Living the Life You Want Is for Blind People Too

Banquet Address Delivered by Gary Wunder
Representative from the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) at the ‘Breaking the Mold’ 2014 Convention of the
Canadian Federation of the Blind (CFB), May 24, 2014, Bowen Island, B.C.

(transcribed into print from audio recording)

From The Blind Canadian, Volume 9, January 2015 (cfb.ca)

When I came into the world, it was three months too early. I weighed two pounds and went down to one pound fourteen ounces, so they said goodbye at the same time that they said hello, but it didn’t work out that way.

There was a lot of guilt in my family about the fact that I was blind. It turns out my mother had been playing a little game of basketball with my father the day before she went to the hospital to have me. He had thrown the ball to her and it was high enough she had to jump for it. So, when she realized that she had a child who was premature, she associated it with this basketball game and felt terrible about it. My father did the same, feeling that I was blind because he threw a ball too high. My mother died in 2008, but my father still feels guilty today. I wish this was a burden I could take from him, for I have as much reason to believe my early start has given me an advantage, as I do to believe it has placed me at a disadvantage.

My parents, after having me in the hospital for about four months, brought me home, and they thought, maybe, that was the worst of it. Then they realized I wasn’t making eye contact or tracking objects. They took me to the doctor and got the news. My father tells the story that when he came home he saw my aunt, my grandmother, and my mother crying. They told him the news, and he said, “I’d like to tell you I was concerned about you, son, but my original thought was that I am screwed. What in the world am I going to do? Here I am, a young husband. We want to have other children. What in the world am I going to do?”

But, the world went along and the doctors gave their prognosis, which was that my father and my mother should immediately plan for how I would live out my life. They should provide for me, at least for the rest of their lives, and, if they could manage to be successful enough, they should provide for me the rest of my life.

Think about what that would feel like to you as young parents if that was the kind of sentence that you got from the medical community. But time passed, and I grew and started talking, and like most of you, learned that the radio was one of my best friends. I was considered a child prodigy because I knew all of the songs on the Forty Star survey, a little countdown of songs on our local radio station. Being blind and a child

prodigy meant that I was spoiled. All the women in my life—they loved me and they coddled me and they thought I could do no wrong. Unfortunately, there were more people in the world than those women. There were men—one of them was my father, and he said, “This kid is never going to grow into anything if you let him have his way all the time and do whatever he wants to do.” He was the disciplinarian. Luckily, he worked a lot, and as far as I was concerned, the more he worked the better I liked it. It turned out he left home at 6 o’clock in the morning and didn’t get home until 8 o’clock at night. I couldn’t figure it at the time, but that was fourteen hours of good time, and if you counted eight hours for sleeping, I only had to put up with him for two hours. But, he managed to make his influence felt, and I kind of came to have a different opinion of him, which I’ll tell you about later.

I got lots of conflicting messages about what it meant to be blind. I expect you did too. I got the message from my folks that, “You can do anything,” and they tried to make that message real for me. For instance, when I wanted to learn to ride a bicycle, they said, “Sure, you can learn to ride a bicycle.” And, when I wanted a horse, they said, “Well, if your brothers and your sister are going to get a horse, we’ll give you a horse too.”

I didn’t think anything about that at the time, but I later learned that my grandfather came to my father and he said, “This is the most irresponsible thing I have ever seen you do. I must have raised a jackass. How could anybody be so stupid. I want you to know that if that boy gets killed or hurt riding that bicycle or riding that horse, I will be the first one to go to the prosecutor and urge you be charged with murder or willful neglect.” I can’t imagine what it was like for my father to endure being called stupid by his father.

My grandfather really thought we all had gone over the edge, when my dad went out and bought motorcycles for my two brothers. He came home and I said, “There are only two motorcycles there.”

He said, “Yes, I got one for your brother, Jay, and one for your brother, Mark.”

I asked, “Well, why aren’t there three?”

He said, “Because your sister is too young to ride one.”

I said, “I wasn’t thinking about my sister.”

