A Family Commitment

by Marc Maurer

From the Editor: I already have an article in this issue about Marc Maurer, but there are some things that come to mind as I read the thoughts he has presented about his work, growth, and presidency. Although he never asked that I do it, I felt some of his worry and strain from afar. In his article he didn't mention the adventure activities he encouraged during his tenure. There were two in particular that come to mind. The one that most will know about is Erik Weihenmayer's summiting Mount Everest. Less familiar may be our sponsorship of Hank Dekker and the trip he would take from Baltimore, Maryland, to Plymouth, England. Like many others, I was all caught up in the publicity, the adventure, the fact that our name was associated with such progress. But I was not on the receiving end of the letters that as much as accused us of being foolhardy, negligent, and imprudent. Some went so far as to suggest that our President was a potential murderer. I spent all my time thinking about the arrival and the celebrations; but he had to consider the very real possibility that these brave men might fail and die in the trying. Everest and the National Federation of the Blind might be tied together very differently. It wouldn't just be what was remembered about the voyage or the climb; it would be the retort that would come whenever we talked about expanding the opportunities for blind people and the artificial limitations placed on us by the low expectations of society and by blind people ourselves. Marc Maurer did not whine. He did not complain. He did not shrink from the challenge or the long-term damage that might come to the organization. He was what he thought he needed to be: strong, positive, forward-looking. Pioneers weren't revered just because they moved west. They were revered because there was danger in that movement, and, like them, he knew that progress and danger often go hand in hand. Here is what one of the most important leaders we have ever had has to say about his time in the National Federation of the Blind:

I became a member of the National Federation of the Blind in 1969 by joining the Des Moines Chapter. My first convention occurred in Columbia, South Carolina, that summer. The people in the organization seemed to me to be profoundly different from others I had met. They were energetic, demanding, and confident. Most of the discussion about blindness I had encountered prior to joining the organization had concentrated on how good the current medical research was and how exciting the prospects were for conquering the disadvantage of blindness. Occasionally people threw out the hope that despite the disability blind people could do meaningful work. However, this was a rare occurrence, and those making such assertions did not seem well informed. Federation members were different. They had plenty of hope, but they also had a lot of knowledge.

The first year that I participated in Federation activities I was a student in the program of rehabilitation orientation conducted under the direction of Dr. Kenneth Jernigan for the state of Iowa. I learned to cook—a valuable skill and, besides, a lot of fun, to use the machines in a woodworking shop and metalworking shop, to travel with a cane, to read Braille scientific notation, and to type effectively. All of these are good things to know, but the most important thing I learned was how to think.

When I reached Indiana to attend the University of Notre Dame, I joined the South Bend Chapter of the Federation. I was the youngest person in the chapter, and because I was from out of state and a college student, I was looked upon with suspicion by the other members. Nonetheless, I persisted in my participation and soon became friends. By 1971 I was elected to the vice presidency of our Indiana affiliate. I undertook to assist the affiliate in raising funds for our state treasury, and in doing so I traveled throughout the state and became familiar with members in every chapter. Furthermore, we managed to raise some money. I remember my first effort. I took a taxi to a local candy manufacturing company in South Bend, and I ordered 150 cases of candy. When they showed up at my dormitory in a few days, I persuaded my friends in the dorm to help me move them into my dorm room. They took up most of the space. I had to find a way to sell the candy to get my room back. I had ordered the candy on credit, and I had no idea why the candy company would sell it to me. When I had sold enough of the candy, I paid the bill, and the rest of the money went into the treasury.

In the same year, 1971, I was elected to the presidency of the student division of the Federation, now known as the National Association of Blind Students, a Division of the National Federation of the Blind. The student division had been created in 1967 because the special interests of students in addressing the need for blind people to get a quality education could be more easily addressed through student activities than through divided efforts in states around the country. I continued promoting educational programs for blind students in the office of the president of the division for six years.

