3—
White Canes

In the 1960s when my vision fell to a corrected 20/200 in the best eye, I was officially blind. That is the definition generally applied in the United States. But I did not accept the condition of blindness. I did not feel blind. I avoided the word. I was skillful in hiding the impairment from others and from myself. I was willing to say that I was having problems with my eyes, or even that I was visually impaired, but long after my vision was far worse than 20/200, the term "blind" was almost impossible to verbalize. As with Andrew Potok, the artist, the word was "fraught with archetypal nightmares: beggars with tin cups, the useless, helpless, hopeless dregs of humanity." When Potok first heard it applied to himself, he wanted to scream.

With the white cane it was the same; there was re-

luctance, real resistance. For years I did not use that badge of cowardice, when for safety I certainly should have. It is an almost universal reaction. Vajda substituted his umbrella for a dreaded white cane and, when he was forced to the latter, buried the hapless umbrella in his garden with solemn rites. Wagner hated her cane. She called herself "the original klutz" and her cane "a real wash-out." She never mastered the rhythm of her step with the back-and-forth swish. One end caught in cracks while the other jammed into her stomach. The cane did not help when she was lost. And "worst of all," she said, "I might as well have waved a banner advertising my blindness."

In 1975 I fell down a flight of steps and landed on gritty, pitiless brick. They were the steps to a party of friends. It was Thanksgiving time. I was in high spirits, with little thought of my blindness, which was pretty well advanced by then. That morning I had been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship to study community on the American frontier. With the Washington letter in my pocket, I was, shall I say, walking on air, which I literally did. I thought I was at the bottom of the steps, but actually there were three or four left.

After lots of help getting inside and a stiff drink, I

was carted away in an ambulance, thereby completely spoiling the party. I never got to read the National Endowment letter to my friends! The whole event made me gun-shy of good news, and ever after when desires come to pass, I wonder how near tragedy lurks. My hip was broken, requiring surgery, a pin, and months of recovery. Believe it or not, I still found excuses to avoid the white cane.

Another time I was happily letting Chad, a six-year-old neighbor, lead me upstairs to see or hear something in his room. To his horror I missed a step and cascaded down a set of stairs. They were softly carpeted this time, so there were no breaks, though plenty of bruises. Aaron Salinger, a ten-year-old friend, presented me with his treasured twisted-wood cane, but I wasn't reading the real message, even from the rod of Aaron. My pride was beginning to fade, however, and after the second fall, I began using a cane cautiously. I even took mobility instructions. Shirley kept reminding me that a white cane was a protection against misunderstanding, a clarification for all those unreturned smiles, inappreciative stares, blank recognitions. Then some adviser warned that if anything happened to harm me or others in public while I was not carrying a white cane, I was legally responsible. That hit home,

and I began to use the infernal stick regularly. But I always understood Potok's cry that with the cane he had become "the stuff of people's nightmares."

One way of looking at blindness is to see it as a partial extinction of ourselves, and we do not generally give up ourselves without a fight. When blindness comes on slowly, the fight is merely prolonged. There is always that bit of light or vaporous form to hang an excuse on. For me the darkness did not crash down in some traumatic accident. It ate away like a shadow in the afternoon and led me to think that little was happening, or at least the problem was not serious. When you can continue to work, teach, and write, as I was doing, why should you admit to yourself that you are blind? I lived in the present, or even the past. Through all my blind years, I continued to wear eyeglasses though they had no effect whatever, and Shirley had to tell me when they got impossibly smudged. I would not go gently into that night, but with a cracked, pinned hip, bruises, an uncontrollable fear of falling down another flight of stairs, and still wearing ridiculously impotent eyeglasses. At long last I brandished a white cane to announce my surrender.

To many blind people, canes and stairs are positives. The cane, of course, is an extension of the arm. It wid-

ens the horizon. It is the self, probing the environment by the inch or the foot, just as the eye probes it by the mile. For these blind people the stairway is much less frightening than it might seem. Once on a stair, the next risers are predictable. Rails are usually at hand. Seldom is there litter to trip on. There are no half-opened doors and no head-height obstructions. All these things are true about stairs, but I must admit that I never reached that level of relaxed understanding. Stairs, even the thought of them, always filled me with sinking terror. A cane is a good support, but I never felt it liberating my horizons.

