The New Breed

One of the lasting by-products of World War II was the coining of a colorful word that proved so useful it remained in the language. The word was "snafu"—an acronym for "situation normal, all fouled up." It was as good a term as any to describe what happened when a well-intentioned government tried to do its best for 1,400 American servicemen blinded in the European and Pacific war zones between December 1941 and August 1945.

That—in spite of bureaucratic bungles, intramural rivalries, incessant red tape—the end result was more triumph than disaster, was due in great measure to the blinded men themselves. They were a new breed: smarter, tougher, better educated, more sophisticated than the men who had fought in France a generation earlier. The best of them were realistic and determined not to succumb to self-pity, and it was their unflagging morale that helped inspirit the rest.

There were other factors in their favor. The blinded men of World War II had the benefit of advances made since the preceding world war. There was now a firm and experienced leadership structure in work for the blind, a structure equipped to act as authoritative spokesman and influential advocate. Prominent in it were men who had known from personal experience the weaknesses of Evergreen and who set out to prevent their recurrence in caring for the new wave of war-blinded.

Early in 1941, as defense mobilization got under way in the United States, the American Association of Workers for the Blind appointed a committee with a cautiously worded title: "Committee on the Care, Training and After-Care of Persons Becoming Blind as a Result of the United States Defense Program and Possible Participation in the Present World War." Robert Irwin chaired the committee, whose twelve members included three blinded veterans of World War I: Colonel Edwin A. Baker of Canada, Rabbi Michael Aaronsohn of Cincinnati, and Dr. J. Francis Smith of Philadelphia. Three other members had had direct experience in working with the men blinded in that war: Maurice I. Tynan, former director of Evergreen and now a field agent of the Service for the Blind of the Federal Security Agency; Grace S. Harper, director of the Bureau of Service for the Blind of the New York State Department of Social Welfare; and Irwin himself, who had served on the 1917 committee which drew up the plan for care of the American war-blinded.

The other six members represented various phases of work for the adult blind on local, state, and national levels: Alfred Allen, who then held the dual jobs of executive secretary of AAWB and executive secretary of the Hadley Correspondence School for the Blind in Illinois; J. Robert Atkinson, managing director of the Braille Institute of America in Los Angeles, which provided a range of social services for the blind in Southern California; Francis B. Ierardi, executive director of the National Braille Press in Boston, an agency which combined publishing activities with social services; Peter J. Salmon, then assistant director of the Industrial Home for the Blind in Brooklyn; Louis L. Watts, executive secretary of the Virginia Commission for the Blind; and Joseph F. Clunk, supervisor of the Federal Security Agency's Service for the Blind. Of the 12 committee members, only Alfred Allen and Grace Harper were sighted.

The committee had just begun to formulate a set of principles when Pearl Harbor was struck. When, in March of 1942, the President of the United States directed Federal Security Administrator Paul V. McNutt to draft plans for the rehabilitation of men disabled in combat, a delegation from the committee called at McNutt's office to offer assistance in planning for the war-blinded.

Central to the committee's thinking at this stage and throughout was the belief that the federal government and not private philanthropy should assume responsibility for the rehabilitation of men blinded in military service. A public declaration to this effect was issued by the committee in September 1942, in an effort to halt what it called a "brand of war-racketeering"—the spurious fund-raising drives that claimed to serve the war-blinded. The warning was not altogether effective; phony appeals along these lines persisted, particularly in California, for the duration of the war and even thereafter.

One factor that held up formal submission of the committee's recommendations to the government was uncertainty over whether Congress would adopt a single rehabilitation service for both war veterans and civilians, or whether the two programs would be separately administered. August 1942 saw the introduction of companion measures (the Barden bill in the House, the LaFollette bill in the Senate) to expand the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1920, but these bills languished in Congress because they were not seen as pertinent to the war effort. To make the legislators aware that rehabilitation did have relevance to war goals Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a special message to the Senate on October 9, 1942. That message supported a comprehensive rehabilitation plan that would embrace both veterans and civilians and enable physically handicapped persons to "become a national asset ready to serve in war industries, agricultural and essential occupations."

Although the message made clear the White House's preference for a unified rehabilitation service, pressure from veterans' groups for separate legislation and a separate program prevailed. March 24, 1943, saw passage of Public Law 78-16, authorizing the Veterans Administration to provide vocational rehabilitation for disabled veterans, increasing disability compensation rates, and providing other benefits that would assist war-disabled servicemen to make a new start. The Barden-LaFollette Act for rehabilitation of disabled civilians was enacted three months later.

