Growing up Blind Conversations with Dr. G
Host Dr. Grace Ambrose-Zaken, President and CEO Safe Toddles non-profit and inventor of the Pediatric Belt Cane for blind toddlers discusses why her mission is to make walking safer for toddlers with a mobility visual impairment or blindness. Listen to: Interviews with families, professionals, adults who grew up with a mobility visual impairment or blindness, and more. For more information about this blog contact: 845-244-6600, info@safetoddles.org
Growing up Blind Conversations with Dr. G
Don McBride born 1936 became blind at age 11, O&M instructor before it was a grad degree.
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This week is a real treat- I found Don McBride’s interview, he was born in 1936. He is a great storyteller and gives amazing insight into what it was like to be blind child in the 1940s and 50s- he became blind at age 11, he attend residential school and so had certain advantages – but, there wasn’t white cane safety at the time and his older brothers were determined to toughen him up which included knocking his head into trees and poles with a warning he better play outside and well… This is part one of his interview
In every accomplishment – the O&M instructor in me wishes more value had been placed on his safety. His life is filled with accomplishments and yet- all I can hear is just how freakin hard it has been to get around safely and he blames himself – not the inferior tools he’s been provided… He taught O&M too – learn more about that in Part II.
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This week is a real treat- I found Don McBride’s interview, he was born in 1936. He is a great storyteller and gives amazing insight into what it was like to be blind child in the 1940s and 50s- he became blind at age 11, he attend residential school and so had certain advantages – but, there wasn’t white cane safety at the time and his older brothers were determined to toughen him up which included knocking his head into trees and poles with a warning he better play outside and well… This is part one of his interview
In every accomplishment – the O&M instructor in me wishes more value had been placed on his safety. His life is filled with accomplishments and yet- all I can hear is just how freakin hard it has been to get around safely and he blames himself – not the inferior tools he’s been provided… He taught O&M too – learn more about that in Part II.
Don McBride
Recorded 8/28/99
At the age of three and four once a year, I would take each child once a year with me to the staff meeting or union meeting or this kind of meeting or that. Which is usually in Chicago or Springfield with the stipulation of a). They sat quietly during the meeting, they could sleep or read or draw anything they wanted to as long as they were quiet. And stipulation #2 when we got to hotel room or back on the train to come home they could just raise hell as much and loud as they wanted to. And stipulation #3 we’d usually stay a day or half a day extra I would take them to the Museum of Science and Industry or this place or that place. And then as they grew a little older sometime we went and my wife would drive and so forth, those things was just a trip out with dad. But we’d go to conventions together. Denver or Toronto or Cleveland or God knows where. And how I got on to this was of course little kids especially, three, four, five, six years old were almost of no help to a blind parent. But everybody thinks that that person is so they won’t help you. If you got a kid that’s able to walk and you want to know where gate 3 is at a bus station forget it.
Q. Right.
A. My very first experience with that was in the St. Louis bus station and we bought the tickets. The little guy had never been on a bus and that was part of the purpose of the trip. And I was trying to get help from, to get the ticket agent to get me a red cap or this or that.
Q. Right.
A. And I was sort of asking what gate he said gate 3 and this kid that was 3 said “father”, that’s what they called me when it was a serious thing, most the time its dad. But he says “father I don’t see a gate but I see a number 3 above the door.” I said let’s go to it. So somewhere early in our marriage and child rearing I sort of had a talk with myself more or less and I said well there’s some things I cannot do with these kids. I cannot play catch with them very efficiently; I can’t drive them any damn place.
Q. Right.
A. I need to capitalize on the things I can do. And we use to swim together both I played a major role in teaching them both to learn to swim. They were under school age; I don’t really remember what age but 3, 4, 5 and 6. We rode tandem, bikes together at a very early age. Each of them had their bikes and my wife bought me a Father’s day gift bike in the 19 either 66 or 67 that would have made the little girl 5 years old and the little boy 6. So we’ve done a lot of that sort of thing together.
Q. So who rode in front of everyone on the tandem?
A. Both of them at different times, but the girl did most of the time.
Q. Sure.
A. As children especially about puberty 10.11,12 years old she and I were really, really closer than he and I. Maybe it’s normal and maybe its not I don’t know I reflected on this a lot. But… At the age of 4 or 5 she could not reach the pedal on that tandem bike had to put her feet on the bar lean over and barely reach the handlebars. And I said to her now honey if you stay on the bike when we start to fall you stay on the bike and I’ll catch the bike and therefore I catch you.
Q. Right.
A. And I’ve never seen another kid under the age of 6 or 7 that could pull that off. But pulling it off really was a more of a confidence in me.
Q. Yeah.
A. And I mean we did this all over a sub, sub, subdivision I mean which we rode hundreds of miles.
Q. I have some questions I’d like to talk about you a little bit. Bring you back from young to older and so some housekeeping things. What’s your date of birth?
A. 1936.
Q. Where were you born.
A. Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Q. And you live now in…
A. I live now in Edwardsville, Illinois. We’ve been right here in this house since 1970. We’ve been in Illinois since 63.
Q. What do you do for a living? Or what did you do before you retired?
A. Let’s see… my main job for 35 years was a Rehabilitation Teacher, or sometimes they call Rehabilitation Instructor. In yesteryear way back when we were called home teachers.
Q. Right.
A. But our function was primarily to provide instruction to newly blind older adults and not necessarily older lets say newly blind adults and counseling relative to the adjustment of blindness. And when I came to work here in 63 the minimum requirement was a Bachelor’s Degree.
Q. I see.
A. I had that.
Q. Where did you get your Bachelor’s from?
A. University of Oklahoma. Norman, O.K.
Q. What was it in?
A. Education and Psychology
Q. So you answered an ad or how did you get that job?
A. I applied, I don’t remember for sure. I had a friend up here going to Southern Illinois University a blind friend that knew about the availability of the job. And he told somebody, the supervisor up here, I know just the guy that you want.
Q. Right.
A. And he told me about it. I don’t kid myself about it. I don’t think I was any great catch
Q. Laugh
A. but they wanted someone with a bachelor’s degree that could function as a blind person.
Q. Uh hm.
A. And function meant got around using the cane maybe a guide dog but back then they would have frowned on that.
Q. Ah.
A. Function meant using Braille and typing and able to do homemaking chores. Function meant I’m sure that it played a role in it being a spouse, uh a father as I say in a rather crude way a guy that was out there working, making love, and having a good time. I believe that’s what they were after and maybe I was the only applicant, I have no idea. But I caught a bus up here for the interview I never been to St. Louis in my life but I was either too stupid to know I couldn’t or shouldn’t be doing this alone or I just did not worry about it. After I got up here I got help where I could catch a local bus to get to the nearby town where the interview was going on. I didn’t know enough about the area to know that I was in a taboo part of the area a rough area.
Q. Goodness!
A. But anyway I wouldn’t have worried about it if I had. You know when you’re 26 or 27 why you could do anything. I worked as a piano tuner before that or during the time I was attending the University. That’s a trade I learned at the school for the blind. Piano tuning really was the ticket for the rest of my life.
Q. Why’s that?
A. Well… I’m the youngest of 7 and my father passed away when I was about just barely 8. We were, we were I’d say an average middle class family until he passed away. And then we plummeted into poverty. I’m the youngest of 7. All of them were quite a bit older than I the nearest to my age was 7 years older than I. So there’s some of them that were even grown…
Q. Right.
A. when I was born. But we spent a few years poor enough had no running water, no electricity, no car. So. we went from having to the have-nots and then back to some having. Well back in those days the residential schools were a lot different then, than they are now. Back then they pretty much took the blind people and not very much multi-handicapped kids.
Q. Right.
Back then they not only taught the three R’s but they were heavy in teaching trades and blindness skills of all kinds except the orientation mobility that didn’t really come into much play until around 1960.
Q. mmmm….did you start in first grade or kindergarten then?
A. Yeah I was blind in one eye at the age of 5.
Q. How did that happen?
A. It’s a combination of things. It was an inherited defect and I was hit in the eye with a baseball.
Q. Interesting.
A. And the eye that was hit with a baseball destroyed that eye right then. Just suddenly and that eye was taken out. Enucleated.
Q. Mmm hmm.
A. The inherited part out of 7 children, 3 of us became blind.
Q. oh my… what’s the name of it?
A. The problem I had?
Q. Yes.
A. It’s probably a couple of things but back then they didn’t know this disease business. This I.D defect thing never came to light until my children were 18 or 19 years old. Now just get a load of that. The disease was Lattice Degeneration L-a-t-t-i-c-e I think.
Q. Ok.
A. What that is, am I giving you more than you want?
Q. No this is great.
A. is a thinning of the retinal wall and a propensity towards glaucoma, which may have been caused by the other thing. Now back then, we’re backing up again, back then the only thing they knew 60 years ago or 55 years ago, they said it was Sympathetic ophthalmia which what happens to one eye that makes the other ------
Q. My phone doesn’t have call waiting. Just makes a noise if I breath wrong… so sympathetic ophthalmia.
A. They didn’t even refer to the other eye as developing glaucoma so there’s no proof of that except as an adult, I remember the immense pain in the other eye over a period of 4 to 5 years enough every day that I was sick to my stomach.
Q. Oh gosh.
A. So I assume probably I had acute glaucoma in the other eye.
Q. Yeah.
A. And they took that out, approximately when I was 11 years old but I’m not even sure what age. So I gradually lost it from age 6 to 10 or 11. So yes I started the school for the blind in kindergarten.
Q. So did you have decreased vision in the other eye. After.
A. I had some vision until I was 10 or 11 years old.
Q. But in that “Good eye”, was it visually impaired?
A. Yeah, most of that time, it gradually was getting worse. I remember in 1945,
Q. mm, hmmm.
A. I’d have been 9 at that time. A tornado destroyed the school for the blind in Oklahoma. I mean just really ripped up about 10 brick buildings. And I was assigned to lead some of the totals in and over the rubble and out of there.
Q. Ohhh.
A. So this is one memory that I have that tells me that I must have could see fairly good. (laugh).
Q. Right. So did you live there?
A. At the town where the school was? No.
Q. In the school for the blind?
A. Oh yeah, day and night.
Q. Yeah.
A. But see a lot of that philosophy has changed during my lifetime.
Q. Yeah.
A. But when I first went there back in about 42 or so they were so archaic that they didn’t want your parents or any of your relatives to see you for 3 or 4 weeks.
Q. Oh wow.
A. Once again I’ve given this thing quite a bit of contemplation, I think. I think that my, my mother, on some level was able to realize that she was very uneducated about the 3rd or 4th grade and I think she, she loved us enough to send us off to a school 60 miles away. That’s probably from her point of view. From a 6-year-old’s point of view it was, it was really an absolute total rejection.
Q. Yeah.
A. Blind in one eye, going blind in the other so I’m thrust away.
Q. Yeah.
A. The saving factor was though, is what I can say now. One of the older adult brothers who had attended the same school,
Q. uh huh.
A. but had good usable sight, though he was 30 some, he would come to visit me every third Sunday.
Q. Right. That was good.
A. And he was as regular (pause, choked up)
Q. Hello?
A. Yeah, he was as the sun coming up. So here you have a young man in his twenty’s that gave up an entire day, he worked the rest of the week,
Q. Uh huh.
A. and come to the school to see this little blind kid.
Q. hmm.
A. And he would take me out to eat and he would have the intent in giving me, in buying me a steak or chicken, a little kid wants a hamburger.
Q. (sincere laugh), yeah.
A. But I remember that with a lot of warmth.
Q. Yeah.
A. I learned to do math in my head at that early age by figuring up when he left the number of hours, minutes and seconds till he would be back.
Q. Oh wow.
A. Now after I went totally blind. Age about 11 or so everything started getting better.
Q. Oh.
A. Keep in mind during that period father died, pretty much poverty, went blind, drift away at school, that was a damned hard time of my life. An in my later years, 15, 20 years ago I sometimes ask people, (my grandson is crawling around here),
Q. hmm.
A. I sometimes ask people If you had to live five consecutive years again which five would it be and why or which five would be the worst five? I really just have the purpose of encouraging people to look at themselves and their lives well pretty obviously my worst five would be from about the age of 5 to 10.
Q. Uh hmm.
A. So, uh after that, (let me see what this 3 ½ year old genius wants, I’m a ham radio operator and he wants to play with the Morse code thing).
