of you are either educating now, or have experience in educating,
deaf-blind children and youth.  Please send us your name, a
summary of your experience, and the name of the school or agency
where you taught. Please tell us how many children you taught,
and include any other pertinent information.  The Committee on
Concerns of the Deaf-Blind would like to know what kind of
education deaf-blind children are receiving. Please contact me
at: 1314 North 1st Street, Apartment 214, Phoenix, Arizona 85004. 


**Buy:
We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
I would like to buy a Braille dictionary. Contact: C. Ronnie
Strote, 1711 Notre Dame Road, Rockford, Illinois 61103.


**Vital Speeches:
 Vital Speeches of the Day  is the most prestigious speech
magazine in the United States. It is received by most colleges
and many high schools and is a standard reference for students
studying debate and oratory techniques. The October 15, 1989,
issue of  Vital Speeches  carries  Language and the Future of the
Blind,  President Maurer's 1989 banquet address. This is one more
evidence of the standing of the National Federation of the Blind
and the caliber of its leadership.

**Iowa Growth:
The Fall, 1989,  Barricades  (the publication of the National
Federation of the Blind of Iowa) reports as follows:
On Saturday, September 23, 1989, the Northeast Iowa Chapter of
the National Federation of the Blind of Iowa was formed at the
MHI Canteen in Independence. Leonard and Mary Oberlander had been
planting the seed for a new Federation Chapter in northeast Iowa.
Now that seed has sprouted, and a new chapter has been formed,
with the following officers elected: Leonard Oberlander,
Independence, President; John Gipper, Fairbanks, Vice President;
Jeannette Delagardelle, Jesup, Secretary-Treasurer; Arlo Knoploh,
Sumner, Board Member; and Myron Chapman, Independence, Board
Member.

**Appointed:
The November, 1989, edition of the  Alaska News , the publication
of the National Federation of the Blind of Alaska, includes an
announcement that Corinne Whitesell, editor of the Alaska
newsletter, has been appointed to the Board of the Louise Rude
Center for Blind and Deaf Adults. As Ms. Whitesell comments, 
Having a member of the NFB on the board is part of the outreach
efforts of this affiliate to contribute to the betterment of the
blind of Alaska wherever those opportunities occur. 

**For Sale:
Franklin Ace 1000 computer. Single disc drive, software, text
talker, Echo speech synthesizer, print and tape instructions.
$1,200 or best offer. Contact: Dennis Turner, 700 North Denning
Drive #104, Winter Park, Florida 32789.

**Elected and Proclaimed:
At the October, 1989, meeting of the Greater Baltimore Chapter of
the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland the following
persons were elected: Eileen Rivera, President; Fred Flowers,
First Vice President; Raymond Lowder, Second Vice President;
Patricia Maurer, Treasurer; and Shirley Trexler, Secretary.
Kathleen Chapman, Michael Harris, Doris Johnson, and Carol Smith
were elected to serve on the Board of Directors. Also at that
meeting the Honorable Kurt L. Schmoke,
Mayor of Baltimore, presented a proclamation, declaring October 
National Federation of the Blind Month  in Baltimore.

**Literary Competition:
The Writers Division of the National Federation of the Blind
makes
the following announcement:
The Writers Division is again holding both a fiction and a poetry
contest. Deadline for submission is March 31, 1990. Fiction
should
be sent to: Tom Stevens, 1203 Fairview Road, Columbia, Missouri
65203, and should be accompanied by a $3 entry fee. Stories
should be no more than two thousand words or approximately eight
pages, typed and double-spaced. Send poetry entries to: Lori
Stayer, 2704 Beach Drive, Merrick, New York 11566. Each entry
must be accompanied by a $3 entry fee. You may enter either
contest as often as you like. Entries should be typed and should
not exceed 35 lines. Previously published material will not be
considered. Entries may not be sent elsewhere for publication
until 60 days after the contest ends. First prize in each contest
is $35. Second prize is $15. Entrants do not need to be members
of the Division. Include self-addressed, stamped envelope if you
wish your work returned.

**Appointed:
Don Morris, one of the long-time leaders of the National
Federation of the Blind of Maryland, was recently appointed by
the Governor of the State to serve on the Board of Blind
Industries and Services of Maryland. Mr. Morris operates a
vending facility at the National Fire Academy at Emmitsburg,
Maryland, and was formerly the Vice President of Blind Industries
and Services of Maryland. He is also one of the leaders of the
Merchants Division of the National Federation of the Blind.
Congratulations to Don Morris. His appointment to the BISM Board
has been universally acclaimed by the blind of Maryland as a
positive and constructive step.

