Rescued by Records 5.

When I lost my sight in late December of 1959, people acted as if it would be only a matter of weeks, months at most before I’d be seeing again as before and all of this would be like a rather long, bad dream. My dad told me that he had the car in tip-top shape so I should be very good and do everything the Dr. told me so I could get to see again then we’d go see Chuck Odgen.

In the months following my first surgery I was hospitalized twice more for shorter stays, the second time early in my First Grade year. The purpose of these operations was to inject a fluid called Vitreous, which fills the eyeball, into my eye. The fluid, recovered from cadavers, was supposed to push back the scar tissue that was impairing my vision. At about age 30, I consulted an ophthalmologist for a routine exam. He said, upon hearing of my operations, that this technique was an erroneous notion of the time in question and had been discredited. During one of the stays I handcuffed Barbara the nurse to the bars of my bed, using my toy sheriff’s handcuffs but the surgery made no improvement in my sight.

As I’ve hinted, I was subject to flights of fancy and at the time I had no trouble convincing myself that my vision was improving, if very slowly. And as Dr. Topinka had said, the scar tissue floated around and I could see more at some times than at others. There was one occasion when I saved myself from a collision with a very nasty pillar at school, using my residual vision. I had so convinced myself that I would someday see again in fact, that friends I had at age ten or eleven and met again in adulthood would sometimes say "You mean you can’t see yet?"

Meanwhile, things were darker than before and more limited than before. Having been released first from the hospital then from the couch, there remained the question How was I to fill my days? Mom called the kindergarten I’d been attending and asked if it would be possible for me to participate in some way, if only to listen to the stories and poems and join in the singing? The kindergarten official told Mom that my presence would cause too many questions in the minds of the students. (Of course curiosity among students definitely could not be allowed!)

Mom got in touch with some school authorities who dealt specifically with the blind and soon we were receiving a lot of information and accessing new resources. My knowledge about blindness was sketchy except for what I was now gaining first hand. About a year before my accident I was inspecting a small, metal object, a paperclip or some such on a particular occasion. I was just inspecting the thing or perhaps trying to decide how it might be used to join a little metal truck to its trailer. I was holding it too close to my eyes, or at least Mom thought so. "Do you want to be blind?" she asked, then explaining, "to not be able to see."

Shortly thereafter Ruth Johnson took me over to meet a neighbor of hers, Mrs. Strum. I’d met her before but never been in the Strum house. On the way Ruth began explaining that Mr. Strum couldn’t see.

"Is he blind?" I asked. Ruth said this was so.

As we entered their house, Ruth pointed out that they had no TV because Mr. Strum couldn’t see it. The Strums were an elderly Danish couple considerably older than Ruth herself. Mr. Strum seemed to be blind all right but also had other things wrong with him. Basically he was just very old. He was lying on the couch, not saying or doing much of anything. When I tried to speak to him the women kept telling me I’d have to speak up.

Mrs. Strum put a hearing aid in his ear, saying "This will help you hear better." I don’t recall if I ever got much response out of him.

I’d had a bad dream about a lady who was being harassed by a cruel man who was trying to take her clothes off or something equally objectionable. When she protested his behavior, he threatened to lock her in jail with "The Three Blind Men," possibly an aberration of the Three Stooges. These men lived in a dark jail cell, wore dark clothing and could be counted upon to "pick on" the poor lady.

My meeting with Mr. Strum hadn’t done much to dispel a certain sense of dread gained from my dream or perhaps elsewhere. For the time being and for a good long time to come, I wasn’t really blind. I had just been injured and would be this way for a while until I got better. Other people may have been born that way and were Truly Blind.

I learned that people who couldn’t see, sometimes used canes to keep from running into things. I never handled a mobility cane until about age 15 and when young, had imagined holding the thing, probably by it’s crook, like an enormously elongated pistol and probably leveled at about the same height. The only step I must negotiate by myself was up and down our red-stained sundeck behind the house. The Magnuses had three or four steps leading to their front door but now I was being led from the car by some one who could see. I didn’t realize therefore till much later, that a cane was used as much to keep from falling or stepping unexpectedly off things as to keep from running into things. I also heard that blind people read with their fingers, using a system called Braille. Mom thought the Braille dots would possibly approximate the shapes of print letters. This turned out not to be so. Shortly after hearing of the existence of Braille, I felt a card embossed with Braille characters. I was affected pretty much like most sighted folks on their first exposure. Braille seemed totally incomprehensible. Perhaps Blind People could read it. I wasn’t at all sure that I could!

Jim Walker, our insurance agent with Allstate, somehow got a hold of a Braille writer for me on temporary loan and a quantity of Braille paper. I spent some time practicing on it, mostly writing whole rows of Gs which are easy to make.

One day Mom asked me how I’d like to go to Kindergarten again but with a different group. It seemed to me much easier just to stick with the old group, but there was a kindergarten class just for people who couldn’t see, so why not give it a try? Here began a long history of disgruntlement between my family, Mom in particular, and the program for the blind in the Seattle Public schools. In short, we weren’t very happy with the single day Mom and I spent at B. F. Day Elementary, where the kindergarten for the blind was held. I don’t recall having much impression myself at the time, but when we got home, Mom was pretty vociferous.

It appeared that I was so far ahead of the other children that there was absolutely no point in me returning to that place. The class was run like a nursery school According to Mom and was dangerous besides.