Even before formal passage of P.L. 78-16 it was apparent that the Veterans Administration would be given charge of men blinded in service. Accordingly, a delegation from the AAWB committee, now retitled the United States Committee on the War Blind, called on the VA administrator, Brigadier General Frank T. Hines, in January 1943 to deliver a revised version of the plan that had been submitted to the Federal Security Agency a year earlier. The plan outlined a three-stage program:

Services in the hospital, including first steps in rehabilitation of the blinded soldier—learning independence in eating, dressing, walking, etc., and possibly a beginning in the use of special devices for reading and writing. Such services provided at the earliest practical moment will do much to alleviate the despondency common to newly blinded persons.
Services in a temporary rehabilitation training center, to which the blinded soldier should be sent on leaving the hospital. A short intensive training course is proposed, in which the man would continue the adjustment begun in the hospital. … During this period each man should be studied intensively with a view to determining the proper vocational retraining and employment program for him.
Services for return to the home community and placement in employment. While this phase of the work should be under the direction of the Veterans Administration, it is suggested that so far as practicable the services of existing State and private agencies for the blind be utilized. …

The document went on to urge that the program make use of "personnel specially trained and experienced in work with the blind," and that it include "the employment of trained blind so far as practicable, since blind persons can, on the basis of common experience, enter into the difficulties of the newly blind to an extent seldom achieved by the seeing." It listed a set of fifteen basic principles, among them that service to the blinded should be separate from the program for the war-wounded with other disabilities. It emphasized that this separate program should be headed by an experienced administrator "who has kept pace with the progress in services for the blind over the past quarter of a century [and] who has the complete respect and support of organization executives, of blind persons, and of the community he now serves."

Soundly and carefully drafted, the committee's plan worked better on paper than in actuality. "We have complications," Irwin explained to a British colleague,

growing out of the fact that the Veterans Administration, which is responsible for the rehabilitation of disabled veterans, has no jurisdiction over the men until they are discharged from the Army. Blinded men who may be kept in the hospitals for months are under the Surgeon General of the Army or of the Navy.

Moreover, the plan's key element, a temporary rehabilitation training center, was encountering opposition in the Veterans Administration. One reason, Irwin noted, was that in World War I Evergreen had been "a headache, and all the government officials are a little bit leery of it." Another factor was the open struggle among several agencies for the blind to be awarded the VA contract to operate such a training center.

Where did the War Department leave off and the Veterans Administration begin? This, too, was clearer on paper than in practice. In July 1943 the Office of the Surgeon General issued a detailed directive to all of its service commands. For a military communication, it was a surprisingly human document, infused with sensitivity and worded with stylistic grace.

The directive designated two Army hospitals for medical treatment of the eye-wounded: Valley Forge General Hospital in Phoenixville, Pa. and Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco (the latter subsequently replaced by Dibble General Hospital in nearby Menlo Park). They would be staffed with physicians who were specialists in eye disease, in facial and plastic surgery, and in ophthalmic surgery. Rehabilitation of the blinded casualty would be started in these two eye centers "instead of awaiting the casualty's arrival in a Veterans Administration facility, where rehabilitation and vocational programs are properly centered." The reason? "Unless facilities for rehabilitation are placed in Army hospitals, long months of convalescence, made necessary by complicated wounds or other conditions, may postpone the early beginning in re-education of the blind, which is so essential to a successful result."

However, the directive also made a point of saying, "it is not the intention of the Medical Department of the Army to take over the entire rehabilitation program; that still remains in the hands of the Veterans Administration." The Army program would be modeled after St. Dunstan's in England. Drawing on the latter's "high order of special service to the blind,"

… it is intended that contact be made with the blind soldier at the earliest possible time, by a blind worker, before the psychological aspects of the deprivation of sight may make any deep inroads on the personality. … The possibility of a happy life must be presented by one familiar with the hardships of that experience.

It was the Army's intention "to keep the soldier in a military hospital until maximum therapeutic benefit has been obtained" and to begin rehabilitation training during this period. There was to be "a full daily program which leaves little time for self-pity." Psychological support was to be given by all personnel in contact with the blinded men so as "to build some measure of optimism." All personnel were to give the patients tactful guidance in personal habits: "neatness of dress, erect posture, mannerisms devoid of groping." There was to be individual instruction in such special techniques as braille reading and writing, typing, and motor skills to assist in mastering the environment.