(talks about his grandson for a while) That’s boy, that’s great, that’s great. And I want to know what that’s saying..uh hey buddy want to tell me what that says? Most of the time he will say, I love paw, paw or ma maw. Ok I’m talking to a person on the phone, ok we’ll see you bye, bye. He’s getting ready to go home, he is 3 years and 7 months old. He really is a very bright child. He could say the alphabet when he was 30 months old. He likes my ham stuff, that’s Mores code – go ahead and ask me your next question…
Q. Well, you were telling me that they really didn’t teach mobility at the school for the blind but ---
A. Well not as we think of it now. There were no certification of O&M people. But yeah they taught it in as much as somebody showed you around the school. I remember a kid coming there a little child 6, 7 years old that was totally blind and I was in my teens. They assigned me to show him around and to be his protectorite for two or three weeks to show him the classes.
Q. Right.
A. That’s just the way it was in those days. Now I had the good fortune of being around not only blind kids but blind adults one brother became blind at the age of 2 from diphtheria, measles, childhood diseases.
Q. mm hmm.
A. Each, we three who became blind were blind sometime after birth and there were other extenuating circumstances, like with that one it was in the 1920s medical science and ophthalmological science almost did not exist. And the other became totally blind about 1953 or 4 but he was visually impaired all of his life. So my whole point this totally blind brother for what ever reason he did not finish high school. He went to the fifth grade. He also was a Grand Mal epileptic but my parents and my grandparents and people around him, you know, taught him as crudely as it was. The story I hear is that a grandfather would take him out into the middle of a pasture and whirl him around, turn him around, turn him around, and go off and leave him with the instructions find your way home.
Q. Oh gosh.
A. No, I’m just telling you the stories as I hear them.
Q. Wow.
A. This fellow was in some way just blessed with being able to interpret what he heard and, you know, what he felt and, you know, from early childhood on. And so by the time I came along he must have been, oh hell he must have been 14 years old or so. He walked all over the Tulsa area and hitch hiked any other place he chose to go. My first cane was a cattle prod.
Q. Wow.
A. A little short heavy hickory cattle prod. This was well before the advent of the long cane.
Q. Hmm, hmm.
A. But I learned good and bad, But what I learned good and bad was from him.
(he’s talking to his wife on the ham radio) explains more about his grandson. He and his grandmother are inseparable…
Q. So what age were you using that cattle prod?
A. Well, that’s what I had as a cane. You know that brother was taught in sort of a harsh cruel way, as we would think now, he also taught me in a similar way.
Q. Uh huh.
A. I remember right after becoming totally blind. I was laying on the couch at home probably during the summer time and I was pretending that I was outdoors playing. Instead of a normal kid would have been outdoors playing and pretending, but I was double pretending. I was pretending I was out there pretending. Get the picture?
Q. indeed.
A. This brother comes in from work, the one that can’t see at all and realized what I was doing. In making believe I was outside making believe I was driving a bus. Well, he jerked me off the couch, in our crude hillbilly way, and drug me out the door and ran me purposely into a tree limb and a telephone pole and cussed me out and said now this is what life is all about and I never want to see you on that couch again. When I come in from work I want you out here playing. And I was you know 10, 11 years old. He was 14 years older than I and I sort of believed that he would beat me to death if I ever was laying there again. So when he came home from work I was damn sure I was outside playing.
Q. (laugh).
A. And then I went with him. I remember there was a grocery store or we’ll say a half a mile and I’ve been with him down this rode to this store many times. He’d buy me a soda, we called it a bottle pop.
Q. Uh hmm.
A. And one fine day he said, "you know I’m busy I’ve got to run some traps". Believe it or not a totally blind guy set traps and ran them. He also built them.
Q. whoo.
A. He said, "I want you to go to the store and get us a candy bar and a soda". Now I have no idea if he had someone watching me or just exactly what but. Anyway those are the kinds of ways that I learned to get around.
Q. How did that make you feel when he entrusted you with that responsibility?
A. At that time, I probably just though well I just thought it was a real honest to God truth, he was busy, and he’d like to have a soda and I probably felt like a big boy.
Q. uh huh. And did you do it? Did you make it?
A. Oh yeah, I mean I strutted.
Q. Yeah.
A. Now when I was about 14, we lived in a different place, more closely in town and there was another older blind guy that operated a snack bar in a police station. And in the summer time I was bored as hell I didn’t have any friends to play with you know that kind of stuff.
Q. all your friends were back at the school.
A. Yeah, that falls under the category of pros and cons.
Q. Hm hmm.
A. This old guy, not saying he was old, he was only about maybe 50 but in my mind he was old.
Q. (Laugh)
A. And I had been to his place many times with the older brother and that’s partly where I learned to make change and feel the difference of different kinds soda bottles and candy. The policemen would come up there really to watch the little blind boy make change or find things whether they wanted it or not.
Q. Right.
A. But I didn’t know it then. Well I really wanted to go down there and my mother kept saying "no, no". You know I’m her little baby that’s blind.
Q. Right.
A. So this old man, Bill was his name. He called my mother up and he said, "Now Ilene you’ve got to loosen the apron strings a little.
Q. Hmm.
A. Now let that boy catch a bus by himself, he caught buses a lot of time with somebody else but let him catch a bus by himself and they’ll let him off where he says, and I’ll have a couple of the boys" meaning the policemen "to meet the bus. And he’ll never know it." And I didn’t know it.
Q. Right.
A. So I go up there and catch a bus, man I think I’m ten feet tall, paid my fare and tell I want off at 4th and Elegent that’s where the police station used to be in Tulsa, I don’t know if it’s there now or not, but they let me off there. There was a traffic light there and little did I know that I was being flanked with a cop on each side as I crossed that street.
Q. Low laugh.
A. I didn’t know it for years, until years later.
Q. hmm.
A. So part of the moral of this story of all these things you can see that I had the right help from the right people at the right time. At the school for the blind I had a sighted teacher in about the 4th and 5th grade that were just wonderful the most caring loving person you could imagine.
Q. mmm.
A. I had a blind teacher that taught geography and piano tuning and worked at being as harsh as they call. But which is kind of what I responded to that’s kinda how I was raised.
Q. mmm.
A. In the geography class he said probably no one will pass this course but the very most anyone will do is a C. Well for whatever reason my psychological makeup was then, you challenge me and I show you, you son of a bitch
Q. Right.
A. and I had the highest grade in the class 113 out of 115 points.
Q. Alright.
A. But it was the challenge of it all and I probably still can name most of the state capitals in most of the states if not all and so forth. So a wonderful, wonderful guy, just a wonderful guy. He was originally from Batavia, New York. He taught at the school for the blind up there. He’d been deceased oh 8 or 10 years now. His name was Cimino, C-i-m-i-n-o little short Italian with a deep, very deep voice and I mean he sounded mean as hell.
Q. light laugh.
A. In piano tuning slap me on the back and he'd say, "McBride remember you’re nothing but a damn blind man".
Q. oh gosh.
A. First of all this was before you said damn
Q. Right.
A. in public and second of all you certainly didn’t in school. At 14 or 13 however old I was a kid loves to hear that he’s a man.
Q. Yeah.
A. And you’re a damn blind man on top of that.
Q. Laugh.
A. Then he would in his growley voice he’d say, "you know what that means McBride?", of course you said no sir back in those days, no sir and no ma'am and even if you knew what he was saying because he would do this every few months so you finally knew
Q. Right.
A. that means if you’re going to be average you have to be above average and to pass my class you have to be way above it.
Q. mmm.
A. So that’s the persona maybe the word is that he had.
(interruption – oh hell would you hold, that darn doorbell. My apologies – papergirl I have a fondness for those kids. I’m aware somewhere in my phycice bein nice to him.
Q. It’s a rough business.
A. Yeah.
Q. I did it once myself.
A. Yeah, I’ve only had one or two that were good. One time I had a kid who was deaf, wearing a hearing aid. I had no idea)
Q. Wow.
Q. Well you were telling me how I guess pretty much you were forced to do. I mean people the local guys would say to your mom let him take that bus by himself who you bring that cattle prod with you everywhere?
A. Oh yeah, I'm that was my cane.
Q. And it was used primarily for what purpose what would you do with it? Have it on the ground or just have it up in front of you to zap people.
A. It might have come up an inch or two below the waist so it was way shorter than it should have been. You’d feel with it the best you could.
Q. so you’d have down on the ground pretty much.
A. Yes, and of course if anything dared to attack a poor little blind kid you’d use a stick on em that cattle prod.
Q. Right.
A. Its just what I had the long cane was not available then,
Q. uh hmm..
A. I could have just as easily used a tree limb. It was white and or red and white.
Q. oh. It wasn’t electric it was just a piece of hickory that
A. It was just a hickory cane, a wooden thick heavy cane probably weighed 4 or 5 times what the cane does now.
Q. So you, how did you get across that street? You didn’t even know you had policemen on either side of you.
A. No well I’d been out with this blind brother
Q. Uh huh.
A. and he taught me to listen to the traffic the flow of traffic
Q. uh huh.
A. and when the traffic was going the same way we are or the opposite way going back towards our backside it was relatively safe to go.
Q. And then how did you locate the store? Was there a landmark or something that told you where you were?
A. All I can tell you is that this brother, this older blind brother had uncanny, unreal use of his ears. And those years before I was 14, he did most of it or he supervised it. He was one of these weirdoes that could walk down the middle of the sidewalk without trailing anything and turn in the 5th door if that’s where he chose to go.
Q. mmmh.
A. And now your O&M people know this is done by interpreting a sense of hearing,
Q. sure.
A. and/or touch and the hearing might include or the touch might include change of air pressure.
Q. Right.
A. But he was extremely good at hearing echoes off of buildings. I’ve know only 2 or 3 people of all the blind people I’ve known that had somewhere close to that kind of skill. Uh… He could be in a car and tell you every time you crossed the street by sound and by feel.
Q. mmm.
A. And he taught me to do it, but I never was as good as he. I could do some of the hearing of echoes off of stuff like when we were out riding a tandem bike, I could tell them when we passed parked cars or telephone poles, but I couldn’t do it as well as he. And by the way I have two prosthetic eyes. And by the further away I’m not as talented or skilled as I once was. Because I’ve gotten older
Q. uh hmm.
A. and my hearing is not as good and I’m aware of it. Just this morning, I went out the front door, going out to get in the car with a friend and somebody was running down the road you know for exercise
Q. uh hm..
A. and the echo of that running was bouncing off of my house.
Q. Right!
A. I thought what the hell is that? On the one hand I’m amazed I can still do that as well on the other hand twenty years ago well I’d had known what it was.
Q. Yea. Have you ever been completely lost and then found your way again?
A. Yep I have, but not too often, but yes I have.
Q. How did you do that?
A. No too often. Snow in my opinion, for a blind person, a totally blind person especially is hell.
Q. Yeah.
A. Anything over a couple of inches is terrible. It alters sound and it certainly covered up landmarks and things that, that you are not even aware that you use. I’ve been lost in snow. I can think of twice. But once since I’ve been grown right in my own back yard.
Q. mmm.
A. There was only maybe 3 inches of snow on the ground on a Sunday morning and we had a pet dog. I’d taken him out to do his business
Q. uh hm..
A. and he hoped and thought, if dogs can think,
Q. laugh.
A. …that I was taking him for a walk. And he got me off down the ally and of course he’s just a cur dog he didn’t know what go home meant he thought I was just going to go to a nearby cemetery and turn him loose so he could romp and play.
Q. uh hmm.
A. Well I didn’t. I wanted to go home, and because I hadn’t planned on being outside very long and it was Sunday morning I wasn’t really dressed to stay out there very long. I had some clothes on but I didn’t have a coat on.
Q. Right.
A. And it was probably about 20 degrees
Q. laugh.
A. wasn’t real cold but it was fairly cold.
Q. Cold enough.
A. So I wondering around out there and I realized I was lost. And I don’t use the cane in my yard or house and I had not taken the cane out there and after about 20 minutes of wondering around I thought you know I could freeze to death out here. (laugh)
Q. mmm.
A. And I thought now just stay calm see if you could hear the traffic on such and such street, well on Sunday morning at 6:30 there was no traffic
Q. mmm.
A. on that damn street. And I kept saying now just stay calm. And I just kept kind a wondering around and finally I decided well I’ll find the house I can make enough noise I’ll hear a house, and any house it doesn’t matter yours or whose. And I’ll bang on the first window I find.
