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                       THE BRAILLE MONITOR

                           June, 1996

                     Barbara Pierce, Editor


      Published in inkprint, in Braille, and on cassette by

              THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

                     MARC MAURER, PRESIDENT


                         National Office
                       1800 Johnson Street
                   Baltimore, Maryland  21230
                   NFB Net BBS: [phone]
              Web Page address: http://www.nfb.org



           Letters to the President, address changes,
        subscription requests, orders for NFB literature,
       articles for the Monitor, and letters to the Editor
             should be sent to the National Office.




Monitor subscriptions cost the Federation about twenty-five dollars per year.
Members are invited, and
non-members are requested, to cover the subscription cost. Donations should be
made payable to National Federation of the Blind and sent to:


                National Federation of the Blind
                       1800 Johnson Street
                    Baltimore, Maryland 21230





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

                  NFB NET BBS:  [phone]
               WorldWide Web:  http://www.nfb.org


ISSN 0006-8829THE BRAILLE MONITOR
PUBLICATION OF THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

                            CONTENTS
                                                       JUNE, 1996

WAR AND CONFUSION CONTINUE AT THE
ARKANSAS SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND
     by the Editors

DAH
     by Gore Vidal

COMMERCIAL TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
     by Curtis Chong

JIM'S GRAVE
     by Barbara Walker

THE CASE FOR BRAILLE

SEEING CLEARLY: TEENAGER REFUSES TO LET BLINDNESS
KEEP HER FROM LIVING LIFE TO THE FULLEST
     by Kim Boatman

WHO IS QUALIFIED TO BE A MOBILITY INSTRUCTOR?
     by Kenneth Jernigan

PORTRAIT OF A DONOR
     by Michael Baillif

BANGLES, BAUBLES, AND BEADS
     by Tamara Kerrill

DIRECTOR'S SALARY SETTLED

TEN THINGS TO THINK ABOUT IF YOU WANT
TO START A BUSINESS
     by Maureen Pranghofer

"OH! I NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT THAT!"
     by Lauren L. Eckery

BRAILLE AWARENESS DAY, 1996, BRINGS
BIG DIVIDENDS IN WASHINGTON STATE
     by Bennett Prows

HOW FAR DOES THE MESSAGE TRAVEL?
     by Kenneth Jernigan

IN MEMORIAM--E.U. PARKER
     by Kenneth Jernigan

MR. PARKER AND PAC
     by Barbara Shaidnagle

RECIPES

MONITOR MINIATURES

        Copyright ■ 1996 National Federation of the Blind[LEAD PHOTO/CAPTION: Each year the Baltimore Chapter conducts an art auction
as a gala fund-raiser. This spring the event took place on Saturday evening,
April 20. It was a spectacular success. Area businesses donated the flowers
pictured here and much of the food prepared by Marie Cobb and her talented
volunteers. Eliza Brown looks on as guests begin to sample the buffet.]

[PHOTO #1: This picture is of a large brick building with a columned entrance.
CAPTION: the administration building of the Arkansas School for the Blind
PHOTO #2: Pictured here is a man seated at his desk in an office. CAPTION: Dr.
Terzieff, photo■, David Reynolds]
                   WAR AND CONFUSION CONTINUE
              AT THE ARKANSAS SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND
                         by the Editors

     There is a war going on at the Arkansas School for the Blind
(ASB)! It is a war of attrition, but no less a war. The victims
are the innocent young blind children of the state; and the
combatants are the superintendent, the teachers, the board, the
alumni, and the politicians. Presumably the winner will decide
the future of the school--assuming, that is, that a school still
exists when the war is over.
     The superintendent is fighting with the board and the
Arkansas State Legislature; the board is fighting with the
superintendent and the legislature; and the legislature is
attempting to overpower the superintendent and the board. The
teachers and administrators are picking sides. After all, their
jobs are at stake! The battle has begun, and blows are being
struck.
     Should the school become a warehouse for children whose
primary disability is not blindness but retardation?
Alternatively, should the school become purely an academic and
vocational institution for children whose primary disability is
blindness? Should the position of the Braille teacher be
eliminated, giving that responsibility to the classroom teachers
of English, mathematics, and science? Can a school for the blind
function efficiently without a high school principal? Can the
superintendent ridicule the president of a local consumer
organization of the blind and get away with it? Did the ridicule
really happen, or is it just a figment of the imagination of a
number of staff members? Will the superintendent tolerate drugs
on campus, or is that too a figment of somebody's imagination?
These and many other questions are at the heart of the war, and
an interim report from the battlefield seems in order.
     As Monitor readers will recall, we reported the unusual and
noteworthy behavior of Leonard Ogburn, former superintendent of
the Arkansas School for the Blind, in our November, 1994, and
March, 1995, issues. A very brief recap of these events might be
helpful.  In June, 1994, the Board of Trustees of ASB suspended
Ogburn for alleged sexual harassment of current and former female
teachers and students, including fondling and wrestling holds in
which the lower part of his body came into close contact with
theirs.
     One teacher in particular, Miss A as we identified her in
earlier articles, complained that Ogburn had abused her by
committing such acts as spanking her. A massive state police
report was gathered after investigation. Ogburn failed a lie-
detector test and was charged by the Pulaski County prosecutor
with sexual abuse. In September, 1994, the Board of Trustees,
after hearing Ogburn and examining the state police report,
invited Ogburn to submit his resignation. The emotional turmoil
which existed at the school boiled over into violence when the
tape recorder of the Braille Monitor reporter attending the Board
meeting was smashed by a man whose wife, a pro-Ogburn alumna of
the school, was being interviewed. This occurred after Ogburn's
resignation had been accepted and the board meeting had ended.
     In January, 1995, after an evidentiary pre-trial hearing,
Ogburn pleaded no contest to one count of sexual abuse. As a
first-time offender he was fined $250 and placed on probation for
a year. Details of these matters were reported in the Monitor
articles. The media in Arkansas had a field day with Ogburn and
ASB.
     However, the Ogburn matter was far from settled. On June 21,
1995, Ogburn filed suit against all the parties concerned in his
dismissal--the board of the school; the attorney who had filed
the complaint against him, Mark Riable, a member of the Arkansas
State Legislature at the time; Phil Wyrick, also a member of the
legislature and a powerful opponent of the status quo; and the
Governor of Arkansas. The complaint was noteworthy for its
aberrant spelling and grammar, leading some to question its
genesis.
     Apparently Ogburn continues to be serious about this
complaint, but nobody is backing down.  Discovery has begun in
the lawsuit, and the State Attorney General (acting on behalf of
the school and its board, along with other named parties) will
defend all persons cited in the complaint. Various witnesses who
spoke with the state police are now saying that they were
misquoted and that they wish to change their stories. These
witnesses had been interviewed by an investigator from the State
Attorney General's office. Most of them are teachers at the
school. In his suit Ogburn alleges wrongful dismissal. It is
interesting to note that he allegedly agreed not to sue the
school at the time of his resignation. The case will probably
come to trial in September, 1996.
     In early 1995 the Board of Trustees of the Arkansas School
for the Blind began to advertise for a new superintendent. After
they had interviewed three final candidates, Dr. Ivan Terzieff
was hired for the position. He was formerly Director of
Educational Services at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School.
Terzieff holds a doctorate in orientation and mobility, and prior
to serving in Iowa, he taught cane travel at the Ohio School for
the Blind--where, the Monitor is told, he once punched his
supervisor for conduct he thought abusive of a female student.
When asked about the incident, Dr. Terzieff confirmed the truth
of the story to the Monitor reporter.
     In June, 1995, Dr. Terzieff moved to Little Rock to assume
his position. During the intervening eleven months from then
until now, the factionalism among the teachers, administrators,
and alumni of ASB has continued unabated. The legislature
continues to find ways to show its dissatisfaction with the
school and Dr. Terzieff. Beginning with the current school year,
for instance, the staff of the school was reduced by fourteen
positions, five administrative and nine maintenance. It seems
likely that additional positions will be cut from the staff of
the school for the 1996-97 school year.
     In addition to these budget cuts, other problems are said to
exist. They include allegations of use of drugs at the school
during a wrestling meet; abuse of elementary school students by a
teacher; ridicule of the NFB State President in public, in such a
way as to take advantage of her blindness; and a change in the
manner in which Braille is taught. These charges are circulating
widely among school personnel, alumni, and parents.
     In order to try to get at the truth, the Braille Monitor
interviewed Dr. Terzieff twice during March and early April of
this year. We also interviewed teachers and administrators from
both pro- and anti-Ogburn factions. Here is what we learned.
     Dr. Terzieff seemed open in his two interviews with the
Braille Monitor, answering all questions. But his reputation for
telling every audience what it wants to hear is given credence by
statements from others that contradict what he told us.
     His response concerning use of drugs on the campus is a case
in point. Several teachers had told us that drugs were used at a
wrestling meet held at ASB where over two hundred students
participated, representing residential schools from throughout
the United States. Dr. Terzieff said (and another administrator
confirmed) that, although drug use was suspected, a thorough
search of students, vehicles, and dormitories revealed no drugs
on the campus and that the rumors of drug abuse were blown out of
proportion. In fact, a source close to the administration said
that one student (not from ASB) was not permitted to compete in
the wrestling event because he went off campus without permission
and it was felt that he might have used drugs while away from the
school. Both Terzieff and high school principal Jim Hill said
that this was all there was to the drug rumors, dismissing them
as nothing more than idle speculation. But a number of teachers
at the school say otherwise.
     And there is more. Since our interview with Dr. Terzieff, we
have obtained information about a student who says that he has
been a regular drug user at the school for several years. During
the 1995-96 school year, sources tell us that he was caught using
drugs on the campus. These same sources tell us that Dr. Terzieff
did not notify the police but that the drugs were confiscated by
the school. If, as seems credible, these allegations are true,
then they directly contradict the statements made by Dr. Terzieff
in his interviews with us. The case is further strengthened by
the natural reluctance of students to admit their use of drugs.
     Regarding abuse of elementary school students by a teacher,
Dr. Terzieff said that he had interviewed the teacher and the
teacher's aid concerned in the matter and that he had disciplined
the teacher for inappropriately punishing several students.
     When asked about how he would handle grave matters of a
criminal nature such as rape, major physical abuse, theft,
possession of drugs, or weapons on campus, Dr. Terzieff said that
it was his policy to call the police about any matter of a
criminal nature that occurred. He said that withholding such
matters from the police hurt the reputation of the school and he
felt that openness in calling the police in a criminal matter
would only enhance the school's reputation. When these statements
are placed in juxtaposition to the drug allegations and Dr.
Terzieff's handling of them, they are troubling.
     Dr. Terzieff is in deep trouble with his Board of Trustees
and the State Legislature regarding the budget of the school and
the reductions in force which are scheduled to take place before
the beginning of the next school year. According to Dr. Terzieff,
he has no administrative staff to help with budgetary matters. He
says that he must go to the School for the Deaf for assistance.
He says that three of the five administrative personnel cut
during the present school year dealt with accounting and
budgetary matters.
     As in dealing with the allegations concerning drugs, Dr.
Terzieff gave every appearance of frankness and openness on other
matters. He seemed quite willing, for instance, to discuss
specifics concerning school personnel. We talked about the case
of Miss A. She is the teacher who complained about being spanked
and harassed by Leonard Ogburn (See the November, 1994, issue of
the Braille Monitor). Miss A is not certified in visual
impairment and teaches in the vocational program at the school.
Dr. Terzieff said that, because of her lack of certification and
the teaching position which she has held, she should be
terminated. In making this statement, Terzieff told the Monitor
reporter that he was aware that Miss A had audited the courses
necessary to receive certification in visual impairment at the
University of Arkansas at Little Rock, but that she had not
received grades in these courses because it was impossible for
her to take graduate and undergraduate courses simultaneously.
     Miss A subsequently told us that the director of the program
at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock had made an
arrangement with Ogburn so that she could take the examinations
and become certified. To date she has not done so. Subsequent to
our interviews with Dr. Terzieff and Miss A, her attorney (former
legislator Mark Riable), who had represented her in the Ogburn
matter, wrote a letter to Dr. Terzieff and the Board of Trustees
at the School:

                                            Little Rock, Arkansas
                                                   March 27, 1996

Mr. Ivan Terzieff, Superintendent
Arkansas School for the Blind
Little Rock, Arkansas

Dear Mr. Terzieff:
     I have not met you personally, but I became very familiar
with the Arkansas School for the Blind in conjunction with my
representation of Miss A, a blind lady who is a teacher at the
school and has been for many years.
     I am sure that you are aware that Miss A complained to the
Governor concerning her treatment at the hands of former blind
school Superintendent Leonard Ogburn. Apparently, following Mr.
Ogburn's suspension and no-contest plea, he resigned under
pressure, resulting in your being hired to replace him.
     I continue to be interested in Miss A's well being, and I am
determined to make sure that she is both properly treated and
that there is no retaliation upon her as a result of her having
the fortitude to complain about the treatment she claims was
imposed upon her at the hands of Mr. Ogburn.
     As a result of information recently provided to me, I am now
concerned Miss A has been targeted for termination at the school.
     I want to let you and the Board know in no uncertain terms
that I will consider any attempts to terminate Miss A as acts of
retaliation for her standing up for her rights.
     I stand ready to bring an action for retaliatory termination
in Federal Court and also will seek recovery pursuant to the
Americans with Disabilities Act, as it is my understanding that
Miss A is one of only two blind employees at the school.
     It is my sincere hope that none of this will be necessary
and that the school will reconsider.
     I should remind you and the Board that Miss A had a viable
action against Mr. Ogburn and the school for what appear to have
been clear violations of her state and federal civil rights. She
chose not to prosecute her claims, being more motivated by her
desire to consider the potential harm further negative publicity
would cause the school over her personal interests.
     However, should her employment be wrongfully threatened, I
will advise her that she must consider her interests first since
apparently no one else will.

                                                      Very truly,
                                     Mark Riable, Riable Law Firm

     During an interview which the Braille Monitor conducted with
State Representative Phil Wyrick, he told us that he had spoken
to Dr. Terzieff and others at the school regarding Miss A and
that it is his opinion that Miss A should not be dismissed. At a
board meeting held on April 9, 1996, Miss A was not recommended
for termination.
     In his interview with the Braille Monitor, Dr. Terzieff said
that he felt that Braille should be taught by the classroom
teachers who teach subjects in which it is necessary to use
Braille, such as English, mathematics, and science. He said that
the classroom teachers are all certified to teach Braille as part
of their certification in blindness and visual impairment. He
felt that those classroom teachers would lose their ability to
teach Braille if they do not keep in practice.
     In a matter involving another teacher, Miss B has taught
Braille at the school for the past seventeen years. According to
Dr. Terzieff, there are forty-one Braille readers at the school,
and that is the number that he reported to the American Printing
House for the Blind under the federal quota system. He says that
twenty of the Braille readers are following an academic course of
study and that the remaining twenty-one are following a
vocational course of study or have additional disabilities other
than blindness. Dr. Terzieff further says that Miss B does an
adequate job of teaching blind students who are following an
academic course of study but that she lacks the patience to teach
students who are slow or have additional disabilities or who may
be following a vocational course of study at the school.
Therefore, it was his opinion that Miss B should also be
terminated, or perhaps reassigned, that the responsibility of
teaching Braille should be left entirely to classroom teachers,
and that they should be evaluated on their ability to teach
Braille as part of their ability to teach specific subjects.
     Subsequent to our interview with Dr. Terzieff, Miss B has
been offered and has accepted another teaching assignment for the
coming school year. The question is not why this is being done
but why any thought of termination was ever considered. After
all, she has seventeen years of seniority at the school, and she
is certified as a teacher of blind and visually impaired
children. It should be pointed out here that there are several
teachers at ASB who do not have their certification in blindness
and visual impairment and have been at the School for much less
time than Miss A or Miss B. Also some say that perhaps other
administrative staff could be cut.
     Shortly before the board meeting on April 9 of this year,
the Braille Monitor learned that Dr. Terzieff had given Jim Hill,
the principal of the high school, a letter saying that he would
be terminated at the end of the 1996 school year. However, at the
board meeting this termination was not ratified. The board went
into executive session to discuss personnel matters, and at the
end of the board meeting no action was taken on the letter that
Dr. Terzieff had sent to Mr. Hill.
     From sources within the school the Braille Monitor has
learned that recommendations were made by senior administrators
to Terzieff regarding positions and staff members who might be
terminated. Dr. Terzieff has failed to act on these
recommendations. Teachers and others at the school say that they
hope any necessary reductions in force will be made in a
reasoned, objective manner by the school's administration; but
they feel that, in the politically charged atmosphere of
factionalism and personalities that permeates the school, this
may not be possible. They believe that the legislature may have
to do the job.
     We discussed NAC accreditation with Dr. Terzieff during our
interviews. In the summer of 1995 a NAC on-site review team came
to the school for one day. As a result of that on-site review, a
report was given and the school was re-accredited for a period of
one year. Dr. Terzieff's position on NAC accreditation is not
clear-cut. During the portion of our interview which dealt with
his views on de-NAC-ing, he said that he thought the most
sensible strategy for any school for the blind to employ was to
seek a single, outcome-based method of accreditation similar to
that which was adopted by the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving
School in 1991. Dr. Terzieff said that he wanted to adopt this
outcome-based accreditation at the Arkansas School. He said this
accreditation could be provided best by the North Central
Association of Schools and Colleges.
     Subsequent to our interviews with Dr. Terzieff, we were told
by school staff members that Dr. Terzieff told them he did not
believe that the Arkansas School will be re-accredited by NAC in
June 1996. However, as Monitor readers know, it is rare
(regardless of quality or merit) for NAC to withhold re-
accreditation so long as the entity in question is willing to be
associated with it and to accept its seal.
     Dr. Buffa Hanse is the State President of the National
Federation of the Blind of Arkansas. She was elected to that
position last October. Also in October, 1995, she made a
presentation to the faculty and staff of the Arkansas School for
the Blind regarding NAC accreditation. Three people who attended
that staff meeting all gave the Braille Monitor the same version
of what occurred. They say that Dr. Terzieff stood behind and to
one side of Dr. Hanse while she was making her presentation. They
say that he shook his head, rolled his eyes, and made faces at
specific points during Dr. Hanse's speech.
     Although Dr. Hanse has some usable vision, she did not see
Dr. Terzieff's alleged inappropriate behavior because she was not
facing him. When asked about the matter, Dr. Terzieff vehemently
denied it. Because of the conflicting testimony, there is no way
to reach a definitive conclusion about what occurred. At the very
least, however, the charges and denials emphasize the tensions
and chaos which swirl in a dance of constant commotion just
beneath the surface of daily life at the Arkansas School for the
Blind--not a good atmosphere for the education of blind children
or, for that matter, any children.
     Obviously Dr. Terzieff knows that he is in deep trouble with
some of the members of the legislature and his own Board of
Trustees. Several new board members have been appointed since
Leonard Ogburn resigned as superintendent. These new members are
much more proactive than their predecessors. To some extent they
were necessarily appointed to reflect the views of members of the
Arkansas State Legislature, who will ultimately determine the
future of the school.
     Comments from board members and legislators indicate that
the school may well be consolidated with the Arkansas School for
the Deaf for administrative matters. That is, the future
structure of the school would be to have one superintendent, with
the school being called the Arkansas School for the Deaf and
Blind. There would be a principal of the School for the Deaf and
a principal of the School for the Blind, and the superintendent
would have administrative responsibility for the entire
operation: purchasing, business matters, transportation of
students, maintenance of the campuses, and other non-educational
administrative functions. The principals would handle educational
and academic matters. This seems to be the thinking of the
majority of those with whom we have spoken.
     Dr. Terzieff, on the other hand, wants to maintain an
identifiable School for the Blind under the current system. He
says he is content with a single board of trustees, but he wants
the two schools administered separately.
     Then there is the issue of whether ASB will continue to
accept the same type of students as previously. Currently the
majority of its students have other major disabilities besides
blindness. In particular, many are retarded. In Arkansas, as in
other states, there is an institution for retarded children,
Arkansas's being called the Children's Colony.
     To date the Children's Colony and local education
authorities have sent children who are both retarded and blind to
ASB even though their primary disability may not be blindness.
Like many other schools for the blind, ASB is providing some
training for these students and giving them a certificate of
attendance at age twenty-one. Some legislators and board members
would like to see the Children's Colony absorb students whose
primary disability is retardation. This would necessitate the
establishment of a special unit at the Children's Colony in order
to assure the safety of the blind students. These same board
members and legislators would like to see ASB return to its
former status as an academic and vocational institution for blind
children with few additional disabilities. ASB would then follow
the model of the Kentucky School for the Blind, which won a
recent court case permitting it to become an academic and
vocational school for students whose primary disability is
blindness.
     New laws restructuring ASB may be introduced in the Spring
of 1997. Meanwhile, Dr. Terzieff does not seem to be in step with
the process of increasing academic emphasis. He has demonstrated
that he believes ASB should accept more students with additional
disabilities and that it should become a school for multiply-
handicapped blind children instead of just a school for the
blind. During the present academic year he has sought funds from
the Easter Seal Society to care for students with additional
disabilities. He hopes to get more students from the Children's
Colony. There is the understandable human incentive to expand
one's operation by increasing the enrollment, with the
accompanying justification for a higher budget.
     Those supporting an academic and vocational school for the
blind contend that, if the school did not take students with
additional disabilities, rural school districts with little money
and bright students who are blind would be inclined to send those
students to ASB. This is a debate that is taking place in many
states, but in Arkansas there is little chance that it will be
settled on its merits. Rather it will likely become just another
focal point for the infighting, personality conflicts, and
political pulling and hauling which seem to characterize every
aspect of the operation of the Arkansas School for the Blind.
     When we first visited ASB in September, 1994, the buildings
and grounds were in bad condition. Since June, 1995, when Dr.
Terzieff took over as superintendent, he has managed to acquire
$390,000 in discretionary funds from the Governor's office. This
money has been used to improve the condition of the physical
plant at the school. However, according to Dr. Terzieff, much
more is needed. The outcome of the current power struggle he is
having with the legislature will probably translate into improved
classrooms, bedrooms, and equipment--or the lack thereof.
     One of the leading Arkansas legislators told the Braille
Monitor that Dr. Terzieff, as he put it, "doesn't make any sense
when he speaks." This legislator, needless to say, thoroughly
disagrees with Dr. Terzieff's educational philosophy, his views
about the future of the school, and his conduct as
superintendent. He believes that Dr. Terzieff should, as he put
it, "go away," that the Schools for the Deaf and Blind should be
amalgamated, and that the School for the Blind should become an
academic institution.
     Regardless of what else may be said, there appear to be
ongoing discord and disagreement at and about ASB. Factionalism
at the school continues. Parents, alumni, staff, administrators,
and board cannot agree on the school's role. And through it all
runs the dirty stain of NAC, doing little these days either to
help or hurt but simply remaining as an ugly reminder. The
forgotten ones, of course, are the blind children of the state--
the people for whom the institution was created in the first
place. They are the ones who count, the ones who should receive
first thought in every consideration. Meanwhile, the battle goes
on; the chaos increases; and the children suffer.