This latter had I believe, mostly to do with an incident on the monkey bars. I had never seen or touched climbing bars before. There was an indoor set in the classroom and though somewhat uncertain at first, I found it was rather exciting to raise myself off the floor in this manner. I’d only gotten up three or four rungs when I was met by a girl named Karen, coming from the other side.

Karen was somewhat mentally retarded and in all the years I knew her, she tended to charge about rather rapidly, her head lowered, treating human obstacles as things which could be just shoved aside. This isn’t to say that Karen wasn’t essentially a nice person. She was. Sensing now that I was in her way, Karen began matter-of-factly shoving me off the monkeybars, which caused Mother to fly into action, rescuing me from this onslaught and from this child who was not only blind, as if that wasn’t already bad enough, but retarded as well.

That was the end of Special Kindergarten for me, at least for the present, and back home I went. My friends were mostly all by now in school at least part of the time and I had conspicuously little to do.

One day Mom asked me if I’d like to receive records with stories on them from the library. I liked records so I said yes. If I’d said no I’m sure I’d have other chances to consider the matter but as a child this decision seems of the truly momentous variety like when I said that Chris could stay with us.

In 1931 something called the Pratt-Smoot Bill was approved by Congress. It said that books in Braille could be sent free of charge to all 48 states of the Union. Three years later the program was expanded to include talking books. Inkprint books were read in their entirety first upon wax masters I believe then the books were copied onto plastic records. Early talking books were recorded on 12-inch record discs, (the kind with grooves,) at 33 1/3 Revolutions per minute. This gave 17 ½ minutes of playing time on a side. Even short books could take up six or eight records, though children’s book might occupy only one record side.

I think the very first recorded book I read was Wonder Tales of Dogs and Cats, which I read many times thereafter. The library did not keep inordinately good track of which books a person had or had not received so we tended to get a lot of recordings over a second or maybe several times. Early on I got a stack of Dr. Suess books, Yurtle the Turtle, Circus Magurcus, Horton Hatches The Egg, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Ever after we called beef roast Roast Beast in our house. I used to stand out in the back yard and call for Five Thousand, Six Hundred and Seven turtles with which to build my throne.

Our Regional Library for the blind at that time, served all of the sightless populations of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska as well as Washington. With a territory like that and long, long before the use of computer databases, the librarians can perhaps be forgiven for sending duplicate offerings or some that weren’t particularly age appropriate.

Lets make it clear that none of the books I received were at all questionable by the standards of the day. Children might be roasted alive in a witch’s oven or sailors eaten alive by six-headed monsters but not even in the books for teenagers was sex mentioned, or underwear or toilets or bad language. The books did come at a variety of age levels though. One day I might have the mad adventures of the Mixed-up Twins, the next I might be reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln which was accessible enough for me in Fourth Grade but a bit over my head in Kindergarten.

One of those books that was a bit beyond me at Five, though fascinating nonetheless, and which I reread and rereread a couple of years later, was The White Falcon. It was the story of a ten-year-old boy named Jonny who lived with his family on the Kentucky Frontier in the 1780s. Jonny ran out of the cabin one day so as not to be forced to baby-sit his baby sister, and was captured by Ottawa Indians. He was taken north and sold to a band of Chipawa. An old woman and a childless man take an interest in him. Jonny is taught to hunt, fight, and live generally as a Native, how to blacken his face with ashes so as not to be identified as white. Jonny, grown to manhood and now called White Falcon, becomes a warrior, marries, sees things from the Indian point of view. He refuses an offer to live again with white settlers and eventually becomes chief. Heady stuff for a kindergartner and absolutely riveting.

There really was a retelling of the Odyssey with most of the gore left in. There were Household Tales which scared the pee out of and Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Anderson which depressed hell out of me. There were also Beverly Cleary’s Henry and Ribsey books; a book called the Great Wheel, about a youth called Con who helped build a Ferris wheel. There was a book about homeless people in Paris, an Indian boy in the Andes of Peru, tales of Jonny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan.

I received another of Ms. Cleary’s books as well; one of those age inappropriate books and probably gender inappropriate too. It was called Jean and Jonny, about a fifteen-year-old girl who was asked one evening to dance by a tall, handsome but unreliable older boy named Jonny. Jean and Jonny go out once but he stands her up the next couple of times. She is crushed but at the school Tolo for which girls can invite, she asks Jonny’s plain but sweet friend Warren. Warren is flattered at being invited, shows up on time, has a nice sense of humor and even knows how to make milk shakes.

At the end of the book Jean is gazing at a picture of Jonny thinking that though their relationship is over she will never forget him. When I was dating I often thought of poor Jean, waiting for a phone call, for a car in the street outside. I tried to be more of a Warren than a Jonny.

One day a book of records arrived and Mom said, "I think there’s some music with this one." Indeed there was. It was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a cooperative effort of The American Printing House for the Blind, based in Louisville Kentucky and Walt Disney Productions. There was a narrator for the story line but the voices of the characters from the Disney movie which I believe was then under production, as well as the entire musical score. The book was three records long; making it a bit over 90 minutes and it transported me to a land or wonder and magic, terror and love. I also fell desperately for Snow White and dreamed of her for perhaps the next two years. I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t somewhere, a person like Snow White. I would marry her and be king with her as queen. By now I had a crown as well as a wooden sword.