Q. Yes,
A. I might get shot but I’ll do it.
Q. Yes!
A. In the meantime…
(end side one tape one)
Q: O.K. so you heard a car
A. I heard a car start. And I said if I can just find out whose car that is I’ll know where I am.
Q. right.
A. So I went running towards this sound waving my one arm and I had this dog now on a leash and I was yelling help, help, help (laugh). The young man comes crawling out of the car. Now here’s a neighbor, to get a load of how this must have come across to him. Here is a neighbor that has seen my leave the house with a coat and tie many, many, many times
Q. Right.
A. and has seen me walk to town and back and has no real knowledge about blindness and he crawled out and said, "Mr. McBride what’s the problem?". I’m sure the guy thought I’d been on an all night drunk. And I said not a damn thing I’m just lost and if you’ll tell me who you are I’ll know where I am. He told me who he was well I knew exactly where I was and I walked home. Well I thought about it so that afternoon I guess this guy might have been going to the earlier Sunday morning mass, I don't know where the hell he was going. But I called him. I thought, you know I ought to explain a little bit of this to this guy he might have the authority down here to have me locked up, so I called him and told him about how snow affects blind people.
Q. Wow.
A. In my later less efficient years, we’re talking about the last year or so, I walked to town and back, which is a little over a mile, thousands of times. We lived here for twenty-nine years and the very first evening here I rode in our car downtown. And they listed the names of the streets as we crossed them and I got out and I got out with probably my daughter. But I really do not remember and her instructions were to follow me home, not to take me home, but to follow me home.
Q. Uh hm..
A. So starting with that in 1970 there’s no real way I know I average three and four round trips you know a week for the first twenty-five years. It’s been less than that since then,
Q. uh hmm.
A. but I’ve done it three times in the last couple of weeks. But anyway there’s one place in the walk where you had one street curving into another street at a downhill slant. And going, and I down know how to explain this exactly, but instead of being a straight four-cornered street. It is… there’s one street angled off. If you followed the curb it would curve around down hill and if you went straight you’d stay on that same street.
Q. right.
A. Well in recent years, because of curb cuts they made a wheelchair ramp there. So now you have a wheelchair ramp and a curve and at a sloping downhill slant
Q. mmm.
A. and I’m supposed to cross that street.
Q. Right.
Now if there’s a car passing me on the side street I can do it perfectly
Q. Right. because I have an auditory string. I could reach up there with my ear and just tag along that string if that car passes and goes on. I can just be as sighted by God, as you are right?
Q. Right.
A. If there’s no cars and that’s not too heavily traveled; if there's no cars maybe and maybe not. And I’m sort of a proud son of a bitch.
Q. laugh.
A. I thought I was about in the 95th percentile in getting around. I hadn’t been lost but once or twice in my whole life.
Q. Uh hm.
A. But one Saturday morning during the summer, I didn’t make that crossing right and I ended up in a parking lot and not even the parking lot that I thought I was in.
Q. Oh gosh.
A. And I wandered around in a parking lot for about a half-hour now.
Q. mmm.
A. The good thing was it was warm and I wasn’t going to die or anything.
Q. Right.
A. But finally I decided well if this is a parking lot, sometime there’s going to be a car pulling in here. And that’s what happened. It was kind of like the last time and I went walking towards it and I was yelling help. Of course, now I’m using a long cane and all of that right. I yell help this old man gets out and says "well, what’s the problem?" And I said well I want to know where I’m at. He says "where do you want to go? I’ll take you any place you want to go", just a wonderful guy. I said I don’t want you to take me I just want to know where I’m at.
Q. Right.
A. (laugh) He told me where I was I said well if you’ll walk me back across the street by St. John’s Church and help me across that curving place I’ll be fine. But this really frustrated me man it just gnawed at my gut. Well, I called my O&M mastered degreed daughter, and I said Kid I need help. So she came home the next weekend and she looked this situation over. She said, "instead of putting your heels to the curb or to the slope just before the wheelchair slope put the side of your foot to that curb and walk as straight as you can". I thought, oh come on you’re kidding me. She said, nope that’s the way to do it. And sure enough I did it that way and sure it worked. I couldn’t believe my daughter knew more than I, but she did.
Q. (laugh) So what was your foot on now, it was on where the, it was sort of the two different heights where the ramp and the…
A. The ramp is slanting downward and the street is going in a slope down the hill and curving.
Q. So what are you feeling under your foot? What are you putting your foot on?
A. Just on the street and the side of my foot is against the curb. In order for me to cross that, street to the other sidewalk on the other side
Q. mm hmm.
A. …that was the way to do it. A very unorthodox thing. I still much prefer a passing car.
Q. So you want the car to come perpendicular to you or parallel?
A. Parallel.
Q. Parallel cause then you could follow it across.
A. I can follow it across. That’s exactly right.
Q. That's the best.
A. Yeah. So the question was have I ever been lost. Not often and I would fantasize that this last time I was lost would not have occurred 15 or 20 years ago but maybe it would have who knows.
Q. Yeah.
A. While we’re talking about my daughter if I might. If you were to ask me what experience have you had that might be the most valuable experience
Q. uh hm.
A. it did not come in a classroom. It did not come in a master degree psychology courses etc. etc. It came from a, about 10-year-old daughter.
Q. Oh.
A. The story is that she was a very active playing child always outdoors with other kids and playing or other kids here and I was doing something in the basement, and she said “Father" when it's serious it's father, if it's not it's dad. "Father, I hope it doesn’t make you mad but I’m glad that you’re blind”. And one part of my brain got to the straighten this out and the other part of my brain said ah “you don’t want to raise hell with your kid”. And before I did anything, you know I’m thinking about, should I knock her across the room, should I lecture her? You know what, before I decided what next to do she was up the steps and out the door to play. So several days passed and the same words from the same child “Father I hope it doesn’t make you mad but I’m glad that you’re blind” and the two parts of the brain did the same little thing. Oh what in the world, I’ve got to straighten this kid out.
Q. uh hmm.
A. You know we parents have an obligation to raise our children in sociably acceptable ways.
Q. Right.
A. And it’s not exactly socially acceptable way to be glad that somebody is blind. So a third time came, a week later I had ridden to town on a local bus got off and was going to walk home. It was a fairly nice day a little after 5 and this child who never did it before and never did it since rode a Tandem bike to town to meet her father. And I was about a block or two toward home and she rode up and said "do you want a ride? " And I said well yeah but what in the world are you doing here. And she said well I was kind of bored and couldn’t fine anyone to play with and I just thought you might want a ride. And she knew about when. So I pulled my cane up and fastened it to my belt and picked up my briefcase get on the back of the bike. Half way home there’s an A &W Rootbeer stand there now you may have never heard of it.
Q. Oh sure, very familiar with them.
A. A&W rootbeer stand about halfway home. And I got it kind of figured out in my parent brain what was behind this. And I said I’ll betch you, you want a soda or an ice cream and she said "Oh you guessed that right".
Q. (laugh).
A. And I said, OK well when we get there well, we’ll stop. And at that time this place was not a go in place. It was just a window.
Q. Right.
A. Now it’s still there but it’s a go inside now.
Q. mm hmm.
A. But she goes in and gets an ice cream cone now I don’t remember if I didn’t have enough change to get me one, I ordinarily would have, but that day I didn’t. So I’m sitting on the back of the bike with my briefcase on the ground she comes out sits up on front of the bike, you got to keep in mind she’s only about 10, maybe 9 and she leans her head and back against my chest and throat. Get the picture?
Q. Uh hmm.
A. The sun is on my right cheek in the west and the cool air in the spring of the year in May, and with this child, I get into a Maslow--that's a pretty well-known psychologist.
Q. Sure.
A. I get in one of his peak states that he talks about and just in my mind, just in my head, I’m thinking what a wonderful life, what a wonderful world. And thanking God for this wonderful child and a wonderful job and a part time job and all the goodness’s of life. And I’m smelling her sweaty head and her hair against my face but no words are being passed. She’s eating an ice cream cone, facing the same way I am and she doesn’t see any expression
Q. Right.
A. and I’m in a sought of a prayerful. And by the way I’m not a church goer, I’m sort of in a meditative state with my creator and the goodness’ of life, and this brat for the third time says, “Father, I hope it doesn’t make you mad but I’m glad you’re blind".
Q. Uh huh.
A. And I thought it’s time to solve this and sort of in the parent voice I said, “oh yeah why is that? And she said well if you could see we wouldn’t have this bike” and the parent part of me says oh hell a lot of people have a tandem bike and she said "oh you don’t understand me", which really infuriates any parent.
Q. Uh huh.
A. Then I’d say well, why don’t you explain it. Of course that’s what she tried to do.
Q. right.
A. Says well I play with kids all the time and other dads take them in a car to get ice cream or hither and yon, but they don’t do things with their kids, they do things for them. Now this is a child! They do things for them not with them. She says when we go fishing sure you bait my hook, and by the way I still do, but you’re not doing that for me you like to do it, you’re doing it with us.
Q. Right.
A. So I realized that this child is telling me something supremely wonderful. I don’t really grasp it yet but I decided not to knock her off the bike.
Q. Laugh.
A. So I kissed her on the top of the head, and I said, “Well Honey I love you too”. For seven days, that was a Friday night I might add, for seven days as I did my work teaching and counseling blind people father I hope it doesn’t make you mad but I’m glad you’re blind and the reason she gave. Just kept rolling around in my brain. And what I came up with I don’t want to make you mad. What that means is you know you're a pretty rough dad and I might get punished so I really don’t want to make you mad but on the other you taught us to express how we feel so I’m going to take a chance. And I am glad that you’re blind and the reason I’m glad, you’re not like the guy across the street.
Q. Right.
A. If you could see you might be like him. By the way, the guy across the street is a wonderful guy.
Q. I’m sure he is (laugh).
A. Now he’s a retired professor of economics and had five kids. Four I think at home back then. So you might be like him and I’m glad that you’re blind. What all that means is I love you like you are including being blind. Now here I am in my mid-thirties, when all this was said. Reasonably functional, fairly good with my hands, fairly good with books, all this kind of stuff, and it occurs to me that one human being totally accepted me as I am. Even to the point of being glad that I’m like I am including being blind. So I said to myself never ever again will I be despondent even for a moment over being blind. I might be despondent over marital troubles, over being old, over a lot of things but blindness is not amongst them.
Q. Hmmm.
A. That was the most meaningful experience single lesson of my life. That helped me more than anything else. And after that when I would give training sessions to nurses or groups like that, often times I would tell that story and I’d say you know you don’t really have to be glad that your patient is old and this and that, but you can certainly accept them including their multiple disability.
Q. Absolutely.
A. OK it's time for you to ask a question.
Q. What kind of cane do you use now?
A. Now? Oh lord, I got 3 at least three canes by the front door.
Q. mh hmm.
A. One is a folding a Porfold I think I’ll have to go look, but I think.
Q. What kind of tip is on that? Is that a roller tip?
A. No it not a roller tip you know I don’t even know. I think it just slides over the end. But just recently Sharon has got me as a father’s day gift, a graphite cane. A graphite cane comes out of California. It’s a folding cane and supposed to be stronger than the typical folding cane and lighter. Apparently is a little bit flexible so if you bend it a small amount it pops back into shape. I haven’t used it enough yet to know.
Q. mm.
A. I don’t know how long she had it before I got it but it’s a fifty-six inch one. I’m a fairly tall person.
Q. Uh hm.
A. And then I have a ridged cane that I guess is made out of aluminum wrapped with tape.
Q. Uh hm.
A. Usually that’s what I use when I walk to town and back because it’s strong. But now that I have this strong lightweight folding cane she told me to go ahead and use it to see how it works. She says that some of her co-workers really swear by it.
Q. Do you use the 2-point touch then when you go or do you use constant contact?
A. It’s really pretty much of a mixture of methods. My guess is most O&M people would not approve.
Q. Laugh.
A. Sometimes I use what you’re talking about back and forth,
Q. Uh huh.
A. …sometimes I trail. You know a couple of unusual things here, I sort of expected the daughter that got a master degree in the work and did the blindfold bit in Chicago and all of that, I sort of expected her to come home and you know tell her dad, look you don’t know what you’re doing you do it like this,
Q. hmm.
A. …she never did that. Never ever did that. Except one time she was driving down the street and I was walking the other way and I don’t remember why but I was dragging my cane along behind me. And maybe I was counting change, I don’t know.
Q. uh huh.
A. But when I got home, she said "you know" she says "I saw the most unusual technique I have ever saw". I said what’s that. She says "I saw this little blind guy going down the street dragging his cane along behind him". (laugh). I said, well maybe he wanted to know where he had been.