“Then you are telling me that you want one?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you told me that you used your ears a lot to ride the bicycle, and you know, a motorcycle makes a lot of noise, and it goes faster than a bicycle. Is this really a smart thing?”

I confidently said, “I think it is.”

In a very thoughtful and somewhat hesitant voice he said, “Well, I’m in no position to judge. You’re fourteen years old. You’re smart enough to figure whether you can do this or not. If you think you can do it, we’ll get you one.”

Now, I didn’t have a big motorcycle. It was a Harley-Davidson though, a 50cc engine– Not much of a motor—a two-cycle engine that you had to mix gas and oil together to operate. But, I rode that thing—and it was cool. I did make believers out of people who rode in front of me. One rule could not be questioned: When they planned to stop, they were to look over their shoulder and yell, “I’m stopping.” My motor did make enough noise that it was difficult to hear their motors at the same time, especially if they were dropping in pitch and amplitude.

So those were the positive messages and life experience that said blindness was okay and I could do anything. I got to do a lot of things as a kid that made me believe that I had some capability. But, there were other messages that I got that weren’t quite so good about blindness. There was my grandmother, who was one of those women who loved to spoil me. She said, “You are smart. I think you can do almost anything. You can talk on the radio, since you already know all those record people and the songs they sing. Maybe you can be a disc jockey. Or maybe, you can be a preacher, because they get paid, you know, to stand up and talk and one thing you’ve proven to us is you can talk. Maybe one day, I mean, if you really work at it, you can be a lawyer, if you want to—you know, like Perry Mason.” I thought this was pretty good because I watched Perry Mason on TV, and from what I could tell, he only worked one day a week, and then, only twenty-six weeks a year; the rest were reruns. That seemed like a pretty good job.

That was the positive message, but then she said, “Now, of course, you are blind, and therefore, the welfare will have to come in every day, and they’ll have to make sure you brush your teeth and wash your face and make sure you’re ready to go out into the world.” That didn’t feel so good. You can imagine how it felt when, one day before I went off to school, I brushed my teeth really quickly and didn’t really wash my face well enough and left with toothpaste on my lips. I knew then that my grandmother had to be right and that bothered me for the longest time. I really did think that, maybe, somebody would have to come in and check my face. I was smart enough to know that I could brush my own teeth and that I could remember to do it, but it really shook my confidence about whether I could wash my face and get it clean.

I was often disturbed by my parent’s reactions to blind people they saw on the street. If they saw a blind person walking down the street with a cane, they would say, “Well, I wonder if he’s going to be okay? I wonder what he’s doing out alone? I wonder if he knows that there’s a big street up here that he’s going to have to cross?” They were very afraid for him—not afraid enough to stop and help, but they were very afraid of what it was like to be blind. So, I grew up with the idea that they were comfortable withthe fact that I was a blind kid, but they were not comfortable with the fact that I would grow up to be a blind man. So, neither was I.

I’m sure your parents offered you a lot of hope about what was to come in the same way mine did. In my day, it was: “If we can send a man to the moon, certainly, by the time you turn sixteen, there’ll be a way for you to drive a car.” That message sounded pretty good when I was seven. It sounded pretty good when I was ten. I started to have some doubts about twelve. At fourteen I thought, maybe, this was a little optimistic, and at sixteen I was pretty darned disappointed, because it didn’t happen. And, it hasn’t quite happened yet. Part of the hope, part of the fantasy, and part of the denial was that I would not grow up to be a blind man.

The biggest problem I had growing up was that I didn’t have positive blind role models. We were in a small town, but we didn’t really work to go out and associate with other blind people. The teachers who worked with my parents discouraged it: too much association with the blind would not be healthy for a young man who was going to live in a sighted world.