Another book which was highly memorable was the already mentioned Follow My Leader, about an eleven-year-old boy named Jimmy who lost his sight due to a careless accident with a firecracker. He began learning Braille and how to use a cane under the tutelage of a caseworker/instructor and is soon sent to New Jersey in order to train with a Seeing Eye dog. Jimmy learns not only how to walk with his dog, Leader, but also how to cut his food and organize his clothes and other belongings. Perhaps most importantly he learns how not to hate the boy who accidentally blinded him and end the series of nightmares he’d been having. This made me stop and think whether I’d ever hated My Guest for accidentally blinding me. My answer then as now is no, I never hated her. What happened was unintentional. My earnest wish is that she will never learn what she did.

At the end of the story Jimmy joins his old scout troop now with Leader who ends up making a valuable contribution on their next campout. Four-legged Eyeglasses was what Jimmy often called Leader and what I modified slightly to nickname my little sister, who had yet to be adopted.

Mom said that even when I was away she’d put my talking books on and listen to them while doing the housework. Dad started listening to them after work in the wee hours, before going to bed. He said he’d nearly finished the life of Abraham Lincoln when Mom shipped it back to the library.

There were two other books, actually read in the First Grade that were particularly significant to me. One was Peter Pan by James Barry, which provided me with day and night dream material till I was in 3^rd Grade or so. The other was Howard Pyle’s Book Of Pirates—Fiction fact and fantasy of the Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main. I approached this book with some trepidation since pirates were portrayed as rather evil in Peter Pan and elsewhere. The tales of daring, battles by land and sea and of buried treasure compiled in this volume were however, the most exciting stuff I’d read so far. Considerable historical material accompanied the story lines and I gained a life-long fascination with the 17^th Century. This period, though it seems grimmer and grimmer the more I learn about it, was nevertheless, an epochal period in world exploration, societal development, politics, science and technology. Howard Pyle who was one of my best beloved childhood authors, presented pirates as persons with ambition, courage, skillful, often heroic and in their own ways sometimes even patriotic. I still loved Westerns, I do today, but my interests were turned notably toward the sea, the 1600s and gallant deeds with pistol and cutlass.

Early on I became very familiar with most of the voices who were now reading to me. Jim Vansicle, who Read Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, was one of the best in my opinion. I never learned very much about Mr. Vansicle but I’d guess he came from somewhere on the Northern East Coast. He had a sort of Down East quality to his voice, which reminded one I thought of seamen and coastal farmers.

Through my records I also met Burt Blackwell, William Gladden, Milton Metz, Terry Hayes Salles, who appeared in several Perry Mason Episodes. I occasionally hear her voice on old reruns and this never fails to bring a smile to my face. Later I met Alexander Scourby reading books also by Howard Pyle, now it was Robin Hood and King Arthur. There was also Robert Donley, Alan Haines, Andy Chapelle, Leon Janney, Yvonne Faire Tessla and many more. As with the TV, I had my own ideas about how a record player must work. I had of course heard people’s voices over the phone, but had trouble understanding how a story or a song could be stored on a piece of glass or plastic. My mother told me that one of the talking book readers we’d heard also sang. That set me wondering what would happen if this person was reading a talking book to me while someone else wanted to listen to him singing, possibly on TV. Wouldn’t there be some sort of conflict?

I had a sketchy but troubling notion that the record player was really a sort of telephone and when I put a record on the phonograph, this somehow communicated with a central station where the reader, singer or musician in question would be summoned to come perform for me. I was ignorant of time zones and since I read mostly in the daytime it was conceivable that the readers were all at work when I wanted them. Sure it was a dumb idea but I was five and six here and I began to feel downright guilty when I made some man or woman read to me hour after hour. Some readers had a characteristic way of sighing before beginning a new record side, as if they’d been doing this for a loong time. In those days an entire seventeen and a half minutes reading must be completed all at once or the entire side had to be done over again. They weren’t yet using magnetic tape for masters as they do today and you don’t record over wax or plastic grooves. The job must’ve been quite taxing then even more than it is today.

Eventually I proved to myself that words and other sounds were really, really right there in the material of the record. With the record player turned entirely off, I spun the turntable with my fingernail in the record groove. This should negate any plausible connection with a remote sending station. By listening very closely, I could just barely make out the sound of words from the record. I could now listen guilt free.

Well not entirely. From the beginning, my record listening was a kind of two-edged gift. It was so enjoyable that I seemed to be doing it too much. "All he wants to do is sit on his butt and listen to records all day long!" was a frequent refrain of my mother. When first I began receiving the talking books, Mom and Dad changed the records for me. Later when I learned to operate the phonograph for myself, there were fairly strict rules imposed regarding how long I could continue listening at a given time. One hour was two records more or less and I might be allowed that much time in an evening, providing I’d done my homework. We’re leaping ahead to Third and Fourth grade here. During Summer or on weekends things might be different but excessive record use one day even with permission could lead to reduced privileges the next. Of course denial of privileges altogether for a day or a week was a painful addition to the list of punishments a parent could impose. I used to fantasize about an alternate world in which kids got spanked when they were good and were made to listen to talking books when they were bad. I’d trade places with a boy my age from that world I thought, then all I’d have to do is be naughty all of the time. Perhaps my first science fiction story concept?

In my mother’s mind especially, there was an intrinsic and qualitative difference between Reading and listening to records. Reading connoted turning pages, moving fingers, practicing Braille. She had a point because learning Braille was important and I didn’t do very well with it until about Fourth Grade. Even in Junior High when I said I’d Read something and Mom suspected it had been via talking book, she’d say sharply "You mean you listened to it on one of your records."

