Posts In: Stories

High school was when I knew that I wanted to have a guide dog someday.

This year, as usual, the National Federation of the Blind of South Carolina will kick off the fall convention season with its state convention, which starts today in the state’s capital city of Columbia.

The National Federation of the Blind helps me and other blind people live the life we want, and McDonald’s has been a tasty part of my life for decades.

Blind actors are rarely given the opportunity to play blind characters in movies, on TV, or on stage.

Prior to my experience as a scholarship finalist, I was only familiar with the National Federation of the Blind through communications with several friends of mine.

Today begins the seventy-ninth year for the National Federation of the Blind. During the past six weeks I have worked with blind people from at least a dozen states—having traveled to four of them—and have gained insight from visiting with blind people in two foreign countries.

There are those that have a hard time accepting a cane, and for a long time I was one of them. I was told it made me “look blind,” which was something I wanted to avoid at all costs. No kid likes feeling different, and I was no exception.

"We’ll find out..." It was a phrase said to me repeatedly by two of my greatest mentors, Fred Sanders and Jim Platt. Almost fifty years later, that phrase seems to pop out of my own mouth with increasing regularity.

My fascination with Asian culture began when I was about thirteen years old sitting in my parents’ house near Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. It started with learning everything I could about the Chinese zodiac, various anime (which is Japanese animation), and manga (which are Japanese comics or graphic novels).

If we were to ask a random sample of our sighted friends if a blind person could work at a children’s museum, the majority of those individuals might say no.