I did know some blind folks, however. I knew this one blind guy in my town. His name was Hawkey. I don’t know how he got the nickname, but that was it. He was renowned in my little town of 216, because he helped his neighbours. He could travel enough with a cane to go to the post office, and not only would he get his mail, but he’d get mail for several of his elderly neighbours. And, the thing that so amazed people was that he could keep their mail straight. So, what was this great technique that he had? Well, he’d take his mail and put it between his thumb and his first finger, and the next neighbour’s mail between fingers one and two, and the next neighbour’s mail between two and three, and the next between fingers three and four. The more people bragged about that, the more I got the impression that this was the low expectation that would be held for me. I mean, I was glad that he did a good turn for his neighbours, but I didn’t think it was the most inventive technique in the world to use the fingers of your hand to separate mail. So, my buddy, Hawkey, was a fellow I liked a lot, but I did not want to grow up to be like him. People loved to drop by his house and talk to him, but that was about the extent of what he did–that and listen to the radio. He was the guy who listened to the radio and he knew all the town gossip. Yes, he loved the town gossip. He would share it if people wanted to go and get some of it. Why, he’d fill them up with it. But, he wasn’t somebody I wanted to be like. He was somebody I wanted to visit from time to time, but I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to be a mover and a shaker, somebody like my father was.

I had ham radio buddies, and some of them were blind. It was cool because we could talk with one another, but some of my blind buddies used ham radio as a way of avoiding going out and getting jobs. They said, “We handle emergency messages. We do phone patches for people. This is the thing that we do in lieu of a job.” And, that scared me, because these were bright people, but they didn’t go out and do what I wanted to do. And, the work ethic they lived by would not earn me the respect of my family.

I kept getting this message that, “You can do anything you want to do. You’ll be different from those few other blind folks that you see out there.” I clung to that message, hoping it was true, but having little evidence to support that hope.

One Christmas, my folks got me a guitar, and it turns out that I have some musical aptitude—not very much, but some. For instance, I can hear a note and usually tell what the note is, which means that I learned to play by ear. Having that kind of talent serves you really well as an amateur, but not very well as a professional. My father, however, got the idea that, if I had this kind of talent, we had now figured out what I could do for a living. But to me, it was just fun, just cool to be able to play some kind of instrument I could carry with me. Every day when he got home, my father would say, “Did you practise your guitar today?” Sometimes the answer was yes, but mostly it was no.

If my father found me shy, he knew the cure. He would make me come out and sing in public for people—relatives, company, at talent shows, and I dreaded it. I can stand and talk with you without breaking a sweat, but if you make me play guitar and sing for you, I’ll start sweating terribly. It won’t matter whether it’s hot in the room or cold, or how many clothes I have on. It just bothers me. I cannot do it.

One night we were out in a fishing boat. My father and I are alone. It’s late and we’re having a nice time in the boat waiting for a fish to hit. And, my father says, “So, Gary, did you practise your guitar this week?”

I said, “Well, no, not much.”

“Not much?”

I said. “Well, no, not really at all.”

He shifted his weight in the boat uncomfortably and said, “All right, Gary, I ask you every week if you’ve practised your guitar, and mostly your answer is some, or no, or not very much. So, son, you are sixteen years old now. I want to ask you, if you don’t learn to sing and play that damn guitar, just what in the world are you going to do with your life?”

Now, that scared me a lot, because I knew what kind of musical talent I had. We had tape recorders in my day. I could sing into a tape recorder and could realize that I did not sound anything at all like the people that I would want to emulate, were I to be a musician. I did not have the three and a half octave voice range of Glen Campbell. I did not have the song writing ability or the guitar skills of a James Taylor. I had other musical idols that probably some of you wouldn’t think about or recall. But, what really scared me was that I pinned almost all of my hopes on the fact that my father, above all people, had told me, “You can do anything.” I found out that evening in the boat, that my father had no more idea in the world what I could do than I had.

The fact that none of us knew what I might do for a living didn’t lessen the family pressure that you would go out and get a job. If you were going to be something, you had to work, you had to do something to pull your own weight. But, I knew that I could not be a musician.

Now, my wife tells me that I made a mistake. She said that she had none of this confidence problem when it came to her musical ability. She said, “Your mistake was that when you practised and sang, you used a microphone. If you had sang into a hairbrush like I did, you wouldn’t have had any doubt about how good you sounded.”