Listening to records connoted hibernating in a stifling room during the summer while normal kids were out getting fresh air and sunshine and of course, sitting on one’s butt. It is true that I spent a good deal of time then and later, inside, listening to talking books. This is partly because I was and still am a bookish sort of person. It’s also true that there really wasn’t all that much for me to do then outside. I had a set of swings most of the time I was growing up, but how much time can or should a kid spend swinging back and forth? I did a lot of it, still enjoy my Martha Stewart yardswing very much, but whether sitting on a chair inside or on the wooden seat of a swing, the seat of my pants was still involved.

I liked to build things but had only rudimentary skills with a hammer, saw and drill. I think I could have had more tools, some sort of work area and more useful materials in order to do things away from the phonograph, which were acceptably non butt sitting.

The phonograph could have been moved outside in the summer, at the end of an extension cord. It wasn’t that heavy. I soon had a very rugged, dependable talking book player supplied by the Library For The Blind. The massive stereo console could stay where it was.

The fact is my parents just weren’t very creative about coming up with things for me to do and life at home was pretty boring without books. This isn’t anybody’s fault in particular. I just wish I could go back and give my elders pointers on how to occupy a curious, creative and frankly quite intelligent blind child.

I had tinker toys and Lincoln logs. Eventually I had Lego’s. I enjoyed all of them thoroughly. I would have loved an erector set or any sort of motor with which to experiment. I think I’d have enjoyed a window sill garden or a segment of flowerbed. I liked to sew and was fascinated with anything to do with textiles, sewing, knitting, crocheting, spinning, weaving. A spindle and a distaff would have provided hours of entertainment inside or out, especially if I could knit too. Things electrical and mechanical fascinated me. A pair of telegraphs and fifty feet of wire could have taught me a number of useful things. A hobby electric motor, bell wire, nails, dry cell batteries and some pushbuttons could have given me hours of instructive work-play and yes I think I could have made use of all these things by age seven or so. A simple work bench, a saw guide and some elementary instruction could have taught me to do much more than simply pound odd scraps of wood together and hope that it would turn out to look like something. I do not really mean to be overly critical of my parents. These are merely suggestions for other people who find themselves in my position, or theirs.

As I’ve mentioned in other chapters, there were issues of gender appropriateness associated with some of the play activities I wanted to undertake. I think this relaxed somewhat after I lost my sight. Still, aside from the basic issue of cost which was ever present though Dad always made good money, everything seemed to be too messy, too much trouble, too hard to explain and too unlikely to be done properly. (Control issues we call them now.)

When I entered grade school and Mom had more opportunities to observe other blind children, there was an increasing tendency and naturally enough I suppose, to compare me with them. "Marty Lancer plays with cars and trucks like normal boys." Marty, who we’ll meet a bit later, was born blind. Playing with cars and trucks seemed to be a play panacea for young boys and while I had my sight I enjoyed playing with them. Something about being blind now and having come to it much later than most of the other kids I was about to meet, had made things which merely rolled across the floor highly boring for me. I still liked horses and harnesses and hitchable wagons. I probably would have liked a toy car or truck I could take apart and reassemble. There was a toy clock on the market at that time, which a kid could take apart and reassemble, The Tick-tock Clock. I wanted that item very much but evidently didn’t ask loudly enough or nobody took my wish seriously. In general, my playscape seemed to have been internalized. I wanted either real experiences or play limited only by my own imagination.

My sixth birthday was a notable event in that it was the first such occasion for which people planned and shopped with my blindness in mind. There was some very creative thought which went into the gifts I received. Jimmy, recalling that through the White Falcon book I’d become interested in trapping, bought me two mousetraps. Wendy, a neighbor girl with whom Jim and I played sometimes, bought me a rubber bowie knife, which had quite good detail to it. Wendy’s sister, Dana, gave me two handkerchiefs, one blue, one red. These served me as bandanas, sashes and pirate headgear for years. Somebody gave me $400,000 worth of play money with which to raise the stakes in my floating poker games. Somebody else gave me two of those crank-type music boxes with storybooks attached, giving the words to the song each box player. They were Jack and Jill and Hickory Dickory Dock, I believe.

Grandma Lois gave me a new deck of cards with western characters on them. My sister Lois gave me a novel about Bret Maverick. I finally had that one read to me by my wife when I was in my late twenties!

I’m sure there were other small gifts, but these are certainly representative. Many of these things I had for years.

The biggest present, from my parents, was an Army set, including a plastic helmet, a belt canteen, mess kit with utensils and most notably a pup tent which we set up in the back yard at the edge of the sundeck.

Mom baked me a lion cake with toasted coconut mane, red candy nose and mouth and a licorice whiptail. She asked my guests from which end of the cake she should start cutting first. "The head, the head!" a couple of the girls said.

"No," Jimmy countered, "if we want Grandma Lois to see it (her arrival had been delayed,) we better start cutting from the rear end."

I’d been an Indian recently, wearing a feather and cardboard headdress with a rubber band in back to hold it on and Brave Chief printed across the front. I carried my bow or sometimes my Winchester rifle and rubbed red modeling clay over my hands and face, fancying I was coloring my skin. (I’d never seen an actual Native American and all of my plastic toy figures were done in a bright, cherry red.) I’m sure my attempts at face tinting were unsuccessful since otherwise Mom would’ve raised bloody hell!

With the arrival of the Army gear I gained a new persona for a while and indirectly, a glimmer of what I might be when I grew up. My helmet had Sergeant stripes on it. I knew Dad had been a Sergeant in the Army so this was really neat. I took a largish metal dump truck which Uncle Tick had sent me as a gift for some special occasion or other (this was one of the indoor variety) and fitted a little folding stool in the bed. On the cab I mounted my pom-pom machinegun, holding the whole thing together with a spare belt. I was small enough then that I could actually sit comfortably on this contrivance and scoot about the house. This was my army tank.