                               DAH
                          by Gore Vidal

     From the Editor: The following copyrighted recollection of
Senator Thomas Gore first appeared in the New York Review of
Books on November 2, 1995. It is an excerpt from Gore Vidal's new
book, Palimpsest, published by Random House, Inc.:

     Much of the first ten years of my life was spent on a hill
above Broad Branch Road--the branch being Rock Creek itself, a
clear, pure stream that rushed shallowly over rocks between
wooded hills, a haven for salamanders and all sorts of fresh
water life. Senator Gore owned three acres of woods above the
creek where, shortly before my birth, he had built a gray stone
mansion. Because of T.P. Gore's anti-war and anti-League of
Nations positions, the good people of Oklahoma had denied him a
fourth term in the U.S. Senate and so, from 1920 to 1930, he
practiced law in Washington, D.C., and built his house, now the
residence of the Malaysian ambassador.
     In the crash of 1929, Gore lost most of his money; in 1930
he returned to the Senate. Predictably, he fell foul of the new
President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By then Gore was a populist
turned conservative. He and the President quarrelled over whether
or not the dollar should go off the Gold Standard. "If you do
take it off," said Gore, "you will have stolen the money of those
who had faith in our currency." Carter Glass, a Senator present
at the meeting, later told the blind Gore that the President had
gone gray in the face. But Roosevelt took the currency off gold;
then, of the half dozen Senators that Roosevelt tried to purge in
1936, T.P. Gore was the only one to lose his seat for good.
     I was ten when he was defeated in the Democratic primary. He
was melancholy, to say the least, and somewhat bored during the
last thirteen years of his life, practicing law in Washington as
attorney for the Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes whose lands
had been stolen by the federal government. In 1984, thirty-five
years after his death, he won a great posthumous victory when the
tribes got a good chunk of the money owed them.
     Rock Creek Park was very much my territory. The house itself
was gray-yellow Baltimore stone. On one side there was a steep
lawn that overlooked Broad Branch Road and the winding creek
while on the other side there was the front door, approached by a
circular drive at whose center was a small fountain. In those
days, from the house one saw only green woods, a rose garden,
rows of flags, as we called irises, and a small vineyard of
purple grapes. At the edge of the woods was a slave cabin,
falling to pieces.
     The main hall always smells of fried bacon, floor wax,
irises, books--thousands of dusty books. There is a large dining
room on the left, with a fireplace and a niche on either side in
which there are two tall gaudy pink and gold Sévres vases. Back
of a screen there is the door to the large white kitchen where
the large dark Gertrude Jackson presides.
     To the right of the hall, a living room with a large bay
window framed by bookcases. I recall a set of Mark Twain; and a
set of Voltaire in a red binding; also, the works of Brann "The
Iconoclast." A large sofa, covered in pumpkin-yellow and salad-
green. Beside the fireplace the Senator's chair, and a smaller
one where I sat when I read to him, drinking Coca-Cola and trying
not to let the ice tinkle. He forbade Coca-Cola in the house
because it contained cocaine.
     Perversely, the Senator, who had done his best to put his
rural origins behind him, insisted on keeping chickens--to
impress visiting constituents?--but since there was too much
shade, they moped in the woods. I found them a bit dull but I did
my best to keep them amused.
     One day at the table I was told, "Eat your chicken." A
terrible knowledge of Edenic magnitude filled me with horror.
This? On the plate? The same? The same. I would not eat chicken
for many years despite my grandmother's cunning ways to trick me
into what I took to be a form of cannibalism.
     The Senator called his wife Tot, which I rendered as Dot. To
her, he was Dad, which I rendered as Dah, an Irish locution, I am
told. Her first name was Nina. I never heard her call the Senator
by his first name except once when they were in the small sitting
room off their bedroom; he wore a long night shirt and she was in
her usual uniform, a pale pink wrapper over a lace night dress--
since he could not see her she never bothered with her appearance
unless there was company. While reading to him, she noticed that
his night shirt had ridden up to his knees. "Put your dress down,
Tom," she said. Otherwise he was Dad or Mr. Gore.
     No one that I know of ever called him Tom or Thomas.
President Roosevelt, in his squire of the manor way, addressed
him once, and only once, as Tom. The Senator ignored him until he
was addressed properly. As a boy in Mississippi, he had been
called Guv, short for Governor, tribute to an ambition that was
noticeable even then. There seems never to have been a time that
he was not in demand as an eloquent and witty speaker,
particularly at those political picnics which were one of the few
communal pleasures during harsh Reconstruction days.
     The Gores belonged to the Party of the People; hence,
populists. T.P. Gore's father was clerk of Walthall County, an
elected post of peculiar power in that state, a sort of regional
chancellor. Since there were few blacks in north central
Mississippi, Gores had never been slaveholders, unlike Dot's
father's family, the Kays of South Carolina, or her mother's
family, the McLaughlins of Meridian, Mississippi.
     Dot and Dah complemented each other. She was dark with large
eyes and high-arched brows; she was also small--hence, Tot. She
had a beautiful low speaking voice. When Dah first heard it at a
political picnic in Palestine, Texas, where her family had moved
after the War, he said, "I'm going to marry you." He was a
twenty-five-year-old blind lawyer, practicing law with his father
and two brothers. After losing an election to the Mississippi
legislature, he had left the state. The campaign had been
unusually dirty. Also, rather more to the point, he was already
bound for the United States Senate; this meant that he must leave
Mississippi, where one had to wait for an incumbent to die, which
could be decades; much too long for a man in a hurry. First, he
headed west to Texas; then on to the Indian territories, where he
helped organize the state of Oklahoma. In 1907, he was sent to
Washington as the state's first senator.
     Thomas Pryor Gore. He is seated in his heavy wood Mission
rocking chair, now in my bedroom at Ravello. He listens as the
secretary reads to him; the straight but rather small chin is
held high while the head is slightly tilted to one side. The
blind eyes are tight shut with concentration. He has a full head
of cowlicked white hair, a rosy unlined face, and a large
straight Anglo-Irish nose with the curious Gore nostrils that
most of us have inherited, including our young cousin who
currently lives in vice-presidential obscurity, a sort of family
ghost flickering dimly on prime-time television.
     Dah is about five foot nine or ten; he stands very straight.
He is well-proportioned except for an astonishing stomach. A
parabola begins at his rib cage and extends half a foot out in
front of him before it abruptly rejoins the lower body. The
stomach is hard as a rock. Dot would often touch it with wonder.
"When you're dead, I'm going to have this opened up. I've got to
see what's in there. It's like iron, that stomach." Now I am
getting the same stomach, but much later in life, and thanks only
to alcohol. Dah himself never drank until old age, when doctors
prescribed two shots before dinner. Both of his brothers were
alcoholic, in the best Confederate tradition. This meant that
they functioned as lawyers all day; then, work done, they drank a
great deal. So, too, I fear, did Dot, to Dah's distress. At
dinner she would begin to ramble in a story or slur her words,
ending the meal by sneezing exactly five times and blowing her
nose in the Irish linen napkin, to my mother's fury. She lived to
be the oldest of my four grandparents, dying in her eighties.
     I have a newsreel of Dah from 1931, the year that he came
back to the Senate. He is standing in front of the Capitol with
another Senator, also blind. Clearly, an unpolitical human
interest story was on the producer's mind. Gore's voice is
measured, precise, more Southern than Southwestern in accent,
with an actor's phrasing. Lyndon Johnson used to imitate him
unsuccessfully. The Gore style influenced at least two
generations of regional politicians. Much of his effect depended
on a sharp sudden wit that could surprise a crowd into laughter,
very like his old friend and fellow Chautauqua speaker, Mark
Twain. It is said that Will Rogers, in performance, most
resembled Gore. But I wouldn't know. Although I often led Dah
from his office onto the Senate floor and even into the holy of
holies, the Senate cloak room, I never heard him make a speech.
It was a family complaint that when he was due to make a major
speech in the Senate, he would tell none of us in advance. We
would only know about it from the newspapers the next day. Dah
ends the 1931 newsreel with an offhand, "Nice to see you,"
straight to the camera. Early in his career he liked to hold
notes in his hand that he would pretend to consult in order to
disguise the little known, at the time, fact that he was totally
blind.
     We are seated on the porch--a sort of open loggia--at one
end of the Rock Creek Park house. It is summer. The irises, in
full bloom, have a heavy lemon smell. I am eating grapes that
I've just picked in the arbor that separates porch from
dilapidated slave cabin. Dah sits in his rocker. A woman
journalist rattles away: How did he become blind? We have all
told this particular story so many times that we can recite it
without thinking. Eight years old. Throwing nails at a cow.
Another boy's nail misses. Hits Guv's eye. Still has one good
eye, and partial, if fading vision in the damaged eye. Age ten,
appointed page to the Mississippi State Senate at Jackson. Boards
in a state senator's house. Son of house has a birthday. Guv
brings him a gun. When you pull the trigger, a spike comes out.
Doesn't work. Guv holds it to his good eye to see what's wrong.
"Now I'm blind," were his first words after the spike found its
target. The family wanted to put him in a school for the
handicapped. No. I'm going to study law. How? Send someone to
school with me, to read to me. A relative named Pittman went with
him to the Lebanon School of Law in Tennessee. Gore learned to
memorize what was read to him, including endless statistics.
Learned to recognize people by their voices. Was not surprised
when radar was developed in World War II. "All blind people know
about radar. You can feel the sound waves bounce off a wall up
ahead of you. Gives you warning."
     Woman journalist has a tinkling laugh. Dah winces, "Is there
any sound more dreadful than that of a woman's laugh?" he would
say. A mild misogynist, he was a true misanthrope, which the
public never guessed as they gazed on his serene, kindly face
with its crooked thin-lipped smile, and the blind gray eyes--one
was glass--that had a surprising amount of life to them,
particularly when he was about to launch a devastating line.
     "You must admit," said the journalist, "that when you lose
your sight, your other faculties develop. So there have to be
compensations."
     "There are no compensations," Dah said, grimly; particularly
for someone whose greatest pleasure in life was reading. He was
read to almost every minute of the day. Once Senate or legal work
was out of the way, he turned to history, poetry, economics. He
disliked novels. Dot, two secretaries, and, later, I were the
principal readers. As our spirits would sometimes start to fail,
he would observe, blithely, "Both of Milton's daughters went
blind reading to him."
     Dah had a curious position in the country, not unlike that
of Helen Keller, a woman born deaf, mute, and blind. The response
of each to calamity was a subject of great interest to the
general public, and we children and grandchildren were treated
not so much as descendants of just another politician but as the
privileged heirs to an Inspirational Personage.
     Politically, Gore always thought of himself as a member of
the Party of the People even after he had been co-opted by the
Democrats, whose more or less populist tribune, William Jennings
Bryan, would three times be a losing candidate for President.
Although not unalike politically, Gore and Bryan got on uneasily.
At Denver in 1908, when Gore seconded the nomination of Bryan for
President, he started the longest demonstration in the history of
American conventions. Gore made, as they used to say, the eagle
scream. I suppose the magic was entirely in his performance,
because the text . . . Well, as he himself said, a successful
speech must reflect the people's mood at the time. He liked
alliteration. "I prefer the strenuosity of Roosevelt to the
sinuosity of Taft," he would observe in 1912.
     The Gores were constantly struck by fate. Dot thought that
Dah had been born under a maleficent star. After all, the odds
are very much against losing an eye in an accident, but to lose
two eyes in two separate accidents is positively Lloydsian. But
fate had many more freakish misadventures in store for him.
     According to family tradition, while practicing law in
Corsicana, Texas, Gore boarded in a house where also lived a
blind girl. She became pregnant, and the blind boarder was
accused of seduction by the blind girl's guardian. A shotgun was
produced in the best tradition of Cavalleria Rusticana. Gore
walked away. "Shoot," he said, his back to the guardian, "but I'm
not marrying her." Thanks to the scandal, he lost an election to
Congress but won Dot; and together they moved on to the Indian
territory, and glory.
     In 1960, I wrote a television play about this episode. I
played myself as the narrator. William Shatner and Inger Stevens
played Gore and Nina Kay. The Indestructible Mr. Gore was shown
on NBC's Sunday Showcase. Dot was ecstatic. The entire Oklahoma
delegation to Congress was at her bedside to congratulate her.
Then Dah's brother, the sardonic Ellis, sent me word that I had
got it all wrong: Guv had indeed knocked up the blind girl, and
their mother, Carrie Wingo Gore, had taken her in.
     Years later, Gore was tried for the attempted rape of one
Mrs. Minnie E. Bond. Dot thought that this bit of melodrama was
far and away fate's masterpiece. Because, as Dot said grimly,
"All our lives, just as things start going well for us, something
awful happens and we have to begin all over again."
     Although in writing my memoirs I have pretty much kept to
the system of recording only what a faulty memory recalls (and
the written--equally faulty?--memories and biographies of
others), I did send away to the University of Oklahoma at Norman
for the various accounts of T.P. Gore's alleged "indecent
assault" on Mrs. Minnie E. Bond in the Winston Hotel at
Washington City during an afternoon of March 1913. Minnie wanted
$50,000 damages for the agony that she had undergone. Gore said
he would not "treat or retreat," and opted to stand trial in
Oklahoma City.
     On February 19, 1914, the jury took ten minutes to exonerate
the Senator. The family's version of events was, more or less,
that of the press of the day. Minnie had come to Washington to
ask Senator Gore to appoint her husband internal revenue
collector for the state. On three occasions he said no. She asked
to see him yet again; he told her to come to his office but she
said that she would prefer that he come to her hotel. He did,
with his secretary-escort, one of Dot Kay's brothers.
     Since the downstairs parlors were full, Minnie led the
Senator upstairs to what proved to be the bedroom of a Mr.
Jacobs; she then tore her clothes and gave what the newspapers
said was a loud "squawk." Jacobs and two other "witnesses,"
conveniently stationed nearby, rushed in. Gore had been framed.
     But reading the press accounts (I think I shall avoid the
actual transcripts of the trial if they exist), I wonder why
Harry Kay didn't go upstairs with him. But then I always wondered
how on earth Dah managed sex. A blind man can't go into a bar
and, with a glance, find a partner. In the course of the trial
the prosecution came up with a number of instances where Dah had
allegedly made advances to women but none of the women ever
stepped forward. The fact that he always had a brother-in-law or
a man secretary as escort meant that he would have to rely on
them for any arrangements that he might have made with women, not
to mention guiding him to the men's room in a strange city.
     The jury simply said there was "insufficient evidence" to
condemn Gore, and no one took seriously the stories of the three
politically interested witnesses. It would seem that the actual
reason for the frame-up involved an attorney named J.F. McMurray
who had involved himself in the transfer of some Indian lands and
then sued the tribes for $3 million in fees. Gore took the side
of the Indians. McMurray did not get his money; hence, revenge in
the generous form of Mrs. Minnie E. Bond.
     All this was par for the course in the frontier politics of
the day. But more disturbing to me was the plaintiff's
investigation of the blind girl and Gore in Corsicana, Texas,
some twenty years earlier. The family story was that, in 1895,
the twenty-five-year-old Gore was practicing law with his father
and brothers in Corsicana. Gore was also the Party of the
People's candidate for the House of Representatives. He took
music lessons from a young blind girl, the ward of a local
couple. The "music lessons" sound truly far-fetched. Gore was
tone deaf. Every time the national anthem was played, he
invariably said, "Now there's a catchy tune."
     I cannot tell what is true and what is not true in the
deposition of one S.P. Render. But the story is hair-raising. In
1914 Render found the blind girl in Galveston, Texas, where she
was still giving music lessons and living in genteel poverty. The
Gores had, she told Render, thrown her out years earlier. As for
the pregnancy, Gore was responsible. "I was engaged to [him] and
I loved him as well as a child--for I was at that time, in heart,
a child, in mind a child . . . but I did not submit to him of my
own free will. He overpowered me and I could do nothing." When
she told him she was pregnant, he plied her with medicines,
saying that "the fever" must break. When this failed to make her
abort, "some little instrument" was used.
     Mr. Render says that Gore was put on trial--who was the
plaintiff?--for seduction and abortion, criminal offenses in
Texas. Just before the trial, the blind girl told Render that
Gore came to her and begged her to answer no questions at the
trial on the ground that not only would she destroy his career
but also his "aged" parents, who had never harmed anyone.
Finally, she concedes, "`The little one is gone--you could not
shield him and you have done all you can against me' and I said,
`If you promise me you will be a better man . . . I will accede
to your wishes, I don't see any good that could come in me doing
otherwise'; and then I was almost immediately conducted into the
court room. I followed out his wishes as far as I could." Render
adds that Gore, as a lawyer, knew that no court in Texas would
send to prison a blind girl who refused to answer questions of
the court.
     In the Bond case the judge ruled that any previous
adventures of either plaintiff or defendant could not be admitted
as evidence. Was Gore guilty? In the Bond case, most unlikely; it
was too obvious a political trap. In the blind girl case, he was
indeed guilty, and according to his brother, Ellis, Guv got their
parents to take the girl in as part of a deal made with her. I
now understand why Dah resisted all biographers as well as
publishers interested in memoirs. "My life," he said to me, "was
such a dull one and there is so much I cannot tell."
     During the influenza epidemic of 1918, Gore nearly died and
never entirely recovered his strength. He was also about to die
of diabetes when Fate saved him--for more torments? Insulin was
invented, and so, more or less in the normal course, he died of a
stroke from high blood pressure in 1949, aged seventy-eight,
while joking with Dot at breakfast.
     Gore's personal triumph over blindness had become so
powerful a myth in his own time that his actual political career
was somewhat occluded, while his intellectual powers and wit,
though duly acknowledged, were hardly treasured by the folk he
represented, much less by Americans at large. There is no first-
rate biography of him, thanks largely to Dot's carelessness with
papers. In the attic at Rock Creek his archives were strewn over
the floor or stacked in trunks and broken boxes. Unable to see
this mess, he probably didn't realize that his history was being
erased through sloth.
     In the absence of primary texts, the Woodrow Wilson
biographers seem not to have got much out of him. A.S. Link
regards him as a political manipulator and not much more. But
biographers of prophets tend to be proprietary of their great
men, and Gore was always there to say no to ambitious
transgression whether in the name of the republic, the common
man, or the Almighty.
     Bryan's nomination in 1908 had, predictably, ensured a
Republican victory. But as a leading populist-Democrat in the
Senate Gore was now ready for a winner. He began to engineer an
alliance between the populists of the South and Southwest and the
big city bosses of the East. The result was the nomination of
Woodrow Wilson, a one-term New Jersey governor who had sworn
faithfully to serve the local bosses; then, more in sorrow than
in anger, he double-crossed them. Wilson's subsequent alliance
with Bryan and Gore was a necessity for him and a convenience for
them. The tribunes of South and West, of farm and factory, had
their permanent base in Congress; the White House was simply a
pleasant extra.
     Gore ran Wilson's campaign out of Chicago. When the
Republican vote was split between Taft and Roosevelt, the truly
eloquent, if not entirely sound of mind, Wilson was elected
President. Bryan was made Secretary of State. Later, when it
became clear that Wilson was maneuvering the United States into
the First World War, Bryan honorably resigned. I've always
thought him of far more consequence than historians now do. They
remember his ignominious end at the "Monkey Trial" in Tennessee,
not to mention the three defeats for President. But I think of
him--like Gore in the early days--as a literally popular voice
raised against the bold crude ownership of the nation and a
resolute enemy to the end, like Gore, of those wars that the
ownership never ceases to wage against what it takes to be
enemies of its financial system.