I started looking at career options, and I ruled out musician. Though I went to church, I ruled out being a preacher, because I did not have the calling. I looked at a career in radio, and I realized that most people who worked in radio made $75 a week, and that only the really good ones—the anchorman and the network broadcasters—made
$100,000 a year. It wasn’t that I needed $100,000 a year, but I needed a lot more than $75 a week.

I latched on to some other ideas that I began to share with some people that I knew in the Federation. One of them, I talked with on a regular basis was a man named Carl Slavens. I said to him one day, “You know, I think I have figured out that my next task is to write a book about my life.”

He tried to suppress a chuckle and said, “You’re going to write a book about your life? You’re sixteen, right? Let me suggest that when you do something in your life worth writing about, that you then worry about writing about it.”

I can’t tell you whether at that time I loved or hated that man. Maybe I held both of those things simultaneously, because, you see, I really thought that I was something worth writing a book about. Besides, a book might pay something, and that might be my career. I hated the fact that he was kind of laughing at the idea that I was going to write a book about me—the bicycle rider, the horse rider, the motorcycle rider, the fellow who actually learned to wash his face after he brushed his teeth. But, I loved him too, because what he was suggesting was that, if I played my cards right in life, there might actually be something to write about. I liked that. Maybe, my book did not have to be about Gary, the blind hero, but Gary, the man who could compete in the world that included the world of the sighted.

So, where does the Federation come into all of this? The Federation I learned about big time when I saw a television show about guide dogs. It was called, “Atta Girl, Kelly,” and it was the first exposure I’d ever had to guide dogs. I decided that I wanted to know more about them, than that little television show would tell me. I asked around and found that there were a couple of fellows—there was one fellow who had a guide dog who’d be willing to talk with me and his name was Jim Couts. He was an old fellow, by which I mean, compared to what I was then. He was probably close to my age now. I called him up and he talked with me about guide dogs. After he talked awhile about guide dogs, he would say, “Now, you know, it’s real important if you get a guide dog that you do obedience. Like, even when I go to the convention of the National Federation of the Blind, which is the largest organization of blind people in the country, we draw people from everywhere…,” and, he’d go off on talking on this tangent, and then he’d get back to guide dogs and tell me how you make the dog sit,
lie down, and fetch, and all that sort of thing.

Then I’d say, “Well, what about grooming?”

“Oh, it’s important that you groom them. Even when I go to the convention of the National Federation of the Blind. Let me tell you, we had congressman such and such there from Utah, and we had Senator Dole…,” and, he just went on and on about this Federation. Finally, I got tired of it. I was getting a lot less guide dog information than I was Federation. I suggested to him, “You know, you’re a very busy man, being in the office supply business. Maybe, you could give me the name of somebody else that I could talk with and take some of this burden off you. I just want to know about guide dogs.”

He said, “Yeah, I know. It probably would be good for you to find somebody closer to your age to talk with. I’ve got this fellow you can talk with. His name is Melvin Lewis.”

He gave me Melvin’s number, and I hung up the phone and smiled to myself. I thought, “This is the end of this Federation stuff. I’m going to get guide dog 24X7.” So, I call up this Melvin Lewis, and in fact, he’s a young law student who has a German Shepherd named Belle, and he’s all interested in telling me about her—and then, he starts talking with me about how, if I want to see Belle, I should come to a chapter meeting of the National Federation of the Blind. Turns out, he was the Kansas City chapter president.

I wanted to see the dog, but there had to be something easier than going to see a group of blind people. But, the more I talked with him, the more I realized that probably that was the only way I was going to see Belle. He said, “You ought to come,”

“I don’t have any transportation.”

“I’ll get you transportation.”

“Well, Friday nights are bad.”

I should have anticipated the next question, “Why? What do you normally do on Friday nights?”

“Well, watch television.”

That didn’t buy me much. “Look, man, they have donuts at the meeting and everything.”