Q. Laugh.
A. But she’s just a wonderful, knowledgeable, insightful person. So perhaps I’m patting myself on the back a bit much but I think as far as work for the blind I would rank above the 95th percentile in overall knowledge and skills but this child is ahead of me, not only because of her experience but her educational specific educational training in that area which did not exist when I was going to school.
Q. Right.
A. Your rehab teaching schools, your O&M schools as far as I know really did not get underway until sometime in the early 60’s. Now they might have but not as far as I’m aware.
Q. So you have three canes…
A. I probably have a lot more than that, but I have three around here that I use often.
Q. And you used the rigid cane predominately but you may switch over.
A. I’d use the rigid cane for if I just going on long walks. Probably right now if I get a ride to town, I’ll use my new cane that she gave that will fold up while I’m in the car and while I’m doing whatever I’m doing downtown and then I’ll use it on the way back. Before fairly recently though I probably would have taken the rigid cane. It depends a lot on where I’m going and how I’m going.
Q. So for example what kind of decisions are you making about what--?
A. If I’m riding in a car or bus a lot, if I’m going to be in meetings a lot or if I’m going to be out and about a lot.
Q. Right. So if you’re going to be sitting down at a meeting a lot or inside ..
A I’m going to be using a folding cane.
Q. You want to be able to put it away easily. But if you’re going to be out doing a lot of walking…
A. Especially if I’m going to be doing a lot of walking alone then I might use the rigid cane. But in this case I probably would use this more recent cane. As I may have said it’s a graphite and something else…
Q. Neat.
A. I think and it’s about twice as expensive. You know most of these folding canes are around 15 to 20 bucks and this is around 28 or 30.
Q. So do you know what kind of tip is on that one? Is it a thin one a thick one a roller
A. It’s not a roller.
Q. Uh hm.
A. It could be the marshmallow tip. Is that the same thing as a roller?
Q. Well the marshmallow they come either rolling or not rolling but the shape is thick like a marshmallow.
A. Yeah it might be that but you see a person that came from a cattle prod could probably use anything.
Q. (laugh) good point! How many different types of mobility tools have you tried?
A. I have had my hands on at meetings the thing that vibrates, for deafblind persons especially
Q. Right. Like a Mowat Sensor or?
A. Yeah I didn’t even know the name of it.
Q. Uh huh.
A. Or the thing that, Cazony I think was involved with. And Kramer maybe but where you have sort of a splashlight thing you move around and it makes a noise.
Q. Yeah.
A. The pitch would change according to how close you get to it.
Q. Uh hm.
A. But I’ve never had one and used it a lot. I had my hands on it at a show and tell thing at a meeting.
Q. But didn’t really say Hey I want one of these.
A. No and besides that they were reasonably expensive
Q. Yeah.
A. and I was raising kids and sending kids to college.
Q. Right.
A. Want me to tell you a little line about that? When the daughter got a bachelor’s degree was when this really, really hit me. Now she had a grant and she I don’t remember what kind of a grant, it may be a Pell grant. But she had loans and she worked part time. And her parents sent her about $500 a month on top of that. All of this went towards housing and tuitions and this and that.
Q. Uh huh.
A. And for the most part that money came from my part time job from the piano tuning. We lived on what I earned from my employment with the State.
Q. Uh hm.
A. I even use to tell my tuning customers thank you, you just make a contribution to my child’s education.
Q. laugh.
A. Now along about graduation time I thought about my ancient history and how many blind people I knew as a child that had went to college of any kind and it was damn few maybe a couple. And then I was beginning to wonder how many blind people sent their kids to, to University then and now and I realized what a wonderful country, what a wonderful time to have been born and to have lived. I speculate where in the world in Russia, or Great Britain, or Sweden, or Germany, or China would a totally blind person have the opportunity to be somewhat educated and to learn a trade and to be allowed to work at both of these things. To be married, to raise a family, to have recreational activities and all of those things, and to be able to send a child to a University and help another child going to school too.
Q. You’re right.
A. Where else would that take place? So at the Graduation they were playing America the Beautiful and the scenario I just ran by you rolled through my brain. And not only was I proud for what she was and was becoming and what she had done but America the Beautiful had a greater and deeper meaning than what I’d ever though about.
Q. Yeah.
A. How fortunate I, and many of us are, to be here now. So when people get to bitching too much about this awful country or burning the flag, I get pretty pissed off.
Q. Sure.
A. You know this country has given me the opportunity to be almost on the same level you are to make love, to work, to recreate to. I had not drawn a pension of any kind until I began to get my teacher’s retirement about a year ago in over 35 years. And I feel a sense of pride about that.
Q. Yeah. Absolutely that's wonderful.
A. I’m sure that you’re getting a different ear…earful than you’ve ever got.
Q. Well I tell you It’s just been for me and I do have more questions and I’m not letting you off the hook yet but I will say that this has just been a real education for me and I’m learning so much talking to people who have been successful. Are working have worked and that’s been, that’s really been the focus of this is to talk to people like you and find out how did they do it and how are they doing it and I’m taking this information and passing it along to my students who are going out there to be mobility instructors. And uhh. So it’s just invaluable I don’t know how else to put that it’s just wonderful, wonderful stuff.
A. So I think the tendency might be for society to think oh how wonderful, don’t see how you do this, you’re such a wonderful person and you’re so magically gifted and, and you must have had a lot of energy and motivation and really my real feeling I don’t usually express it, you know I usually would just say thank you but my real feeling is bullshit; you the taxpayers, you the culture has made it possible.
Q. Yes.
A. Now not to take anything away from my own sweat. But sweat or not, energy or motivation or not, that would not have happened had the opportunity not been available.
Q. Yeah.
A. And I think we blind people sometimes are told so much how wonderful we are and how skilled we are that we get to believing it.
Q. Yeah.
A. And we think we did it all on our own. Well that’s a bunch of bullshit. We just didn’t.
Q. That is an actual phenomenon
A. Yeah, yes it is.
Q. …in children in residential schools or otherwise especially in sort of integrated schools where they get this false sense of ability because people are constantly saying you are above average but in reality the work maybe sub par and its just a skill a false sense of accomplishment.
A. As a teacher and counselor for 35 years at one point it probably irritated me a little bit to hear some blind person say, "well I learn all by myself I did it all by myself" and I’d spent hundreds of hours going in there teaching them Braille.
Q. Laugh.
A. So finally I realized you know when a person says that they really means I’ve been really successful.
Q. Yeah.
A. I made them think they did it and they really did do it themselves. The best teacher can’t learn it for you.
Q. Right. Absolutely agree with you. When you have student that leaves you believing that they’re the reason, I do I get a real charge out of that too. I’m like yeah that’s right.
A. "I never had any O&M help in my life.
Q. Laugh.
A. Those damn people do know what they’re talking about."
Q. "I taught you how to do it." (laugh).
A. See even in my case all I’m saying is I had no professional O&M help.
Q. Uh huh.
A. I had a lot of O&M help. Crude, but it was still there.
Q. Right. But you attribute your ability to travel at your current level of independence to your brother, to your experiences as a child?
A. Most of it. Now after I went to work here, a partially sighted supervisor, I use to walk way too fast…
Q. mm hmm.
A. maybe that’s a characteristic of young blind males,
Q. hmm.
A. I don’t know but I use to walk, way too fast, you know maybe I was trying to prove something. I think maybe that’s the case. I remember hitting a telephone poles or stuff so hard it knocked me flat on my back. Well I was in my mid twenties and this supervisor says, "McBride" he says "you ought to slow down a little you oughta walk like you got a million bucks and a million hours to spend it". He says "be a little more graceful if you run into something it won’t hurt you so bad. And if you run into somebody it won’t hurt them so bad."
Q. Were you walking fast with a cane or with a cattle prod?
A. Yeah with a goddamn cane.
Q. Laugh.
A. You know after all if you sighted people are supposed to walk a mile in 15 minutes well I can do it faster than that.
Q. Yeah.
A. But that made sense to me walk like you have a million bucks and a million hours to spend it and be more graceful, you won’t get hurt so bad, and you won’t hurt anybody else so bad. That might be as near to professional help as I’ve ever gotten except from my daughter teaching me how to cross that one place that I told you about.
Q. How do you feel about traveling alone to unfamiliar places.
A. Well depends upon how far you carry the word, unfamiliar. If either you or somebody can describe to me where I’m going to be and give me some useful landmarks in my head. It doesn’t have to be an O&M person it could be a guy on the street. You know, I can stop someone and say Where is Banzoes tavern.
Q. uh hm.
A. And if he'd say well you go right straight the way you're going and cross the next street, turn right about half a block up there there’s a big wide driveway into a parking lot and it’s the next door on the left. I don’t have any problem with that at all, not at all.
Q. Uh hm.
A. But I don’t know of anyway I could very independently, anyplace without some direction, some instructions about how to find it.
Q. Uh hm.
A. And the same is true of you,
Q. Absolutely.
A. …except you might could read the names the names of businesses. And if I’m going to a certain place I know I’m close I’ll find the door, open the door and ask them I’m looking for Ekar’s barbershop, "oh that’s the next door down, oh you just missed it a door." So
Q. Neat.
A. I don’t know if that’s answering your question.
Q. Absolutely it is.
A. but you learn to use other information from other people that you need.
Q. So what is a useful landmark to you?
A. Goodness. Even things that I’m not even aware of but certainly curbs and allies, post and trees and mailboxes and auditory cues. You know maybe motors of air conditioners or cars or I suspect there’s landmarks that I use subconsciously.
Q. yup.
A. I’m not even aware of. You know until there not there and then I’ll think woop what’s happening here. (laugh). So, there’s just all sorts of landmarks that a person would use the slope of the sidewalk.
Q. Uh hm.
A. You know almost a hundred percent of the time where there’s a driveway into a parking lot or into a home there’s going to be a change in texture.
Q. Right.
A. There’s going to be a feeling of a slope. One of the big ways I cross a wide driveway is I walk along the slope. You know my right foots going to be a little lower then my left foot.
Q, Uh hmm.
A. or vise a verse or whichever way it is.
Q. Sure.
A. The smells, smells of things all the way from restaurants at the Chinese place, or man that hamburger sure smells good.
Q. laugh.
A. Clothing stores will put out a different smell. Shoe shops a different smell, gasoline services and those places can also, you know, be troublesome because you got wide areas that are close to the same height to the street. But usually you got a little bit of a slope so, so instead of making that a problem you use it as a solution, that slope.
Q. Right. That's good. So how do you prepare for a trip to go to an unfamiliar like a conference.
A. How do I prepare for a trip? Me personally? Well my wife packs my suitcase.
Q. Uh hm.
A. Okay?
Q. Okay.
A. I’m not telling you that’s acceptable, that’s the way its been for me. She packs my suitcase.
Q. In terms of traveling to that place?
A. O.K that’s what you’re talking about? Either my wife or somebody I pay or I catch a bus to a train station or a plane to an airport or a bus station and I’ve done all of those things.
Q. uh hm.
A. I boarded a train fairly independently. By that I mean I bought the ticket, and I waited. Just me, my wife may have left me out there or I may have gotten there on a bus. At an airport I find I need more help
Q. Uh huh.
A. I need sighted guide stuff a lot there.
Q. Yeah.
A. Maybe if I did it a lot in that place, I might can learn to be more independent. I use to go into Chicago a lot which is as you could guess a fairly big you know busy place.
Q. Yeah.
A. So I’d get off the train and I would just say to them which way is the terminal, right or left and they’d say left. I never knew for sure if they were backing in or leaning forward.
Q. Right.
A. And I would head up that way amongst all the noise of the train engines and all of that. When I start to go into the terminal it’d be a slope upward and maybe by that time a porter, redcap would come along pushing the cart helping someone else, wants to know if they can help me and I’d say, “Yeah just let me grab a hold here. I want to catch a cab”.
Q. Yeah.
A. That might have been it or some fellow passenger might have offered me help.
Q. Do you ever seek out help from somebody, like you hear them and you say Hey give me assistance?
A. Yeah, I always. If I need it, I’ll ask for it. Now if you’re asking me if I ever called ahead ?
Q. Sure.
A. …or somebody I never did do it but I would. OK? And then I’ll always was prepared to tip the porter. And some of the time, "Oh no I don’t your money you’re a poor blind man".
Q. Oh gosh.
A. They didn’t say that that’s kind of what you thought.
Q. You got the message.
A. And I would say I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t have it. So I’ve used it all in different ways and I’ve known blind people in Chicago that use that same train station, Union train station everyday and could do it without any help.