Perhaps the most astonishing passage in this military document was captioned "A Philosophy":

There was a time when those handicapped by blindness might only look forward to selling shoelaces on a corner, or to begging, or to making brooms, or to caning chairs, or to tuning pianos, without regard to educational background or personal fitness. Each individual, we believe, has potentialities that fit him for a particular kind of activity. Some possess the ability to achieve professional distinction in the fields of law, medicine, education, etc.; others possess the technical skills and adaptability to fit them for industrial assignments; still others may look forward to clerical work, vending stand sales, or agricultural activities. It is our feeling that every opportunity should be given the patient to discover his own capabilities and what he would like to do and to give him the assistance to achieve that objective.

To put this philosophy into practice, each eye center would be staffed with one or more vocational counselors to advise on opportunities for self-support, and with social workers to counsel the patient and to assist in preparing his family. The last function was crucial: "A sympathetic family may, through its pity, destroy much of the self-confidence and reliance that the patient will learn, unless they are prepared to meet the situation wisely."

Another staffing provision was that persons trained in work with the blind would be rounded up from among a number of such men serving in various military units. A key role in the total program would be assigned to "a blind man who can get about easily and who has a pleasing personality … [a person] well adjusted to his blindness and capable of imparting that philosophy of life so essential in creating proper psychological support by demonstrating in himself its operation."

Finally, transfer to the care of the Veterans Administration for continuation of rehabilitation measures and for specific vocational training and placement services would take place when the patient had secured maximum hospital benefit and was discharged from the armed services.

The only trouble with this admirable prospectus was that it failed to anticipate how rapidly the number of war-blinded would grow, and how slowly the VA would move to pick up its end of the job. In a matter of months the two Army eye centers grew crowded with new casualties. But if the men ready for medical discharge were to move out and make room for new arrivals, where were they to go?

The question was thrashed out at the highest government level and formalized in a four-party agreement approved by Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 8, 1944. The signatories to this document—Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, War Manpower Commission chairman Paul V. McNutt, and VA Administrator Frank T. Hines—agreed:

"Each blind person should have such social adjustment training during hospitalization as may be feasible." However, since few would achieve enough adjustment during hospitalization to prepare them for vocational training or employment, additional help should be given under military auspices until the blinded patient had made "the best adjustment he is capable of making."
Blinded personnel would therefore be retained in the service until social adjustment training was completed. It was expected that this would take about four months.
During this extended training period, the Veterans Administration was to "initiate and complete as early as possible … the vocational advisement of each case" so that "the blind person will know precisely … not only his ultimate vocational objective but also the vocational training program by which the objective is to be attained."
Social adjustment training would consist of specific instruction in:

Mental adjustment as may be necessary to develop a proper attitude and a will to overcome his handicap; use of the braille watch; use of the Talking Book; perception of objects by sound; recognition of people; use of the cane; how to get about indoors and out of doors; assistance with personal problems, shaving, eating, posture, etc.; pencil writing; typewriting; braille reading; braille writing with slate and machine; aid in learning how to study; hand training, hand tools, machine tools; use of leisure time—games, checkers, cards, etc.; recreation, theatres, parties … and such sports as may be feasible.

To execute this plan, all blinded personnel of both the Army and Navy would become the responsibility of the Army Medical Department for training in a rehabilitation center to be made available by the Army.

The center established in fulfillment of this agreement was located in Avon, Connecticut, and bore the official title of Old Farms Convalescent Hospital (Sp.). Colonel Frederick H. Thorne, an Army ophthalmologist, was named commanding officer. As had been the case with Evergreen, "hospital" was a misnomer; it was used because the installation was under medical direction. Nor was "convalescent hospital" an accurate description. Old Farms, which opened in June 1944, was a training school with a specific curriculum and specific goals.

The physical setting to which men now began to be transferred from Valley Forge and Dibble was unique. Old Farms occupied the premises of a former private preparatory school of the same name, located on a 2,000-acre tract of rural land in Connecticut's Farmington River valley, about 11 miles from the state capital of Hartford. The school, which had been built in 1926, was the creation of an eccentric and talented woman architect, Theodate Pope Riddle, heiress to a bicycle-manufacturing fortune. Mrs. Riddle had designed Old Farms to simulate the appearance of centuries-old English schools. Its buildings had three-foot-thick stone walls, red slate roofs, hand-hewn beams and doors, a good deal of hand-wrought ironwork. Its plant comprised 26 irregularly shaped buildings, the principal structures arranged around a quadrangle and connected by a complex maze of passages and pathways. In the words of one of the blinded veterans trained there, Old Farms was "a good substitute for an obstacle course. The ceilings are of various heights, none of them very high; the stairways are winding and uneven, and the floors are uneven, too."