That did it. “Okay. If you’re going to give me a ride, I’ll come to the meeting. What kind of donuts, and will the dog really be there?”

I saw the meetings, and I saw the dogs, and I ate the donuts, and I wasn’t all that impressed with the Federation. But, I was really impressed with Melvin Lewis. I respected him. He was doing something I might want to do. More importantly, he was showing me that I could be something, other than a musician or a stay-at-home ham radio operator. Still, I was bored at the meetings and wondered if there was a way to stay in good with Melvin without the Federation. But, when those wise old Federation members realized I might leave, because I was bored, they elected me to an office, playing on my ego and sense of guilt. They elected me as the corresponding secretary. In that chapter, this was a do-nothing job, but if I had the job of corresponding secretary, I had to come to the meetings. Having an elected position made people, like Melvin Lewis, proud of me, and I wanted them to be proud of me, in the same way that I was proud of them. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I got involved in the Federation. I started to meet people who told me that my narrow outlook about how I couldn’t do anything if I couldn’t be a musician, or a preacher, or a radio disc jockey, was very limiting. They, actually, had this radical proposition, that you could do the average job, in the average place of business, with the right training and opportunity, and they said this not only applied to them, but to me. They told me they knew where I could get the training and they would do their best to see that I had the opportunity. And, what amazed me about these blind people was that they were people who were movers and shakers, just like my father – and, I wanted to grow up to be like my father, blind or not.

Kenneth Jernigan was a mover and shaker. He could put somebody up on the stage, they could give their speech, he could reveal it for the hogwash that it was. He could do it all politely, but very firmly, and I thought, “That guy’s like my father. That’s wonderful.”

Well, the Federation had that same message that my friend, Carl, had about the book, which is that: we’ll give you a reward when you’re worthy of a reward, but mostly, you got to do something that is different than just existing, to be recognized in a positive way by us. That was very liberating, because again, it sent a message that I could do something of value and that they weren’t giving up on me. They just weren’t going to give me false flattery.

One of the questions they made me ask and answer was fundamental: as a blind person, was I shafted or was I challenged? They made me come to believe that I was challenged and, if it turned out I was shafted, that would be my doing.

So, how have I fared? Well, my Dad likes to tell the story that I told you earlier about being told that he’d have to take care of me for the rest of his life. And, the truth is that, financially, I’m probably better off now than my two brothers and my sister, because being blind gave me a shot at a college education, it gave me a shot at materials that

they’ve never had the chance to read, it gave me something very wonderful—this contract between rehabilitation and blind people. Now I’m not famous. I’m not rich. There is not much chance that I’m going to be immortalized through history. But, I have my own family of four. I have a decent job, maybe even better than a decent job—a good job—on most days, I have an excellent job where I am trusted, respected, and appreciated. In real life, it doesn’t get much better than that. I pay my taxes. I complain about my taxes like everybody else. It’s a pretty darn good thing for a guy who was afraid he might end up doing nothing but living off those taxes.

I love the Federation because it helped give me the life that I have, the education that I have, the rehabilitation that I have, the belief that I can do my job and be a contributing part of society. If the Federation did all of that for me, then I have no choice, if I have a conscience, which I do, in deciding that I’m going to pay back those people who did so much work for me. Not only am I going to try to pay them back—Jacobus tenBroek, Kenneth Jernigan, Marc Maurer, Jim Couts, Melvin Lewis, and all of the people who worked hard, either to build what we have or to get me involved. I want to do that for them, but I also want to pay it forward. I want people to have it at least as good as I’ve had it. I have not a thing to complain about in my life that other people don’t complain about. I urge you to do what you can to reach out to people–not to make them wait until they’re sixteen or eighteen to have role models—but, to show them from day one, that being blind is a nuisance, it’s an inconvenience, but it can be as positive as it is negative, and it all depends whether we create the opportunity that makes sure that people have the training that they need to live normal and enriching lives. I thank God for the life I have. I thank my parents for the life I have. I thank the Federation for the life I have. Last but not least, I thank you guys for listening.