Beginnings and Blueprints

Beginnings and Blueprints

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BEGINNINGS AND BLUEPRINTS

by Kenneth Jernigan

When does a beginning turn into a blueprint? I don't know, but of one thing
I am certain. Blueprints have played an important part in my life. And not just
in the work I have done managing and remodeling buildings but also in the disappointments
and opportunities that have shaped my being and made me what I am.

As readers of the Kernel Books know, I have been blind since birth. I grew
up on a farm in Tennessee in the late twenties and early thirties, and as might
be imagined, jobs and money were much on the minds of my parents and their neighbors.
Such things were on my mind too, but not from the perspective of my elders.
I knew that there was a depression, of course, and that things were bad. But
that wasn't what mainly concerned me.

From my earliest hazy memories, I recall wondering what would happen to me
when I grew up. My blindness didn't bother me (I took it for granted—just
as I did that I was a boy and not a girl), but I didn't ignore it. It was there.
It was part of me. My mother and dad didn't believe I would have very many options.
They didn't say so, but I could tell how they felt. They had seen a blind person
preaching once, so they thought I might do that. They also thought I might be
able to play some kind of musical instrument. In fact, they went so far as to
buy me a second-hand piano somewhere along the way; and early on, my Aunt Ethel
(she was my dad's sister) gave me a violin that had belonged to her husband's
brother Scott.

But all of this was to come to nothing. For although I was required to memorize
a great many chapters from the Bible when I went to the Tennessee School for
the Blind, and although some of the speeches of my adult years have been likened
(sometimes happily and sometimes not) to sermons, preaching was not for me.
Nor was music.

Soon after I entered the Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville in January
of 1933, I was enrolled in the violin class. After all, I had a violin of my
own. Simultaneously (or soon thereafter) I joined the school band, vainly moving
from horn to horn in a futile attempt to find my niche. But for me, trying to
learn the notes was like memorizing a string of telephone numbers. I couldn't
play the simplest melody, and I still can't today. I continued band and violin
for five years, being thoroughly bored with both.

I ultimately quit band to take what was called manual arts, which in reality
was a high-toned name for chair caning and broom making; and I quit violin to
take piano, an even greater disaster since I spent the bulk of my practice time
disassembling the piano and engaging in similar mischief. Occasionally I tried
sleeping, but the bench was too short. In brief, neither music nor preaching
fit the blueprint. In previous Kernel Books I have talked about my

activities in high school and college, my building and selling of furniture,
and my work as an insurance salesman; so I will not deal with those things here.
Suffice it to say that (although furniture and insurance were rewarding, both
financially and otherwise) they did not suit the ultimate blueprint of my life.
Nor did real estate, which I considered for a while—going so far as to
get a broker's license once. No, it was not to be music or preaching or furniture
or insurance or real estate even though I made beginnings in some of them.

After college, I did a stint of high school teaching for a few years, and then
I had my first formal acquaintance with blueprints. It happened like this.

There was an opening for the Superintendency of the Kentucky School for the
Blind, and I applied. Happy Chandler (former baseball commissioner and erstwhile
senator) was governor of Kentucky at the time, and I had his support; so it
seemed likely that I would get the job.

But a snag developed. When I talked with the hiring officer (I think he was
called Superintendent of Education or some such), all went well until we came
to the question of working with architects. Some 300,000 dollars' worth of remodeling
was to be done at the school, and the hiring officer wanted to know how I as
a blind person would read blueprints.

I told him I had never thought about the matter but that I was sure it wouldn't
be a problem. That wasn't good enough, and I didn't get the job—a fact
that is laughable in light of my later experience.

When I became director of state programs for the blind in Iowa in the late
1950's, we bought an old YMCA building (it was seven stories tall) and made
it into a training center and headquarters. As the years went by, we did many
millions of dollars of remodeling, and I directed it all.

As to the matter of blueprints, it was amazingly simple. The architects and
I sat down one morning for a couple of hours and worked it out. The architects
did their normal measuring and drafting, and then produced their regular blueprints.
All that was necessary for me to read them was for the architects to trace each
line with a narrow piece of plastic tape.

Most people think of blueprints as mysterious and complex, but they aren't.
A series of parallel lines close together indicates stairs, and a line drawn
at an angle in a doorway shows which way the door is to swing. Narrow lines
represent windows, and wider lines represent walls, with squares or rounds appropriately
placed marking columns. All of this can be done with tape of proper width, and
it can be done in a very short time. The resulting blueprint is completely accurate
and easily useable by both the sighted and the blind. Yet, in the attempted
beginning in Kentucky a few years earlier my lack of experience cost me the
job. Maybe that is the way it always is. If beginnings and blueprints don't
go hand in hand, there isn't much chance of success.

When I came to Baltimore in 1978 to establish the headquarters of the National
Federation of the Blind, we got a complex of old factory buildings and began
the process of remodeling. By now, working with blueprints was routine, as easy
for the blind as the sighted. I could in a few minutes teach any architect how
to prepare blueprints for me, and as the Baltimore years have gone by, I have
done it repeatedly. The National Center for the Blind is visible proof of how
it works. The buildings are the envy of all who see them, attractive and well
proportioned.

So far, I have said almost nothing about the National Federation of the Blind,
but in a very real sense it is key to everything—the beginnings, the blueprints,
the career, the full life, and all of the rest. I first became acquainted with
the Federation in the late 1940's, and it gave me a whole new perspective about
blindness and what I could hope to be and do.

It was not just an organization for the blind. It was the blind, speaking,
thinking, and doing for themselves—helping and encouraging each other,
exchanging ideas, and working to bring new insights to the public.

With its more than 50,000 members throughout the country, the National Federation
of the Blind has, in my opinion, been the biggest single factor in improving
the quality of life for blind people in the United States in the twentieth century.
Most of the work of the Federation is done by volunteers, by those of us who
are blind and by our sighted friends. On a daily basis we do our work with new
beginnings and expanding blueprints, and the encouraging thing is that we who
are blind are no longer doing it alone. An increasing number of sighted friends
and associates are helping us change what it means to be blind. In the circumstances
how can we do other than to look forward to the future with hope and confidence?