Q. Oh wow.
A. Any help at all. Now I only did it occasionally and I didn’t have that kind of knowledge of the place.
Q. What are some tricks of the trade for getting reoriented when you’re lost?
A. Of getting reoriented when you’re lost? Well you might have to tell yourself to be calm. (laugh)
Q. uh hm. That’s a good one.
A. You know you haven’t frozen to death yet
Q. Right.
A. and you stay as calm as you can and you listen for traffic flow. You analyze as much as you can what you felt or heard in the process of being lost like, like I’ve described. You ask for help.
Q. yeah.
A. That’s about as much as I can tell you I pretty well described what I’ve done in the past. You know you listen and use what you can. If there's traffic patterns that will help you. Or the starting of a car you go toward that car and ask for help.
At the age of three and four once a year, I would take each child once a year with me to the staff meeting or union meeting or this kind of meeting or that. Which is usually in Chicago or Springfield with the stipulation of a). They sat quietly during the meeting, they could sleep or read or draw anything they wanted to as long as they were quiet. And stipulation #2 when we got to hotel room or back on the train to come home they could just raise hell as much and loud as they wanted to. And stipulation #3 we’d usually stay a day or half a day extra I would take them to the Museum of Science and Industry or this place or that place. And then as they grew a little older sometime we went and my wife would drive and so forth, those things was just a trip out with dad. But we’d go to conventions together. Denver or Toronto or Cleveland or God knows where. And how I got on to this was of course little kids especially, three, four, five, six years old were almost of no help to a blind parent. But everybody thinks that that person is so they won’t help you. If you got a kid that’s able to walk and you want to know where gate 3 is at a bus station forget it.
Q. Right.
A. My very first experience with that was in the St. Louis bus station and we bought the tickets. The little guy had never been on a bus and that was part of the purpose of the trip. And I was trying to get help from, to get the ticket agent to get me a red cap or this or that.
Q. Right.
A. And I was sort of asking what gate he said gate 3 and this kid that was 3 said “father”, that’s what they called me when it was a serious thing, most the time its dad. But he says “father I don’t see a gate but I see a number 3 above the door.” I said let’s go to it. So somewhere early in our marriage and child rearing I sort of had a talk with myself more or less and I said well there’s some things I cannot do with these kids. I cannot play catch with them very efficiently; I can’t drive them any damn place.
Q. Right.
A. I need to capitalize on the things I can do. And we use to swim together both I played a major role in teaching them both to learn to swim. They were under school age; I don’t really remember what age but 3, 4, 5 and 6. We rode tandem, bikes together at a very early age. Each of them had their bikes and my wife bought me a Father’s day gift bike in the 19 either 66 or 67 that would have made the little girl 5 years old and the little boy 6. So we’ve done a lot of that sort of thing together.
Q. So who rode in front of everyone on the tandem?
A. Both of them at different times, but the girl did most of the time.
Q. Sure.
A. As children especially about puberty 10.11,12 years old she and I were really, really closer than he and I. Maybe it’s normal and maybe its not I don’t know I reflected on this a lot. But… At the age of 4 or 5 she could not reach the pedal on that tandem bike had to put her feet on the bar lean over and barely reach the handlebars. And I said to her now honey if you stay on the bike when we start to fall you stay on the bike and I’ll catch the bike and therefore I catch you.
Q. Right.
A. And I’ve never seen another kid under the age of 6 or 7 that could pull that off. But pulling it off really was a more of a confidence in me.
Q. Yeah.
A. And I mean we did this all over a sub, sub, subdivision I mean which we rode hundreds of miles.
Q. I have some questions I’d like to talk about you a little bit. Bring you back from young to older and so some housekeeping things. What’s your date of birth?
A. 3/16/1936.
Q. Where were you born.
A. Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Q. And you live now in…
A. I live now in Edwardsville, Illinois. We’ve been right here in this house since 1970. We’ve been in Illinois since 63.
Q. What do you do for a living? Or what did you do before you retired?
A. Let’s see… my main job for 35 years was a Rehabilitation Teacher, or sometimes they call Rehabilitation Instructor. In yesteryear way back when we were called home teachers.
Q. Right.
A. But our function was primarily to provide instruction to newly blind older adults and not necessarily older lets say newly blind adults and counseling relative to the adjustment of blindness. And when I came to work here in 63 the minimum requirement was a Bachelor’s Degree.
Q. I see.
A. I had that.
Q. Where did you get your Bachelor’s from?
A. University of Oklahoma. Norman, O.K.
Q. What was it in?
A. Education and Psychology
Q. So you answered an ad or how did you get that job?
A. I applied, I don’t remember for sure. I had a friend up here going to Southern Illinois University a blind friend that knew about the availability of the job. And he told somebody, the supervisor up here, I know just the guy that you want.
Q. Right.
A. And he told me about it. I don’t kid myself about it. I don’t think I was any great catch
Q. Laugh
A. but they wanted someone with a bachelor’s degree that could function as a blind person.
Q. Uh hm.
A. And function meant got around using the cane maybe a guide dog but back then they would have frowned on that.
Q. Ah.
A. Function meant using Braille and typing and able to do homemaking chores. Function meant I’m sure that it played a role in it being a spouse, uh a father as I say in a rather crude way a guy that was out there working, making love, and having a good time. I believe that’s what they were after and maybe I was the only applicant, I have no idea. But I caught a bus up here for the interview I never been to St. Louis in my life but I was either too stupid to know I couldn’t or shouldn’t be doing this alone or I just did not worry about it. After I got up here I got help where I could catch a local bus to get to the nearby town where the interview was going on. I didn’t know enough about the area to know that I was in a taboo part of the area a rough area.
Q. Goodness!
A. But anyway I wouldn’t have worried about it if I had. You know when you’re 26 or 27 why you could do anything. I worked as a piano tuner before that or during the time I was attending the University. That’s a trade I learned at the school for the blind. Piano tuning really was the ticket for the rest of my life.
Q. Why’s that?
A. Well… I’m the youngest of 7 and my father passed away when I was about just barely 8. We were, we were I’d say an average middle class family until he passed away. And then we plummeted into poverty. I’m the youngest of 7. All of them were quite a bit older than I the nearest to my age was 7 years older than I. So there’s some of them that were even grown…
Q. Right.
A. when I was born. But we spent a few years poor enough had no running water, no electricity, no car. So. we went from having to the have-nots and then back to some having. Well back in those days the residential schools were a lot different then, than they are now. Back then they pretty much took the blind people and not very much multi-handicapped kids.
Q. Right.
Back then they not only taught the three R’s but they were heavy in teaching trades and blindness skills of all kinds except the orientation mobility that didn’t really come into much play until around 1960.
Q. mmmm….did you start in first grade or kindergarten then?
A. Yeah I was blind in one eye at the age of 5.
Q. How did that happen?
A. It’s a combination of things. It was an inherited defect and I was hit in the eye with a baseball.
Q. Interesting.
A. And the eye that was hit with a baseball destroyed that eye right then. Just suddenly and that eye was taken out. Enucleated.
Q. Mmm hmm.
A. The inherited part out of 7 children, 3 of us became blind.
Q. oh my… what’s the name of it?
A. The problem I had?
Q. Yes.
A. It’s probably a couple of things but back then they didn’t know this disease business. This I.D defect thing never came to light until my children were 18 or 19 years old. Now just get a load of that. The disease was Lattice Degeneration L-a-t-t-i-c-e I think.
Q. Ok.
A. What that is, am I giving you more than you want?
Q. No this is great.
A. is a thinning of the retinal wall and a propensity towards glaucoma, which may have been caused by the other thing. Now back then, we’re backing up again, back then the only thing they knew 60 years ago or 55 years ago, they said it was Sympathetic ophthalmia which what happens to one eye that makes the other ------
Q. My phone doesn’t have call waiting. Just makes a noise if I breath wrong… so sympathetic ophthalmia.
A. They didn’t even refer to the other eye as developing glaucoma so there’s no proof of that except as an adult, I remember the immense pain in the other eye over a period of 4 to 5 years enough every day that I was sick to my stomach.
Q. Oh gosh.
A. So I assume probably I had acute glaucoma in the other eye.
Q. Yeah.
A. And they took that out, approximately when I was 11 years old but I’m not even sure what age. So I gradually lost it from age 6 to 10 or 11. So yes I started the school for the blind in kindergarten.
Q. So did you have decreased vision in the other eye. After.
A. I had some vision until I was 10 or 11 years old.
Q. But in that “Good eye”, was it visually impaired?
A. Yeah, most of that time, it gradually was getting worse. I remember in 1945,
Q. mm, hmmm.
A. I’d have been 9 at that time. A tornado destroyed the school for the blind in Oklahoma. I mean just really ripped up about 10 brick buildings. And I was assigned to lead some of the totals in and over the rubble and out of there.
Q. Ohhh.
A. So this is one memory that I have that tells me that I must have could see fairly good. (laugh).
Q. Right. So did you live there?
A. At the town where the school was? No.
Q. In the school for the blind?
A. Oh yeah, day and night.
Q. Yeah.
A. But see a lot of that philosophy has changed during my lifetime.
Q. Yeah.
A. But when I first went there back in about 42 or so they were so archaic that they didn’t want your parents or any of your relatives to see you for 3 or 4 weeks.
Q. Oh wow.
A. Once again I’ve given this thing quite a bit of contemplation, I think. I think that my, my mother, on some level was able to realize that she was very uneducated about the 3rd or 4th grade and I think she, she loved us enough to send us off to a school 60 miles away. That’s probably from her point of view. From a 6-year-old’s point of view it was, it was really an absolute total rejection.
Q. Yeah.
A. Blind in one eye, going blind in the other so I’m thrust away.
Q. Yeah.
A. The saving factor was though, is what I can say now. One of the older adult brothers who had attended the same school,
Q. uh huh.
A. but had good usable sight, though he was 30 some, he would come to visit me every third Sunday.
Q. Right. That was good.
A. And he was as regular (pause, choked up)
Q. Hello?
A. Yeah, he was as the sun coming up. So here you have a young man in his twenty’s that gave up an entire day, he worked the rest of the week,
Q. Uh huh.
A. and come to the school to see this little blind kid.
Q. hmm.
A. And he would take me out to eat and he would have the intent in giving me, in buying me a steak or chicken, a little kid wants a hamburger.
Q. (sincere laugh), yeah.
A. But I remember that with a lot of warmth.
Q. Yeah.
A. I learned to do math in my head at that early age by figuring up when he left the number of hours, minutes and seconds till he would be back.
Q. Oh wow.
A. Now after I went totally blind. Age about 11 or so everything started getting better.
Q. Oh.
A. Keep in mind during that period father died, pretty much poverty, went blind, drift away at school, that was a damned hard time of my life. An in my later years, 15, 20 years ago I sometimes ask people, (my grandson is crawling around here),
Q. hmm.
A. I sometimes ask people If you had to live five consecutive years again which five would it be and why or which five would be the worst five? I really just have the purpose of encouraging people to look at themselves and their lives well pretty obviously my worst five would be from about the age of 5 to 10.
Q. Uh hmm.
A. So, uh after that, (let me see what this 3 ½ year old genius wants, I’m a ham radio operator and he wants to play with the Morse code thing).
(talks about his grandson for a while) That’s boy, that’s great, that’s great. And I want to know what that’s saying..uh hey buddy want to tell me what that says? Most of the time he will say, I love paw, paw or ma maw. Ok I’m talking to a person on the phone, ok we’ll see you bye, bye. He’s getting ready to go home, he is 3 years and 7 months old. He really is a very bright child. He could say the alphabet when he was 30 months old. He likes my ham stuff, that’s Mores code – go ahead and ask me your next question…
Q. Well, you were telling me that they really didn’t teach mobility at the school for the blind but ---
A. Well not as we think of it now. There were no certification of O&M people. But yeah they taught it in as much as somebody showed you around the school. I remember a kid coming there a little child 6, 7 years old that was totally blind and I was in my teens. They assigned me to show him around and to be his protectorite for two or three weeks to show him the classes.
Q. Right.
A. That’s just the way it was in those days. Now I had the good fortune of being around not only blind kids but blind adults one brother became blind at the age of 2 from diphtheria, measles, childhood diseases.
Q. mm hmm.
A. Each, we three who became blind were blind sometime after birth and there were other extenuating circumstances, like with that one it was in the 1920s medical science and ophthalmological science almost did not exist. And the other became totally blind about 1953 or 4 but he was visually impaired all of his life. So my whole point this totally blind brother for what ever reason he did not finish high school. He went to the fifth grade. He also was a Grand Mal epileptic but my parents and my grandparents and people around him, you know, taught him as crudely as it was. The story I hear is that a grandfather would take him out into the middle of a pasture and whirl him around, turn him around, turn him around, and go off and leave him with the instructions find your way home.