**Honored:
The following item appears in the Fall, 1989, issue of the 
Oregon Outlook , the publication of the National Federation of
the Blind of Oregon:
On Thursday, October 5, 1989, Michael Bullis was named as
Disabled Citizen of the Year in a ceremony with Governor Neil
Goldschmidt and Secretary of State, Barbara Roberts. Michael
currently serves as secretary of the NFB of Oregon and has held
numerous offices in the organization over the last twelve years.
During 1988 Michael administered the Governor's Task Force on the
Disabled, which produced some fifteen bills that went before the
Oregon Legislative Assembly. In 1989 he shepherded the bills
through the Legislative Session and saw several of them enacted
into law. In his acceptance speech Mike noted that the real
problem of disability is one of attitude. In an interview with
the
Salem, Oregon,  Statesman Journal  newspaper Michael said, 
Disabled people should be hired (and, for that matter, fired)
just like any
other employee. Employers are in business to make money, and the
employee who produces will be retained, regardless of disability. 


**Dies:
On Friday, September 29, 1989, Jerry Hemphill died of cancer.
Jerry and her husband Victor worked hard to help bring about the
phenominal growth which the National Federation of the Blind of
Louisiana has experienced in recent years. Jerry first learned
that she had cancer in 1987. She waged a courageous battle
against the disease, undergoing four operations in eighteen
months and also having extensive chemotherapy and radiation.
Victor was with her at the time of her death. She was a brave and
dedicated woman, who will be greatly missed.  

**New Chapter:
Bernadette Krajewski recently wrote to us as follows:
Saturday, September 30, 1989, at 1:27 p.m. marked the beginning
of
our first chapter meeting of the Green Bay Area Chapter of the
National Federation of the Blind of Wisconsin, which was held at
the home of Bernadette Krajewski. The following people were
elected to office:  Bernadette Krajewski, President; Robert
Heiser, Vice President/Secretary; and Martin (Pete) Howe,
Treasurer. Present were as follows: Bernadette Krajewski, Robert
Heiser, Martin (Pete) Howe, Kathleen Howe, Lori Compton, Wilfred
Thomas Callahan, Jr. all from Green Bay. I am extremely proud to
acknowledge our participants from Milwaukee, who are as follows:
Bonnie Peterson, President of the National Federation of the
Blind of Wisconsin; Joel Peterson, Bonnie's delightful husband;
and Judith K. Congdon, all from the Milwaukee Chapter of the
National Federation of the Blind of Wisconsin. Items on the
agenda included:  state and national reports, both given by
Bonnie Peterson. Lots of participation and questions concerning
this information followed.

**Promising Career Ahead:
Dan Frye is the President of the Student Division of the National
Federation of the Blind of South Carolina. He is also a senior at
Erskine College and an active participant in campus life. The
impression he is making on his fellow students and the public in
general can
be seen from the article which appeared in the Greenwood, South
Carolina, newspaper on October 3, 1989. Here is how the article
begins:
Two terms on the judicial council; one term in the student
senate; staff reporter for the college newspaper; three years as
a bass in the Choraleers, a traveling musical group. A 3.0
average as a History major and Government minor. Strong
credentials for a college senior with law school as a goal. The
strength of these activities is amplified by the fact that the
student is totally blind. But Erskine College senior Dan Frye
doesn't dwell on the handicap, or as he prefers to call it, the
inconvenience ... or characteristic.

**Appointed to Important Post:
We are constantly urging our members to become involved in
community affairs, particularly political activities. Every time
a blind person makes a public appearance or is placed in an
important position, all of us benefit. Harold Snider, long-time
Federationist and President of the National Federation of the
Blind of the District of Columbia, has been appointed Director of
Outreach for Persons with Disabilities at the Republican National
Committee in Washington. This is a key position with broad
implications. The person who holds this job will have access to
top congressional and administration leaders and will have input
at the decision-making level.

**Operatic Giants:
One never knows what interesting things Federationists have been
up to. Peggy Pinder, who was recently the national representative
at the convention of the National Federation of the Blind of
Wyoming, discovered that Ernie Hagen, treasurer of the Wyoming
affiliate, is
a composer and librettist with a full-length opera score to his
credit.   Beret and Per Hansa,  a work based on the O.E. Rolvaag
novel,  Giants in the Earth , had its world premiere in April of
1978.  It was performed at the University of Arkansas at Little
Rock while Ernie Hagen was a rehabilitation student at Arkansas
Enterprises for the Blind. The opera received a good deal of
acclaim in Little Rock, and Mr. Hagen is currently revising it
with plans to show it to European opera companies in hopes of
performances there.