     In the Senate Gore was expected to forward Wilson's
ambitious domestic program, which he did, enthusiastically, even
though the two had personally fallen out after the election when
the Senate was in the process of "organizing" itself--that is,
selecting various officers and setting up legislative procedures.
The all-important post of secretary to the Senate had not yet
been chosen. Urgently, Wilson sent for Gore. "I would like," said
the new President, "for the Senate to appoint my brother, Joseph,
secretary. He is highly qualified and . . ."
     Gore listened, astonished. Finally, he said that he never
thought that he would have to remind so eminent an historian as
the author of Constitutional Government in the United States that
the legislative and executive branches of the government were
forever equal and forever separate and that for the executive to
have his own brother, as an executive spy, in the councils of the
legislature would make a perfect hash of the separation of
powers.
     "Wilson never forgave me for that." Dah is in his rocking
chair, cracking peanuts, lap covered with their shells; the bushy
white hair is in an interesting tangle. "Of course, he was the
sort of man who got uneasy if you ever raised your eyes higher
than the third button on his waistcoat. As for me," the crooked
smile, "well, whenever there's a Republican President, I'm a
Democrat and when there's a Democratic one, I'm out of step." He
sounded more amused than sad. As a politician, he was a lone
wolf. I suppose, at heart, he was more Whig than populist and no
conservative at all, at least in the current sense of the word:
one who serves unquestioningly the wealthy interests that control
American life while parroting official cant of the "better dead
than red" sort. He particularly loathed Franklin Roosevelt's
phrase, "age of the common man."
     "There was never such an age and never will be and it goes
beyond the limits of necessary demagoguery to pretend that there
could even be such a thing." He also disliked Lincoln's rhetoric.
"Was there ever a fraud greater than this government of, by, and
for the people?" He threw back his head, the voice rose: "What
people, which people? When he made that speech, almost half the
American people had said that the government of the North was not
of, by, or for them. So then Lincoln, after making a bloody war
against the South, has the effrontery to say that this precious
principle, which he would not extend to the Southern people, was
the one for which the war had been fought. Well, he did say this
at a graveyard for Northern soldiers. I suppose that was
appropriate." If I got anything from Dah, it was the ability to
detect the false notes in those arias that our shepherds lull
their sheep with.
     I always found him noblest when he put his career at risk
for some overriding principle. He thought that no foreign war was
worth the life of any American. Neither do I. When the Oklahoma
City Chamber of Commerce ordered him to vote for war in 1917, he
wired them, "How many of your members are of draft age?" He was
defeated in 1920. But he was re-elected in 1930, on the same
principles, he liked to say, that had defeated him a decade
earlier. The comeback was a dim affair. "I remember asking a
political friend, just before I entered the race, what was the
mood of the people nowadays, and he said, `They're a lot harder
to tickle now.'"
     Courage was Gore's most notable trait. But then his great-
grandfather had been a Methodist preacher of such somber fire and
will that he was known as "Rock" Gore. On the demerit side, Dah
did not think that government money should go to anybody if he
could help it. "When I first came to the Senate there were still
pensioned widows from the war of 1812. Give someone a pension and
you create a Methuselah." Coldly, he refused the request of a
delegation of the blind for government aid. He had been able to
make his way, he told them, and so could they. This was
disingenuous. "When I was young, cheese and crackers was one word
to me," he used to say, emphasizing his poverty. Bored with this
repetition, I am said to have responded, at the age of six or so,
"Well, ice cream and cake are one word to me."
     Actually, the Gores were well-to-do for their time and
place. He was born in 1870, among the ruins of Walthall,
Mississippi. Yet even then, when the university degree was the
principal dividing line between lawyers, teachers, divines, and
the redneck peasantry, most of the Gore clan was educated.
     Ironically, after the Gores had become prosperous in
northern Mississippi during the 1840's by taking over what had
been Chickasaw land, T.P. Gore went west to the territories to
which the Chickasaws had been removed, and, in effect, by
creating Oklahoma, he helped rob them of their land a second
time. Also ironically--guiltily?--he tended to take the side of
the Indians in their losing disputes with the government over the
stolen lands. Then, out of office he became their attorney.
     The spirit of Harry of the West, as Henry Clay was known,
was the spirit of the border people from Clay to Lincoln to Gore.
"Internal improvements" was what interested these rustic
paladins. When imperialist President Polk gave us the Mexican
War, which, in turn, gave us what is now one third of the United
States, including California, Congressman Lincoln denounced him.
Lieutenant U.S. Grant did, too, on the ground that we were
behaving like a predatory European power. We were supposed to
create our unique Arcadia without border raids on other
countries. We certainly needed no more land. Wasn't the Monroe
Doctrine our holy text--along with the Declaration of
Independence, which proclaimed as a universal given the right not
only to pursue happiness but the implicit right to separate from
an onerous foreign master?
     Gore came out of the border world. He represented the ruined
farmers of the Civil War, who would later be victimized by
eastern financiers, playing casino with the price of cotton.
"Seven-cent-cotton" was one of the first phrases I remember
hearing.
     In due course, Bryan and Gore and the other liberals--today
called conservatives or nativists or worse--reached out to labor,
organized or not. The Civil War that had brought ruin to the
South had also awakened all sorts of energies that led to new
alliances. In effect, the Party of the People took over the
Democratic Party and, despite the presence of the big city bosses
who at least represented the working man, unionized or not, the
party was for the working people at large in a way that the
Republicans could not be since they tended to agree with
Alexander Hamilton that the rich were wiser and better than the
poor and so ought to be allowed to rule the country and do
business without popular interference. For Gore and the other
populists, the imperialism of the two Roosevelts and Woodrow
Wilson--Polk, too, earlier--was a terrible distraction from our
destiny, which was the perfection of our own unusual if not, in
the end, particularly "exceptional" society.
     I sit with Gore in the living room of his flat in Crescent
Place, just across the street from the stately house of Agnes and
Eugene Meyer, owners of The Washington Post, that official voice
of empire. The Rock Creek Park house was sold in the war:
impossible to heat. I am still in uniform, a Warrant Officer back
from the Aleutians. Dah rocks in his Mission chair. Discusses my
political career and what he calls "the New Mexico option"
because "Oklahoma is too volatile." He always looked grim at the
thought of his Bible-loving constituency. "Of course, you were
born in New York. Why not take advantage of that? Why not get
yourself a district in the city? You pay Tammany Hall your first
year's salary and, except for city matters, they leave you
alone." I thought this a dead end.
     Then we talked of the past. He had got into the habit of
answering my long questioning letters with long ones of his own.
I thought that his to me were lost in the war when my mother
threw out all my clothes, books, and papers, on the sensible
ground that I'd not be coming back. But apparently Dah kept not
only my letters but carbons of his own to me. Excerpts have been
published in World Literature Today by one Marvin J. La Hood, who
found the collection at a university library.
     It is nice to hear Dah's voice again; disconcerting to hear
my own, a sort of schoolboy Machiavelli with, alas, a non-
Machiavellian fury to be in the right like my politically
martyred grandfather.
     I always thought Dah somewhat invidious whenever he
discussed the ever-more imperial trappings of the Presidency and
the blaze of world publicity which, from Wilson's triumph at
Versailles to Bush's vomiting in the lap of the Japanese Prime
Minister, was the outward and visible sign of our imperium's
military glory and economic primacy. But all that is now quickly
fading away, and one can see how quaintly prescient we were
fifty-five years ago.
     The correspondence begins March 9, 1940. I am at the Los
Alamos Ranch School at Otowi, New Mexico. Apparently, I've been
reading about the First World War and Gore's ambivalent
maneuverings in the Senate.
     Gore explains his "resolution [that] warned American
citizens not to exercise the right to travel on the armed ships
of a belligerent. . . . I introduce that resolution two or three
days after the celebrated Sunrise Conference which is now
`historic' . . . . I thought then that we were speeding headlong
into war--as we were." For someone brought up in the wreckage of
the Civil War, any foreign war seemed like perfect folly. For
someone who detested the country's ruling class, the idea of a
war that would be profitable only to the Rockefellers and to the
Morgans was insupportable. Certainly those who actually fought
the war would not do well out of it. But then they never do.
     Dah's socialist impulses eroded with time. He had wanted to
nationalize the railroads at the time he helped write the
constitution of the state of Oklahoma, and I believe that this
virtuous proposal is still in the text. But despite his expertise
on banking and currency in the Senate, he detested Maynard Keynes
without quite understanding him. He grasped, reluctantly, tax and
spend in bad economic times, but he never took in the other side
to Keynesianism: try to make money in good times and in the
classic marketplace.
     In the letters Dah deeply dislikes Roosevelt both personally
and politically. "He worships at the shrine of Power and
Popularity." There is now, he notes, almost $50 billion of
national debt, hardly a Star Wars price tag for what was meant to
be a New Deal for those millions of people undone by a vast
depression. The worst hit, as Dah had prophesied, were the
veterans of that war for Wilson's greater personal glory. I had
always thought Gore's concentration on one man's vanity too petty
a motivation for the American role in the events of 1914-1917.
But when I came to study Wilson at Versailles, blithely carving
up the Austro-Hungarian empire, I would understand why this
ignorant, would-be Metternich drove Dr. Freud so mad that he felt
obliged to publish a libelous "psychoanalysis" of Wilson, without
having met him, of course. Although Freud's analysis is nearly as
demented as Wilson's imperial--even messianic--behavior, he does
echo Gore's original analysis of a prim American school teacher
whose ignorant self-esteem never faltered. As I write, Wilson's
handiwork is now exploding in what proved to be his dottiest
invention, Yugoslavia.
     Senator Gore was obliged to observe three American Caesars
in action. In his youth there was Theodore Roosevelt's Spanish-
American War, followed by the bloody conquest and subjugation of
the Philippines. When Gore came to the Senate at thirty-seven,
Roosevelt was still President and an anathema to a tribune of the
farmers and workers. Then, twice, Gore helped elect Wilson
President. From the start, there had been a vague understanding
between them that the egregious Thomas Riley Marshall be replaced
as Vice-President in the second term by Gore, but, as of 1916,
relations were so bad between Wilson and Gore that the Senator
decided to sit out the election. When it became obvious that
Wilson was going to lose, Gore got a desperate call from the
White House. The election would be determined by California. Gore
was popular in California. Would he stump the state? Gore made
one condition: The slogan must be, "He kept us out of war" and,
presumably, "he" would do the same in the second term. Gore
barnstormed California. Then he wired the White House the exact
margin by which Wilson could carry the state. That night Wilson's
opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, went to bed as President of the
United States. But the next morning California was heard from and
Gore's predicted plurality reversed the election. Wilson was
President; and the war came.
     Dah turns on the radio news. He mostly listens to right-wing
commentators like Fulton Lewis, Jr. He did not live long enough
to realize just how conservative a President Roosevelt was at
home, or how much a radical imperialist he was abroad, breaking
up the colonial empires of our allies as well as those of our
enemies and, like metal filings to a magnet, attracting their
fragments to us. But in the Forties all that Gore can see is the
vast amount of debt--so puny compared to what the truly radical
Reagan was to give us.
     "These debts," Dah writes me, "constitute a first lien, a
first mortgage on every dollar's worth of private property. . . .
However, all this is not the most fatal defect in the New Deal:
it has spoiled the character and the morals, spoiled the souls of
millions of our people. I have always thought that self-respect
is the sheer anchor of human character. As long as it holds,
there is hope. When it breaks there is no hope, nothing left."
Thus speaks the Protestant conscience, not to mention, alas,
Herbert Hoover.
     I have always regarded Roosevelt's improvisations in a
kindlier light. It was the Depression brought on by the higher
capitalism that denied people work, and Roosevelt was there, no
matter how opportunistically, to get the people, as well as the
capitalists, through the bad times. But there is indeed a
terrible truth in Gore's observations on the necessity of self-
respect--of individual autonomy. In order to exclude the black
minority from American society, the white majority decided to pay
them off with welfare, thus seeing to it that there would be no
"anchor" for many black families for many generations. No wonder
so many are now choosing the fire this time as the ultimate in
"self-respect."
     "Those crowds," he begins, turning off Fulton Lewis, Jr.--
Amos and Andy would soon be on, his favorite comedy, swarming
with politically incorrect "Negro" stereotypes. "Those crowds
that Wilson saw in Europe." He shakes his head; the white hair is
now all on end as two cowlicks meet and Dot will soon have to
start unsnarling and combing them straight. "I suppose any man's
head would be turned by them. Now Roosevelt has gone to Yalta. At
least there won't be any crowds. But he'll be just like Wilson.
He won the war, and he'll make the peace or so he thinks. But
Churchill and Stalin will be too smart for him. Just as Lloyd
George and Clemenceau were too smart for Wilson. Then there's the
fact he's dying, which doesn't help matters. . . ."
     From Dah's letter to me on my fifteenth birthday: "I compare
or contrast your opportunities now with mine when I was your age
and I all but envy you. I lived thirty miles from the railroad
and attended a school which ran about four or five months a year-
-in a building 30 by 50 there was no fifth dimension."
Nevertheless, by then, he had freed himself of that religion
which was--and still is--a terrible blight in that part of the
world. At nine or ten, told that if he had faith he could fly, he
attached corn stalks to his arms and climbed out on to the roof
of a barn and took off, to fly around the world. He broke his
collarbone. Later, when his father decided to abandon the family
Methodism for the Campbellite variant of Fundamentalism, the
family was ordered to choose its brand. The mother stayed as she
was. Two children became Campbellites, for father's sake. Gore
turned atheist, a daring thing to do then--and now--in Christ-
cursed Mississippi. On the other hand, he did not let it be
generally known that he was a non-believer; if he had, he could
not have had a political career. A conundrum that he liked: "Can
God, the all-powerful, do anything?"
     "Yeah! Yeah!"
     "No, He can't"
     "What can't He do?"
     "Can't make a year-old heifer in a minute."
     "Course He can. Why, in just a minute, there it is."
     "Yes, but no matter how big that heifer is, it's still only
a minute old and not a year."
     From Antigua, I write Dah about my new friend, the president
of the Guatemalan Congress: "They respect men of learning here
and don't try to reduce them to the lowest possible common
denominator."
     Dah is amused: "I particularly enjoyed the last paragraph
where you mentioned the fact that in certain localities you have
to appear genial and a little half-witted in order to woo the
omnipotent public."
     But he was not without considerable political cunning. "The
worst thing an intelligent man must endure in politics is to keep
a straight face while a man thinks he's making a fool of you." Of
enemies: "I always turn the other cheek, bide my time, and wait
for him to lay his head on the block." Then he'd clap his hands
sharply, like an ax severing a head, and smile his saintly smile.




     If you or a friend would like to remember the National
Federation of the Blind in your will, you can do so by employing
the following language:

     "I give, devise, and bequeath unto the National Federation
of the Blind, 1800 Johnson Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21230, a
District of Columbia nonprofit corporation, the sum of
$__________(or "______ percent of my net estate" or "The
following stocks and bonds: ________") to be used for its worthy
purposes on behalf of blind persons."