Q. Oh gosh.
A. No, I’m just telling you the stories as I hear them.
Q. Wow.
A. This fellow was in some way just blessed with being able to interpret what he heard and, you know, what he felt and, you know, from early childhood on. And so by the time I came along he must have been, oh hell he must have been 14 years old or so. He walked all over the Tulsa area and hitch hiked any other place he chose to go. My first cane was a cattle prod.
Q. Wow.
A. A little short heavy hickory cattle prod. This was well before the advent of the long cane.
Q. Hmm, hmm.
A. But I learned good and bad, But what I learned good and bad was from him.
(he’s talking to his wife on the ham radio) explains more about his grandson. He and his grandmother are inseparable…
Q. So what age were you using that cattle prod?
A. Well, that’s what I had as a cane. You know that brother was taught in sort of a harsh cruel way, as we would think now, he also taught me in a similar way.
Q. Uh huh.
A. I remember right after becoming totally blind. I was laying on the couch at home probably during the summer time and I was pretending that I was outdoors playing. Instead of a normal kid would have been outdoors playing and pretending, but I was double pretending. I was pretending I was out there pretending. Get the picture?
Q. indeed.
A. This brother comes in from work, the one that can’t see at all and realized what I was doing. In making believe I was outside making believe I was driving a bus. Well, he jerked me off the couch, in our crude hillbilly way, and drug me out the door and ran me purposely into a tree limb and a telephone pole and cussed me out and said now this is what life is all about and I never want to see you on that couch again. When I come in from work I want you out here playing. And I was you know 10, 11 years old. He was 14 years older than I and I sort of believed that he would beat me to death if I ever was laying there again. So when he came home from work I was damn sure I was outside playing.
Q. (laugh).
A. And then I went with him. I remember there was a grocery store or we’ll say a half a mile and I’ve been with him down this rode to this store many times. He’d buy me a soda, we called it a bottle pop.
Q. Uh hmm.
A. And one fine day he said, "you know I’m busy I’ve got to run some traps". Believe it or not a totally blind guy set traps and ran them. He also built them.
Q. whoo.
A. He said, "I want you to go to the store and get us a candy bar and a soda". Now I have no idea if he had someone watching me or just exactly what but. Anyway those are the kinds of ways that I learned to get around.
Q. How did that make you feel when he entrusted you with that responsibility?
A. At that time, I probably just though well I just thought it was a real honest to God truth, he was busy, and he’d like to have a soda and I probably felt like a big boy.
Q. uh huh. And did you do it? Did you make it?
A. Oh yeah, I mean I strutted.
Q. Yeah.
A. Now when I was about 14, we lived in a different place, more closely in town and there was another older blind guy that operated a snack bar in a police station. And in the summer time I was bored as hell I didn’t have any friends to play with you know that kind of stuff.
Q. all your friends were back at the school.
A. Yeah, that falls under the category of pros and cons.
Q. Hm hmm.
A. This old guy, not saying he was old, he was only about maybe 50 but in my mind he was old.
Q. (Laugh)
A. And I had been to his place many times with the older brother and that’s partly where I learned to make change and feel the difference of different kinds soda bottles and candy. The policemen would come up there really to watch the little blind boy make change or find things whether they wanted it or not.
Q. Right.
A. But I didn’t know it then. Well I really wanted to go down there and my mother kept saying "no, no". You know I’m her little baby that’s blind.
Q. Right.
A. So this old man, Bill was his name. He called my mother up and he said, "Now Ilene you’ve got to loosen the apron strings a little.
Q. Hmm.
A. Now let that boy catch a bus by himself, he caught buses a lot of time with somebody else but let him catch a bus by himself and they’ll let him off where he says, and I’ll have a couple of the boys" meaning the policemen "to meet the bus. And he’ll never know it." And I didn’t know it.
Q. Right.
A. So I go up there and catch a bus, man I think I’m ten feet tall, paid my fare and tell I want off at 4th and Elegent that’s where the police station used to be in Tulsa, I don’t know if it’s there now or not, but they let me off there. There was a traffic light there and little did I know that I was being flanked with a cop on each side as I crossed that street.
Q. Low laugh.
A. I didn’t know it for years, until years later.
Q. hmm.
A. So part of the moral of this story of all these things you can see that I had the right help from the right people at the right time. At the school for the blind I had a sighted teacher in about the 4th and 5th grade that were just wonderful the most caring loving person you could imagine.
Q. mmm.
A. I had a blind teacher that taught geography and piano tuning and worked at being as harsh as they call. But which is kind of what I responded to that’s kinda how I was raised.
Q. mmm.
A. In the geography class he said probably no one will pass this course but the very most anyone will do is a C. Well for whatever reason my psychological makeup was then, you challenge me and I show you, you son of a bitch
Q. Right.
A. and I had the highest grade in the class 113 out of 115 points.
Q. Alright.
A. But it was the challenge of it all and I probably still can name most of the state capitals in most of the states if not all and so forth. So a wonderful, wonderful guy, just a wonderful guy. He was originally from Batavia, New York. He taught at the school for the blind up there. He’d been deceased oh 8 or 10 years now. His name was Cimino, C-i-m-i-n-o little short Italian with a deep, very deep voice and I mean he sounded mean as hell.
Q. light laugh.
A. In piano tuning slap me on the back and he'd say, "McBride remember you’re nothing but a damn blind man".
Q. oh gosh.
A. First of all this was before you said damn
Q. Right.
A. in public and second of all you certainly didn’t in school. At 14 or 13 however old I was a kid loves to hear that he’s a man.
Q. Yeah.
A. And you’re a damn blind man on top of that.
Q. Laugh.
A. Then he would in his growley voice he’d say, "you know what that means McBride?", of course you said no sir back in those days, no sir and no ma'am and even if you knew what he was saying because he would do this every few months so you finally knew
Q. Right.
A. that means if you’re going to be average you have to be above average and to pass my class you have to be way above it.
Q. mmm.
A. So that’s the persona maybe the word is that he had.
(interruption – oh hell would you hold, that darn doorbell. My apologies – papergirl I have a fondness for those kids. I’m aware somewhere in my phycice bein nice to him.
Q. It’s a rough business.
A. Yeah.
Q. I did it once myself.
A. Yeah, I’ve only had one or two that were good. One time I had a kid who was deaf, wearing a hearing aid. I had no idea)
Q. Wow.
Q. Well you were telling me how I guess pretty much you were forced to do. I mean people the local guys would say to your mom let him take that bus by himself who you bring that cattle prod with you everywhere?
A. Oh yeah, I'm that was my cane.
Q. And it was used primarily for what purpose what would you do with it? Have it on the ground or just have it up in front of you to zap people.
A. It might have come up an inch or two below the waist so it was way shorter than it should have been. You’d feel with it the best you could.
Q. so you’d have down on the ground pretty much.
A. Yes, and of course if anything dared to attack a poor little blind kid you’d use a stick on em that cattle prod.
Q. Right.
A. Its just what I had the long cane was not available then,
Q. uh hmm..
A. I could have just as easily used a tree limb. It was white and or red and white.
Q. oh. It wasn’t electric it was just a piece of hickory that
A. It was just a hickory cane, a wooden thick heavy cane probably weighed 4 or 5 times what the cane does now.
Q. So you, how did you get across that street? You didn’t even know you had policemen on either side of you.
A. No well I’d been out with this blind brother
Q. Uh huh.
A. and he taught me to listen to the traffic the flow of traffic
Q. uh huh.
A. and when the traffic was going the same way we are or the opposite way going back towards our backside it was relatively safe to go.
Q. And then how did you locate the store? Was there a landmark or something that told you where you were?
A. All I can tell you is that this brother, this older blind brother had uncanny, unreal use of his ears. And those years before I was 14, he did most of it or he supervised it. He was one of these weirdoes that could walk down the middle of the sidewalk without trailing anything and turn in the 5th door if that’s where he chose to go.
Q. mmmh.
A. And now your O&M people know this is done by interpreting a sense of hearing,
Q. sure.
A. and/or touch and the hearing might include or the touch might include change of air pressure.
Q. Right.
A. But he was extremely good at hearing echoes off of buildings. I’ve know only 2 or 3 people of all the blind people I’ve known that had somewhere close to that kind of skill. Uh… He could be in a car and tell you every time you crossed the street by sound and by feel.
Q. mmm.
A. And he taught me to do it, but I never was as good as he. I could do some of the hearing of echoes off of stuff like when we were out riding a tandem bike, I could tell them when we passed parked cars or telephone poles, but I couldn’t do it as well as he. And by the way I have two prosthetic eyes. And by the further away I’m not as talented or skilled as I once was. Because I’ve gotten older
Q. uh hmm.
A. and my hearing is not as good and I’m aware of it. Just this morning, I went out the front door, going out to get in the car with a friend and somebody was running down the road you know for exercise
Q. uh hm..
A. and the echo of that running was bouncing off of my house.
Q. Right!
A. I thought what the hell is that? On the one hand I’m amazed I can still do that as well on the other hand twenty years ago well I’d had known what it was.
Q. Yea. Have you ever been completely lost and then found your way again?
A. Yep I have, but not too often, but yes I have.
Q. How did you do that?
A. No too often. Snow in my opinion, for a blind person, a totally blind person especially is hell.
Q. Yeah.
A. Anything over a couple of inches is terrible. It alters sound and it certainly covered up landmarks and things that, that you are not even aware that you use. I’ve been lost in snow. I can think of twice. But once since I’ve been grown right in my own back yard.
Q. mmm.
A. There was only maybe 3 inches of snow on the ground on a Sunday morning and we had a pet dog. I’d taken him out to do his business
Q. uh hm..
A. and he hoped and thought, if dogs can think,
Q. laugh.
A. …that I was taking him for a walk. And he got me off down the ally and of course he’s just a cur dog he didn’t know what go home meant he thought I was just going to go to a nearby cemetery and turn him loose so he could romp and play.
Q. uh hmm.
A. Well I didn’t. I wanted to go home, and because I hadn’t planned on being outside very long and it was Sunday morning I wasn’t really dressed to stay out there very long. I had some clothes on but I didn’t have a coat on.
Q. Right.
A. And it was probably about 20 degrees
Q. laugh.
A. wasn’t real cold but it was fairly cold.
Q. Cold enough.
A. So I wondering around out there and I realized I was lost. And I don’t use the cane in my yard or house and I had not taken the cane out there and after about 20 minutes of wondering around I thought you know I could freeze to death out here. (laugh)
Q. mmm.
A. And I thought now just stay calm see if you could hear the traffic on such and such street, well on Sunday morning at 6:30 there was no traffic
Q. mmm.
A. on that damn street. And I kept saying now just stay calm. And I just kept kind a wondering around and finally I decided well I’ll find the house I can make enough noise I’ll hear a house, and any house it doesn’t matter yours or whose. And I’ll bang on the first window I find.
Q. Yes,
A. I might get shot but I’ll do it.
Q. Yes!
A. In the meantime…
(end side one tape one)
Q: O.K. so you heard a car
A. I heard a car start. And I said if I can just find out whose car that is I’ll know where I am.
Q. right.
A. So I went running towards this sound waving my one arm and I had this dog now on a leash and I was yelling help, help, help (laugh). The young man comes crawling out of the car. Now here’s a neighbor, to get a load of how this must have come across to him. Here is a neighbor that has seen my leave the house with a coat and tie many, many, many times
Q. Right.
A. and has seen me walk to town and back and has no real knowledge about blindness and he crawled out and said, "Mr. McBride what’s the problem?". I’m sure the guy thought I’d been on an all night drunk. And I said not a damn thing I’m just lost and if you’ll tell me who you are I’ll know where I am. He told me who he was well I knew exactly where I was and I walked home. Well I thought about it so that afternoon I guess this guy might have been going to the earlier Sunday morning mass, I don't know where the hell he was going. But I called him. I thought, you know I ought to explain a little bit of this to this guy he might have the authority down here to have me locked up, so I called him and told him about how snow affects blind people.
Q. Wow.
A. In my later less efficient years, we’re talking about the last year or so, I walked to town and back, which is a little over a mile, thousands of times. We lived here for twenty-nine years and the very first evening here I rode in our car downtown. And they listed the names of the streets as we crossed them and I got out and I got out with probably my daughter. But I really do not remember and her instructions were to follow me home, not to take me home, but to follow me home.