When I entered the white-cane world, I had no concept of the population I was joining. If I had asked, I would have learned that statistics for the blind are not easy to come by anyway. The general reluctance to use white canes is only a symptom of the widespread hesitation to admit blindness; figures can therefore be unreliable. Thousands in the United States do not claim blindness even though their vision has fallen below the legal definition of 20/200. That is why estimates for some years vary from 441,000 to 1,700,000, not including the millions who are functionally blind, unable to read ordinary newsprint with perfectly fitted glasses. I would suggest that the most reliable estimate is that

of the National Federation of the Blind, 750,000 blind in 1992. I had joined three-quarters of a million people.

If I had been born elsewhere, my statistical cohorts might have been fewer. Other countries often use far less generous definitions of blindness, sometimes allowing no more vision than the counting of fingers at a distance of one yard. With such narrow definitions, the numbers of blind sink as low as 53 per 100,000 (Germany) or 58 per 100,000 (Switzerland). At the other extreme, in countries like India and Egypt, partly from definition and partly from health conditions, the number can be in excess of 500 per 100,000. The world's blind in the 1970s were estimated anywhere from 14,000,000 to 22,000,000. An even larger figure would be necessary to reflect the sociological or functional definition proposed by the National Federation: "One is blind to the extent that he must devise alternative techniques to do efficiently those things which he would do with sight if he had normal vision." With that definition I would have been blind since I first devised the taped quotations for lecturing.

Not many of the group with whom I was numbered, however, were blind for the same reason. Uveitis is an important but not a leading cause of blindness. In one statistic it accounted for 2.5 percent of the blind; higher, if considering only younger people. It is some-

times related to venereal disease. In some parts of the world, it is especially connected with leprosy and tropical fevers. Everywhere, it is associated with infectious viral and bacterial diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis and not infrequently, as in my case, with rheumatoid arthritis, especially the juvenile variety. The associated diseased cells target parts of the eye, such as the cornea, the sclera, or the uvea.

Very few people have ever heard of the uvea, and one of the hardest situations in the early blind years was explaining my medical condition. I likened the uvea to a thick grape skin running around the outer parts of the eyeball. Actually it is a highly vital structure: one of its parts, the choroid, carries blood through its rich veins to the outer part of the retina, while its ciliary body generates the aqueous humor, the central portion of the eye, the pathway for light, the jelly that maintains proper pressure in the whole eyeball. The uvea also contains the iris, and with that my listeners had no difficulty, especially if I was speaking with my communards. Cultists of the 1960s were convinced that in the iris, secrets of the entire body were revealed. I often wondered what they would have found in the contours and color gradations of my iris as the uveitis took its toll.

I know they would have seen continuing inflam-

mation, which was causing the iris to produce fibrous exudations that clogged up the whole system. That chronic infection led to the usually slow, sometimes rapid, growth of the cataracts. In turn, these were hastened by the use of cortisone, which paradoxically provided the most effective treatment for the inflammation.

The cataracts were easier than the iris to explain. Most everyone knows how cataracts form in the lens, the eye's crystalline prism of a window. Because the lens, like the cornea, is not connected to the blood supply, the cataract will continue to develop until it has clouded the lens sufficiently to be called a mature cataract, which generally means total blindness.

Cataracts allowed me to join a significant subgroup of the sightless, for they are responsible for up to 20 percent of the blind in the developed countries and far more in the Third World. Babies can be born with cataracts as a result of their mothers' illnesses, but every person is apt to develop them with aging. This seems to be the result of the exposure throughout life to ultraviolet light. Cataracts that result from aging are unlike those caused by disease, which are usually posterior and adjacent to the lens capsule.

Most everyone knows, too, that the surgical removal

of cataracts is commonplace and highly successful. From one to one and a half million are removed in America each year, and in the population at large, there are about eight million people who have undergone cataract operations. That striking fact made it hard for others to understand why I stood still and let blindness engulf me. It was at that point that I had to go back and explain the uveitis that blocked the surgery.