[PHOTO/CAPTION: Curtis Chong]
               COMMERCIAL TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
                         by Curtis Chong

     From the Editor Emeritus: As Monitor readers know, Curtis
Chong is the President of the National Federation of the Blind in
Computer Science. He is employed as a designer consultant by
American Express Financial Advisors of Minneapolis. As a member
of the World Blind Union's Committee on Technology, he recently
prepared a paper concerning guidelines for designing modern
technology that can be used by the blind. Very few subjects have
more importance to the blind than this one, and Mr. Chong's
straightforward approach is refreshingly understandable. Here is
what he has to say:

                          Introduction

     Although there will always be a need for some specialized
technology designed especially for the blind (for example, the
Braille writer), it is preferable for people who are blind to be
able to operate the same technology that is commercially
available to the general population. The problem we face is that,
more often than not, commercially developed technology is
designed in such a way as to preclude efficient and convenient
use without sight. It is not that manufacturers deliberately set
out to prevent blind people from using the technology they
develop. It is simply that they haven't considered the
possibility that a blind person might want to use their product.
Moreover, even if some developers wish to ensure that blind
people can use a specific device, they face the problem that
there are no easily obtainable guidelines which they can follow
to meet this goal. In other words, their design efforts are
likely to be conducted on a hit-or-miss basis.
     The ideal goal is to have electronic appliances usable by
everyone, including people with physical, sensory, or cognitive
disabilities. However, in attempting to achieve this goal, it is
important to recognize that features that make the appliance
usable for one disability group may cause the device to be
unusable for another. For example, replacing printed labels with
raised pictographic symbols may be beneficial to people with
learning disabilities, but they are useless to blind people who
may read Braille or raised print. Accordingly, it should be
clearly understood that this paper focuses specifically upon the
access requirements of persons who are blind.
     This paper will attempt to establish broad principles and
suggest some specific practices that may be followed by
developers of commercial technology so as to ensure that the
products they develop can be operated by a blind person without
sighted assistance. It should be viewed as a guide that can be
used to stimulate thinking on the subject--not as the definitive
solution to the problem.
     This paper will not address the problem of access to
computers and the graphical user interface. Many organizations
have devoted substantial time and energy to this problem.
However, relatively little thought and effort have been devoted
to the question of how modern consumer electronics can be
designed so as to be operated by those of us who happen to be
blind. As a growing number of these devices use digital controls
and computer technology to carry out basic functions, our ability
to use them steadily diminishes.

                       Guiding Principles

     Before making specific design recommendations, I would like
to suggest a few principles that should be used to shape the
design effort. These include operability, integration, usability
built-in, and accessible documentation.
     Operability in this context means that a specific appliance
is designed in such a way that a blind person can exercise all of
its essential functions without sighted assistance. A good
example of this concept is the television. We may not be able to
see the picture while enjoying our favorite movie, but we are
able to turn the television on and off, adjust the volume, and
select the desired channel without asking a sighted friend to
help us. (At least, this is the case with most televisions
available today.)
     The principle of integration is aimed at ensuring that
features necessary to operate an appliance without sight are an
integral part of the design and benefit everyone who uses the
appliance--not only the blind. A telephone with buttons that can
be operated by touch is an excellent example of this concept. The
fact that the buttons can be felt is beneficial not only to the
blind user but also to everyone else. Other examples include the
talking clocks and calculators formerly manufactured by Sharp and
the talking answering machines currently available from such
companies as AT&T and Panasonic. With regard to these latter
devices, the speech generated is sufficient to enable full
control and operation without sighted assistance.
     Usability built-in means that ideally a peripheral (and
often expensive) piece of assistive technology is not necessary
for a blind person to operate an appliance. Although in some
cases necessity may force us to use assistive technology (e.g., a
Braille 'n Speak equipped with an infrared transmitter) to
operate some equipment with infrared or other connection schemes
installed, this is not the preferred method of controlling an
electronic appliance. It makes no sense for us to have to use a
piece of equipment costing a thousand dollars simply to operate
an appliance that may at most cost a few hundred. One method for
accomplishing this goal would be to provide speech output, either
built into the appliance or available as a low-cost accessory.
Given the increasing sophistication of digital technology, this
may well become a necessity for the appliances of tomorrow.
     Accessible documentation refers to the concept of making
instruction manuals available in a medium other than print. For
manuals prepared using a word processor, it should be possible to
make ASCII-text versions available (for a nominal fee) so that
the manual could be transcribed into Braille or read on the blind
person's own computer.

           Guidelines for Physical Controls and Labels

     Physical controls usually take the form of knobs, dials,
switches, slide controls, and buttons. In digitally controlled
devices, they have sometimes taken the form of switches activated
by light, pressure, heat, or capacitance. Usually these switches
are located on smooth control panels that are totally unusable by
the blind. Moreover, these switches often provide only visual
cues to indicate that they have been activated. In some cases
remote controls with tactile buttons are available, but the user
is presented with only visual cues to indicate what the appliance
is doing.
     Physical controls should not depend upon sight alone for
operation. Consideration needs to be given to the use of other
senses (e.g., touch and hearing) to manipulate controls. This
would be of benefit to all users, blind and sighted alike.
Sighted users will appreciate not having to divide their visual
attention between two activities and will also enjoy the ability
to operate the appliance--even when lighting is poor. Blind users
will appreciate the ability to operate what would otherwise be an
unusable appliance.
     Here are some suggested guidelines. Bear in mind that other
approaches are possible if sufficient creativity and motivation
are brought to the design effort.

1.   Push buttons should be discernible by touch. The button can
     be indented, raised, or contained within a raised boundary
     that can clearly be detected by touch.

2.   Push buttons should never be touch-activated. Some minimal
     pressure should be required to activate the control, and the
     appliance should provide tactual or audio feedback to
     indicate when the button has been pressed.

3.   The shape of a push button can provide important clues to
     its function. Consider using texture or other tactually
     detectable changes (such as a raised symbol) to identify
     buttons for unusual or important functions.

4.   Small, closely clustered controls are often difficult to
     negotiate by touch. Consider spacing controls so that each
     one can be detected easily by touch. Ideally, spacing
     between controls should be no less than one-half the
     control's width or height. Crowding controls together to
     provide what appears to be a seamless surface makes them
     difficult to operate by touch.

5.   Buttons that turn modes on or off should provide tactile or
     other nonvisual means to indicate the on or off state. These
     might include:

         Leaving the button in when a mode is on and causing it
          to pop out when the mode is off, or

         Generating a high tone when the mode is turned on and a
          low tone when the mode is turned off.

6.   Slide controls can be made more useful if they have notches,
     clicks, or tactile markings indicating normal settings.

7.   The use of a continuous rotary selector (as in a radio
     tuning knob) will be enhanced for everyone if a notch, dot,
     or raised pointer is placed on the knob. Also it is very
     helpful if the selector has a detent for every possible
     setting so that individual settings can be selected by
     touch.

8.   Tactile labels should be built in to supplement visual
     labels which the blind cannot use. These may consist of
     raised sans serif upper-case characters made of thin lines.
     Tactile labels should not use pictograms or other non-
     textual symbols. This assumes that the controls being
     labeled are not dynamic in nature--that is, that the
     controls always perform the same function.

9.   Braille labels and overlays should be made available upon
     request.

        Guidelines for More Sophisticated Digital Devices

     Appliances which use digital technology pose a more complex
problem for blind people. Individual buttons do not perform the
same function consistently. Modes change automatically, without
notice. Often, the operator is required to select an item from a
menu displayed visually. Although for some devices a remote
control with tactile controls may be available, the blind person
may be unable to perform any control or selection functions
because the choices to be made are displayed visually with no
verbal prompts. In other words, many appliances have today become
dedicated computers, with all that the term implies.
     Although many digital devices with relatively simple control
systems can be operated without sight, it is often necessary for
the blind person to spend considerable time and effort memorizing
numerous sequential procedures. The control of these devices is
made more difficult when they memorize settings--even when turned
off. Sometimes these devices will shift from one menu to another
after a predetermined amount of inactivity time has passed,
making it difficult for the blind operator to determine what
function is being selected.
     The guidelines presented here are at best a preliminary
attempt to deal with the digital appliances of today. It should
be understood that, as digital appliances become even more
sophisticated, these guidelines will need to be adapted. Here are
some suggestions that can enable blind people to operate digital
appliances independently with the maximum possible efficiency.

1.   There should be a way for the user to return the appliance
     to a state where all mode settings are known. This is
     different from the "Reset" function that many appliances
     have to restore factory settings. The intent here is to
     enable the operator to predict what will happen when
     specific procedures are executed. If the operator makes a
     mistake in executing the procedure, he or she should be able
     to return to a known starting point to try again. In
     addition, the operator should be able to perform any desired
     function from this known state with a minimum number of
     keystrokes.

2.   If the design calls for displayed menus to change
     automatically after a certain amount of inactive time, there
     should be a way to lock the display so that it doesn't
     change, or, failing that, an audible cue should be provided
     to alert the operator to the fact that the display has
     changed. In this latter instance the design should be such
     that the user can predict what the display will change to,
     without having to see it; and it should be possible to turn
     off the audible cue when it is not needed.

3.   The design of the digital appliance must be such that a
     blind operator can memorize a sequence of events that can be
     executed consistently to perform a specific function or set
     a desired state. If for any reason the sequence of events
     needs to be aborted due to an error in execution, the
     appliance should provide some means of letting the blind
     operator know that the error has occurred and return the
     device to a known state. A simple beep will suffice for most
     situations. Other audible cues should be provided to
     indicate, for example, when data are to be entered (as in
     the security code for an automatic teller machine); when an
     automatic sequence is beginning and ending; and when the
     appliance will no longer accept input. Audible cues may not
     always be desired; therefore, there must be a method for
     turning them off.

4.   If speech output is built in to the appliance or provided as
     a low-cost accessory:

     A.   There should be a way to turn the speech on and off.
          This mechanism should not require sight for use. People
          who do not need the speech may find it a novelty at
          first but will quickly find it an annoyance if they
          cannot disable it.

     B.   Speech should be responsive and interruptable. This
          means that it can be stopped and started almost
          instantly, simply by pressing a key which causes new
          speech to be generated.

     C.   A button should be provided which causes the speech to
          speak the entire display, if it is one line, or the
          entire list of menu choices, if the display consists of
          multiple lines. If a choice is to be selected from a
          list, a method should be provided to speak each choice
          individually so that the operator will know what is
          being selected.

     D.   Speech output does not need to carry more information
          than the visual display unless it is essential to the
          operation of the appliance.

     E.   A headphone jack should be provided for private
          listening. This will enable the blind person to hear
          confidential information as in the case of an automatic
          teller machine.

                           Conclusion

     The principles and guidelines set forth in this paper should
not be viewed as the total answer to the question of how
technology can be made usable by people who are blind. For one
thing we cannot possibly know all of the forms that future
technology will take and the problems that such technology will
pose for the blind. Moreover, technology is changing at an
accelerating rate. Solutions that may work for today's technology
will certainly not solve the problems that will arise with the
technology of the future. We can hope, however, that designers,
engineers, and marketers will make a conscious effort to ensure
that the products emerging from their work can be used by those
of us who are blind. If they will consider that technology will
be used by everyone--blind and sighted alike--and plan their work
accordingly, we stand a better chance of maintaining parity with
our sighted peers in our ability to use electronic appliances.


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Barbara Walker]
                           JIM'S GRAVE
                        by Barbara Walker

     From the Editor: Six years ago this month word began to
circulate throughout the Federation family that Jim Walker, a
leader in the National Federation of the Blind of Nebraska,
husband of Barbara Walker (then President of the affiliate) and
father of two young children, had died suddenly of a massive
heart attack. The tragedy deeply saddened Jim's and Barbara's
hundreds of friends and brought the Federation family together in
shared grief and love when Barbara spoke during the roll call of
states on the opening day of the convention. Barbara has
continued to raise her children and live her life as an active
Federationist as she and Jim had always done. She is quiet and
unspectacular in the way she goes about doing what she believes
in, but in the end nothing can resist her will when she knows she
is right. The following article is a case in point. Barbara wrote
it for the Issue 1, 1996, of News from Blind Nebraskans, a
publication of the NFB of Nebraska. Here it is:

     There were many reasons I didn't put a stone on Jim's grave
right away when he died six years ago. Most of them had to do
with my grief work. I knew that my intention to have Braille on
the marker had the potential to stir up resistance. In addition,
there was my need to educate. Ordinarily I find that kind of
thing to be an interesting challenge and an opportunity for
growth. But for quite a while after Jim died I found almost
everything annoyingly trivial. I had no patience and seemed to
vacillate between cutting people off before they had a chance to
present yet another barrage of triviality and letting them finish
while I withdrew, saying only what seemed necessary to encourage
them to fill the unbearable silence. So it was that I waited
almost two years to begin a process that took another four to
complete.
     Knowing I would both want and need support, I asked my
parents to go with me to choose the marker when they were
visiting. During the discussion with the salesperson, I said I
wanted Jim's name and dates in both Braille and print. I could
hear apprehension mixed with an attempt at cool customer
accommodation as the woman explained that no one had ever
requested such a thing and she didn't know how it could be done.
Did we have any ideas? I told her about my involvement in having
a plaque made with both Braille and print. At that time we
explored the use of several metals, most of which would require
making a mold at considerable expense. I also said I had talked
with someone at the Christian Record Braille Foundation about
their use of stainless steel Braille plates in the outdoor nature
center. They would be both willing and able to make such a plate
for the marker. She asked me to get measurements and said she
would talk to the monument people about attaching it to the
stone. I left feeling encouraged.
     My parents and I went immediately to the Christian Record
Braille Foundation, had the plate made, and took it to the
cemetery. Within the next couple of days the woman called to say
that there should be no problem setting the plate in as I had
requested in such a way that it would be flush with the stone. On
Memorial Day of 1991 my children and I saw the marker for the
first time. Although the plate was not exactly flush with the
stone all the way around, it seemed to be set in permanently. It
wasn't until it rained that the problems began.
     The first two times the plate needed to be reglued, I felt
uneasy but said very little. They fixed it promptly, telling us
to let them know whenever it came loose so that they could redo
it. By the third time, though, I was beginning to feel concerned.
For one thing the plate was no longer flat in the inset. It
seemed to me that the old glue wasn't being removed before the
new was applied. Besides that, the plate was no longer flush
anywhere, but depressed at one corner and raised at the corner
diagonally opposite, allowing moisture easy access.
     But the thing that turned my concern to action was the time
in August of 1994 when Garth, my children's half-brother, was
visiting from the Army. He said it looked like the plate wasn't
put in carefully, and he thought it should be done right so it
would look like it belonged there. With that and Marsha's and
John's assent, I talked again to the cemetery personnel. They
assured me that they would study the situation and try to rectify
it.
     On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, 1995, Marsha, John,
my friend Judy, and I visited the grave with a bouquet of
flowers. As I was brushing the dust from the plate, it came loose
in my hand. We went immediately to the cemetery office, and I
said that something needed to be done. I explained that the glue
wasn't working and that because they weren't taking the old glue
off before putting on new, the plate was beginning to bend.
     The woman there said she would make a note for the
maintenance person, saying the glue might need to be removed
before affixing the plate. I asked that she take "might" out of
her note and that she let the person know that I wanted the job
done right this time. She handled the plate as if it were a
foreign object, wondering aloud if it was read vertically. I
showed her how it was read, and Judy helped her mark it so that
it would be right-side up. She said it should be done by Friday
of the coming week. I asked that I be notified by phone. Judy
said we would be there the following Saturday to check it.
     The next day, when Marsha and her friend Jane were bike-
riding, they went through the cemetery. It was raining. They saw
the plate sitting on the stone with glue oozing out around its
edges. They said that it was crooked and that, when Marsha tapped
it gently with her foot, it moved. During the week someone did
call and leave a message on our machine saying that the job was
done. When we went on Saturday, the plate was there, but less
well done than any time previously. No one was in the office, so
I called early the next week. I was told that someone would get
back to me by the following Monday. No one did.
     When I called on Tuesday, I was transferred to the manager.
He said they had done their best. When I asked how thoroughly
they had studied ways of attaching stainless steel to granite, he
said that, if I wanted to go to someone else to have the job
done, it was my business, but I would be expected to pay for it.
I said that I would prefer that they explore options other than
glue. I told him about my conversations with someone at Christian
Record and someone in the hardware business, both of whom had
wondered about the possibility of using stainless steel screws or
something of that kind. He knew nothing about that. He added that
the person who would be doing the work was on vacation but would
be back toward the end of the week and would call me.
     Later that week, as the children and I were preparing to go
to our Bible School program, Steve, the grounds superintendent
from Wyuka Cemetery, called to ask if I could come there to show
him which side was up on the Braille plaque. I suggested our
trying first to talk through it by phone. I decided to start by
describing Jim's middle initial, D., in the middle of the top
line, since that was the shortest grouping of dots. When Steve
said that he could see a dot there followed by two right angles
one just below the other, I knew we had succeeded. He then
explained to me that they had decided to use a compound which
sets up like concrete and put rivets through the plate and into
that. He said they couldn't use screws because, unlike concrete,
granite crumbles when drilled. I said our requirements were that
the plate be right-side-up, flat, as permanent as possible, and
appealing to look at both visually and tactually. He said he
would do his best.
     That Saturday Marsha, John, Judy, and I went again to the
cemetery. And finally, after four years of hassling, the marker
looked finished. I don't like the fact that the rivets aren't in
exactly the same place on each corner. But I'm told that it shows
more by touch than by sight. The important thing is that, at long
last, it meets our specifications.
     The Braille is not, as some have conjectured, there so that
I can read the tombstone. I can easily read the print tactually.
It is there because, when I thought of what I could do to have
the marker reflect something important to Jim without putting
words in his mouth, I decided that to have his name and dates in
both Braille and print might be the best legacy a slab of granite
and a plate of stainless steel could convey. I am grateful to my
family, friends, Steve, and fellow members of the National
Federation of the Blind everywhere for support in seeing the
project through. I hope it will stand in a positive way as a
symbol of our changing what it means to be blind.


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Jim Gashel]
                      THE CASE FOR BRAILLE

     From the Editor: The following statement was presented by
the National Federation of the Blind in late fall of 1995, to the
Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth, and Families of the House
Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. The draft
language of the House version of the revised Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act is more constructive than that of the
Senate bill, S. 1578, which has now been reported out of
committee and will go to the Senate floor for consideration
during the next several months. The Senate bill no longer
contains language to require an IEP team to follow certain
procedures, such as considering a blind child's need for Braille
instruction or materials. In other words, the Senate bill would
leave the present law, which is silent on Braille, silent.
     The House draft still contains strong language, including
the requirement that Braille instruction and the use of Braille
must be part of a blind child's IEP unless all members of the IEP
team concur that Braille is not needed. Although this provision
is very strong in its present form, a definition of "blindness"
has not been included. This could mean that the provision on
Braille, now in the House bill, would apply to very few children,
especially if school districts are free to define blindness very
restrictively, which is something they may choose to do. We will
be working in the weeks and months ahead to correct the problems
with both versions of this legislation. Meanwhile, everyone with
an interest in improving the lives of blind children should
continue educating members of the House and Senate about the
importance of including provisions in IDEA that will insure the
right to learn Braille to children who cannot see well enough to
read print effectively. Here is the NFB statement:

                            Statement
             of the National Federation of the Blind

Re: Basic Literacy Instruction for Blind Children: A Compelling
     Educational Need

     It is the policy of our nation as stated in the National
Education Goals that by the year 2000 "Every adult American will
be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary
to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and
responsibilities of citizenship." In order for blind adults to
achieve this goal, literacy instruction must be strengthened for
children. The trend is shocking. Nearly half of all blind
elementary- and secondary-level students can read neither Braille
nor print. The percentage of those who can read at all is
declining. This statement will discuss the underlying factors
which have led to these conditions and describe a proposal for
remedial federal legislation.