One day I suggested to Mom that I should be an army sergeant when I grew up. "No," she said, "I think you should be a lawyer." She added that I had a good brain and should not have to make my living with my hands.

This exchange was interesting on several levels. To my parents, being a Dr. or lawyer, possibly a judge or dentist were the obvious ambitions for a smart person. I had yet to compile any significant academic history but since I had been Very young people had generally concurred that I was an intelligent child. Science then wasn’t the Societal Phenomenon I think that it became in the sixties. College professors were strange, know-it-all types who could never quite come down to earth with the rest of us. Law was a profession a blue-collar Dad and Mom could get behind and support. Lawyers made lots of money and everybody needed one sometime or other.

Lawyers enjoyed a better popular perception then, than now. Perry Mason was a lawyer and everybody respected him.

Mom had heard about a blind man who was practicing law, so it was obvious that I should be able to do that too, someday. Perhaps this was a first admission that I might be blind for a long time? I’ve often wondered if Law would have been my parents’ career choice for me if I’d retained my sight.

Had I been able to pursue my interests in visual art and in buildings, I rather think I would have become an architect, or I might well have done something else entirely. For the time being, Alfego Bakka in the Disney series was a lawyer. I imagined myself riding horseback or driving a buckboard, wearing a brace of pistols, fighting for the down-trodden with words or with bullets.

I talked a lot about becoming a lawyer and learned that being an attorney seemed to require a lot of books. I collected a fairly large prospective clientele among our friends and relations.

I was also spending a lot of time making designs in my head for steamboats, stage coaches, buckboard wagons, bunkhouses, a little shack I wanted to build in the yard. Once I drew a plan of the playhouse I wanted and Mom acted as if I might be able to build it sometime. Whether this was anything serious or just an offhand validation of my initiative in making the picture I don’t know.

That summer I started raising fishing worms in a two-pound coffee can. Under the direction of Jim Walker, the insurance man who’d become a buddy of mine, I added to the soil the worms lived in, corn meal, beef fat, coffee grounds, shredded newspaper and crushed red brick which was supposed to color the worms and evidently did.

Pam, Fritzie, Vicky and I continued playing on the swings together. Fritzie and Vicky, like myself, professed to be in love with Snow White and we had long wrangles over who would get her for keeps if she could be found. Through the Snow White story I had become interested in the subject of burial. I don’t know that I was interested so much in the process of dying, though I thought it would be interesting to find out what it felt like to be dead. The subject of coffins was particularly interesting, since when Snow White had bitten the poison apple she had been placed in a glass-lidded coffin. Unable to accept that she was truly dead, the poor grieving dwarves had kept her so, all through the winter, in order to go on looking at her beauty. Of course the Handsome Prince had shown up, kissed Snow White, knocking the piece of apple out of her mouth and causing her to awaken and sit up. I’d assumed that this handsome Prince guy could be shouldered aside by a better hero. He didn’t even appear to carry a gun!

Snow White is a horrible story for children, really. It’s been said that it’s originally about necrophelia as Cinderella is about foot love. The fetishistic earmarks are fairly plain in both stories. Since I was pretty well emersed in the Snow White story I thought I should have a coffin on hand in case I was called upon to participate in the sadder portion of her saga. I set about therefore to build a coffin out of the spare lumber in our back yard.

Mom got wind of the project and gave both Stacy Blodgett from next door and myself a tongue-lashing on the subject of morbid play. After that I pretty much kept my ideas about coffin building to myself and the desire thankfully passed soon enough. When on our next trip to Montana though, we visited Grandma Seat on her Idaho farm, I spent much of my time burying my toy soldiers in obscure crannies of her living room. Grandma took this, like most else, in stride, telling me about the horse-drawn funeral wagons they had when she was young.

This time Dad was going to Billings with us and though there were again two kids in the back seat, we were at least of the same family.

I didn’t know if Aunt Margaret and the family knew that I couldn’t see anymore. Nobody acted very surprised about it when I showed up. I’m sure it had been well discussed beforehand though. The first night, Dave and I shared a bed and we lay there talking about the last visit and what had been happening in Billings since. I reminded him of when he’d hit me the previous summer and he promised he’d never do that again. I told him I was sure I deserved what I’d gotten. I had officially become John Slaughter some weeks previously but I allowed my relatives to continue calling me Maverick, at least at first since one must allow out-of-towners some opportunity to catch up with events.

A cab driver of my acquaintance would continue calling me John until I was in Fourth Grade.

Dave told me about the attempt of some boys to make a boat out of a wooden trunk and rafts, which had been built. He said he’d make me a wooden bowie knife with a sharp edge to it.

I’d told Dad on one occasion that Uncle Jerry worked in the daytime. Dad said, "Your Uncle Jerry is a plutocrat." I don’t know if Dad had a clear notion of what a plutocrat is or not. It’s used so often as a term of derision, to describe someone perceived as lazy or unjustly privileged that it’s easy to forget that the word means capitalist. I thought it just meant somebody who worked day shift so back in Billings now and drawing on my elephantine sort of things I’d wanted to tell everybody, I said "Uncle Jerry, my dad says you’re a plutocrat."

"Oh, you’re calling me names are you?" Jerry replied, not sounding too upset about it.

"I was just telling you," I said a bit sullenly, thinking he really could be a bit more grateful to find out the proper name for what he did.