**Christian Material:
We recently received the following letter:
                                                  Jefferson, Ohio
                                                 October 16, 1989

Dear Mr. Maurer:
I am writing to inform you that our Christian radio station WCVJ
90.9 FM has free, nondenominational Christian Bible lessons
available for the blind. The lessons are available on cassette or
in Braille. They are available through the mail to any blind
person who requests them.  We just wanted you to be aware of this
service.

                                                Very truly yours,
                                                 Carolyn Stracola
                                              Program Coordinator
                                                     WCVJ 90.9 FM
                                              Post Office Box 112
                                            Jefferson, Ohio 44047

**Interest-Free Software and Hardware Purchase Program:
R. Clayton Hutchenson, founder of Computer Conversations, Inc.,
sent us the following information:
Computer Conversations announces the availability of a  special
interest-free payment plan to assist visually impaired
individuals in purchasing the company's interactive voice output
software, The Verbal Operating System. The VOS program, which
sells for $550, and VOS Basic, which costs $350, can be purchased
with a $100 downpayment followed by monthly installments of at
least $50. If hardware such as voice synthesizer, keyboard,
modem, or interface card is purchased with VOS or VOS Basic, the
purchaser can put down half the cost of this equipment and pay it
off in monthly installments along with the software. Purchasers
of VOS Basic can upgrade to the complete Verbal Operating System
at any time for $200. In addition, certain VOS modules (Verbal
Macros, Verbal Rainbows, Verbal Master, and the Verbal File
document reader) can be purchased separately for $49.95 each.
This means that VOS users can purchase precisely the voice output
capabilities they need. The company has recently released VOS
5.0, an update of its Verbal Operating System software, providing
improved speech output capabilities for the IBM PC and compatible
computers, including 286 and 386 machines and all models of the
IBM PS/2. The software works well with the MS
DOS and PC DOS operating systems and a wide variety of speech
synthesizers to create speech output with about 95 percent of the
software available for MS DOS computers. The program is
completely interactive, making  review modes  obsolete. It is
extremely transparent, which allows it to work with more
applications. The Verbal Operating System uses only one cursor.
It is not copy protected. Updates of The Verbal Operating System
are available to current users for $30. For further information, 
contact Computer Conversations at (614) 924-2885.

**Greek To Me:
Robert Greenberg, winner of the $10,000 Ezra Davis Memorial
Scholarship at the 1986 convention of the National Federation of
the Blind, is making a notable splash in his chosen field of
Slavic linguistics.  In April of 1989 he delivered a paper before
the American Association of Slavic and East European Languages at
Yale University, where Robert is earning a Ph.D. His review  From
Common Slavic to Slovenian  will appear in the 1987 edition of
the  International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics ,
one of the leading journals in the world in the field of Slavic
linguistics and philology, even if it is not remarkably punctual.
The 1987 edition of the journal is expected to appear during the
current academic year, but don't look for it on your favorite
newsstand. We congratulate Robert Greenberg heartily, even if we
can't understand what he is talking about.  **Hospital Audiences,
Inc.:
 We have been asked to carry the following announcement:  
Hospital Audiences, Inc.'s (HAI's) Audio Description Service
provides trained volunteer describers to assist blind and
visually impaired theatergoers to `see' a play. Through the use
of tiny radio receivers, the blind or visually impaired audience
hears a live description of the action, scenery, costumes, and
actors' nuances. These devices are non-obtrusive (the size of a
cigarette box) and can be used almost anywhere in the theater.
HAI's Audio Description Service is now available for any
individual in the New York metropolitan area who wants to take
advantage of the service. For further details, please contact
Trisha Hennessey at (212) 575-7660 or write: HAI, 220 West 42nd
Street, New York, New York 10036. 

**International Dining:
Cheryl McCaslin asks that we carry the following announcement:
The Cultural Exchange and International Program Committee of the
National Federation of the Blind is venturing forth with a new
fund-raising project. We are planning to produce a cookbook, and
guess the title?  It will be called  International Dining . We
will have it for sale in both print and Braille. And guess how
each of you can help us with this project? You're right. We are
asking for recipes from each and every one of you. Be sure these
foreign recipes that you
send have ingredients that can be purchased in the States. After
selecting a wide delicious variety of recipes, please send them
to: NFB of Minnesota, Attention: Joyce Scanlan CEIP Committee
Chairman, Suite 715 Chamber of Commerce Building, 15 South 5th
Street, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55472. We will be anxiously
awaiting to hear from each and every one of you with your
delicious foreign recipes. See you at the National Federation of
the Blind convention in Dallas, Texas, in 1990!

**New York Convention:
At the 1989 fall convention of the National Federation of the
Blind of New York the following people were elected to office:
David Arocho, President; Gisela Distel, First Vice President;
Carl Jacobsen, Second Vice President; Laura Herman, Secretary;
and Ray Wayne, Treasurer.
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