A Hobby that Taught me the Value of an Education, the Need for Self-discipline, How to Raise Money, and the Value of Networking

by Gary Wunder

In recent articles about blind people both older and younger than I am, I have frequently heard them referred to as pioneers in going into the public school system. I started public school in 1961, and certainly teachers and administrators regarded what we were doing as a novel experiment, one that would free children from having to travel across the state to go to a residential school for the blind. That freedom, which many of us who got to stay at home appreciated, would come at a cost for far too many in my generation and the ones to follow. But at the time we were involved in a social experiment, and we firmly believed it was good, forward thinking, and progressive.

The public school I attended was Norman Elementary and was located in downtown Kansas City. I lived in the south part of the city, so a special bus was sent to get me and other children who did not live near downtown. The bus ride took about an hour each way, but there was not a complaint to be heard about the time on the bus because the public schools accepting blind people wasn’t considered a right, but an honor. My parents were grateful for and impressed by the fact that the school system would send the bus so far to help their child and even more impressed that there was such a program. There was no Public Law 94-142, no Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and I don’t believe I heard the words “free and appropriate education” until I was enrolled in college.

The school I attended had what we called a resource room. In the first few grades, this is where I spent all my time, and it was in this room that I learned the fundamentals that would see me through school: reading, writing, and the basic concepts of arithmetic. My instruction was in Braille, and on many mornings I would arrive at school to the sound of the Braillewriter embossing that day’s assignments. Ruth Thomas was a sighted teacher, and after I had used a Braillewriter for about a year, it seemed to me that her Brailling was exceedingly slow. In fairness what she lacked in speed was offset by her accuracy, and I took it as my job to work on that part of my Braille writing.

Miss Thomas was the woman who taught me to read, and I do not remember being told that the process would be difficult or cumbersome because I would have to learn 180 contractions before I could read. The books I got were written in grade two, and learning to read simply meant that this shape was for the word and, this shape for the word with, and this shape for the word for. I learned that the letter b standing alone represented the word but, c the word can, d the word do, and so on until we got to z which, when standing alone, meant the word as.

At the same time I was learning to read Braille, I was also learning to spell. Sighted people who read print did not know my special grade two signs and had to be content reading each word letter by letter. My spelling tests would ensure that I could write in a way they could read, the typewriter being shortly introduced into the curriculum. Oh how I wished they knew grade two when on my spelling test appeared the word knowledge, the word represented in Braille with the simple letter k.

In those first few years I got what today might be called a segregated education. But as I learned the basic skills, I first took one, then two, then three classes with the sighted children attending the school. By the time I was in fifth grade, the resource room was not so much a place of learning but a place to store my books between classes and to answer questions that for some reason teachers in the regular classroom could not address. Usually they had something to do with Braille and its special format requirements. Sometimes it meant asking my resource teacher to draw a picture, a graph, or a diagram.

While in the fifth grade I met a student who had recently come from the Missouri School for the Blind. When we would ride the bus together to and from school, he would tell me about all of the experiences he had way across the state in St. Louis. He rode a train; I had never ridden a train except at a zoo. He had ridden a Greyhound bus; I had only taken a short trip on one when our family went to see my father, who worked for a short time two hundred miles from where we lived. My friend had ridden in an airplane to get back and forth from school, but at that point in my life I had only seen model airplanes and heard the sound of jet engines. Did I bowl? No. I knew what a bowling alley sounded like from television, but I had no idea that a blind person could bowl. He said that the school for the blind had a bowling alley and that he used it several times each week. Did I have access to a swimming pool all year round? No, only in the summer, and even then it was rather crowded. He said that at the school for the blind children could go swimming anytime they wanted.