By 1973 I had become dissatisfied with the leadership of the Indiana affiliate. The president of the affiliate said that the national organization had created the national policies of the Federation and that if it liked them so much, it could enforce them. The Federation affiliate in Indiana would make no effort to assist. I was elected to the presidency of the affiliate in the fall of 1973 by a very narrow margin. Some liked the energy that I brought in the organization, and some thought I was crazy. I served as president of our affiliate for four years, until I moved to Ohio. During the time when I was president of the affiliate, I graduated from college and matriculated through law school. I got my law degree, and I passed the bar examination in the spring of 1977; then I began to hunt for work. I got a job offer from Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, a public interest law firm in Toledo, Ohio. I took up my first law job in the fall of 1977.
Patricia Maurer and I had married in the summer of 1973. She had a teaching degree, and she had been employed as a teacher in Burlington, Iowa, her first fulltime job after college. When we moved to Indiana, she had trouble finding a full time teaching assignment. She worked for a time typing computer-generated letters for the Blue Cross company. She used what was then the state-of-the-art word processing equipment called the Magnetic Tape “Selectric” Typewriter, MT/ST. It wasn’t the work she had trained for, but it did keep the groceries and rent paid. In Toledo the job market for her was even worse. My salary as a beginning lawyer for a public interest law firm was slim, and Patricia found work when she could get it but also did volunteer work.

The fall of 1977 and the spring of 1978 was a period of time when the Federation came under attack by the Minneapolis Society for the Blind, a sheltered workshop that had been paying subminimum wages and had justified its behavior by falsified time studies. The Minneapolis Society engaged a reporter from the Des Moines Register who prepared scurrilous articles about the Federation that repeated false statements about the purpose, behavior, and intent of the outfit and its president Dr. Kenneth Jernigan. By the spring of 1978 the attacks had become so virulent that the Maurers decided to return to Iowa to try to assist with the defense of the organization. I had come to know some of the members of the Iowa legislature, and I thought we could be some use in presenting fairly the work of the National Federation of the Blind in attempting to bring fair treatment to blind workers in sheltered shops. I did not know how bad conditions had become in Iowa until I talked to my friends in the legislature. They told me that Dr. Jernigan and his colleagues were “down for the count” and that I had better get away as fast as possible. However, I had come to know Dr. Jernigan and to trust him. I decided that to abandon him could not be done. During the months in the spring of 1978 I studied for the Iowa bar exam and passed it. Dr. Jernigan, who had then resigned from the directorship of the Iowa program, recommended that I look for a job in some other location. I started sending resumés to government offices in Washington, DC, and in late summer I became a staff attorney for the Civil Aeronautics Board. While I was studying for the bar exam in Iowa, Patricia Maurer had taken a position as a teacher in an adult training program for the blind. I left for Washington, and she stayed in Des Moines and continued teaching for a few months. By the end of the year she had moved with me to DC.

In my job at the Civil Aeronautics Board I did such things as writing an order for the board that changed the name of Alleghany Airlines to US Airways. I came to know a great deal about the economics of operating an air carrier. During the 1-1/2 years I worked for the board, the National Federation of the Blind was pursuing efforts to establish the right of blind workers to be represented in their employment by unions. The National Labor Relations Board, which supervises the rights of workers to be represented by unions, had decided decades earlier that sheltered workshops were not places of employment but places of service to the people who were in them. Consequently, unions were not permitted. In the Federation’s efforts in the 1970s the board adopted a new standard to determine whether workers could be in unions. If the primary purpose of the functioning of a sheltered shop was to provide training to workers in rehabilitation techniques and the like, a union would not be permitted. If the primary purpose was to produce products for interstate commerce, then a union could represent the workers. The Federation assisted with union organizing in Ohio and in Texas. I noted that Jim Gashel was writing briefs to be filed with the National Labor Relations Board. I assisted with research on the history and principles of law to be applied in the briefs to be filed with the board. This was not part of my day job but was ordinarily part of the work we did between 6:00 p.m. and midnight.
The pressure that had been brought on Dr. Jernigan and the National Federation of the Blind by the Des Moines Register in 1977 and ’78 included reckless charges of inappropriate use of government funds. I learned later that one of the charges had been that the Iowa program wasted its money by paying tuition at a private religiously-based university for me. The US Attorney had decided to investigate the Federation and Dr. Jernigan. I came to know this directly because I was served with a subpoena to provide information by the US Attorney. By December of 1980 the US Attorney announced that the investigation had been closed. Nothing had been found to justify the reckless charges of the Des Moines Register. However, the newspaper never reported this.