My new community of the blind came to their state from causes that were legion. There is a motion blindness in which individuals can see a quiet object but not one that is in action. Ordinary light can produce such pain that a perfectly functional eye is to all intents and purposes blind. Psychological trauma can bring about functional blindness in which people simply refuse to see. Such has been reported for certain Cambodian women now in the United States far from their homeland. In our age of psychologizing, it is inevitable that blindness should be linked with mental problems.

Perhaps the most ironic and melancholy cause, however, came from the oxygen tents in which premature babies were unwittingly placed in the 1940s and 1950s. Some eight thousand children were blinded by this retinopathy of prematurity. One of my blind stu-

dents, Gary Schmidt, who had an enormous effect on me, lost his sight in that same cruel backlash to medical helpfulness.

Before Gary entered college, his high school counselor, who had heard that I was blind, brought him over for introductions. The young man was shy. It took him months, maybe a year, after my repeated suggestions, to call me Bob instead of Dr. Hine. But his voice spoke enthusiasm; he liked the word "Wow." In the years ahead I created a picture of Gary as tall, well proportioned, agile, with a mop of dark hair over his forehead. He became a friend as well as a student, and before he graduated, we drank hundreds of cups of coffee together and shared innumerable lunches. As he led me to the cafeteria across the campus with his stick tapping, the blind literally leading the blind, his defiant independence made him so quick that I could not keep up and frequently asked him to slow down. He was like Hull, who contends that most help is a hindrance, that all those well-intentioned calls of "Turn right" or "Watch out for that" do little more than make him forget the telephone number he is trying to remember.

Gary's roommates were an active bunch; they cooked special curry dinners for Shirley and me. Once, in his room Shirley noticed his Optacon (a device that

translates print into raised needles under a finger), and on it was Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex . I had not read The Joy of Sex myself (though the day would come), and it was probably my fault that we did not talk of intimate things like girlfriends. I guess his roommates took care of that subject. But Gary and I were close, and we helped each other. I could advise him, listening to his grand plans for teaching medieval history in college, trying gently to dissuade him from what could be a wrenching goal for the blind. He was more positive, encouraging me to master grade-three braille. When he was home in summertime, we corresponded in grade three and corrected each other's mistakes.

Gary was granted his B.A. with honors and went on to graduate school in medieval history at UCLA. His advisers there were rougher on him than I had been about his prospects in the marketplace, and he only finished one year, returning to Riverside to work in the public schools with blind and handicapped students. He was liked and did a good job and continued in that line in Colorado and later in northern California. I never forgot what his dream had been, however, and blessed my stars that I was functioning as a professor before the sight was taken away.

It always has disturbed me that Gary was denied ful-

fillment of his ambition. I strongly support the National Federation of the Blind (the preposition is important: of , not for ) in its drive to eliminate such discouragement. The Federation, a civil rights movement that emerged from New Deal days and matured in the era of the Great Society, has railed against sheltered workshops and "broomcorn," restrictions on the blind in air travel, prohibition of guide dogs in restaurants, and in general those sighted attitudes encapsulated in a language that includes phrases like "blind alley." The movement will make certain that the blind never again are "overseen but not heard."

I knew blind college professors, and they had been real successes. Jim Burns, for example, a good friend of Shirley's in college, was blinded at age five by a rare form of glaucoma. When he finished his master's degree in psychology, he sought a teaching job. State law directed that having met all other qualifications, the blind could not be denied a teaching credential, but it said nothing about hiring, and local boards of education often maintained health codes that required teachers to have good sight. Seven years went by, including a period in which Burns vended newspapers and candy at a stand in a state employment building. A psychology professor at Los Angeles City College, in-

furiated by this derailing of a trained and brilliant mind, challenged Burns to apply for a position for which the health requirement was suspended during a three-year probationary period. Thus began a thirty-year, highly meritorious career teaching psychology there.