So, at the age of ten, I sat at the table with my parents and told them that I really needed to go where I could get a better education, and that was the Missouri School for the Blind. Just how they kept from laughing at a boy of ten telling them where he wanted to go to school I don’t know. They talked with me about how far away the school was and that I wouldn’t be able to come home every day. They talked with me about missing home and being away from my brothers and sisters. I listened respectfully, but what were brothers and sisters compared with bowling and swimming? With repeated urging my parents took me to the school, talked with officials there, and reluctantly had me admitted to start at the beginning of my sixth-grade year.
 I learned some great skills, and there is no question that I benefited from the experience in many ways. When at home, my clothes magically appeared in my closet and in my dresser drawers. At the school, I soon discovered that I did not know how to hang up a pair of pants or a suit coat. I did not know how to fold underwear or mate socks. I didn’t even know how to make a bed. In the dining room at the school for the blind we sat at long tables, and when we arrived, we found an empty plate in front of us. Serving dishes were passed, and I had to figure out how many scoops constituted a reasonable serving. For the first few weeks my helpings ranged from meager to more than my share, but eventually I figured it out. How much butter does one cut off a stick to cover a biscuit? When butter is in a bowl, what serving is appropriate to coat two pieces of toast? I had never thought of myself as sheltered or protected, but I certainly came away with a new appreciation for mom and how much she did for me and the rest of her children. I suspect my house parent thought her new charge a little dull, but she was patient enough to show me how to do these things once or twice and stubborn enough to let me succeed or fail on my own after that.

After the school for the blind I came home and went to a small public school that drew its students from three towns and the farms that separated them. In this school there was no resource room, and the school staff freely admitted that they knew nothing about educating a blind person. Their assumption was that I probably already knew what I needed to know about blindness and that together we would work out whatever obstacles presented themselves. Mostly they were right, but they had a little too much faith in my resourcefulness and self-discipline. When the school couldn’t provide me with books in Braille, I had no idea how to go about getting them, so I tried to use materials on tape for some subjects in which Braille was absolutely necessary. Algebra without a Braille book was a nightmare. Trying to learn Spanish without being able to see the spelling of words was quite difficult.

Despite the good intentions and educational resources available to me, I was not a good student. I was an average student. People would remark on this frequently, observing that someone who was as smart as I appeared to be should be doing far better. They attributed my poor performance to laziness and not applying myself. I didn’t like the label; it didn’t fit with my self-image, and fortunately it didn’t do much to mold it. Nobody thought I was lazy when it came to doing chores. Nobody applied that label when I was given work to do for pay and spent long days in the field putting up hay, cleaning bricks, or working in the sheltered workshop in Kansas City. So why was the label so liberally if sadly applied to my academic performance?

It is hard to know how valuable one’s reflections are after all this time, but I offer a few conclusions. For one thing, I had a hard time connecting the dots— a rather strange statement from someone who reads and writes Braille, don’t you think? People said I was mature for my age, but I think this only meant that I had a well-developed ability to talk and listen, spending a goodly amount of time with adults and being the oldest in my family. I cannot reconcile my failure to get Braille books that I desperately wanted with the fact that I knew of two agencies in Kansas City that did Braille transcription and was willing to pass that information along to anyone who might ask. To me, textbooks had come from the American Printing House for the Blind, and I had no idea how to ask them to send me the books I needed.

But I think a more accurate reason for my mediocre performance is that I did not really understand why I went to school. I went because I was told to. I went because I was a rule follower. I went because that was my assignment, just as my mother’s assignment was to clean our house and my father’s assignment was to bring home the bacon. But it took me a long time to capture the real why of school and the role it would play in my life.

I was reminded of all of this when I saw Curtis Willoughby’s article about ham radio. When I heard that people could talk with others in different cities, states, and even countries, I was intrigued. To say that I was enthralled with electronic gadgets would be an understatement, but when I decided to be a ham radio operator, I learned that it wasn’t as simple as buying a radio and getting on the air. One had to learn about basic concepts of electricity, about transmitters and receivers, about the characteristics of various frequency spectrums and how the bending of radio waves in the upper atmosphere would determine which part of the spectrum could be counted on for communication given the time of day, the distance involved, and even the place we were in the eleven year sunspot cycle. How were vacuum tubes constructed? What were their components? How did the vacuum tube actually serve to amplify a signal? Putting up an antenna was more than just dangling a wire out the window. Given the frequency one used, it had to be a certain length. How was that figured? I couldn’t go to my mother, my father, or any of my school teachers to find out.