"Don’t you nag Jerry to build you some project again this summer," Mom had warned me, but for Heaven’s sake! that was half the reason for going to Montana. I’d had about ten things I wanted built but my wants had changed about weekly over the last month or so. By the time we got there I seemed to be mostly into wooden go-carts.

Dave and I argued over designs for a while and I tried to build one car myself. Then Jerry built another for me. Jerry’s car was essentially a platform mounted on casters, with sides and a back and the front open. It could be pulled with a rope or pushed from behind. During the assembly operation I learned about using screws for joining pieces of plywood. I also learned about tinsnips because we intended making Montana license plates for my car, which I named Speedy. Dave also made the promised Bowie knife, though without the edge.

The car wasn’t as sturdy as the venerable cat house. The sides and back fell off within a year or two and Chris and I used it as a means of moving things around or sometimes as a sort of scooter board. In effect and quite by accident, we’d invented the skateboard years before its popularity.

That summer, Dave who pitched on the high school Varsity Baseball team, introduced me to The Grand Old Game and gave me my first physical training since I’d lost my sight, and just about the first ever, save for some games and circle dancing in Kindergarten. Dave required me to run around the back yard with him or Steve, to do girl push-ups and to raise successively heavy bats over my head. He also taught me to hit a ball.

Dave of course threw very straight when he wanted to. He taught me to swing the bat in a level arc, then taking his position he’d say "one, two, three" and he’d pitch. I’d swing on three and quite often I’d connect, smacking the ball across the yard. I do not like spectator sports particularly. I used to wrestle a fair amount and did some competitive swimming and I still enjoy walking, lap swimming and toning exercises. Baseball will always have a small, soft spot in my heart ,though I seldom turn on a game intentionally.

As it turned out, Dave would be travelling west with us to spend a month in Seattle. Lois would be gone for the summer (and perhaps longer) so her room would be available for Dave to use.

While I was visiting my Aunt Margaret, Lois was visiting hers. Lois’s Dad, Mom’s first husband was Keith Hackett. He came from a somewhat rustic family of hill people living in the Washington-Idaho border area. They were all mechanically inclined, at least the men, and had been involved in mining as well as ranching.

Grandpa Hackett the patriarch of the clan had been a gold prospector, inventor and practical engineer. He invented screen boxes for his outhouse, in which flies were trapped and prevented from bugging the occupant. He operated sluice boxes to extract gold from a frigid creek near Coer d’Alene. He submerged an earthenware crock in the same stream and used it as a refrigerator in summer, a freezer in winter, to store bear meat and other supplies.

Grandpa Hackett had spent a number of years worth of spare time, building what he claimed was a perpetual motion machine. Like many eccentric inventors he was very concerned that someone would steal his highly valuable machine or even get a look at it and steal the idea behind it. A shotgun was always in evidence and the machine was hidden under a canvas cover when not under construction.

It’s a bit outside the scope of this chapter to explain why a perpetual motion machine won’t work, but for those who enjoy thought experiments, Imagine a ball rolling down an inclined plane, which strikes a spring at the bottom and is sent rolling back uphill again. The ball will never get all the way back up the plane because of friction. If you could somehow get the ball all the way back up the plane and with a little extra push left over besides with which to do anything at all; you’d have a perpetual motion machine because you’d be making energy out of nothing at all! If you figure out how to do that, let me know.

Most such machines appear to work somewhat or almost and would work a lot better if a million bucks or so could be invested in the development phase. That sort of perpetual motion machine you should sell to the National Inquirer.

I don’t know if Gramps ever looked for investment capital. I doubt it. He told his son, one of Keith’s brothers, that the machine operated on the principle of Balance. (so think now of a rocking chair, which never stops and pushes something at the end of each rock or stroke.) So far as I know, the device is still somewhere in the Los Angeles area.

All of the boys in the family, taking to heart their kinship with the Wright Brothers, had learned to fly. When Grandpa Hackett died, they personally scattered his ashes over the mountains of Northern Idaho. Like our family, theirs had scattered a good bit too and Keith’s sister Margaret had ended up in Hawaii. About the time Lois was graduating high school and I would have finished kindergarten, an unpopular boyfriend started showing on the scene, (unpopular with Mom, Dad and Keith.)

Dad and Keith split the price of a plane ticket and presented Lois with a trip to Honolulu for her graduation present. She stayed the summer living with her Aunt Margaret and working in a dress shop with several Chinese women. They reportedly turned their noses up at Lois for being white and a mainlander but relented somewhat when they found that she, being taller than they, could make shelf stocking go much more quickly.

I was at the airport when Lois took off and heard that she had a seat on the wing. I thought this meant that my sister was flying across the Pacific sitting out on the wing of the plane where she could enjoy the breezes and get a really good look at the water! I went home and using my trusty wagon as an undercarriage, proceeded to cobble together an airplane of boards and apple boxes, with a seat positioned about midspan of the right wing. Pam Blodgett said it wouldn't’fly because it had no motor.

About a week before we started home from our vacation, Dave started plying my parents with questions about sharks and whales. Were their sharks in the ocean where we lived? What were the chances of getting eaten? How big were the sharks if any? Did whales really swallow people? At this point I am going to share some material which is, if in no sense Dangerous, at least embarrassing. Dave harped on the shark and whale thing so much that soon, getting into a bathtub, sitting on the toilet, even drinking from a cup became extremely uncomfortable for me.

Bathtubs are pretty big when you’re six, weigh about 37 pounds and can’t see. The water could go on for miles so far as you know and you’re not in a big hurry to move to the other end to dispel this surmise because a shark might be there.