The Army took an affirmative view of these navigational hazards. If a blind man could learn to cope with the topography of Old Farms, he could get along anywhere. It was this approach to the shaping of self-confidence that led the staff to adopt a policy which became the target of considerable criticism.

This policy was to take away from the blinded man arriving at Old Farms "the thing on which he had come to place the most confidence—his cane. … During the 18 weeks he remains at Avon, while on our grounds he gets about without a cane, without a dog, and without a guide—completely on his own."

The criticism stemmed from the fact that this approach represented an abrupt about-face for most of the men coming to Old Farms. It was generally agreed that one of the most valuable accomplishments of the preliminary adjustment program at Valley Forge was the "long cane" foot travel system, developed by Sergeant (later Lieutenant) Richard E. Hoover, who was one of the soldiers brought to the Valley Forge eye center when the Surgeon General's office spread a net through all Stateside Army service commands to locate men with experience in work for the blind.

Before the war Hoover had been a teacher and physical training coach at the Maryland School for the Blind. He was convinced that the "white cane" customarily used by blind people was too short, too heavy, too cumbersome, and not a sufficiently good sound conductor to be really helpful as an aid to mobility. Moreover, it was employed in the wrong way and for the wrong purpose. The most serious problem of all was that no system existed for teaching blind people how to use a cane to maximum advantage. The assumption had always been that each person could learn for himself.

A man of scientific bent (after the war he entered medical school and became a distinguished ophthalmologist), Hoover came up with the "long cane." It was made of metal with a plastic tip, was six to ten inches longer than the usual wooden cane, had a shaft about half the thickness of the latter, and weighed only six or seven ounces.

What came to be known as the Hoover cane was topped by a shepherd's crook that protected the hand. Designed for use as a bumper and a probe, the cane had to be employed in a definite technique, sweeping a low arc in front of the user in a rhythmic, cross-body pattern in which it lightly touched the ground in front of the foot that was about to be brought forward, insuring that this foot had an unobstructed spot on which to land. As it described the arc from one side to the other, the long cane struck any obstruction (a wall, the edge of a half-open door) directly in front of the blind man. It was long enough to keep the user from stooping while executing the arc or changing posture when going down or up a step. Its metallic body was a good sound conductor which provided important orientation clues to the presence of walls, open spaces or changes in terrain.

Skill in the use of the cane was acquired only through careful teaching and rigorous practice. At Valley Forge Hoover trained a group of instructors in the systematic and orderly method by means of which they, in turn, could train the newly blinded men.

The hundreds of men who passed through this preliminary training were startled to discover that at Old Farms the canes were banned on the premises. This arbitrary rule also dismayed leaders in work for the blind, who deplored the absence of continuity between the two programs—an absence which left those in charge at Old Farms free to devise their own theories and methods of teaching mobility.

It is difficult to say which of many possible reasons was responsible for the discontinuity. To the trainees, it was simply one more example of "the Army way" of doing everything. To the Surgeon General's staff in command at Old Farms, it was at least partly a question of making use of human laboratory subjects to pursue independent lines of scientific inquiry. One of those lines was the subject of facial vision, then very much in the news by reason of the just-published Cornell study of echolocation. A number of experiments were conducted at Old Farms with various "crickets" or other noise-making devices, whose echoes helped blind men to orient themselves in space.

Exaggerated press reports about the experimental work at Old Farms led to the false impression that cane travel had been totally abandoned there. The men did use canes when they went on field trips to Hartford, where they were given practice in street travel and in the use of busses, trains, and other public conveyances and facilities. However, further refinement of cane travel technique, which might logically have been pursued, was put off, and it was not until the Veterans Administration eventually opened its rehabilitation center in Hines, Illinois, in 1948 that the technique was perfected.

The basic 18-week training program at Old Farms had four separate aspects. One concentrated on self-care and other personal adjustment activities. Another dealt with physical exercise, particularly sports, to prove to the trainees that they could continue to enjoy many of the same outdoor activities they had engaged in when they had sight. They bowled, swam, rode horseback, roller-skated, fished, boated, played golf and thus came to realize that they were by no means sentenced to a future of physical torpor. A third aspect—social recreation in the form of dances, dinner parties, and other entertainments—made the same point.