I envied Burns his skills. He reads braille faster than anyone I ever knew (up to 150 words per minute, which is about the speed of normal speech). It is a joy to hear him recite while his fingers race over a Thurber story. On the piano he plays Bach and Brahms with verve and warmth. And what a sense of humor! Witness one of his limericks:

On the breast of a strumpet named Gale
Was tattooed the price of her sale,
     And on her behind
     For the sake of the blind,
Was the same information in braille.

Another friend, Werner Marti, a fellow historian, was totally blinded playing high school football. Five years later a social worker helped him get into UCLA. He joined a fraternity, and the brothers challenged him to live as normally as possible and look straight at a voice rather than let his blind eyes waver. As a result,

casual acquaintances often did not realize he was blind. He taught at a nearby preparatory school long enough to get himself admitted to graduate school with a teaching assistantship and returned to UCLA for the doctorate. Fortunately, he was directed by a renowned historian-humanitarian, John Caughey. Under him, Marti persisted through the completion of his dissertation on the California conquest, which was published as Messenger of Destiny . The doctoral degree, however, led only to years of futile searching for a job. At California Polytechnic Institute, then a small agricultural school in Pomona, three years of application and repeated contacts finally produced a regular position. He taught there very successfully for nearly twenty-one years, nine of them as chairman of the history department.

I do not know John Gwaltney, but he bears the double whammy of being both blind and black. He is a professor of anthropology, who in his book, The Thrice Shy , tells of his fieldwork in a small Oaxacan village where blindness is endemic from a local fly-borne disease. He points out that his work is founded not so much on visible as on audible evidence—the emergence and recession of death knells, the crackle of Belgian rifles, the escalation of canine din, the alterna-

tions of domestic and imported speech. "The braillewriter, the typewriter, the tape recorder, and a pair of attentive, accessible ears" were the primary resources of his book. His fieldwork in the steep, rocky, stepped Oaxacan terrain wore out six collapsible canes in a month and forced him to use heavy steel sticks.

The blind of that village are a long way from me or any of the academic blind in the United States. For one thing the Oaxacans (poor candidates for the National Federation of the Blind) accept their dependence stoically. Their culture offers them few occupations, except begging for food. The people have a saying, "As poor as a blind man," which implies a great deal. Although modernization is rapidly changing the society, there remains much social deference paid the blind, children are still often expected to act as guides, and there persists a belief that the blind live under special divine protection. The contrast between Gwaltney's own life (and mine) and the culture his culture freed him to study is dramatic.

Robert Russell, totally blind from the age of seven, stocky and strong, a champion wrestler, "a fat little guy, just like a turkey," fought his way through a blind school and a bachelor's degree at Yale University. There he learned to love poetry. With Wordsworth and

Coleridge and Edith Sitwell, his "spirit lay bare in the sunshine of spring." Though his blindness made him feel "like some strange beast tethered by a malignant deity at the gates of paradise," he went on to an M.A. at Yale and then to a B.Litt. at Oxford University. Even with those impressive degrees, jobs came with difficulty, and he spent some time in the mentally deadening tasks of a workshop for the blind, remanded to the broomcorn. After years of countless letters of inquiry and fruitless interviews, he secured a permanent position at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. Russell's story, along with all the others, causes me to wonder if I could have made it had I been blind before I was hired.

Still, the blind academic is familiar enough. There are at least six hundred blind teachers in America, according to David Ticchi, whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard was on this subject. At least two leading figures in the National Federation have been university professors—Jacobus ten Broek (California) and Floyd Matson (Hawaii). The evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, Geerat Vermeij, holder of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellowship, has been blind since three.

Higher education historically was one of the first areas where the blind were accepted, since student

discipline there was a lesser problem than in the elementary and high schools. Frederic Schroeder of the National Association of Blind Educators believes that in the last twenty years, the number of blind in higher education has dropped dramatically. He sees three causes: the greater number of professional opportunities available to the blind, the misplaced fear among hiring committees that the blind might have trouble in the university's frantic priorities of research over teaching, and the lack of training in braille among mainstreamed blind children. Schroeder feels that there are now probably no more than half a hundred blind in higher education.