                           The Problem

     Basic literacy skills are fundamental to an appropriate
education. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
declares that a "free appropriate public education" must be
provided to children with disabilities. Impaired vision can have
a profound impact on reading and writing performance. Therefore,
the selection of instructional methods and materials--Braille,
print, auditory instruction, or a combination thereof--to be used
for each child is a critical educational decision.
     The process used to develop an Individualized Education
Program (IEP) for each child should lead to appropriate choices
of reading and writing media, but entirely too many children who
are blind or visually impaired receive inadequate instruction
with the result that they become functionally illiterate. In the
information age it is obvious that reading and writing skills
must be highly developed for almost anyone to lead an
independent, self-fulfilling life. Participation in the social
mainstream is becoming virtually impossible without basic
literacy skills.
     Successful communication using print can be correlated to
having normal or nearly normal eyesight and the ability to
process information. With print as their sole alternative,
persons with defective vision often find themselves struggling
just to keep up with fellow students or colleagues whose vision
is unimpaired. Still, among educators who teach blind and
visually impaired children, use of print as the instructional
format is decidedly favored. Special educators who are trained to
serve children who are blind are officially referred to as
"instructors in vision" or "vision teachers."
     This professional designation reflects an educational
philosophy which is then expressed as a planned instructional
approach. The philosophy is that use of eyesight is the customary
way by which people receive and process information. Therefore,
use of the visual sense for learning is preferred. If a child who
is blind still has some sight, it is predictable to a virtual
certainty that the child must first demonstrate an inability to
achieve progress in school before use of non-print media occurs.
As a result of this philosophy the individualized planning
process used under IDEA leads to adopting print (requiring use of
eyesight) as the preferred form of instruction for blind
students.
     Data collected by the American Printing House for the Blind
in Louisville, Kentucky, show that in 1968--the first year for
which figures are available--9 percent of the blind students in
elementary and secondary schools in the U. S. did not have
reading or writing skills. They used neither print nor Braille.
Students classified as "blind" are generally those whose vision
is less than 10 percent of normal eyesight. During 1968 40
percent read Braille and 45 percent read large type or regular
print. Four percent read both. There were 19,902 blind students
enrolled in elementary and secondary schools in 1968. In January,
1993--twenty-five years later--there were 50,204 blind students
enrolled. Fewer than 9 percent read Braille, 27 percent read
print, and 40 percent read neither.
     These figures reveal the shocking magnitude of the literacy
crisis among blind youth. The tragedy is that lives can be wasted
unless intervention and literacy skills training occur at some
point for those who are not being taught to read and write in
school. Their recourse is to receive training from vocational
rehabilitation or to face lives of dependency, subsisting at
public expense. In preparing for and seeking employment, blind
people face some obvious physical restrictions in performing work
(such as unskilled labor) which may be available to others who
are not literate. This is why the ability to read and write using
the alternative skills of blindness such as Braille is absolutely
critical for today's blind youth.

                         Current Efforts

     It would be misleading and certainly inaccurate to attribute
the literacy crisis for blind people solely to the mandate in
IDEA for school placements in the "least restrictive
alternative." The underlying causes are far more complex and must
be addressed by professionals in special education, parents, and
blind students themselves. Recognizing this fact, leaders in the
field of blindness services have begun to respond to this
acknowledged literacy crisis. Projects to improve Braille
literacy skills training for blind adults have been funded in
recent years by the National Institute on Disability and
Rehabilitation Research and the Rehabilitation Services
Administration in the United States Department of Education.
State laws are also beginning to echo the concern that blind
people in growing numbers are graduating from school without the
ability to read and write.
     Bills, generally entitled the "Blind Persons' Literacy
Rights and Education Act," have now been passed in essentially
the same form in 26 states. [By the time of publication this
number had risen to twenty-seven. (See Bennett Prows's article
elsewhere in this issue.)] These state laws generally require
that each blind student must receive a Braille literacy skills
assessment and instructional services using Braille unless all
members of the IEP team concur that the student's visual
impairment does not affect the ability to read and write
proficiently. The proficiency standard stated in the law for
blind students is the same as that expected for a sighted student
of comparable ability and grade level. There is a presumption
stated in the law that using Braille is necessary for a blind
student to communicate at the expected level of proficiency.

                      Essential Principles

     The principles listed below have been unanimously agreed to
by all of the major organizations both of and for the blind in
the United States:
     (1) If a child is unable to read print by reason of total
     blindness or visual impairment and if literacy skills are to
     be taught, the child should be taught to read and write
     Braille by a certified teacher competent to teach Braille
     literacy skills to the blind, unless by reason of multiple
     disabilities it is impossible for the child to read Braille.
          (2) If a child has a visual impairment and if literacy
          skills are to be taught, the child should, if the
          parent or parents want this to be done, be taught to
          read and write Braille by a certified teacher competent
          to teach Braille literacy skills to the blind. If a
          dispute arises between the parent(s) and the local
          educational agency regarding appropriate reading media,
          both print and Braille shall be taught.
     (3) No teacher should be considered competent to teach
     Braille literacy skills to the blind unless such teacher has
     passed the Braille competency test developed by the National
     Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped of
     the Library of Congress. The passing of the Braille
     competency test should not be considered a substitute for or
     an alternative to regular training and certification of a
     teacher but should be in addition to such training and
     certification.

                  Need for Federal Legislation

     Individualized planning for instruction is one of the
fundamental principles of IDEA. That principle is sound. Each
disability is unique, and individuals are often uniquely affected
by essentially the same disability. Therefore, the IEP process is
appropriately designed to create an individually tailored
response to each child's disability-related needs.
     Because the policy of individualized planning is sound
philosophically, it is ironic that it has contributed to
diminishing opportunities for blind students with some vision to
learn to read and write in Braille. However, there is no question
that this has happened. Those who have opposed state-level
Braille literacy laws have often argued that a legislatively
expressed preference for virtually any form of instruction would
violate IDEA. The response is that the state laws very carefully
preserve individualized planning as the starting point for each
child, while acknowledging the likelihood that the child who is
blind has a high probability of needing Braille.
     Those who say that a preference for Braille violates IDEA
claim that the choice of reading and writing media for a child
must be governed solely by the IEP. This position has never been
tested in the courts, but it raises an ominous warning that state
laws in and of themselves may be insufficient to make Braille
instruction and the availability of Braille materials priority
considerations for schools. As a matter of practical reality
(although such an interpretation would probably lack legal
soundness), an interpretation that the state Braille literacy
laws conflict with IDEA can be envisioned and would certainly
threaten the small amount of progress that has been made.
     It is clear that using IDEA as a roadblock to literacy for
blind children is undesirable and definitely not consistent with
the purpose of the law. This is precisely what is happening,
however, when state policy makers and legislators are told that
an expressed preference for Braille for blind students would
place the state in jeopardy of losing Federal assistance.
Therefore, a Federal solution in the form of amendments proposed
for IDEA should be considered. The legislation must preserve
IDEA's individualized planning process and ensure that such
planning acknowledges an express right for each blind child to
receive instruction in Braille without first being required to
fail at reading and writing print.

                       Proposed Amendment

     Legislation to amend and reauthorize the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act is now under active review in the
first session of the 104th Congress. Bills have been developed by
both the Clinton Administration and the responsible subcommittees
in the House and Senate. While the bills are sharply divergent in
certain respects, they are essentially identical in regard to
proposing new provisions for the IEP process.
     As compared to current law, the bills under review generally
provide more precise direction on the process for developing the
IEP. While the makeup of the IEP team would be consistent with
current regulations, certain considerations which must be made by
the team are brand new. One of these is the provision concerning
the IEP for a child who is blind, to wit: "In the case of a child
who is blind or visually impaired, consider whether the child
needs instruction in Braille or in the use of Braille."
     If this language is adopted as currently proposed, the IEP
team would be fulfilling its responsibilities for the blind child
merely by considering the child's need for Braille instruction.
As a standard the obligation of "consideration" is clearly
minimal. Even worse, it could actually become harmful.
     The state laws which have been enacted to promote Braille
literacy training for children have already been described. All
of these laws have standards for the IEP process which go far
beyond the mere "consideration" of the blind child's need for
Braille. Generally the laws state a "presumption" that Braille
skills will be needed for the blind child to read and write at
grade level. Exclusion of Braille from the IEP is permitted in
individual cases if all members of the team concur that the
child's visual impairment does not restrict reading and writing
performance at grade level. Also the child's future literacy
needs must be evaluated by the team.
     In response to the "consideration" standard, organizations
representing blind consumers and service providers have jointly
developed a substitute provision. The language (attached) would
specify that Braille skills training will be made available to
all blind and visually impaired children. Consistent with both
the state Braille literacy laws and the individualized planning
principles of IDEA, Braille instruction would not be provided to
a given blind child if all members of the IEP team concur that it
is not needed. Once again, the child's future literacy needs must
also be evaluated in making decisions about Braille training.
     In contrast to the draft bill language on "considering the
blind child's need for Braille," the substitute language would
better support and complement the state-level efforts now
underway to address the literacy crisis among blind youth of
school age. Most important of all, the substitute language would
not overturn the existing state laws and would actually do a
great deal to strengthen them.


          IDEA: Proposed Amendment on Braille Literacy

Section 614.

(d) INDIVIDUALIZED EDUCATION PROGRAMS.--

(3) In developing an IEP, the IEP team shall--
.....

(E) in the case of a child who is blind or visually
impaired, as defined in clause (ii) of this subsection--

(i) provide for instruction in Braille and the use of Braille
unless all members of the IEP team concur that, after an
evaluation of the child's reading and writing skills, needs, and
appropriate reading and writing media (including an evaluation of
the child's future needs for instruction in Braille and the use
of Braille), instruction in Braille or the use of Braille is not
appropriate for the child.

(ii) For purposes of this subparagraph, the terms "blind" and
"visually impaired" mean--

(I) visual acuity of 20/200 or less in the better eye with the
use of a correcting lens or a limited field of vision so that the
widest diameter of the visual field subtends an angle no greater
than 20 degrees;

(II) a medically indicated expectation of visual deterioration;
or

(III) a functional limitation resulting from a medically
diagnosed visual impairment which restricts the child's ability
to read and write standard print at levels expected of other
children of comparable ability and grade level.

     Note: This legislative language was developed jointly by the
American Council of the Blind, the American Foundation for the
Blind, and the National Federation of the Blind. Though the
Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and
Visually Impaired (AER) chose not to participate in this
exercise, its leaders have agreed not to oppose the three
organizations' efforts to get the language  incorporated into
IDEA.


[PHOTO: A young woman is standing at a table in the convention exhibit hall
examining a Braille 'n Speak. CAPTION: Shannon Ramsey]
                         SEEING CLEARLY
         TEENAGER REFUSES TO LET BLINDNESS KEEP HER FROM
                   LIVING LIFE TO THE FULLEST
                         by Kim Boatman

     From the Editor: the following article first appeared in the
February 12, 1996, edition of the San Jose Mercury News. It is
one more illustration of the contributions being made by members
of the National Federation of the Blind of all ages. Here it is:

     On Friday afternoons, when the promise of the weekend lures
many of her Los Gatos High School classmates to the usual teenage
pursuits, Shannon Ramsay can be found reading the New York Times.
     In a clear, careful voice she read about the Middle East
recently to three elderly women in wheelchairs at the Terraces of
Los Gatos Health Center.
     She might as well have been reading about the moon, for all
Vivienne Simpson cared. Simpson was content to watch Shannon's
hands dance effortlessly across the stark white pages of a
Braille edition of the Times.
     "She is so adorable," said Simpson, smiling with
grandmotherly affection. "How she manages to do what she does at
her age is beyond me."
     Born with limited vision, Shannon, fifteen, sees nothing now
because of retina deterioration. But she moves through life with
a cane and a determination that has her father Alex convinced
she'll be famous.
     She maintains an "A" average at Los Gatos High, where she
studies chemistry, algebra II, advanced English, and German.
Shannon also takes driver training--learning road rules for which
she has no use--because it's a required class. She takes notes in
Braille and reads textbooks translated into Braille. She sings in
the choir, participates on the debate team, and works with the
National Federation of the Blind.
     Shannon wishes she had time to swim or to run track, like
she did in middle school.
     Like many girls for a while she harbored a real affection
for horses. With radio antennae soldered to her stirrups as a
sort of curb-feeler contraption, she used to ride in an arena.
     "I like to fit as much as I can possibly do into the day,"
Shannon said.
     She possesses little patience for those who think it'd be
simpler if she let obstacles defeat her, and she frequently has
to convince teachers she can keep up in their classrooms.
     "There are a lot of things I have to battle for," she said.
     Shannon wears a silver bracelet of linked turtles that her
mother Antje, a resource specialist at McKinley High, bought for
her.
     For a turtle, Shannon moved swiftly as she left school on
that recent Friday. The people at the Terraces have no idea what
Shannon must do to get there.
     With her cane tapping in a wide arc in front of her, Shannon
walked confidently down two sets of steps at the high school. She
tangled briefly with a rose bush next to the walkway, a skirmish
she shrugged off.
     She requires assistance to cross busy Main Street in front
of the school, but mostly she flies solo.
     Shannon made her way a couple of blocks, where she caught
the bus for the ten-minute ride to a stop near the Kings Court
shopping center.
     She walked through the center, talking familiarly about the
Wooden Horse toy store, Peet's Coffee and Tea and drawing an
occasional glance from shoppers. As she left the center, she
wandered into a grass strip but found her way back to the
sidewalk.
     Shannon walked into the Terraces, where the receptionist
greeted her by name.
     Although she doesn't consider her route difficult, her
father frets and sometimes follows her.
     "There's a battle between us parents and Shannon," said Alex
Ramsay, a retired IBM engineer. "We're afraid she'll do something
to herself, and she wants to do things to gain her independence."
     But the Ramsays also have paved the way to freedom for
Shannon, who has a twenty-year-old brother and an older half-
brother and an older half-sister.
     Although Los Gatos High Principal Ted Simonson said he, too,
must resist the urge to assist Shannon around campus, he believes
the Ramsays' work to help Shannon function on her own has been
critical.
     "She is really a focused young woman," Simonson said. "We've
got a heck of a lot of kids with a heck of a lot less problems
who don't do nearly as much."
     The Ramsays spent hours helping Shannon learn her way around
the campus before she started high school. They have brainstormed
to provide recreational opportunities: Alex Ramsay came up with
the stirrups that allowed Shannon to ride horses.
     And they pay attention to the details that help Shannon feel
like any other teenager.
     So, even though she can't see, Shannon carefully coordinates
her clothing and accessories with her mother's help and applies
makeup herself. Recently she dyed her hair a burnished red.
     "I got tired of being a blond," she said.
     Still, despite her effort, Shannon is isolated at times.
Although she has blind and partially-sighted friends across the
country, "Sometimes I feel a little bit lonely at school because
I don't have a group of friends to hang out with," she said.
     So she, too, gains something each Friday at the Terraces.
     "It's so cute. They walk up and say, `I love you,'" she
said. "It's really rewarding to see how the people enjoy having
me around."
     On that recent visit she admired a crazy quilt made by
ninety-one-year-old Vera King's mother, reaching out to stroke
the satin when King proffered it.
     Shannon read for thirty minutes to a woman who could not
speak but who waved goodbye as Shannon left.
     "I think it is wonderful Shannon experiences that there are
people who need her help," Antje Ramsay said as she picked up her
daughter. "I think it's an incredible thing Shannon is doing."


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Dr. William Wiener]

          WHO IS QUALIFIED TO BE A MOBILITY INSTRUCTOR?
                       by Kenneth Jernigan

     Professor William Wiener teaches and is Chairperson of the
Department of Blind Rehabilitation at Western Michigan University
at Kalamazoo. He is also the Co-Chairperson of the Certification
Standards Committee of Division Nine (Orientation and Mobility)
of the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind
and Visually Impaired (AER). He and I have recently had an
exchange of correspondence that I believe Monitor readers will
find interesting. Here it is:

                                              Kalamazoo, Michigan
                                                   March 30, 1996

Dear Dr. Jernigan:
     It has been a long while since I communicated with you. When
we last spoke, we discussed the conference on reasonable
accommodation in O&M that Elga Joffee, Dennis Lolli, and I were
mounting in behalf of Division 9 of AER. At that time I assured
you that the purpose of the conference was not to prevent the
certification of instructors who are blind or disabled but
instead to explore how we could include them within our
certification process.
     Now, a year later, I am glad to tell you that we have met
our objective. At the conference we worked with blind and other
disabled instructors who teach mobility and video taped the
approaches that they use to teach people to travel. Among the
various techniques that were used, we found a number that were
effective and that should enable blind and disabled people to
teach travel skills and assure the safety of the client. Also at
the conference we reaffirmed our desire to implement a
certification process that would include all instructors who can
perform the essential functions of the job without regard for
disability. Following the conference the Certification Standards
Committee further modified the certification standards to better
reflect this participation. Recently the membership of the
Division approved these standards by a ten to one margin.
     Today we have several blind students enrolled within our
university training programs. AER has certified at least one
blind instructor and has a process in place to certify other
blind and disabled instructors. I believe that we have made great
strides in this important area. I invite you and other leaders
within the organized blind movement to refer blind students to
our university programs. I can assure you that they will be
warmly welcomed.

                                                       Sincerely,
                                                William R. Wiener
                              Co-Chairperson of the Division Nine
                                Certification Standards Committee

                                             Baltimore, Maryland
                                                   April 14, 1996

Dear Dr. Wiener:
     I have your letter of March 30, 1996, and my problem with it
is the one I had with the conference you held a year ago. Perhaps
I can best capsulize it by substituting a term. Let me use your
own words and replace blind with sighted. Your letter would then
read in part:

          When we last spoke, we discussed the conference on
     reasonable accommodation in O&M that Elga Joffee,
     Dennis Lolli, and I were mounting in behalf of Division
     9 of AER. At that time I assured you that the purpose
     of the conference was not to prevent the certification
     of instructors who are sighted but instead to explore
     how we could include them within our certification
     process.
          Now, a year later, I am glad to tell you that we
     have met our objective. At the conference we worked
     with sighted instructors who teach mobility and video
     taped the approaches that they use to teach people to
     travel. Among the various techniques that were used, we
     found a number that were effective and that should
     enable sighted people to teach travel skills and assure
     the safety of the client.