In 1981 I decided to leave government employment and to establish an independent practice in Baltimore, where Patricia and I had been living. Thus began a period of four years in which I represented individuals from many states, most of them having to do with discrimination on the basis of blindness.

Dr. Jernigan had been elected to the presidency of the NFB in 1968, a year before I had become a member. By 1977 he was sick. He had heart trouble and other ailments. His work as President of the Federation and his work as director of the program for the blind in Iowa had demanded so much energy of him that he had become unable to continue at the level that he thought was required. He resigned from the presidency of the Federation, and Ralph Sanders became President. I had worked with Ralph Sanders, and I had become convinced that his being President of the organization would not work. Dr. Jernigan resumed the presidency in 1978, and I was one of many who were delighted. He decided that he could not serve as director of the Iowa program and continue in the presidency. He resigned as director and moved the offices of the Federation to Baltimore. By the time of the national convention in 1978 he had identified a property in Baltimore that he thought would serve as our national headquarters. We bought what is now the National Center for the Blind.

By 1984, I had been working as legal counsel for individuals the Federation was seeking to assist. I met with Dr. Jernigan regularly to give him background on the state of the law and such cases as he asked that I pursue. I noticed that he was once again feeling unwell. I remembered that Ralph Sanders had come into the presidency when Dr. Jernigan resigned in 1977, but I did not want that to happen again. I told him so. He asked me if I wanted to be president, and I said yes. I was not anxious for the job if he was prepared to do it, but I was determined that Ralph Sanders would not come back into the office. At the 1985 convention Dr. Jernigan announced that he would not be seeking reelection in 1986 but that he would be supporting me for election to the office. Somebody said to Dr. Jernigan, “Why don’t we have an open election?” to which he responded, “What do you mean? I have told you a year ahead of time what I am going to do. If you have a candidate by all means get your candidate together, collect your votes, and come to the floor.” In the fall of 1985 I moved into space at the National Center for the Blind, and I began to work with Dr. Jernigan on a daily basis to gain background on the challenges, the programs, and the prospects for the Federation. In 1986 I was elected to the presidency of the organization.

The methods of doing business in 1986 are different from those we use today. Most of the transactions being conducted occurred on paper. The cost of a telephone call was less expensive than it had been in former decades. Consequently, a great deal of conversation occurred over the wires. However, letter communication was still vital, and the electronic transmission of documents had not yet become common. When I came into the presidency, the Federation had a staff of about twenty-five people. The task of the President included such diverse obligations as managing the politics and policy within the Federation, comprehending and dealing with the politics of the blindness field, interacting with and gaining advantage from information sources in the World Blind Union and other entities dealing with blindness in the international arena, locating funds sufficient to meet the ongoing needs of the Federation, conducting program activities to support the policies and purposes of the Federation, collecting and disseminating information about blindness-related matters that would affect blind people throughout the nation, establishing relationships with government entities involved with blind people, planning for campaigns to bring the correct understanding of blindness as a characteristic to public notice, finding ways to use to best effect the property at the National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute, supervising maintenance of the buildings that we own and conducting remodeling efforts, finding personnel to deal with the questions that must be managed in the course of conducting our program, creating and presenting policy matters to Congress and governmental agencies, and determining when to create innovative programs which had not been initiated in the past. Part of this demanding job increasingly was directed toward the development of access technology for the blind throughout the decade of the 1980s and into the 1990s. In the midst of all of it the President of the Federation was expected to create novel methods of presenting to the Federation and others the reason that the Federation was created and its long-term purposes. Part of the work required attempting to gain relationships with government and industry leaders to create partnerships that would focus energy to bringing new possibilities to blind people. Many of the relationships were personal. Consequently, part of it required bringing people to our national headquarters for conversation and entertainment. It became evident long before I assumed the presidency that this could occur only if the Maurer family would be a part of the commitment in the building process.

When we were putting the National Center for the Blind together in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we did not have places in the building for people to stay. Consequently, the Maurers often welcomed people into our home. One Saturday afternoon Dr. Jernigan called me to say that a gentleman from Israel had been visiting him and that he did not have a place to keep him overnight. He wondered if the Maurers could do it. Of course we did. Unfortunately, I had been cooking a ham for dinner, and I did not have anything else readily available. Our Jewish friend said that he was sure God would understand, and he ate the ham.