It is surprising that the television industry created a prime-time situation comedy around this little group. I was peripherally involved in the effort and thought that the day of the blind college professor had dawned. A college friend of mine, Bob Thomas, Hollywood editor for the Associated Press, caught wind of a planned show at ABC called "Mr. Sunshine" about a blind university teacher. Thomas knew the producer, Gene Reynolds ("MASH"). And big names like Henry Winkler (the Fonz) and John Rich ("All in the Family") were involved. Among the actors were equally well-known figures from the theater: Jeffrey Tambor, Nan Martin, and Barbara Babcock.

Thomas told Reynolds of me, a real, blind college professor living nearby. Reynolds called and came out. I expected he might want a minute-by-minute review of my life, the inside story, and since this was Hollywood, even a bit of sexy detail. He must have been disappointed in the latter, but we sat in my office, drank coffee, and talked away a whole morning. Busy as he must have been, he called his secretary to cancel other appointments and stayed for lunch and much of the afternoon. He was interested in my braille cards for lectures, in my class strategy for calling on students, in my braillewriter and talking computer, in the procedure for writing books, in relations with students and colleagues.

I practically memorized the pilot video. The central character, Paul Stark, was like me, having gone blind while a college teacher. But his wife was unable to cope with his infirmity and left him. In his work, however, he did better, successfully understanding students through other than visual means.

Shirley and I studied the pilot carefully, and my commentary to Reynolds went like this:

Slow down Paul Stark's walk and also his reading. A man only two years blind will read braille

rather slowly, not as fast as Stark. And when he uses his white stick, his tapping sweeps should be wider and cover his full path. You are right on the mark when you picture him reluctant with his white cane.

I like the show. It is funny, touching, and deals with interesting human questions. You are playing with an idea once expressed by Jonathan Miller (the physician-psychologist-theater man) that we can laugh at the blind because they don't intimidate others. The deaf, in contrast, require others to repeat themselves, talk louder, and feel silly. The blind in their ridiculous stereotype are only themselves made to look silly, bumping into things, shaking the hand of the wrong person, entering a closet instead of the exit, talking to an empty chair.

Since Stark teaches English literature, you might sometime have him lecture on Milton and his blindness, and through his comments on Milton's difficult relations with his wife mirror his own marital problems. I suppose you will in the future capitalize on the widespread feeling that the blind are rejected as sex objects, or on the sighted person's difficulty in imagining sex with the blind.

Finding comedy in infirmity is in itself an enormous contribution. Like most situations in life, the flip side or the next step in the dialectic can cast a completely different light on what might be considered a grim situation. You have explored a lot of this humor in disability during your career. It makes us normal. Keep it up.
Sincerely,
Robert Hine

Reynolds asked me to the filming of another episode. On the Paramount set, Shirley and I were seated in the front row of a studio audience. Shirley could not give many clues because of the sound, but, knowing the pilot so well, I could judge the action easily from the words. It was the segment about a blind date (oh, what a hackneyed joke among the blind!). After the show, as the audience applause died down, Tambor came over and shook my hand. I liked his vigorous handshake and his enthusiasm at doing the part. He seemed more than passingly interested in the blind and told me how much he appreciated the help he received from the Braille Institute in Los Angeles. The Hine-Reynolds discussion did not come up.

Because the show was so far along before I got in-

terviewed, I doubt if my contribution crept much into the final eight shootings, but there were a few details that I thought I recognized—some of the relations with the teaching assistants and the unusual uses of braille. In one later episode, the last-minute illness of an actor in a school dramatic production caused Stark to be drafted because he could read his lines from a braille script concealed in his clothing. It was certainly like my pocket lecturing.

Except for its last four letters, I never liked the title "Mr. Sunshine." It suggested Candide's Pangloss, a syrupy message of silver in every blind person's cloud or, equally maudlin, the truly valiant blind conquering their impediment. The show's blurbs also gave that feeling. In them Stark was "a bright acerbic curmudgeon who treats blindness as just another challenge and leaves you laughing." "Mr. Sunshine" was a warm story, well produced and well acted, but the blind are not the raw material for a "MASH" or an "All in the Family." ABC showed the ten episodes through the spring and summer of 1986, but no more were made, and the show quietly died. With it went my day—maybe the day of the blind college professor—in the entertainment world.