     If I should write you such a letter, you would not just
think it inappropriate. You would question my sanity. You would
feel that, since sighted people by the hundreds are now
successfully teaching mobility to the blind, the issue is not in
doubt and that accommodation implies something that is manifestly
ridiculous. I must confess to similar emotions.
     I suspect that there are more blind people teaching mobility
today than sighted people and that the proficiency of the
trainees and the safety with which they travel equal the product
of the sighted. I am concerned that blind people attending your
courses will be expected to use the techniques of the sighted and
that they will be "accommodated."
     If this reasoning seems strange to you, it only underscores
the fact that I have never succeeded in conveying to you the
problem I have with the very foundation of your approach. Let me
be sure that I am clearly understood. I am not saying that
sighted mobility instructors are necessarily less proficient than
the blind; I am not saying that sighted mobility instructors
should use the techniques of the blind; and I am not denigrating
university training for mobility instructors. If you respond to
my letter (either to me or to others) by putting forward these
false issues to attack, the exercise will be a study in futility,
one that is calculated to do nothing but make points in an
argument, an argument that is not only negative and
counterproductive but fails to deal with the issue I have
repeatedly raised with you.
     A number of years ago I showed you the standards that I
would apply in considering whether a student should be certified
as a mobility instructor. You will remember that they were
different from yours and seemed as quaint to you as yours did to
me. In the final analysis the test of a thing is: does it work.
Perhaps, if you take a sufficiently long view, there is no other
meaningful test.
     The day may come (assuming that we continue our dialogue)
when we will have a meeting of the minds. Meanwhile, I thank you
for your letter and for the contribution it makes to the
exploration of this important subject.

                                                       Sincerely,
                                                 Kenneth Jernigan
                                               President Emeritus
                                 National Federation of the Blind


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Michael Baillif]
                       PORTRAIT OF A DONOR
                       by Michael Baillif

     From President Maurer: I have been working with a number of
Federationists to try to find new funding sources for the
organization. One product of this effort is a new committee
entitled the Future Assets and Tax Tips (FATT) Committee. Last
fall Ramona Walhof, Secretary of the National Federation of the
Blind, observed that there are members of the National Federation
of the Blind who could benefit from our developing innovative
methods of donating to the organization. Sometimes we do not
think of making large gifts to our own cause. Sometimes we do not
know the mechanisms for making gifts that will be most beneficial
to the organization and to ourselves. To solve this problem,
Ramona Walhof suggested that the FATT Committee be established.
Its purpose is to explore methods for raising future assets for
the organization through planned giving. Planned giving is the
phrase which means finding ways to give our money to good causes
so that they actually get most of it while we continue to enjoy
its use during our lifetimes and benefit from tax incentives as
well.
     One of the members of the committee is Michael Baillif, who
served several years ago as president of the student division and
who is presently a tax lawyer for one of the best known tax law
firms in the United States. Michael Baillif suggested that we
print a description of a donor. Even though he is a tax
specialist, this description is in English. Here it is:

     Meet Margaret Syring. She is an elderly lady from Saint
Paul, Minnesota, with a sprightly manner, a generous heart, and
more than her share of common sense. Not long ago Margaret
donated $10,000 to the Federation in the form of a Charitable
Gift Annuity.
     When asked her reasons for giving, Margaret explained: "The
money I have isn't mine. I'm only a steward, and I should use it
well. I'm not a millionaire; I don't even have one million
dollars, but I want to use the money I have to help people." At
the time of her gift, Margaret had no direct involvement with the
Federation. In fact, she did not even recall how she heard of us.
One day she simply wrote the organization requesting information,
was impressed with the activities and programs described in our
literature, and decided to support the Movement. She contacted
our National Office in Baltimore and said that she wanted to
establish a charitable gift annuity with the Federation as
beneficiary. We were only too happy to oblige.
     Margaret had some very sound reasons for making a donation
through a charitable gift annuity. She explained: "I wanted to
make an outright gift, but I also needed money to live on." The
charitable gift annuity accomplished both of these goals nicely.
The $10,000 gift now is the property of the Federation to spend
as it likes; and, in exchange, Margaret will receive an annuity
of $800 per year for the rest of her life. Thus, by her gift
Margaret was able to support the Federation, while at the same
time assuring herself of a lifetime stream of income.
     Although Margaret's donation was not motivated by income tax
considerations, she nevertheless was able to reap significant tax
advantages from the charitable gift annuity. A substantial
portion of her $10,000 gift was deductible against income from
other sources, thereby reducing her tax bill for the year in
which the gift was made. Moreover, part of her annual annuity
payment from the Federation will be free of tax when it is
received in the future.
     "I think there are many people out there who would like to
support the Federation," Margaret commented. "They just need to
know how. They don't realize that it is so easy to do and that
there are so many different ways to make gifts."
     Portraits of donors, like that of Margaret Syring, come in
all shapes and sizes. As Margaret proves, a donor need not be
rich and need not make a gift outright without any sort of
financial return. Charitable gift annuities and other giving
vehicles currently being developed as part of the Federation's
Planned Giving Program make gifts a real possibility for people
of all ages and income levels. This is an effort in which we all
are able to participate, either by establishing a planned-giving
program ourselves or by helping to find those who can.
     As Margaret Syring found out, the Federation's Planned-
Giving Program is a new and innovative means of funding the
Movement. More information regarding the Federation's Planned
Giving Program will be disseminated in July at the Federation's
National Convention in Anaheim, California. Material and guidance
can also be obtained directly from the National Office in
Baltimore. The program has great potential for allowing both
members and supporters to help build the organization's financial
strength to the unprecedented levels necessary to undertake the
work that so desperately needs doing.


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Janet Caron]
                   BANGLES, BAUBLES, AND BEADS
                        by Tamara Kerrill

     From the Editor: Janet Caron is one of the leaders of the
National Federation of the Blind of Florida. She is also a
talented jewelry maker. The following story about her appeared in
Tapping the Charcoal, our most recent Kernel Book. Here it is,
beginning with Dr. Jernigan's introduction:

     Creating custom-made jewelry is not a common occupation. It
requires a particular artistic talent. It does not, however, as
we of the National Federation of the Blind and as the following
story (reprinted from the Miami Herald) show, require eyesight.

     In 1985 Janet Caron walked cautiously toward the Trevi
Fountain through the streets of Rome. Her failing sight made the
trip difficult, but she was determined to toss three coins into
the cascading water. According to Roman tradition, if a visitor
tosses coins into the famed fountain, she is assured of
returning.
     "I stumbled to get there. I was heartbroken," she said. "I
was in tears as I threw those coins over my shoulder, and people
were looking at me. I was losing my sight, and I truly thought
that I would never get back to my beloved Rome."
     She also never thought she would lead a productive life
again. She was wrong. Today, Caron, who lives in Pompano Beach,
makes exquisite jewelry from scratch.
     "When I first lost my sight, I couldn't believe it was
happening to me," Caron said.
     She said doctors are at a loss to determine the cause of her
blindness. "But once something like this happens, you really
realize how capable blind people are," Caron said.
     Caron began creating jewelry two years ago to satisfy an
artistic craving. Her tiny apartment is filled with colorful bags
of beads from Italy, Africa, China, and other distant places.
Caron also makes her own beads from raw clay, which she glazes
and fires in a kiln at a Pompano Beach ceramics shop.
     The colorful chokers and matinee lengths are combinations of
ivory, handblown glass, painted porcelain, jade, and other
special materials. She finds the beads at various thrift shops.
Caron tests the authenticity of the beads■ material by rubbing
them together and running her fingers over them. She takes her
cache of colorful creations to some local art fairs, like the
annual Christmas show at Coral Ridge Mall.
     Caron's biggest triumph as a blind woman, however, took
place two years ago when she hesitantly boarded a plane bound for
Rome--the city she had visited regularly before she became blind.
     "I fell in love with Rome," she said. "I love the European
way of life. I thought I would never get back there again. In
1990 I went back, and I did very well. I got off the plane, and I
just broke into Italian. I stayed for a month." Caron has been
back to Rome three times and plans to keep on going every spring.
Her necklaces have even gone on sale at the American embassy. "My
life is very full now," she said. "Blind people may have lost
their sight, but they haven't lost their intellect."


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Nell Carney]
                    DIRECTOR'S SALARY SETTLED

     From the Editor Emeritus: As Federationists know, Nell
Carney was Federal Commissioner of Rehabilitation during the Bush
Administration. Blind herself, Dr. Carney's association with the
blindness field is long-standing. In the 1950's she was my
student at the Tennessee School for the Blind. Later she was
employed in work with the blind on the West Coast in the state of
Washington. Then for a time she was one of the program officials
at the Virginia Department for the Blind. In the 1960's Dr.
Carney was the President of the National Federation of the Blind
of Tennessee, and for a number of years she was a National Board
Member of the Federation.
     When the Bush Administration left office, Dr. Carney went to
Mississippi as head of the State Department of Rehabilitation. It
is noteworthy that the Mississippi Services for the Blind was
NAC-accredited when she became Director, and that such is no
longer the case. Likewise, Royal Maid, the state's major workshop
complex, was NAC-accredited and is no longer. The same can be
said of another small agency in the state.
     Dr. Carney went to Mississippi as the outgoing employee of a
Republican administration. The Governor who hired her (he is
still in office) is also a Republican. Not surprisingly, members
of the Legislature from the other party might find occasion to
criticize. Be that as it may, today she finds herself embroiled
in the partisan politics that swirl around the Governor and the
Legislature. If the Republicans should elect the President this
fall, many have speculated that Dr. Carney will again be seen in
Washington. Meanwhile, the political kettle boils in Mississippi.
Here is an article that appeared in the Laurel, Mississippi,
Leader Call on April 14 of this year:

     The director of the Mississippi Department of Rehabilitation
will get to keep her $93,500 salary, but lawmakers have gotten a
chance to vent frustration over her leadership.
     Governor Kirk Fordice vetoed part of a bill Saturday that
would have reduced Nell Carney's salary by $20,000. He called the
decrease "arbitrary and capricious."
     The House failed sixty-six to forty-four to override. The
vote was eight shy of that required.
     Representative Steve Holland, Democrat-Plantersville,
displayed letters he said were critical of Carney and her
management of the 865-worker agency. Holland said he has passed
along the criticisms to Fordice's office for several years.
     "We may be micro-managing, but we have to look after the
disabled citizens of the state if the governor is not, and
apparently he's not concerned," he said.
     The governor said he had investigated some complaints and
has "seen nothing in the way of tangible evidence to suggest any
serious failures in the leadership or the performance of this
agency."


                    TEN THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
                 IF YOU WANT TO START A BUSINESS
                      by Maureen Pranghofer

     From the Editor: Maureen Pranghofer is a frequent
contributor to these pages. The following article first appeared
in JOB Recorded Bulletin 167, January, 1996. Here it is:

     Last November, after considerable assistance from the staff
at BLIND, Inc., and Minnesota State Services for the Blind, I
began a small business. This past year has been a wonderful
learning process. Hopefully, if you have the yen to be an
entrepreneur, you can glean something from what I have learned.
          1. Know what your abilities are. After my accident in
     June of 1993, when I became totally blind, I began thinking
     about what kind of career I might like to pursue. Working
     from my home seemed to be the most practical thing to do.
          Make a list of things which you are good at and think
     about how they could be used in a business. As you gain
     skills in additional areas, they can be added to this list
     of possible entrepreneur ideas. But it's difficult to start
     a business unless you know well the area which you are
     entering.
          2. Figure out how you can use what you have. As I just
     indicated, making a list of what one can do is important.
     You need to know your strengths and weaknesses, your
     limitations and potentials. After making this list, you must
     weed out what will not work. For example, while I was at
     BLIND, Inc., making a grilled cheese sandwich was a major
     undertaking. Now I cook all kinds of things, ranging from
     Nigerian cuisine to homemade peach sherbet to ordinary fare.
     Could I start a business preparing some kind of food and
     selling it? Well, maybe, but in looking at this idea I found
     obstacles, in that cooking--though I enjoy it--is physically
     very tiring for me. It would be an inefficient and fatiguing
     venture at best, even though I could perhaps be said to have
     abilities in that area.
          3. Don't be afraid to do more than one thing. In
     sorting out what I could and could not do, I was left with
     three things which were all of great interest to me and
     which I felt had business possibilities. So I came up with a
     business which uses all three things. They are separate
     entities, but I earn money from all of them. In my case my
     business, consists of transcription of print material into
     Braille and onto cassette tape, speaking to groups about the
     needs of people with disabilities, and writing music. I love
     this arrangement. There is great variety in what I am doing,
     and there is no possibility of my becoming bored.
          4. Put together a business plan. I received funding for
     my computer and embosser through Minnesota State Services
     for the Blind. They first required me to have a small
     business plan. I had not a clue about what such a plan
     should include, so I contacted SCORE, which is a volunteer
     organization made up of retired business executives who
     assist people in starting their own businesses. In one
     meeting I learned what kind of information should be in the
     plan. I would advise using SCORE or another business expert
     to check your completed plan and assist you in formulating
     it. Items in your plan can include, but are not limited to,
     reasons why you think you should go into business, your
     background, your resumé, a statement about the nature of the
     proposed business, a description of your marketing plan,
     your projected expenses in beginning the business, and your
     projected revenue.
          5. Don't become discouraged about money. Several blind
     individuals have called me during the last year with
     business ideas. None of them has had money to use to obtain
     the necessary equipment to begin the business venture. I
     obtained money from my state agency for the blind. This
     avenue is available to many people. However, it is not
     something that happens overnight. I had to contact my
     counselor repeatedly in order to make anything happen. I
     returned to him time and time again with what I wanted to
     do, and with others from BLIND, Inc., speaking up on my
     behalf, things eventually moved. If one source tells you
     "no," keep trying. Don't be afraid, for example, to go to a
     supervisor. Know your rights. Know what you as a client of
     the agency are entitled to before beginning to pursue what
     you want. Return to the "no" answer with a desire to find
     out why it was given. Then counter that argument.
          Don't give up if your state vocational rehabilitation
     agency is not the way to go. Most states have a small
     business agency, which has lots of information about how to
     start a small business. Thanks to the Americans with
     Disabilities Act, people with disabilities are a minority, a
     protected class, and therefore eligible for many small
     business grants. Pursue these.
          6. Know what you would consider success. If in your
     small business plan you have determined that you need to
     make a certain income, reach for this goal, but be
     realistic. Success for one person is not the same thing as
     it is for the next. For example, I want to make enough to
     supplement my Social Security Disability Insurance. Because
     of other disabilities, it's not practical for me to get out
     of the system, but I can still earn the monthly amount
     allocated. I consider that success. Others would want to
     earn far more money in order to consider themselves
     successful. Decide what to aim for, and make it realistic
     for your own circumstances.
          7. Don't drop everything to start the business. Did you
     know that it takes an average of five years for most small
     businesses really to start showing a consistent profit? This
     is, of course, an average, so it isn't always accurate. But
     just because your business is starting, don't leave another
     job, for example, until you know you will have a regular
     income from your business.
          8. Prepare for feast or famine. I have found in the
     last year that there are times when I am not particularly
     busy and times when I feel quite overwhelmed with the amount
     I have to do. This feast-or-famine business takes some
     getting used to. Don't worry if there isn't a lot to do; it
     will come. Balancing your life when there is an abundance of
     work can also be a problem. At times I have had to struggle
     to keep from working every waking hour. It's only a job, so
     don't get caught in the unhealthy loop of working all the
     time simply because you work out of your home. When I'm not
     busy, I work on no-deadline things which have been sitting
     around for a while, and when I'm swamped, I get things done
     while trying to stick to an eight-hour work day.
          9. Let your business go where it takes you. Sometimes
     we get ideas of how things should be, and we want to stick
     to the plans we have made. I have found that flexibility is
     essential in business. It may simply be that I am a creative
     person and think in those terms, but I have found my
     business taking me in directions I never would have dreamed
     it would. Almost all of my speaking to groups about
     disability has, for example, been made possible because of
     word-of-mouth contacts. I have done very little marketing.
          One day, while I was reading my mail, I got a card from
     a real estate company advertising their services. I dropped
     it into the trash but did not drop the thought: I wonder if
     there is any way I could market my teaching about disability
     to people in this field? I did some digging, found out where
     people in Minnesota become licensed as real estate agents,
     and made a cold call to the executive director. I asked if
     anyone had taught a course dealing with the way one assists
     disabled customers and issues related to accessibility in
     housing. He said, "Write a proposal; that sounds
     interesting." I did and got a lucrative contract out of the
     deal. They have since hired me to do a number of other
     classes dealing with aspects of real estate and fair
     housing, which only indirectly have to do with disability.
     This means that I am delving into new areas requiring
     research, which I am having to learn starting at the bottom.
     However, I would not be involved with this if I had not let
     my creativity take me in this direction and if I had not
     then used the opportunities presented to me.
          10. Be confident. I cannot emphasize this last point
     enough. Be confident, be confident, be confident. I have
     made many mistakes along the way. I have constantly learned
     new things, ranging from more efficient ways to use my
     software to evaluating how I can improve public speaking
     based on audience critiques. However, that is not what I let
     people know. The biggest drawback I have noticed when
     talking to potential entrepreneurs is that they seem to lack
     confidence in what they can do. Believing you can do what
     you set your mind to do is one of the first steps toward
     doing it.