Q. Uh hm..
A. So starting with that in 1970 there’s no real way I know I average three and four round trips you know a week for the first twenty-five years. It’s been less than that since then,
Q. uh hmm.
A. but I’ve done it three times in the last couple of weeks. But anyway there’s one place in the walk where you had one street curving into another street at a downhill slant. And going, and I down know how to explain this exactly, but instead of being a straight four-cornered street. It is… there’s one street angled off. If you followed the curb it would curve around down hill and if you went straight you’d stay on that same street.
Q. right.
A. Well in recent years, because of curb cuts they made a wheelchair ramp there. So now you have a wheelchair ramp and a curve and at a sloping downhill slant
Q. mmm.
A. and I’m supposed to cross that street.
Q. Right.
Now if there’s a car passing me on the side street I can do it perfectly
Q. Right. because I have an auditory string. I could reach up there with my ear and just tag along that string if that car passes and goes on. I can just be as sighted by God, as you are right?
Q. Right.
A. If there’s no cars and that’s not too heavily traveled; if there's no cars maybe and maybe not. And I’m sort of a proud son of a bitch.
Q. laugh.
A. I thought I was about in the 95th percentile in getting around. I hadn’t been lost but once or twice in my whole life.
Q. Uh hm.
A. But one Saturday morning during the summer, I didn’t make that crossing right and I ended up in a parking lot and not even the parking lot that I thought I was in.
Q. Oh gosh.
A. And I wandered around in a parking lot for about a half-hour now.
Q. mmm.
A. The good thing was it was warm and I wasn’t going to die or anything.
Q. Right.
A. But finally I decided well if this is a parking lot, sometime there’s going to be a car pulling in here. And that’s what happened. It was kind of like the last time and I went walking towards it and I was yelling help. Of course, now I’m using a long cane and all of that right. I yell help this old man gets out and says "well, what’s the problem?" And I said well I want to know where I’m at. He says "where do you want to go? I’ll take you any place you want to go", just a wonderful guy. I said I don’t want you to take me I just want to know where I’m at.
Q. Right.
A. (laugh) He told me where I was I said well if you’ll walk me back across the street by St. John’s Church and help me across that curving place I’ll be fine. But this really frustrated me man it just gnawed at my gut. Well, I called my O&M mastered degreed daughter, and I said Kid I need help. So she came home the next weekend and she looked this situation over. She said, "instead of putting your heels to the curb or to the slope just before the wheelchair slope put the side of your foot to that curb and walk as straight as you can". I thought, oh come on you’re kidding me. She said, nope that’s the way to do it. And sure enough I did it that way and sure it worked. I couldn’t believe my daughter knew more than I, but she did.
Q. (laugh) So what was your foot on now, it was on where the, it was sort of the two different heights where the ramp and the…
A. The ramp is slanting downward and the street is going in a slope down the hill and curving.
Q. So what are you feeling under your foot? What are you putting your foot on?
A. Just on the street and the side of my foot is against the curb. In order for me to cross that, street to the other sidewalk on the other side
Q. mm hmm.
A. …that was the way to do it. A very unorthodox thing. I still much prefer a passing car.
Q. So you want the car to come perpendicular to you or parallel?
A. Parallel.
Q. Parallel cause then you could follow it across.
A. I can follow it across. That’s exactly right.
Q. That's the best.
A. Yeah. So the question was have I ever been lost. Not often and I would fantasize that this last time I was lost would not have occurred 15 or 20 years ago but maybe it would have who knows.
Q. Yeah.
A. While we’re talking about my daughter if I might. If you were to ask me what experience have you had that might be the most valuable experience
Q. uh hm.
A. it did not come in a classroom. It did not come in a master degree psychology courses etc. etc. It came from a, about 10-year-old daughter.
Q. Oh.
A. The story is that she was a very active playing child always outdoors with other kids and playing or other kids here and I was doing something in the basement, and she said “Father" when it's serious it's father, if it's not it's dad. "Father, I hope it doesn’t make you mad but I’m glad that you’re blind”. And one part of my brain got to the straighten this out and the other part of my brain said ah “you don’t want to raise hell with your kid”. And before I did anything, you know I’m thinking about, should I knock her across the room, should I lecture her? You know what, before I decided what next to do she was up the steps and out the door to play. So several days passed and the same words from the same child “Father I hope it doesn’t make you mad but I’m glad that you’re blind” and the two parts of the brain did the same little thing. Oh what in the world, I’ve got to straighten this kid out.
Q. uh hmm.
A. You know we parents have an obligation to raise our children in sociably acceptable ways.
Q. Right.
A. And it’s not exactly socially acceptable way to be glad that somebody is blind. So a third time came, a week later I had ridden to town on a local bus got off and was going to walk home. It was a fairly nice day a little after 5 and this child who never did it before and never did it since rode a Tandem bike to town to meet her father. And I was about a block or two toward home and she rode up and said "do you want a ride? " And I said well yeah but what in the world are you doing here. And she said well I was kind of bored and couldn’t fine anyone to play with and I just thought you might want a ride. And she knew about when. So I pulled my cane up and fastened it to my belt and picked up my briefcase get on the back of the bike. Half way home there’s an A &W Rootbeer stand there now you may have never heard of it.
Q. Oh sure, very familiar with them.
A. A&W rootbeer stand about halfway home. And I got it kind of figured out in my parent brain what was behind this. And I said I’ll betch you, you want a soda or an ice cream and she said "Oh you guessed that right".
Q. (laugh).
A. And I said, OK well when we get there well, we’ll stop. And at that time this place was not a go in place. It was just a window.
Q. Right.
A. Now it’s still there but it’s a go inside now.
Q. mm hmm.
A. But she goes in and gets an ice cream cone now I don’t remember if I didn’t have enough change to get me one, I ordinarily would have, but that day I didn’t. So I’m sitting on the back of the bike with my briefcase on the ground she comes out sits up on front of the bike, you got to keep in mind she’s only about 10, maybe 9 and she leans her head and back against my chest and throat. Get the picture?
Q. Uh hmm.
A. The sun is on my right cheek in the west and the cool air in the spring of the year in May, and with this child, I get into a Maslow--that's a pretty well-known psychologist.
Q. Sure.
A. I get in one of his peak states that he talks about and just in my mind, just in my head, I’m thinking what a wonderful life, what a wonderful world. And thanking God for this wonderful child and a wonderful job and a part time job and all the goodness’s of life. And I’m smelling her sweaty head and her hair against my face but no words are being passed. She’s eating an ice cream cone, facing the same way I am and she doesn’t see any expression
Q. Right.
A. and I’m in a sought of a prayerful. And by the way I’m not a church goer, I’m sort of in a meditative state with my creator and the goodness’ of life, and this brat for the third time says, “Father, I hope it doesn’t make you mad but I’m glad you’re blind".
Q. Uh huh.
A. And I thought it’s time to solve this and sort of in the parent voice I said, “oh yeah why is that? And she said well if you could see we wouldn’t have this bike” and the parent part of me says oh hell a lot of people have a tandem bike and she said "oh you don’t understand me", which really infuriates any parent.
Q. Uh huh.
A. Then I’d say well, why don’t you explain it. Of course that’s what she tried to do.
Q. right.
A. Says well I play with kids all the time and other dads take them in a car to get ice cream or hither and yon, but they don’t do things with their kids, they do things for them. Now this is a child! They do things for them not with them. She says when we go fishing sure you bait my hook, and by the way I still do, but you’re not doing that for me you like to do it, you’re doing it with us.
Q. Right.
A. So I realized that this child is telling me something supremely wonderful. I don’t really grasp it yet but I decided not to knock her off the bike.
Q. Laugh.
A. So I kissed her on the top of the head, and I said, “Well Honey I love you too”. For seven days, that was a Friday night I might add, for seven days as I did my work teaching and counseling blind people father I hope it doesn’t make you mad but I’m glad you’re blind and the reason she gave. Just kept rolling around in my brain. And what I came up with I don’t want to make you mad. What that means is you know you're a pretty rough dad and I might get punished so I really don’t want to make you mad but on the other you taught us to express how we feel so I’m going to take a chance. And I am glad that you’re blind and the reason I’m glad, you’re not like the guy across the street.
Q. Right.
A. If you could see you might be like him. By the way, the guy across the street is a wonderful guy.
Q. I’m sure he is (laugh).
A. Now he’s a retired professor of economics and had five kids. Four I think at home back then. So you might be like him and I’m glad that you’re blind. What all that means is I love you like you are including being blind. Now here I am in my mid-thirties, when all this was said. Reasonably functional, fairly good with my hands, fairly good with books, all this kind of stuff, and it occurs to me that one human being totally accepted me as I am. Even to the point of being glad that I’m like I am including being blind. So I said to myself never ever again will I be despondent even for a moment over being blind. I might be despondent over marital troubles, over being old, over a lot of things but blindness is not amongst them.
Q. Hmmm.
A. That was the most meaningful experience single lesson of my life. That helped me more than anything else. And after that when I would give training sessions to nurses or groups like that, often times I would tell that story and I’d say you know you don’t really have to be glad that your patient is old and this and that, but you can certainly accept them including their multiple disability.
Q. Absolutely.
A. OK it's time for you to ask a question.
Q. What kind of cane do you use now?
A. Now? Oh lord, I got 3 at least three canes by the front door.
Q. mh hmm.
A. One is a folding a Porfold I think I’ll have to go look, but I think.
Q. What kind of tip is on that? Is that a roller tip?
A. No it not a roller tip you know I don’t even know. I think it just slides over the end. But just recently Sharon has got me as a father’s day gift, a graphite cane. A graphite cane comes out of California. It’s a folding cane and supposed to be stronger than the typical folding cane and lighter. Apparently is a little bit flexible so if you bend it a small amount it pops back into shape. I haven’t used it enough yet to know.
Q. mm.
A. I don’t know how long she had it before I got it but it’s a fifty-six inch one. I’m a fairly tall person.
Q. Uh hm.
A. And then I have a ridged cane that I guess is made out of aluminum wrapped with tape.
Q. Uh hm.
A. Usually that’s what I use when I walk to town and back because it’s strong. But now that I have this strong lightweight folding cane she told me to go ahead and use it to see how it works. She says that some of her co-workers really swear by it.
Q. Do you use the 2-point touch then when you go or do you use constant contact?
A. It’s really pretty much of a mixture of methods. My guess is most O&M people would not approve.
Q. Laugh.
A. Sometimes I use what you’re talking about back and forth,
Q. Uh huh.
A. …sometimes I trail. You know a couple of unusual things here, I sort of expected the daughter that got a master degree in the work and did the blindfold bit in Chicago and all of that, I sort of expected her to come home and you know tell her dad, look you don’t know what you’re doing you do it like this,
Q. hmm.
A. …she never did that. Never ever did that. Except one time she was driving down the street and I was walking the other way and I don’t remember why but I was dragging my cane along behind me. And maybe I was counting change, I don’t know.
Q. uh huh.
A. But when I got home, she said "you know" she says "I saw the most unusual technique I have ever saw". I said what’s that. She says "I saw this little blind guy going down the street dragging his cane along behind him". (laugh). I said, well maybe he wanted to know where he had been.
Q. Laugh.
A. But she’s just a wonderful, knowledgeable, insightful person. So perhaps I’m patting myself on the back a bit much but I think as far as work for the blind I would rank above the 95th percentile in overall knowledge and skills but this child is ahead of me, not only because of her experience but her educational specific educational training in that area which did not exist when I was going to school.
Q. Right.
A. Your rehab teaching schools, your O&M schools as far as I know really did not get underway until sometime in the early 60’s. Now they might have but not as far as I’m aware.
Q. So you have three canes…
A. I probably have a lot more than that, but I have three around here that I use often.
Q. And you used the rigid cane predominately but you may switch over.
A. I’d use the rigid cane for if I just going on long walks. Probably right now if I get a ride to town, I’ll use my new cane that she gave that will fold up while I’m in the car and while I’m doing whatever I’m doing downtown and then I’ll use it on the way back. Before fairly recently though I probably would have taken the rigid cane. It depends a lot on where I’m going and how I’m going.
Q. So for example what kind of decisions are you making about what--?
A. If I’m riding in a car or bus a lot, if I’m going to be in meetings a lot or if I’m going to be out and about a lot.
Q. Right. So if you’re going to be sitting down at a meeting a lot or inside ..
A I’m going to be using a folding cane.