So it was that at age thirteen, when I wanted to do something on my own and could not find a teacher, that I learned why I had been taught to read and write. For the first time it came to me that I could learn about the flow of electricity and the application of Ohm’s law, radio theory, and the regulations governing the amateur radio service. I could if I exercised self-discipline and the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic that I had too often viewed as boring tasks to be done with as quickly as possible. Although most who heard about my ambition to be a ham radio operator congratulated me, they had nothing to offer when it came to explaining all the material that would be on my test. Because it was a hobby and simply something that I wanted to do, there was no pressure from adults to do it. If I worked at it, it might happen. If I decided to let it go because it was too hard, no one in the family would criticize me because I was the only one who was invested in the idea of doing it.

For all of the enjoyment I have gotten out of amateur radio—learning the international Morse code and using it to communicate with people from around the world, serving to help people from around the country get corneas for transplant, handling messages from military personnel to their loved ones at home—the greatest gift I have gotten from amateur radio has been learning why I went to school and coming to see what I was taught as a way to educate myself on any subject I wished. Although I now live in an area that restricts the installation of antennas that can be used for worldwide communication, the fact that I am a ham radio operator continues to play an important part in my life. I now appreciate learning for the sake of learning. Although I don’t have the greatest mind in the world, I am convinced that I can learn most things if only I decide to invest energy into the task. It was the experience of having to find books without the assistance of a school librarian that taught me to be resourceful enough to find the materials I needed, and how many times that experience has paid off for me. And then there was the special experience of doing something that my family did not do that made me unique and caused me to know things they did not.

As a minor aside, once I studied the material, passed the tests, and got my license, I needed radio equipment. That took money. Where did money come from? Usually it came from mom and dad, but here another lesson was learned. My dad said that money came from work and that if I wanted some of it I better be prepared to do something to earn it. This hobby is the reason that I know how to put up hay, clean and stack bricks, put washers on bolts, and put together China markers. These activities would not play much of a role in my resumé today, but they served me well in my early years when people could see that I was not asking them for my first job.

I have written this piece in the hope that it will bring together several important points. Helping a child learn is extremely important, but getting him or her to see the reason why learning is important is every bit as significant. Be slow to label: is a child’s failure to do a thing based on laziness, or is it from not really understanding how it fits into what he or she will be expected to do in the future? Be aware that maturity is not indicated by having a good attention span and being able to understand and use big words; maturity also requires understanding something about the world, one’s place in it, and what will be expected to achieve one’s goals. Don’t discount the importance of a hobby as some of my family would do, seeing it as a distraction that might keep me from doing other more productive things.

I close with one final tribute to amateur radio. Young people are constantly told about the importance of building a network. That kind of talk was not fashionable in my time, but I unknowingly built one. When I moved to Columbia, Missouri, and began to converse regularly with residents who were ham radio operators, I especially enjoyed talking to a man named Pete and a friend of his named John. They would frequently talk with one another and welcome me into their conversation. When I went looking for my first job as a computer programmer, I got an internship at the University of Missouri Hospitals and Clinics. I told my two friends about it and went into a rather lengthy explanation of computers and the institution giving me an internship. They were ever so polite in laughingly telling me that they knew about computers, and they knew about the university hospital. Pete was the director of laboratories and had a substantial role in starting the hospital’s computer department and later the section that would develop programs for the department of pathology. Oh, and his boss John turned out to be the head of the pathology department, and although I can’t say whether my relationship with them had anything to do with it, I was offered a job after my six-week internship. Who knew? What a hobby, and to it I offer a most heartfelt thank you.