When sitting on the toilet, who knew what was really down there? Toilet flushing had always been noisy scary events for me so I’d tended to flush and run anyway. I didn’t really know how big the hole at the bottom of a toilet was. I was certainly not encouraged to explore. Toilets were essentially dirty, shameful objects, which were discussed when necessary in discrete terms and in hushed voices. It seemed to me that the toilet was connected, via a huge tunnel, first to the sewer, then to the ocean! The blind musician Tom Sullivan, in his autobiography, If You Could See What I hear, said that he had a similar phobia concerning toilets, his brought on by his grandmother’s stories about sea serpents. For me, there were sharks in them thar toilets!

Even when drinking milk or other beverages the lapping of the liquid against my lips could easily turn into the waves of the sea and a shark or whale could be dead ahead. Soon I was limiting my trips to the bathroom and was getting slapped at table for gulping my milk. I couldn’t discuss these fears of course. They were far too silly. I knew a whale couldn’t fit into an 8-ounce cup. I tried that sort of self-talk to work on these absurd fears, even felt the toilet bowl to see how big it really was inside, but reason flees when the activating event is at hand and I knew little of psychology.

For years I was inordinately fond of drinking straws and pop from cans or bottles. Interestingly enough though, these water phobias didn’t seem to interfere with my enjoyment of pools, lakes, even the ocean shallows.

Dave and Stacey Blodgett became friends and hung a around a lot together sometimes doing things for me too. They caught numerous worms for my coffee can, shared ice cream and Koolaide in our kitchen. They built me a sort of raft with low sides and two bench seats. It was never finished and became a play thing of a tenant’s daughter when we moved.

Dave bought me a tin dagger at the Woodland Park Zoo when the Seattle Seafair celebration was on. Dave also continued to be like a big brother. He was prone to be sarcastic and a smart alec and still was when I met him at age 27. Mom was after him fairly often but also told me not to start arguments with him.

Dave returned home by bus and was very anxious about travelling alone. A day or two before he left, he’d been gluing together a model and had lost a piece down a crack in our sundeck. At Mom’s suggestion he tried gum on the end of a stick to retrieve the part and was finally able to lever it out using a butcher knife.

"I should have kept that butcher knife," he said as we were about to drive him to the bus terminal.

"Why?" Mom asked in some consternation.

"In case that bus driver gets fresh," Dave answered. It was likely a joke, but what precisely he meant by this phrase in 1960 I don’t know.

Though I know now my poor raft would have swum like a stone if given the chance, I was at the time anxious to try it out. At just about this time, toward Summer’s end, we as a family, first made the acquaintance of John Eile, still another friend from Safeway, his wife Edna and daughter Margaret, whom I believe was Eight. They lived on Cottage Lake, near Bellevue, and a nearer place to Heaven there seemed never to be.

Bellevue is now a posh suburb of Seattle, heavily traffic-congested, full of high-tech industrial parks and landscaped office complexes. Rich people live in Bellevue, or at least the sort of people who have a lot of cash flowing through their fingers.

Two jokes tend to indicate how people living further west, think about Bellevue. Joke 1. How many Bellevue housewives does it take to fix dinner? Two. One to shake the martinis and one to make the phone call.

Joke 2. Mother Teresa was sent by God, to India with the directive to save a million souls. This she does. Next she is sent to China to save 100,000 souls. She also accomplishes that.

"Okay," says God, "here’s the most difficult assignment yet. I’m sending you to Bellevue, Washington and I want you to try and pick up—well, win ten or twelve souls and we’ll call it a good try." Of course Mother Teresa goes willingly enough but then God doesn’t hear anything from her for quite a while, so decides to give her a call.

This is what God hears on the other end of the phone. "Hi, this is Teri. I’m at the Plaza Mall Shopping Center right now but your call is real important to me. Leave your name and number at the beep and I’ll get back to you."

That’s Modern Bellevue. Back when I was young, in the days of iron ships and wooden men, Bellevue was still largely agricultural. People had horses and cows and not only just prize winners either. Dad’s workplace, which was called The Garage where the drivers went to pick up their trucks, was in Bellevue. He and Mom had toyed a good deal with the idea of moving there. Each summer we went to the Safeway Picnic at Norm’s Resort on Cottage Lake to enjoy a day of picnicking, cold beer and pop, foot races, games, swimming, sunbathing, pretty much whatever we felt like doing in those innocent days. All around Cottage Lake were favorite swimming and eating spots and now we had friends whose front door was about as close to the water as ours was from the street.

Margaret, the Eile’s daughter, had a rowboat and could row it all by herself. She wanted to take me out in it but I became frightened of the rocking as the boat was being launched and I opted out of the trip. I thought Perhaps Next Time, or better yet, my own raft would ride more comfortably. Margaret was also getting a horse and I couldn’t see how any one child could be any more fortunate than that, with a horse in the yard, a lake in the front yard and her own boat to boot!

I think we visited the Eiles three times. We never did remember to bring along the raft in the back of our new two-tone brown Ford station wagon, but each visit was delightful. I genuinely liked John and his family and save for Jimmy Magnus’s back yard perhaps, you just couldn’t find a better place to visit.