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Lauren L. Eckery]
                "OH! I NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT THAT!"
                       by Lauren L. Eckery

     From the Editor: Lauren Eckery is a thoughtful member of the
National Federation of the Blind of Nebraska. She is also a
frequent contributor to these pages. The following article first
appeared in Issue 1, 1996, of News from Blind Nebraskans, a
publication of the NFB of Nebraska. Here is what she has to say:

     I have written several articles now about the situations
other blind persons and I have encountered in our daily lives and
the ways we solve them. Something in me wants to come up with
that one perfect comment that will help bring about greater
understanding between sighted and blind people whenever the issue
of the capabilities of the blind arises. I want to find something
that will eliminate some of the experiences we now have over and
over and over again. I frankly seem to be having more and more
difficulty keeping my patience when I hear what sounds to me like
the same old same old for about the zillionth time.
     If I heard less than reasonable reactions to blindness only
now and then, I could chalk the incidents up to some individual
person's ignorance, but these things happen all the time. They
often occur with otherwise intelligent and kind people, and they
occur with people we've known for years as well as with
strangers. What could I do that would eradicate, once and for
all, the misunderstandings that seem to crop up in our lives?
Unfortunately, no pill allows people, voila! to deal with a blind
person appropriately. If that pill were available, I could
probably also find one to give me the patience I need.
     The fact is that people do have choices. They can learn all
they need to know about treating blind people respectfully. They
can learn it quickly and easily or slowly, the hard way. Right in
the Federation we have the tools for crash courses in reasonable
treatment; however, as in almost all other aspects of life, most
of us learn most of what we know the hard way.
     I had taken my now fifteen-year-old daughter Lynden and her
friend Shafina to the ice-skating rink. I chose to sit and
crochet while they skated. I heard many bits of conversation from
people of all ages as they came and went. Only one brief
conversation sticks in my mind today.
     A very young child and her or his father had been watching
the skaters through the window. The child asked, "Why do some
people keep falling down?"
     The father explained, quite wisely, "That is how they learn
to skate."
     The child, hesitating only briefly, then said, also quite
wisely, "Oh, I think that is how they learn to fall down."
     Whether we like it or not, one step at a time, one word or
idea at a time is what usually gets results in our everyday
lives. I believe we could all do more to raise society's
consciousness about blindness. Most of us will never be world-
renowned figures who can have a profound impact by using the
media effectively, but the best teaching is done one-on-one,
virtually unnoticed by the world. I will never have the skill,
funds, or creativity to invent that pill, but until I can neither
speak nor write another word, I can continue to give the best I
have--words of enlightenment.
     I cannot force anyone to listen to what I say. Neither can I
force anyone to believe as I do. I can, however, plant seeds
which others can choose to let grow in their minds and hearts.
That is what I and so many other ordinary blind people do all the
time.
     Sometimes people understand completely; more often they
understand a little. At times blind people are permitted to
function exactly as we would prefer to; sometimes, when we
educate only partially, we find ourselves compromising. I would
do well to remind myself that most of the time I am doing the
best I can. This is true of others, too.
     Some time ago I was singing in a combination choir from the
three sister churches in our area. We were rehearsing at my then
home church, the site of our special Thanksgiving service.
     No one seemed to question that I could learn the alto parts
to the songs; nor did anyone seem bothered by my use of Braille
words for the music.
     Eventually it came time to rehearse lining up and moving
from our seats to our standing position. Most choirs do this as a
matter of course, and I have sung in many choirs around the city
with no catastrophic consequences. But my consistent experience
has been that, whenever it comes to moving around, suddenly
somebody, or a group of somebodies, panic--even though I have a
long white cane and use it effectively.
     As usual, on the day in question someone suddenly realized
that I was at the head of the line of altos and that I would be
standing at the end of the line near the steps which led off the
platform. This fact did not bother me. I knew I could lead the
section to the right spot, and I knew that I could stop before
reaching the top of the steps by using my common sense and my
cane.
     When I assured the group that I could do this, I got no
responses like "Oh sure, we never gave it a thought." Instead,
coming from the general buzz of voices came suggestions: "Let's
put someone else in front of Laurie for her to follow. That will
be safer for all of us." "Laurie, you could stay in your seat and
just rise with the rest of us to sing. You know your part, so you
can sing from wherever you are. It won't matter." "Why don't you
make it easier for all of us?"
     I felt an avalanche of well-intended solutions covering and
almost smothering me. I also felt totally embarrassed having this
much attention unnecessarily focused on me.
     It seemed to me that I would stick out like a sore thumb if
I didn't move with the rest of the choir. In addition, I felt
that my opportunity to help by leading our section was being
taken away from me. I felt more and more as if my dignity were
being snatched away, right in front of all these people.
     The words "It won't matter" struck me like a bullet, right
in the middle of my broken heart. I suddenly heard myself ask,
quite strongly: "Well, what about my dignity?"
     What followed was that deafening silence with which many of
us are far too familiar. Had I now been totally rejected, or was
there an inaudible "Oh! I never thought about that"?
     The silence seemed to last longer than any of the pieces we
were to sing. Would even one person understand? Would anyone be
there to support my view of the matter? Would I be able to fit in
as I desired? Or would I be bluntly told that I was inconsiderate
of their worries? Maybe they would somehow slide it all under the
platform, act as though I had never said a word, and refuse to
speak to me. In other situations I have faced all of these
reactions. How would this incident resolve itself? Who would
break the silence? I prayed fervently to the Holy Spirit, who in
my understanding has never addressed blindness negatively. God
has given me a good mind; I trusted that He would give me the
necessary words to help us move on. After all, God gave Jesus and
others powerful words to combat hypocrisy and prejudice in ways
that could mend broken hearts.
     I broke the silence by laughingly saying that I didn't
understand why people thought I couldn't walk when it was my eyes
that didn't work properly. They seemed to recognize then that I
really had not intended to shame them or show them up, as some
people have occasionally interpreted my words.
     The night of the service came, and as usual I was first in
line in our section. I walked to my place and back two or three
times to our seats with the rest of the choir without incident. I
believe no one in the congregation noticed, but I did. I did not
stick out like a sore thumb. Instead I fitted naturally into the
choir.
     Another time I was at a store in which the staff did not
know me. I had purchased several items and was told the total
cost. Then there was a long pause. "Do you have cash?" the clerk
asked.
     I told her I could use either a check or credit card since I
did not have that much cash in my purse.
     "Well," she replied, hesitantly, "You'll have to use cash.
If you used a check or credit card, you would have to sign your
name, and I can't sign for you."
     I felt flustered and had to work hard to check my
impatience. It was 1995, almost the turn of the century. We have
experienced all kinds of technological advances and amassed vast
scientific knowledge, but people still think a blind person
cannot sign her or his name? I answered with impeccable logic and
as much patience as I could muster, "Well, I can sign my name. I
do it all the time."
     "Oh!" she replied very relieved, "I never thought about
that." The rest of the transaction went smoothly.
     I went into this store over the holidays, and someone saw me
using my signature guide. This same clerk said to the customer,
"Isn't that neat? I never thought of that before she came in."
The customer came over to inspect my signature guide.
     She said her father, who was ninety years old, was totally
blind, but neither he nor his family had ever thought of using a
signature guide. They either signed things for him or let him
scribble wherever he wanted to on the page whenever his signature
was needed.
     As the customer was telling me this, she suddenly realized
how her father's dignity had been affected. This realization came
to her without either of us addressing the issue of dignity
directly.
     I didn't have a spare signature guide to give her that day
(I do now), but she said she was sure she could make one after
seeing mine. Before she left, she said, "Sometimes we don't
realize the simple things we can do to make something work."
     When I first started working as a reservationist at Westin
Hotels and Resorts, I was asked a lot of questions. The workers
saw that I was getting around fine, handling my lunch on my own,
and making phone calls at break time. They were told that speech
had been added to my computer so that I could do the work. But
they didn't understand how I did all those things.
     I am unusually protected against blatant discrimination at
work because of our strict policies against harassment. In the
harassment policies of many companies, issues of racism, sexism,
and age discrimination are fully explained; but there is no
language specific to disability. Westin's policy, however,
includes warnings in its policy about negative comments or
treatment based on disability. There are also procedures for
filing a complaint to resolve an unfortunate situation. This is a
freedom I have seldom known, and though some people respond to
this policy by simply not speaking much to me for fear they'll
say the wrong thing, most people there now realize I am as much a
part of the company as they are and that I can answer any
questions they might have. I do not consider questions about how
I do things as discrimination. I accept questions gladly--after
all, questions invite answers.
     I explained (through an office memo and personally) that I
used my cane to find what was in front or around me, and I
memorized the work facility during our orientation day in
training.
     I told colleagues that I have various ways of identifying my
lunch items and containers by touch, and I microwave the food I
want to heat just as they do. I do keep my lunch in a specific
area in the refrigerator because I would not want to be thought
to be rummaging through everyone else's lunch to find mine.
     Then there is the phone--I have difficulty understanding why
anyone thinks using the phone would be a problem for a blind
person. I can feel the keys on the number pad and count them, and
I know which number is which by the location. When I dial, I can
also hear the touch-tones in my ear as a second means of
identification. I can either bring phone numbers with me in a
format I can read, get them from directory assistance, or
memorize a phone number as someone gives it to me. These are
things any ordinary person can do.
     As for my work station, I am still explaining how my speech
system allows me to read the computer screen. Many co-workers
seem to think that my computer functions differently from theirs
and that I do different work. I constantly assure them that I do
the same work they do, but that I access it differently.
     Inevitably I am met with, "Oh, I never thought about that,"
or "Duh, stupid me." When people say the latter, I remind them
that I do not consider them stupid. At times in my life I haven't
thought of the obvious; it can happen to any of us.
     One of the most perplexing problems I confront as a blind
adult is that many people are afraid to get to the Oh-I-never-
thought-about-that stage. Some will insist that they know what is
best for me, even when they have never met a blind person before.
Having other people decide for me that I cannot do something has
been one of the greatest handicaps I have lived with on a daily
basis.
     The assumption of such people is that the blind are
inevitably bound to be students and they themselves teachers
whenever their paths cross. Certainly there are many things I can
learn from sighted people, but teaching others how to deal with
blindness is one thing better left to those who live with it.
     I am actually quite relieved when someone hangs in with me,
asks questions, listens to my answers, and is able to say, "Oh, I
never thought about that." By so doing, such people allow me to
be the teacher, and they allow themselves to be students. In that
lies my dignity--our dignity!


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Governor Mike Lowry of Washington State prepares to sign the
Braille bill into law while NFB of Washington President Gary Mackenstadt
(right, behind the Governor's chair) and other interested Washingtonians look
on.]
                  BRAILLE AWARENESS DAY, 1996,
            BRINGS BIG DIVIDENDS IN WASHINGTON STATE
                        by Bennett Prows

     From the Editor: Washington State is the twenty-seventh
state to pass a law protecting the right of blind children to be
taught Braille. Bennett Prows is one of the leaders of the NFB of
Washington. Here is his report on the historic completion of the
affiliate's long struggle to see this bill passed:

     The 1996 legislature once again saw the NFB at the forefront
of the battle to bring Braille to blind students. We have now
enlisted the assistance of virtually every organization, group,
and individual in the educational field in Washington State and
brought the Braille bill to the Washington House of
Representatives and Senate one more time. On February 17, 1996, a
large contingent of the blind of the state, their friends, and
parents of blind children, along with teachers, agency
administrators, and the general public met at Olympia for our
finest Braille Awareness Day ever.
     We set up tables in the capitol building between the House
and Senate galleries, where legislators and staff could come and
see any number of demonstrations of the benefits of learning
Braille. While agencies and organizations of and for the blind
showed the public that Braille is as effective for blind persons
as print is for the sighted, a number of us spread out to meet
with the key legislators who were going to pass the legislation
to give legally blind students the opportunity to read Braille in
the public school system in Washington State. And our efforts
paid off.
     At about 10:45 a.m. H.B. 1078 was read for the final time on
the floor of the House. While the blind of the state watched from
the gallery, the Representatives passed the current version of
the Braille bill unanimously after very little discussion.
     At noon we lined the rotunda of the capitol and held a
ceremony to celebrate this victory. Bennett Prows was the master
of ceremonies for the twenty-minute program, during which Gary
Mackenstadt, President of the National Federation of the Blind of
Washington, thanked the many officials who had taken a hand in
passing the House version. He pledged to have the bill out of the
Senate very soon. The highlight of the ceremony was the moment
when Governor Mike Lowrey read his own proclamation declaring
February 17 as Braille Awareness Day in Washington State. The
crowd roared, and the echo could be heard throughout the capitol
when the governor whole-heartedly endorsed the Braille
legislation this session. "As soon as it is passed," he told the
audience, "I will sign this common-sense bill to ensure literacy
for blind children." The ceremony was followed by singing from a
trio of blind children from the Washington School for the Blind.
     We have worked hard since the red-letter day in February,
and at this writing we can announce that the Braille bill has
passed both houses and now awaits the Governor's signature.
Because of the steadfast determination of the National Federation
of the Blind over the past eight years, we will soon have a
Braille law in Washington State. It has been a long time coming,
but we, the members of the National Federation of the Blind, did
it!

     Editor's postscript: On Friday, March 22, 1996, the National
Federation of the Blind of Washington hosted a reception to
celebrate the signing of the Braille bill into law, which
occurred at 4:30 p.m. that afternoon in Olympia, the state's
capital. The reception took place in Tacoma at the affiliate's
mini-convention, and a number of legislators and representatives
from organizations and agencies that had worked on the bill were
in attendance. The event was a huge success, and Washington State
looks forward to increased Braille literacy for its blind
children.


                HOW FAR DOES THE MESSAGE TRAVEL?
                       by Kenneth Jernigan

     The National Federation of the Blind takes every opportunity
it can to acquaint people with its name and message. On pencils,
books, calculators, and anything else we can find, we give our
address and invite people to contact us if they need our help. We
often wonder how far the message travels and how effective it is.
Here is at least one answer, and it is encouraging:

Bucharest, ROMANIA
The 22nd of March 1996

Dear President Maurer:
     I think you'll be surprised when you will find out that you
are receiving this letter from far away, from Romania.
     My name is Nicolae Dosan. I am 34 year old and I have been
blind since 1986 as a result of a detached retina. Since my
childhood I have suffered from short-sightedness. This illness
got worse gradually till my retina got detached in 1985. I was
operated, but everything was useless. I must tell you that I am
married and I have 2 children about 10 and 12 years old.
     Why am I writting to you?
     Maybe it will seem fun for you, but I found your address on
a pencil by which my children wrote in school. I noticed this
note that was written there: "Someone you know needs assistance
with problems of blindness." I don't know if this note was
addressed only to the american blind, but I felt that I must try
to write to you, that I must tell someone about my problems.
     Maybe you will ask: "Why tell your problems to someone
outside your country?" The answer is very simple: here, no one
has time to listen to the problems of the blind, their everyday
difficulties. Maybe neither you have the time, but I beg you to
make it possible for me, a Romanian blind man, to be heard by
you, the President of the National Federation of the Blind in
U.S.A.
     The most important of my problems is the economical one, but
for no missunderstandings, I will explain in a few words what is
this problem about. I am qualified in watering physiotherapy-
masseur. I graduated the Medical College. In our country, are
guided to this profession people who have serious sight problems,
but yet, they don't ensure us a job according to our
qualification. This is my present situation. I and my family have
to live with approximately $80.00 a month although the prices are
equal or, sometimes, even higher than those in the Occidental
Europe. So you see that it is obviously impossible for us to live
this way.
     Mr. President, I would like to ask you a question: which are
the chances for a blind medical assistant in watering
physiotherapy-masseur to come to your country in searching for a
job? Because this is what I want to do. I would like to go
anywhere to work so that I could ensure my family a normal life
and a future.
     You are the first foreign person to whom I write about this
problems and that is because I think that U.S.A. is the most free
and democratic country.
     I would like very much to find out something about the
blind's life in your country.
     Before I end, Please permit me to thank you for your time
and attention and in the same time I apologize for my writing
mistakes.
     I hardly wait for your answer and I want to tell you that I
am greatfull to you whether you would help me or not.

                                                  Your greatfull,
                                                   Dosan, Nicolae

     This is the letter we got from Romania, and if we can be of
help, we will. Meanwhile, we have evidence that our message is
finding its way throughout the world.

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Ethel U. Parker, March 18, 1922, to April 7, 1996.]
                    IN MEMORIAM--E.U. PARKER
                       by Kenneth Jernigan

     Some of the things I find it necessary to do for the
National Federation of the Blind are unpleasant, and some are a
joy. Others are tinged with sadness and cause reflection. The
present undertaking falls into the latter category, for I must
report the death of one of our longtime leaders, E.U. Parker of
Mississippi.
     I first met E. U. and his wife Gene at the Houston
Convention in 1971. E. U. was in the full prime of his active
life, being one of the most successful State Farm Insurance
agents in Mississippi (and, for that matter, the country). He was
also serving as one of the movers and shakers in the politics of
his state. He went home from the Houston Convention to organize
the NFB of Mississippi, a job that he did vigorously and well.
     It was E. U. who first suggested and then helped establish
the Pre-Authorized Check (PAC) Plan, and it was he who constantly
promoted it year after year. Anybody who has attended the NFB
Resolutions Committee even for a little while during the past
fifteen or twenty years is familiar with the voice and opinions
of E. U. Parker. He was courteous and considerate, but he always
said what he thought--and he would be heard.
     E. U. (his name was Ethel) was always willing to serve, and
he always had good judgement and sound opinions. A few years
back, I went to Laurel and visited in the Parker home. It was
clear from conversations with people on the street and at dinner
that night at the country club that Ethel and Gene were among the
leading citizens of the town. The respect of their neighbors was
obvious.
     As I look back on my association with Ethel and Gene, I
remember a man and a woman with character and integrity. I
remember Ethel's contacts with Mississippi congressmen and
senators, and how he was always willing to leave whatever he was
doing to come to Washington or go anywhere else when needed. I
remember the meals I shared with Ethel and Gene at national
conventions and in my home. I remember Ethel's financial
contributions and the unassuming (almost anonymous) way in which
he gave, no wish for credit, no asking for recognition. I
remember a successful man, one who shared what he had with others
and did it for the joy of the act itself. But above all I
remember a friend--a close, dear friend--one that I will greatly
miss. He made life better for the blind of the nation and for the
National Federation of the Blind, and he made life better for me
personally. His contributions will be lasting; his memory will be
honored.


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Barbara Shaidnagle]
                       MR. PARKER AND PAC
                      by Barbara Shaidnagle

     From the Editor: The following little article arrived just
as the Monitor was going to press. It was so obviously in the
spirit of the other tributes to E. U. Parker included in this
issue that we thought it should be added. Barbara and Joe
Shaidnagle live in Texas. Here is Barbara's recollection of Ethel
Parker:

     When the daily mail brought the message that E. U. Parker
had died, my mind played hopscotch with memories. My most vivid
is the day he struggled to teach me to dive, and I resisted
because I was afraid to hit the water face first. I remembered as
a newlywed visiting his home in Laurel being awed by him. He was
a successful businessman, had lots of plaques of appreciation on
the walls of his house, and took time to help his blind brethren.
I remembered being especially awed by that house. It is
practically two houses in one, and Mr. Parker and his wife Gene
lived on the bottom floor.
     I remembered spending some time there and listening to Mr.
Parker talk about his trips to Jackson, developing contacts in
the state legislature, trying to improve the lives of blind
people. He talked a lot about a Kenneth Jernigan and a Federation
and the fight to help blind people. I could easily imagine Mr.
Parker giving a skeptical legislator a good talking to, but this
Jernigan and the NFB? Who were they?
     Eventually we went to a national convention, and I met Dr.
Jernigan and seemingly thousands of other blind and sighted
people in the National Federation of the Blind. It became clear
why Mr. Parker called the NFB "my Federation" and why it became
my Federation too.
     He believed that we had bigger legal battles looming and
that the National Federation of the Blind simply had to keep
fighting for the little guy, the blind guy. The blind had to lead
the blind.
     He came up with a little idea called the Pre-authorized
Check (PAC) Plan as a way of donating to the NFB. Mr. Parker
downplayed his role in the creation of PAC when explaining it to
our chapter; he simply wanted the NFB to have the money. His only
thought was for the guy in the workshop, the woman in the post
office stand, the couple with only their AB (Aid to the Blind)
(now SSDI) monthly check.
     When we convene in Anaheim in July, Mr. Parker, we will
remember you. When we meet at our state conventions, we will
remember you. At our monthly chapter meetings we will remember
you. We will talk about the Pre-authorized Check Plan as you set
it up to be, a form of painless, monthly, tax-deductible
contribution to the National Federation of the Blind.
     You were a great friend, Mr. Parker, and I will miss you.
But your PAC legacy will be with us always.


[PHOTO/CAPTION: Ruth Broadnax]
                             RECIPES

     This month's recipes were submitted by the National
Federation of the Blind of Tennessee.


                          SUNSHINE CAKE
                        by Ruth Broadnax

     Ruth Broadnax is the Secretary of the National Federation of
the Blind of Tennessee.

Ingredients:
2 sticks margarine
1 stick butter
5 eggs
 3/4 cup lemon-lime soda
3 cups sugar
3 cups cake flour
3 tablespoons lemon extract

     Method: Soften margarine and butter. Beat in eggs. Add
lemon-lime soda, sugar, flour, and extract, then blend well.
Grease bundt or pound cake pan with shortening and flour it.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Bake for one hour and twenty minutes
or until a toothpick or knife inserted in center comes out clean.
Allow to stand on cooling rack for a few minutes before removing
from pan.


