Helping the blind and the sighted to see

Ebony, Feb, 1992

CONTRARY to widespread misconceptions, the nation's 800,000 "legally blind" persons are neither helpless, lazy nor wanting sympathy. They want, instead, the same opportunities to highlight their abilities--rather than their disabilities--that sighted persons take for granted.

So say Ray and Rita Fitzpatrick, Christine Mongtomery, Harold Hicks and Derrick Phillips, who are among the hundreds of blind persons trained at the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind. Each is an inspirational example of how independent and productive individuals with severe visual impairments can be. Their skills have been honed at the Lighthouse by Braille typerwriters, image-enlargers, talking computers and other technological wizardry. As a result, they lead active lives and maintain challenging careers.

Take, for example, 43-year-old Ray Fitzpatrick. He not only runs a vending business at Chicago's main post office, he also repairs automobiles, despite blindness caused by retinitis pigmentosa. A bowler who once rolled seven straight strikes to score a career-high 243, he also has won a trophy in "beepball" (a sound-emitting softball). His wife, Rita, 38, is a computer operator for the Social Security Administration in Chicago, despite her cataracts and detached retina. For Fitzpatrick, the outside world is an opaque cave inhabited by shadows. For his wife, it is todal darkness. Both report, however, that blindness neither hampers their work nor the rearing of their children, Lisa, 13, a sixth-grader, and Eric, 12, a fifth-grader.

Born legally blind, meaning that at 20 feet he can't see the "Big E" on eye charts that normally sighted persons see even at 200 feet, Fitzpatrick relies heavily on feedback from his tapping white cane. But changed terrain has been one of his biggest street problems. "I know my neighborhood pretty well," he explains. "But let's say I'm walking to catch the "L" train to go to work. If they've dug a hole on my route that I don't know about, I might fall in. I've fallen in a lot of holes like that."

Not so for Christine Montgomery, 41, a talented skiing competitor who had to give up the sport two years ago when it became too expensive. She often travels around Chicago without her white cane, but as the Lighthouse's consumer and advocacy specialist, she would like to be independent enough to drive.

"I started losing my vision when I was 12 becaue of macular degeneration, which also afflicts my dad and sister," Montgomery recalls. "I didn't date while I was in school because guys either felt sorry for me or kind of shied away."

Sometimes mistaken as snobbish and stuck-up, Montgomery explains: "Someone will say, 'Oh, I saw you and you didn't speak.' They didn't understand that I didn't see them. Thinking I'm faking, they'll ask, 'If you can see this, why can't you see that?' A totally blind person has it easier.

"In a grocery store, I might ask somebody where something is and they'll say, 'Over there.' And I'll ask, 'Where over there?' Everybody always wants to fingerpoint."

A longtime Lighthouse staffer, Montgomer is chagrined by public attitudes about blindness, which, she says, ranges from ignorance to indifference and open hostility. "They're either very sympathetic or expect you to be a superbeing," she says. "You can't be just a normal person who went on with your life. We're striving to be accepted just like everybody else."

Combating the negative hang-ups that the sighted world has about the abilities of blind persons is a perpetual struggle, says Harold Hicks. A music director in the Lighthouse's Adult Living Skills Program, he also sings in Chicago nightclubs, hoping, at 33, to eventually break into show business big time. Hicks has long since adjusted to progressive eyesight degeneration which ended his participation in high school athletics and the operation of motor vehicles. "I tried to still fit in as though it didn't exist," he recalls. "I wanted to be accepted because being different means you're an oddball. I had a little bit of rejection in dating because people don't know how to relate to other people who are diffrent. I used to call myself Mr. Magoo to deal with blindness, realizing quickly that I had to learn how to laugh at myself."

Similar urges to escape plagued Derrick Phillips, 37, a part-time braille instructor at the Illinois Visual Handicapped Institute. Though married and the father of four children between the ages of 8 and 14, he comtemplated suicide in 1985 after his vision, which had been failing since age 12, vanished completely. "I asked myself 'What are you going to do with your life?'" he recalls. "Are you going to roll over and die or get up and fight like a man?'"

Phillips elected to be "the best blind person" that he could possibly be. Resigning as supervisor of the mail and reprographic department at the Chicago Board of Trade, he enrolled at Roosevelt University and earned a degree in business administration. Then he interviewed for jobs with more than 75 personnel managers.