I wondered later if our sudden comradeship with the Eiles had something to do with an event, which had recently happened, the most recent result of my being blind. Summer was about to end and we were looking toward First Grade for me. Grades K through 12 were taught, with accommodations for blind students, in Seattle, on Queen Anne Hill, a goodly distance from where we were living. The Yelllow Cab Company had contracted to bring special ed. students to school and back, but service was available only within the Seattle City limits. Mother inquired if I could be driven to the city limits to meet the cab and be picked up likewise at the end of the day? We were told that no, in order to be eligible for taxi transportation to and from school we must actually live within the city limits. We were currently County residents.

There was no schooling for the blind available in our southern region of King County. There was a program of some kind in Bellevue, but beyond that, there was only the option of sending me to the State School For The Blind in Vancouver, which was 180 miles away. All in all it looked like we were going to move and the transition to Seattle Proper was cheaper than the farm near Bellevue about which we’d all dreamed.

Serious trouble began brewing when Mom received one morning, a call from Mr. Howard Superintendent of Special Education for the Seattle School District. He informed her that I was not eligible to enter First Grade for the ‘60-’61 school year because I didn’t have a full year of kindergarten. Mom countered that I’d had half a year and had done fine. Mr. Howard said he meant a full year of special kindergarten for the blind. Mom again trotted out my credentials saying I was far ahead of any of the kids in that "preschool you call a kindergarten" and went on to say that she’d move to Bellevue if necessary but I was going to First Grade!

In spite of this adversarial exchange, Mr. Howard asked Mom if she’d be willing to have me attend the B. F. Day kindergarten class for the first three days of the school year? He would come and talk with me sometime during that period and if he felt I could handle First Grade, I could be enrolled. Mom agreed, but said privately that if he sent me back to kindergarten, she’d move to Bellevue, we’d get a farm and I could have a horse.

So I went back for the required three days at B. F. Day and evidently told everyone that if Mr. Howard didn’t let me into First Grade I was getting a horse! My teacher, Mrs. Anderson, a very nice lady, counseled me not to get my hopes up too high.

Strangely enough, though I wanted to get Mr. Howard to say whatever it took to send me to Bellevue, my own self regard and basic honesty I think, wouldn’t let me sabotage my score, or perhaps the idea just never occurred to me. I don’t recall much of what Mr. Howard asked me but he did ask how high I could count. I started in at One and made it up to 28. Mom of course quizzed me on what I’d been asked and wanted to know as long as I’d gotten all the way up to 28, why hadn’t I said 29? That was a very good question.

The verdict came in and I passed, meaning I wasn’t getting my horse. We did continue looking for land, but nothing ever came of it. I guess what Mr. Howard said was academically I was ready for First Grade but socially I was somewhat immature. He may have been referring to my adjustment to blindness. Having only been blind for eight months at the time I was not on a par, in terms of independence of movement and orientation, with kids who’d been without sight since birth.

Things must’ve moved rather rapidly then. School in Seattle used to start always on the Wednesday after Labor Day. The first three days were kind of a shakedown period with final class assignments being made and probably some last minute assessing of unfamiliar students. I remember Mom driving me back and forth to B. F. Day the first three days of that year and she brought me to the first day of Grade 1 at John Hay Elementary. I think I rode the cab home that night though and rode the cab after that. This suggests that we moved on the weekend prior to the first full week of school or very shortly thereafter. We took a unit in a four-plex on Empire way, near Beacon Hill in South Seattle. The apartments were owned by a youngish couple named Tanaguchi, possibly the first Japanese people I’d known. The Tanaguchis let me have my swingset on a vacant patch behind the building and we settled in for the winter. My family, myself included, are congenital apartment haters. It must have been a bitter blow for us to move out of the house we all liked. I remember though, even when I could still see, our family talking about moving and looking at other houses. My parents always said they wanted to get out into the country. Talking about moving, or doing so when you’re ready, and moving because you feel you have to and suddenly, are two different things obviously.

Many parents around the country sent their blind children far away to school as a matter of course. In Seattle and in a few other locations there was some chance of getting a reasonable education without having to leave home. Seattle was probably the best of the nonresidential programs then and for a good while to come. I think the right decision was made. We had another house soon enough and the dream of owning a farm turned out to be a dream only. Whenever the opportunity to move arose, and it did several times in the next 20 years, the Plassmans always opted for city life.

Early in my First Grade Year, I believe it was on a Saturday or Sunday, Dad asked me to come to him in his brown armchair. He put me on his knee and asked me if I remembered John Eile. Well, of course I did. Our last visit couldn’t have been much more than a month before. "He died," Dad told me. I said I felt really bad, but I was trying not to cry. "You’re a good boy." Dad said.

I think John Eile had a heart attack. In a later conversation with Mom I asked what was Edna and Margaret going to do. She said they’d probably have to move out of their house and live somewhere else because their place was expensive and they didn’t have a daddy anymore to earn money enough to pay for it. I was struck at that point with the unfairness of life. Why should Margaret lose her lake, her horse, her boat because John had died? Wasn’t losing your Daddy enough to endure?

And so I had my first real brush with death and it’s associated grief. I think I’d lost my fascination with coffins by then and I think Snow White had retreated somewhat in my imagination to be replaced with other fancies. I heard about Miss America when I was still Six and how she was the prettiest girl in the country. I thought since Snow White was The Fairest in All The land, perhaps they were one and the same and M.A. might be worth looking up. At about that time the movie Snow White was playing in the drive-in theatre, though I never got to go to it. Snow White was played by a woman named Carol something or other. Perhaps she was the real Snow White? Grade school was for me a rich time of fantasy, to match some hard realities. I soon identified myself as a good student and a popular one too, but the first few weeks of First Grade, I doubted that I was going to make it!