                       COCONUT POUND CAKE
                        by Ruth Broadnax

Ingredients:
1-1/2 cups butter (3 sticks)
3 cups sugar
6 eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
 1/4 teaspoon salt
 1/4 teaspoon soda
1 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 package frozen coconut

     Method: Cream or soften margarine or butter. Add sugar
slowly, beating constantly, until mixture is light and fluffy.
Add eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Sift flour,
measure, and resift three times with salt and soda. Add flour
mixture alternately with sour cream, beginning and ending with
flour mixture. Stir in vanilla and fold in package frozen
coconut, which has been thawed. Line a 10-inch tube pan with wax
paper. Grease and flour the paper. Turn batter into pan, pressing
it down with spatula, making circles. Bake at 300 degrees for one
hour and twenty minutes. Cake is done when toothpick inserted in
center comes out clean. Remove cake to cooling rack and allow to
cool slightly before carefully removing it from the pan.


                        SCALLOPED APPLES
                        by Ruth Broadnax

Ingredients:
6 tart apples (peeled and sliced)
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup butter melted
2 cups bread crumbs

     Method: Mix together nutmeg, cinnamon, butter, and bread
crumbs. Toss apples and sugar together. Grease casserole dish and
arrange a layer of apples on the bottom, then a layer of the
bread-crumb mixture. Repeat these two layers until all
ingredients have been used. Bake at 350 degrees for forty-five
minutes.


                        HUMMINGBIRD CAKE
                        by Ruth Broadnax

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3 eggs, beaten
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup chopped pecans
1 8-ounce can crushed pineapple, undrained
2 cups chopped bananas (about three medium)

     Method: Combine dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Add
eggs and oil, stirring just until moistened. Do not beat. Stir in
pecans, pineapple, and bananas. Pour into three well-greased 9-
inch pans or two well-greased 9-by-13-inch pans. Bake at 350
degrees for twenty-five to thirty minutes. Cool in pan ten
minutes. Remove from pan and cool completely. Frost with cream
cheese frosting.


                      CREAM CHEESE FROSTING

Ingredients:
1 8-ounce package cream cheese, room temperature
1 stick margarine
1 16-ounce box confectioner's sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup chopped pecans

     Method: Cream together cream cheese, margarine, sugar, and
vanilla until smooth. Spread to cover each cake layer and
sprinkle with nuts before stacking cake.


                 ** ** MONITOR MINIATURES ** **


** Don Capps Remembers E.U. Parker:
                                         Columbia, South Carolina
                                                   April 11, 1996

Dear President Maurer:
     Enclosed is a check in the amount of $100 for ten SUN Shares
as a living memorial to the loving memory of a good friend, E. U.
Parker. Betty and I were very close to E. U. and of course love
his wife Gene. We first met E. U. and Gene at the 1971 convention
at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston. They visited with us in our
hotel suite for a period of time, allowing us the opportunity of
getting acquainted with them. It was at that time we planned to
organize the NFB of Mississippi, and it was my privilege to
preside over the organization of the affiliate. Serving on both
the NFB Board and the tenBroek Board with E. U. was a positive
experience. Having earned valuable experience as a successful
businessman, tremendously assisted by Gene, E. U. had good
judgment and vast knowledge which he always used to make the
Federation better. All of us in this big Federation family across
the nation will greatly miss E. U. He certainly leaves a legacy
of service to his fellow blind. We have talked with Gene and have
encouraged her to come to Anaheim since she is also very
important to all of us in the Federation.
      In making this living memorial to the NFB in loving memory
of E. U., Betty and I believe we will also please Gene.

                                                       Cordially,
                                       Donald C. Capps, President
               National Federation of the Blind of South Carolina

** Braille Transcription Available:
     We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
     I am a certified Braille transcriber, and my rates are lower
than most. Call or write for a list. Contact Donna Jean Webb,
1106 N. Olive Street, Gladewater, Texas 75647, relay, (800) 735-
2989, or [phone].

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Jessie Nash]
**In Memoriam:
     Those who have been in the movement for any length of time
will remember the name Jessie Nash (see Braille Monitor,
November, 1980). She was the operator of a vending facility in
Georgia and was unjustly removed from it. Year after year as we
fought for her rights, her name became a rallying cry for the
Federation's struggle to establish the rights of blind vendors.
     In recent years she had been in bad health. Her husband Hugh
recently sent us the notice of her death. Here in part is the
obituary:

     Jessie Mae Nash, age seventy-one, of Jacksonville, Florida,
passed away Thursday, March 7, 1996, in Jacksonville after a long
illness. The Suwannee County native moved to Jacksonville from
Albany, Georgia, two years ago. She was a restaurant manager and
the president of the Southwest Chapter of the National Federation
of the Blind in Albany.
     Survivors include her husband, Hugh I. Nash, Sr.; her
mother; three sons; one daughter; and twelve grandchildren.

** National Center for the Blind Staff Member Honored:
     Melvin Ray does tape duplicating and performs other duties
at the National Center for the Blind. He is also an ordained
Minister of considerable eloquence and ability. Recently he
received a triple honor--citations from Lawrence A. Bell,
President of the Baltimore City Council; Kurt L. Schmoke, Mayor
of Baltimore; and Parris N. Glendening, Governor of the State of
Maryland. We congratulate Mr. Ray on his receipt of these honors,
and we doubly congratulate him for having earned them. Here is
the Citation from the Governor:

                      The State of Maryland
              Governor of the State of Maryland, to
                 Reverend Melvin Ray, Greeting:

       Be it Known, Because of your demonstration of high
       integrity and ability, meriting our great trust and
          respect, we are most pleased to award you the

                       Governor's Citation

         in appreciation of your outstanding services to
                   the citizens of this State

                           Given Under My Hand and the Great Seal
                                         of the State of Maryland
                                           this 29th day of March
                         One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Six

                                             Parris N. Glendening
                                                         Governor

                                                   John T. Willis
                                               Secretary of State

** Reported in the 1890's:
     As evidenced by the speech "Blindness: Is History Against
Us?," the phenomenon of the blind as movers and shakers is not
limited to the present century. Catonsville, which is a suburb of
Baltimore, has a newspaper called the Catonsville Times. In the
April 3, 1996, edition, the Times said:

     One hundred years ago, in The Argus of April 4, 1896, was
the notice of John Glenn's death. . . .:

     Mr. John Glenn . . . died Monday morning in his sixty-eighth
year. He had lost his eyesight when only twenty-one years of age.
. . . For some time after this calamity he lived the life of a
country gentleman at the family country seat, Hilton, and was
closely identified with all the movements for the development and
advancement of Catonsville.

** Elected:
     Karen Clayton, Secretary of the Siouxland Chapter of the NFB
of Iowa, reports the following election results: Rich Crawford,
President; Dorothy Westin, Vice President; Karen Clayton,
Secretary/Treasurer; and Will Kitto and Glen Klemme, Board
members.

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Claire Parker
PHOTO/CAPTION: Donna Maglin]
**In Memoriam:
     We are saddened to report the deaths of two active and
committed members of the National Federation of the Blind of New
Hampshire. On April 2, 1996, Claire Parker, wife of affiliate
President John Parker and Treasurer of the Lakes Region Chapter,
died following an illness of several months. Then on April 16
Donna Maglin, a member of the Board of Directors of the New
Hampshire affiliate, lost her battle with cancer. Both Donna and
Claire were deeply loved and will be greatly missed.

** Braille Books Available:
     We recently received the following notice:
     Two educational books in TWIN VISION■ (print-Braille) are
available at cost from the American Action Fund for Blind
Children and Adults: Handbook of Braille Contractions ($4) and
Dictionary of Braille Problem Words--in two volumes ($6).
     Checks should be made payable to American Action Fund and
sent to American Action Fund, 18440 Oxnard Street, Tarzana,
California 91356.

** The Ups and Downs of Exercise:
     Recently Michelle Landry of Maryland came to the National
Center for the Blind to give a demonstration and discuss an idea
with President Maurer. Her idea requires use of a personal-size
trampoline. Devotees call the exercise done on this equipment
rebounding. This is what Ms. Landry has to say about her idea:
     Rebounding is a way to have fun and improve your health at
the same time. The Rebounder is a round trampoline-style device
which allows you to jump, exercise, and do aerobics in the
privacy and convenience of your own home and at an affordable
cost. A stabilizing bar can be attached to provide increased
security and control. To use this bar, however, you must keep one
hand on it at all times, limiting your ability to use both arms
simultaneously for upper-body movements.
     I am interested in developing a new stabilizing method which
would enable blind users to have both hands and arms free to do
aerobics and other exercises on the rebounder without the
stabilizing bar. I am looking into grants and other funding
options in order to make this available, and I plan to contribute
a percentage of the profits to the NFB.
     The Rebounder is great fun in addition to being good for the
user. It offers many health benefits, especially for women. Here
are just a few of the advantages of Rebounding: increased lung
capacity, greater oxygen absorption, resistance to cardiovascular
disease, increased efficiency of the heart and other muscles,
decreased cholesterol and triglyceride levels, increased
metabolism and endurance, improved coordination, improved
relaxation and ability to sleep, and better control of weight.
     If you want to have fun and improve your health at the same
time or if you are interested in helping to pursue funding for
this project and the NFB, I would like to hear from you. Please
contact Michelle Landry, P. O. Box 28362, Parkville, Maryland
21234, telephone [phone].

** Computer Instructional Cassettes Available:
     We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
     Top Guide to the Internet is an eleven-track, thirty-one-
chapter tutorial on Internet use for users of Shell accounts. The
interactive tutorial teaches ten skills of effective Internet use
and features many resources of particular interest to blind
folks, including reading newspapers, searching the yellow pages,
and searching the RFB&D and NLS catalogs. Also included is a
supplemental disk full of additional information and useful
programs.
     In addition, Top Windows Demystifier is a tutorial
consisting of six tracks and a supplementary disk, which teaches
the basics of navigating Windows 3.1. The tutorial is useful with
any screen reader and gives an interactive introduction to
Program Manager, File Manager, and some of the other programs
which come with Windows. The tutorials are available by check or
money order for $19.50 plus $2.00 shipping from Top Dot
Enterprises, 8930 11th Place, S.E., Everett, Washington 98205,
[phone], e-mail: [e-mail].
     Inquire about catalogs and credit card availability.

** For Sale:
     We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
     I have the following items for sale:
1. Echo Commander synthesizer with external speaker, Braille and
print instructions, price $100 (never been used).
2. Sensible Speller (to be used with Echo Commander synthesizer),
cassette tape, three disks with print instructions, $50 (never
been used). (Both of these items are used with Apple computer.)
3. Myna 386 computer-organizer, IBM PC compatible, uses MS DOS
and DECtalk speech synthesizer, also uses IBM Screen Reader,
includes Myna tutorial cassette tapes and IBM Screen Reader
tapes, print manual, rechargeable batteries, adapter, headphones,
carrying case, and twelve raised locator dots. Still under
warranty with technical support. Other accessories: external
floppy disk drive with AC adapter. Price $1,000 (never been
used).
4. Talking calculator, clear female voice, price $30 (never been
used).
     Please contact me in Braille, on cassette tape, or by
telephone, [phone]. Make payment by money order or check
to Gladys Taylor, 3335 Beech Drive, Decatur, Georgia 30032.

** New Address:
     We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
     Arkenstone has a new address, 555 Oakmead Parkway,
Sunnyvale, California 94086-4023; phone [phone],
international [phone], fax [phone], and TDD (800)
833-2753. Current Arkenstone developments include the Atlas
Speaks Talking Map and the enhanced ArkenClone. The latter is a
computer designed to support PC-based access technology, price
$1,495.

** For Sale:
     We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
     We are a new company selling speech software, scanners, and
other software. You can save from $20 to over $200 on our
products. For further prices and information call or write in
Braille if possible to Clayton Wall, President, National
Technology for the Blind and Visually Impaired, 105 Sawyer
Street, South Portland, Maine 04106, [phone]. Our catalog
comes in three formats: IBM 3.5-inch floppy disk, print, and
cassette.

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Dr. David Ticchi]
** Honored:
     We recently received a press release which included the
following information:
     David Ticchi, President of the Cambridge Chapter of the
National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts and member of
the YMCA board of trustees in his community, has been selected by
the United Way of Massachusetts Bay to carry the Olympic Flame in
the upcoming 1996 Olympic Torch Relay. Cambridge resident David
Ticchi was selected as a Community Hero based on his outstanding
contributions and service to others and the community. The 1996
Olympic Torch Relay, undertaken by the Atlantic Committee for the
Olympic Games, will span 15,000 miles and travel through forty-
two states for eighty-four days, beginning in Los Angeles on
April 27. The Olympic Torch Relay will conclude July 19 in
Atlanta at the opening of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games.
     Selected through the Share the Spirit campaign organized by
Olympic Torch Relay presenter Coca Cola, David Ticchi is one of
5,500 Community Heroes nationwide who will carry the specially
designed 3.6 pound torch up to one kilometer. Congratulations to
David Ticchi.

** For Sale:
     We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
     Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language,
seventy-two Braille volumes, $400; Roget's New Pocket Thesaurus,
twenty-nine Braille volumes, $300; a light probe, $20; and King
James version of the Bible in Braille to give away. The book
shelves for the dictionary are easily disassembled and can be
included. For information call Jean Parker weekdays at (303) 355-
9935.

** In Memoriam:
     Ted Robbins, one of the leaders of our Montana affiliate,
recently wrote President Maurer to report the sad tidings of the
death on March 4, 1996, of long-time Federationist Mike Maloney.
Mike had been an active member of the Montana affiliate for fifty
years. He attended several national conventions and worked
tirelessly to ensure the quality of the organization's summer
orientation program. Mike will be deeply missed by those who knew
and loved him.

** New Large-Cell Braille Agency:
     We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
     Many newly blind adults find it difficult or impossible to
learn standard dot Braille. In many cases this problem is due to
a lack of sensitivity caused by neuropathy. Due to being older,
newly blind adults do not have as much sensitivity in their
fingers. Their fingertips cannot easily distinguish a standard
dot Braille cell.
     There are some materials available in large-cell or jumbo
dot Braille. Nevertheless, such materials are scarce. What has
been needed is a non-profit agency dedicated to the large-cell
Braille format, an agency that can devote 100 percent of its
resources and time to making large-cell Braille materials
available to those blind people who need the large-cell Braille
format due to difficulty reading standard dot Braille.
     To meet the need for large-cell Braille courses and
materials, the National Large-Cell Braille Foundation (NLCBF) has
been founded in Orlando, Florida. The agency will work to
accomplish three major goals. First is the creation, production,
and distribution of a Grade I and Grade II large-cell Braille
course called Hooked on Braille■. This course will use audio
tapes, Braille course materials, and an innovative set of flash
cards to teach large-cell Braille. The course is expected to be
unveiled in August, 1997. The second goal of the NLCBF is the
production and distribution of a large-cell Braille King James
version of the Bible. It is expected to be ready for distribution
in five years. The third goal of the NLCBF is to help raise the
Braille literacy level in America by getting blind people hooked
on Braille. To this end the National Large-Cell Braille
Foundation will launch a Braille literacy campaign in January,
1997. The campaign will officially introduce the slogan of the
NLCBF, "Get Hooked on Braille■."
     The NLCBF will be supported entirely by contributions and
grants. The agency was founded by Harry Martin, a blind Navy
veteran and author.

** First Annual Jazz Camp:
     We have been asked to carry the following announcement:
     During the week of July 7-13, 1996, renowned jazz artist
Henry Butler will conduct a jazz camp for visually impaired/blind
students at the Indiana School for the Blind in Indianapolis,
Indiana. This project, the first of its kind, is supported in
part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Students accepted through an application process will attend the
camp at no charge.
     Henry Butler will be supported by a small staff of
accomplished jazz educators including Alvin Batiste, Professor of
Jazz Studies at Southern University; Greg Erbeck, Music
Instructor at Indiana School for the Blind; and Michael Mandel,
performer and composer from New York City. The jazz camp will
incorporate many components of jazz performance. For example,
separate clinics are planned on piano and vocal performance,
music fundamentals, jazz improvisation, and demo tape
construction. A public performance featuring Henry Butler with
the students and staff will close the camp on Friday evening.
     Henry Butler will serve as artistic director and lead
instructor of the camp. A native of New Orleans, Butler received
formal music training at the Louisiana School for the Blind.
Butler then earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Southern
University and Michigan State University, respectively. He then
returned home to perform with almost every important Crescent
City R & B jazz musician. Along with a rigorous recording and
touring schedule, Butler also is a jazz studies faculty member at
Eastern Illinois University.
     For further information on the jazz camp or to schedule an
interview with Henry Butler, Artistic Director, please call Jo
Ann Collins (Administrative Director) at [phone].

** Attention Everyone Interested in the Senior Blind:
     Cathy Randall, Chairwoman of the Committee on the Senior
Blind, writes as follows:
     Attendance and audience enthusiasm at annual NFB Senior
Blind Committee meetings keeps growing year after year. The 1996
meeting will include a panel to discuss the first year of a
series of twelve-week courses for seniors in developing the
skills of blindness. Panel members include Judy Sanders, state-
wide coordinator for the Older Blindness Project in Minnesota;
Chris Cuppett, instructor for seniors classes at Mankato
Rehabilitation Center, Minnesota; and Kathy Burnside, instructor
for the senior blind at BLIND, Inc.
     Jim Gashel, Director of Governmental Affairs, will give an
update on legislative matters important to seniors. The committee
will revisit the recent issue of becoming a division. The meeting
will begin at 8:00 p.m. Sunday, June 30. The location will be
announced in the convention agenda. Don't miss this important
meeting; everyone is invited.

** Attention Masons:
     Don Morris writes to remind all Masons that the NFB Masonic
Square Club will hold a breakfast meeting Monday, July 1, at 7:00
a.m. Call him for further details at [phone].

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Karl Smith]
** Turning Water Into 7-Up:
     The following anecdote appeared in the September, 1995 issue
of Insight. It was contributed by Karl Smith, President of the
NFB of Utah. It reminds us all of the value of both a sense of
humor and the right perspective. Here it is:
     The first time it happened was about seven years ago during
lunch with my family at a local restaurant. About half way
through the meal the waitress glided past and deftly filled my
half-empty glass of 7-up with water. I didn't quite know how to
react since this had never happened to me before. I ended up
drinking my Water-up and chalking it up to experience, glad for a
great story to tell my friends.
     The NFBU state convention began just a few days later. I was
sitting at the head table at the banquet on Friday evening when,
imagine my surprise, the waitress whipped by and filled my again
half-empty glass of 7-up with water. This was getting ridiculous-
-Two different waitresses in two different restaurants just a few
days apart. I knew if I didn't think of something fast I would be
doomed to a life of drinking Water-up, or maybe I would have to
start ordering brown, red, or some other colored liquids to
drink.
     The next day during the lunch hour at the convention I came
up with what I thought was a simple solution. When the waitress
came to take my order, I told her I wanted 7-up. Then I put my
plan into action. "By the way," I asked, "can you bring my 7-up
in a different kind of glass from the one my water is in?" Well,
what do you think she said? "Oh sure, Honey, I guess that's so
you can tell the difference, right?"
     This may not seem a very important reason to you for having
the National Federation of the Blind, but I ask you, have you
ever drunk Water-up? How did I finally solve my problem? I now
drink Dr. Pepper.