The personal computer was becoming a standard office product in the 1980s. In the Federation we had worried about access to use information from the computer in the 1970s, and this interest continued. The first of the universal access systems for the blind was conceived by our technology committee. The access system was known as the Speaqualizer, which gathered information from the computer and sent it to a voice box. Prior to the invention of the Speaqualizer, such access systems as had been built concentrated on single programs. A speech program might offer verbal feedback from a word processor, but not from other programs running on the computer. If a blind person wanted to program the computer, speech programs would not work. Because of the need to give equal access to information presented by computers, the Federation got into the access technology business. During the early part of my presidency, the concept of Windows was invented. Computer products prior to Windows presented text in character form, most often using the ASCII code. Windows presented information in pictorial form. Speech programs had previously been required to manage a code set of 256 characters. With the advent of Windows, the number of different characters that could be presented was almost unlimited. What could possibly be done? Many people felt that the problem was insoluble, but the Federation did not give up. Many years later in the early 2000s, a similar combination of circumstances occurred when colleges and universities adopted a plan to use cell phones or other flat screen devices to conduct education. Blind people could not get at the information. Flat screens have no buttons. What to do? Many people thought the problem was insoluble, but the Federation did not give up. The Federation did not invent the solution to equal access to information using Windows, but it did keep the pressure on to encourage inventive minds to seek such a solution. The same is true for access to information using flat screens. Not all of the answers regarding the proper methods for gaining equal access to information have been found, but the Federation does not give up, and progress continues to be made.

One of the more difficult challenges of serving in the presidency of the Federation is to determine when to be innovative and when to leave good enough alone. If innovation is to be sought, how much of the resources of the organization should be committed to it, and what will the damage be if the innovation fails? Such a question raises the ancient argument about the difference between a wise leader and a fool. A wise leader succeeds in the face of obstacles; a fool does not.
A number of us were imagining what the future should be when we had built our new building, which we opened in 2004. One of the ideas that came from the discussion was that we should build an automobile that the blind could drive. The complexities of operating an automobile can be broken down into discrete tasks. Vision is required for gathering information from outside the automobile, but what says it has to be? If the information that is ordinarily gained by sight can be obtained some other way and it can be done in real time, why cannot a blind driver operate the machinery? We set about the task of building the blind drivable car with the assistance of engineering experts at Virginia Tech university. Before we had the car completed, Parnell Diggs, now an administrative law judge for the Social Security Administration, secured the opportunity for us to drive the car on the Daytona International Speedway. When we knew that we had the right to drive it at Daytona, I announced to the convention of the National Federation of the Blind that we would put on the demonstration prior to the Rolex 24 race for 2011. The demonstration model was completed in the fall, and we rented a racetrack in Virginia to test it. Racetrack officials told us that part of the cost of the rental would be the cost of having an ambulance at the end of it with a crew in it to be present at any time we were on the track. They would save us if we destroyed the car and hurt the people in it. We said we weren’t going to wreck the car. They responded that if you want the racetrack you get the ambulance, and we agreed. Five of us practiced with the car. The two best operators were Mark Riccobono and Anil Lewis. Mark Riccobono drove at Daytona, but Anil Lewis was available if he was needed. The demonstration was a dynamic indication that a car could be driven by a blind person and that it would be possible to operate it with unexpected obstacles that could be readily avoided using the technology we had built. During the time that we worked on the project, I found that many people thought we were crazy to imagine that something like that could be done, and I learned that some of them thought that the Federation might not be crazy but that I certainly was. During the final twelve months that we pursued the project the Federation got more publicity than we had ever had in the history of the Federation.

Serving in the presidency of the Federation requires its principal officer to manage the day-to-day activities of the organization, but it also requires planning for tomorrow. If a president is doing the job properly, the president will plan for what happens to the organization when that president ceases to lead. I tried to gather about me leaders who could carry on the work of the Federation when my term of service came to a close. By 2013 it seemed to me that Mark Riccobono had demonstrated the kind of leadership that could bring the organization to greater heights of development than had been true in the past. In 2014 Mark Riccobono assumed the presidency of the organization. I have continued to work actively with him, and I believe that he is a leader to meet the standard that the Federation has established.