Q. You want to be able to put it away easily. But if you’re going to be out doing a lot of walking…
A. Especially if I’m going to be doing a lot of walking alone then I might use the rigid cane. But in this case I probably would use this more recent cane. As I may have said it’s a graphite and something else…
Q. Neat.
A. I think and it’s about twice as expensive. You know most of these folding canes are around 15 to 20 bucks and this is around 28 or 30.
Q. So do you know what kind of tip is on that one? Is it a thin one a thick one a roller
A. It’s not a roller.
Q. Uh hm.
A. It could be the marshmallow tip. Is that the same thing as a roller?
Q. Well the marshmallow they come either rolling or not rolling but the shape is thick like a marshmallow.
A. Yeah it might be that but you see a person that came from a cattle prod could probably use anything.
Q. (laugh) good point! How many different types of mobility tools have you tried?
A. I have had my hands on at meetings the thing that vibrates, for deafblind persons especially
Q. Right. Like a Mowat Sensor or?
A. Yeah I didn’t even know the name of it.
Q. Uh huh.
A. Or the thing that, Cazony I think was involved with. And Kramer maybe but where you have sort of a splashlight thing you move around and it makes a noise.
Q. Yeah.
A. The pitch would change according to how close you get to it.
Q. Uh hm.
A. But I’ve never had one and used it a lot. I had my hands on it at a show and tell thing at a meeting.
Q. But didn’t really say Hey I want one of these.
A. No and besides that they were reasonably expensive
Q. Yeah.
A. and I was raising kids and sending kids to college.
Q. Right.
A. Want me to tell you a little line about that? When the daughter got a bachelor’s degree was when this really, really hit me. Now she had a grant and she I don’t remember what kind of a grant, it may be a Pell grant. But she had loans and she worked part time. And her parents sent her about $500 a month on top of that. All of this went towards housing and tuitions and this and that.
Q. Uh huh.
A. And for the most part that money came from my part time job from the piano tuning. We lived on what I earned from my employment with the State.
Q. Uh hm.
A. I even use to tell my tuning customers thank you, you just make a contribution to my child’s education.
Q. laugh.
A. Now along about graduation time I thought about my ancient history and how many blind people I knew as a child that had went to college of any kind and it was damn few maybe a couple. And then I was beginning to wonder how many blind people sent their kids to, to University then and now and I realized what a wonderful country, what a wonderful time to have been born and to have lived. I speculate where in the world in Russia, or Great Britain, or Sweden, or Germany, or China would a totally blind person have the opportunity to be somewhat educated and to learn a trade and to be allowed to work at both of these things. To be married, to raise a family, to have recreational activities and all of those things, and to be able to send a child to a University and help another child going to school too.
Q. You’re right.
A. Where else would that take place? So at the Graduation they were playing America the Beautiful and the scenario I just ran by you rolled through my brain. And not only was I proud for what she was and was becoming and what she had done but America the Beautiful had a greater and deeper meaning than what I’d ever though about.
Q. Yeah.
A. How fortunate I, and many of us are, to be here now. So when people get to bitching too much about this awful country or burning the flag, I get pretty pissed off.
Q. Sure.
A. You know this country has given me the opportunity to be almost on the same level you are to make love, to work, to recreate to. I had not drawn a pension of any kind until I began to get my teacher’s retirement about a year ago in over 35 years. And I feel a sense of pride about that.
Q. Yeah. Absolutely that's wonderful.
A. I’m sure that you’re getting a different ear…earful than you’ve ever got.
Q. Well I tell you It’s just been for me and I do have more questions and I’m not letting you off the hook yet but I will say that this has just been a real education for me and I’m learning so much talking to people who have been successful. Are working have worked and that’s been, that’s really been the focus of this is to talk to people like you and find out how did they do it and how are they doing it and I’m taking this information and passing it along to my students who are going out there to be mobility instructors. And uhh. So it’s just invaluable I don’t know how else to put that it’s just wonderful, wonderful stuff.
A. So I think the tendency might be for society to think oh how wonderful, don’t see how you do this, you’re such a wonderful person and you’re so magically gifted and, and you must have had a lot of energy and motivation and really my real feeling I don’t usually express it, you know I usually would just say thank you but my real feeling is bullshit; you the taxpayers, you the culture has made it possible.
Q. Yes.
A. Now not to take anything away from my own sweat. But sweat or not, energy or motivation or not, that would not have happened had the opportunity not been available.
Q. Yeah.
A. And I think we blind people sometimes are told so much how wonderful we are and how skilled we are that we get to believing it.
Q. Yeah.
A. And we think we did it all on our own. Well that’s a bunch of bullshit. We just didn’t.
Q. That is an actual phenomenon
A. Yeah, yes it is.
Q. …in children in residential schools or otherwise especially in sort of integrated schools where they get this false sense of ability because people are constantly saying you are above average but in reality the work maybe sub par and its just a skill a false sense of accomplishment.
A. As a teacher and counselor for 35 years at one point it probably irritated me a little bit to hear some blind person say, "well I learn all by myself I did it all by myself" and I’d spent hundreds of hours going in there teaching them Braille.
Q. Laugh.
A. So finally I realized you know when a person says that they really means I’ve been really successful.
Q. Yeah.
A. I made them think they did it and they really did do it themselves. The best teacher can’t learn it for you.
Q. Right. Absolutely agree with you. When you have student that leaves you believing that they’re the reason, I do I get a real charge out of that too. I’m like yeah that’s right.
A. "I never had any O&M help in my life.
Q. Laugh.
A. Those damn people do know what they’re talking about."
Q. "I taught you how to do it." (laugh).
A. See even in my case all I’m saying is I had no professional O&M help.
Q. Uh huh.
A. I had a lot of O&M help. Crude, but it was still there.
Q. Right. But you attribute your ability to travel at your current level of independence to your brother, to your experiences as a child?
A. Most of it. Now after I went to work here, a partially sighted supervisor, I use to walk way too fast…
Q. mm hmm.
A. maybe that’s a characteristic of young blind males,
Q. hmm.
A. I don’t know but I use to walk, way too fast, you know maybe I was trying to prove something. I think maybe that’s the case. I remember hitting a telephone poles or stuff so hard it knocked me flat on my back. Well I was in my mid twenties and this supervisor says, "McBride" he says "you ought to slow down a little you oughta walk like you got a million bucks and a million hours to spend it". He says "be a little more graceful if you run into something it won’t hurt you so bad. And if you run into somebody it won’t hurt them so bad."
Q. Were you walking fast with a cane or with a cattle prod?
A. Yeah with a goddamn cane.
Q. Laugh.
A. You know after all if you sighted people are supposed to walk a mile in 15 minutes well I can do it faster than that.
Q. Yeah.
A. But that made sense to me walk like you have a million bucks and a million hours to spend it and be more graceful, you won’t get hurt so bad, and you won’t hurt anybody else so bad. That might be as near to professional help as I’ve ever gotten except from my daughter teaching me how to cross that one place that I told you about.
Q. How do you feel about traveling alone to unfamiliar places.
A. Well depends upon how far you carry the word, unfamiliar. If either you or somebody can describe to me where I’m going to be and give me some useful landmarks in my head. It doesn’t have to be an O&M person it could be a guy on the street. You know, I can stop someone and say Where is Banzoes tavern.
Q. uh hm.
A. And if he'd say well you go right straight the way you're going and cross the next street, turn right about half a block up there there’s a big wide driveway into a parking lot and it’s the next door on the left. I don’t have any problem with that at all, not at all.
Q. Uh hm.
A. But I don’t know of anyway I could very independently, anyplace without some direction, some instructions about how to find it.
Q. Uh hm.
A. And the same is true of you,
Q. Absolutely.
A. …except you might could read the names the names of businesses. And if I’m going to a certain place I know I’m close I’ll find the door, open the door and ask them I’m looking for Ekar’s barbershop, "oh that’s the next door down, oh you just missed it a door." So
Q. Neat.
A. I don’t know if that’s answering your question.
Q. Absolutely it is.
A. but you learn to use other information from other people that you need.
Q. So what is a useful landmark to you?
A. Goodness. Even things that I’m not even aware of but certainly curbs and allies, post and trees and mailboxes and auditory cues. You know maybe motors of air conditioners or cars or I suspect there’s landmarks that I use subconsciously.
Q. yup.
A. I’m not even aware of. You know until there not there and then I’ll think woop what’s happening here. (laugh). So, there’s just all sorts of landmarks that a person would use the slope of the sidewalk.
Q. Uh hm.
A. You know almost a hundred percent of the time where there’s a driveway into a parking lot or into a home there’s going to be a change in texture.
Q. Right.
A. There’s going to be a feeling of a slope. One of the big ways I cross a wide driveway is I walk along the slope. You know my right foots going to be a little lower then my left foot.
Q, Uh hmm.
A. or vise a verse or whichever way it is.
Q. Sure.
A. The smells, smells of things all the way from restaurants at the Chinese place, or man that hamburger sure smells good.
Q. laugh.
A. Clothing stores will put out a different smell. Shoe shops a different smell, gasoline services and those places can also, you know, be troublesome because you got wide areas that are close to the same height to the street. But usually you got a little bit of a slope so, so instead of making that a problem you use it as a solution, that slope.
Q. Right. That's good. So how do you prepare for a trip to go to an unfamiliar like a conference.
A. How do I prepare for a trip? Me personally? Well my wife packs my suitcase.
Q. Uh hm.
A. Okay?
Q. Okay.
A. I’m not telling you that’s acceptable, that’s the way its been for me. She packs my suitcase.
Q. In terms of traveling to that place?
A. O.K that’s what you’re talking about? Either my wife or somebody I pay or I catch a bus to a train station or a plane to an airport or a bus station and I’ve done all of those things.
Q. uh hm.
A. I boarded a train fairly independently. By that I mean I bought the ticket, and I waited. Just me, my wife may have left me out there or I may have gotten there on a bus. At an airport I find I need more help
Q. Uh huh.
A. I need sighted guide stuff a lot there.
Q. Yeah.
A. Maybe if I did it a lot in that place, I might can learn to be more independent. I use to go into Chicago a lot which is as you could guess a fairly big you know busy place.
Q. Yeah.
A. So I’d get off the train and I would just say to them which way is the terminal, right or left and they’d say left. I never knew for sure if they were backing in or leaning forward.
Q. Right.
A. And I would head up that way amongst all the noise of the train engines and all of that. When I start to go into the terminal it’d be a slope upward and maybe by that time a porter, redcap would come along pushing the cart helping someone else, wants to know if they can help me and I’d say, “Yeah just let me grab a hold here. I want to catch a cab”.
Q. Yeah.
A. That might have been it or some fellow passenger might have offered me help.
Q. Do you ever seek out help from somebody, like you hear them and you say Hey give me assistance?
A. Yeah, I always. If I need it, I’ll ask for it. Now if you’re asking me if I ever called ahead ?
Q. Sure.
A. …or somebody I never did do it but I would. OK? And then I’ll always was prepared to tip the porter. And some of the time, "Oh no I don’t your money you’re a poor blind man".
Q. Oh gosh.
A. They didn’t say that that’s kind of what you thought.
Q. You got the message.
A. And I would say I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t have it. So I’ve used it all in different ways and I’ve known blind people in Chicago that use that same train station, Union train station everyday and could do it without any help.
Q. Oh wow.
A. Any help at all. Now I only did it occasionally and I didn’t have that kind of knowledge of the place.
Q. What are some tricks of the trade for getting reoriented when you’re lost?
A. Of getting reoriented when you’re lost? Well you might have to tell yourself to be calm. (laugh)
Q. uh hm. That’s a good one.
A. You know you haven’t frozen to death yet
Q. Right.
A. and you stay as calm as you can and you listen for traffic flow. You analyze as much as you can what you felt or heard in the process of being lost like, like I’ve described. You ask for help.
Q. yeah.
A. That’s about as much as I can tell you I pretty well described what I’ve done in the past. You know you listen and use what you can. If there's traffic patterns that will help you. Or the starting of a car you go toward that car and ask for help.
(End of Side 2 tape one)
Q. Have you ever used tactile maps or auditory maps?
A. Very little. Very little. I have seen them. Of course as you know by that I have felt them.
Q. Uh hm.
A. I have been in sessions where an O&M person would instruct me through a fairly complicated area and ask me to draw a map according to it. Or vice a versa he would give me of the tactile map, lets see you go through this. But I have a not used those a lot.
Q. Have you found them useful then, not really? Does it help sort of put things in perspective?
A. I don’t get it..?
Q. Was it useful when?
A. I find that tactile maps help. I could use them I just haven’t had a lot of experience with them.
Q. When I was talking to Alvin, he told me that you and he used to do some mobility instruction yourself?
