by Marc Maurer
To one extent or another all of us as adults reflect the experience of our childhood. Marc Maurer is President of the National Federation of the Blind. He learned the value of collective action early on. Here is how he tells it:
Twenty dollars was for me a vast sum of money in the 1960s. I knew that it would be years (perhaps decades) before I possessed so much. The sum was so impossibly great that I never even tried to get it. Then, things changed.
I grew up in a small town in Iowa in the 1950s and '60s. Because I was born blind, I was sent over a hundred miles from home to attend the school for the blind. Most weekends, and during the summer months, I could come home. Otherwise, I lived, ate, played, slept, and attended classes at the school for the blind. By 1963 the Maurer family had grown to include Mom and Dad, five brothers, and one sister. Our family appears in retrospect to be much like the ones you read about in books. Mom baked cookies, bread, and rolls. There was always plenty to eat, and the food was good. In my family all the children had one pair of shoes. They were purchased each fall and were expected to last until the next new pair, purchased the following fall.
Pocket money was not plentiful. We were always thinking up schemes to get it. When I was small a penny was quite spendable, a nickel would get you much of what the candy store had to offer, and a dime would fetch anything on display. If a boy had fifty cents, a thing which happened almost never, much of what was to be found in the toy department at the dime store was within reach. We (my brothers and I) set up a lemonade stand in front of the house, but it didn't generate much income. Most of the potential customers were the other kids in the neighborhood. They didn't have much more money than we did. The lemonade business usually brought us two or three cents. Sometimes we collected as much as a dime, but never more than that.
When I was 10 or 11, my mother taught me to make bread. I was so proud of the results of my first effort that I shared them with a neighbor. My neighbor liked the bread, and offered to buy a loaf. From this developed the weekly baking service. My mother made me a deal. If I would bake bread for the family, I could also bake some for sale. The loaves that I sold sometimes brought in sixty centsa week. Store-bought bread was selling for between nineteen and thirty-six cents a loaf.
Boys in my home town made their money by de-tasseling corn or walking beans in the summer and by shoveling snow in the winter. Because of my blindness, I was not welcome in the agricultural pursuits. However, I did shovel snow. I was always sorry when the snow came on weekdays because I was expected to be at school. There wasn't much time for shoveling before the school bell rang. One of the other kids in my class generally skipped school when the snow fell. On the following day, he would boast about the wallet full of money he had collected the day before. I was sorry not to have the money, but I didn't dare skip school.
The standard for conduct in our family was well established. If a kid wanted to do something out of the ordinary, permission from a parent was required. This did not mean that the parent would provide the means for doing what the kid wanted done. One time my brother asked my mom if he could have a bicycle. She told him he could. He wanted to know where he would get the money to buy it. She explained to him that it was his problem. He could have the bike, but he would have to earn the money to buy it himself. I learned to swim in the first grade, and I thought it was more fun than almost anything else. I looked forward to swimming lessons with great anticipation and was sorry when they were over. Whenever the pool was available (but this wasn't very often) I could be found in the water.
Of course, school begins in the fall and ends in the spring. The swimming pool at the school for the blind was not available to me during the summer months. The closest publicly-available pool was over a mile from my home. Sometimes I could persuade my brothers to go with me, but sometimes I could not. Besides, swimming in the public pool cost money, and money was not - plentiful.
When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I learned that above-ground swimming pools were made. The biggest one in the Ward's catalog cost a little over twenty dollars. I got the idea of forming a buying syndicate. I didn't have twenty dollars, and I didn't think I could save that much. I persuaded my brothers to help me collect enough cash to buy a jointly-owned swimming pool. It took us months. We employed every means we could think up to bring in money hunting for empty returnable soda bottles to be turned in at the gas station for two cents apiece, running errands to the post office for the elderly neighbor lady for five cents, raking leaves for twenty-five cents, and especially saving our allowances.
As primary thinker-upper and manager of the alliance, I served as treasurer. Each nickel and dime that came my way was cherished and hoarded against the day that we would have enough to place the order. In my home town there was no Montgomery Ward's retail establishment. Instead there was a catalog store a fairly small storefront office with Ward's catalogs, a very limited selection of display items (not for sale), and an ordering desk. We figured the costs to the penny, including postage and shipping. I remember the important day. We trooped into the catalog store and counted the money out on the counter. Our order was duly taken, and we received the official copy, marked "paid in full." We were advised that shipping would take up to four additional weeks. After the months of scrimping and the work to bring the money together, it seemed like an interminable length of time. We went home to wait. Every day we checked with Mom to see if she thought the package would come. Finally, a postcard arrived telling us that the box had been delivered to the catalog store and could be picked up at our convenience. We thought that the best thing would be to go get the carton right away. We fetched it home on a coaster wagon and opened it in the back yard. The pool consisted of an outer cage or frame to give the assembled parts their shape, a large plastic sheet shaped to fit into the outer cage and serve as the body of the pool, and fasteners to keep the liner in place. There was also a complicated set of instructions, that not even my father could understand. Nevertheless, we got the whole thing set up and filled it with water.
Swimming in the pool was fun, but I think working and saving to get it were a major part of the reason I liked it so much. Combining resources and working together with others made it possible to accomplish what would otherwise have been out of reach. At the end of the 1960s I joined the National Federation of the Blind. This organization which brings together tens of thousands of blind people from all over the United States changed forever the possibilities for accomplishment and progress in my life. The blind of America were working together and combining resources to achieve what would otherwise have been beyond our reach. We needed more than twenty dollars; we needed the encouragement of our blind brothers and sisters and the strength which comes from working together. I did not know that blind people could be farmers or chemists or electrical engineers or physicists or mostly anything else. Then, when I joined the National Federation of the Blind, things changed. I learned that I was not limited by my blindness to idle hours and unfulfilling tasks. Instead, with the help of others, I could study at the university, enter a profession, and contribute to my community. It was even better than getting a swimming pool