The heart of the program lay in the several dozen courses which occupied most of the men's time. Each man was free to choose what he wanted or needed. There were three types: courses in braille, typing, and manual dexterity designed to help the trainees live as blind men; courses in English, music, public speaking, and creative writing designed to help them live as full human beings; and courses in industrial and commercial skills aimed at discovering vocational interests and aptitudes.

One of the most constructive aspects of this last group was their extension into actual practice with the cooperation of some large business and industrial firms in the area. Men who had learned to operate power machines were given brief tryout placements in factories, holding down regular production jobs for which they earned regular salaries. Others worked as paid employees in stores, garages, filling stations, and insurance companies. These tryouts were the capstones of the Old Farms training program; they were both practical prevocational tests and important confidence builders.

All told, 850 men went through the Old Farms program during its three years of existence. A study made by Colonel Thorne after the first 200 men had completed their training showed four out of five to have achieved adjustments rated satisfactory or better. The other 20 percent were men who showed consistent immaturity or irresponsibility; men who were mentally retarded, brain-injured or suffering from severe emotional disturbance; or men who were chronic alcoholics or sociopaths. An even higher degree of success—90 percent—was later claimed by a ranking military medical officer who termed the Army's rehabilitation of blinded soldiers "one of the greatest achievements in military ophthalmology."

While evaluations by outside observers produced a less roseate picture, the overall judgment was "that newly-blinded persons could learn to be blind in a time-limited period if there were sufficient personnel, equipment and services available." Mounted at substantial cost (the Old Farms program alone was said to have involved over $6 million), this demonstration helped give the final impetus to postwar development of rehabilitation centers for all newly blinded adults.

Where was the organized field of work for the blind in this largely military picture? Except for a few special circumstances, and even more special personalities, the professional experts on blindness played only a peripheral role. In the initial planning for the Army program, the Surgeon General's office refrained from seeking advice from leaders in work for the blind. It did not get around to asking for help from specialists in blindness until the beginning of 1945, when it invited Robert Irwin to recommend a small group of "honorary advisory consultants" who would "visit our blind hospitals from time to time and give us counsel and advice as to the working of our program." The group suggested by Irwin, which was given the official title of Honorary Civilian Advisory Committee, Program for the War Blinded of the United States Army, held its first meeting with the Surgeon General's chief consultant in ophthalmology, Colonel Derrick T. Vail, on March 21, 1945.

Colonel Vail told the ten men and two women who met with him that day that they were there as individuals and not as representatives of agencies or professional associations. He was blunt in his criticism of some of the interagency and interpersonal rivalries he had observed while setting up the Army program. At least part of his negative impression, it became clear, had grown out of contact with Dr. Merle E. Frampton who, as a reserve officer in charge of special services for the Navy's department of rehabilitation, had been instrumental in the Navy's last-minute decision not to participate in the Old Farms program. Instead, the Navy established its own rehabilitation service for blinded sailors and marines at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital; the program incorporated a two-week period at Dr. Frampton's school, the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind.

Vail was equally outspoken in his criticism of the Veterans Administration which, he said, had dragged its feet to the point where the Army had been forced to go much further into the work of rehabilitation than it had wanted or expected. He made it clear, however, that he and his colleagues in the Surgeon General's office were pleased and proud over their accomplishments and that, while they were willing to heed criticism given in a constructive spirit, the basic pattern had been set and would continue.

In addition to Irwin, who was elected chairman, the Army's honorary civilian advisory committee consisted of Canada's Colonel Baker; Reverend Thomas J. Carroll, then assistant director, Catholic Guild for the Blind, Newton, Mass., and an official chaplain at Old Farms; Joseph G. Cauffman, principal, Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind (Overbrook); Dr. Roma S. Cheek, executive director, North Carolina Commission for the Blind; Dr. Gabriel Farrell, director, Perkins School for the Blind; Philip N. Harrison, executive secretary, Pennsylvania Association for the Blind; R. Henry P. Johnson, executive director, Florida Council for the Blind (who was replaced, after his sudden death a few months later, by Dr. Richard S. French of the California School for the Blind); Mrs. Lee Johnston, executive director, Missouri Commission for the Blind; W. L. McDaniel, executive secretary, Washington Society for the Blind; Eber L. Palmer, superintendent, New York State School for the Blind (Batavia); and Peter J. Salmon, who by that time had become executive director of the Industrial Home for the Blind, Brooklyn.

The committee agreed that it would not be feasible for all of its members to visit the Army rehabilitation units, and three were selected to serve as the official consultants. In the course of the next weeks they made their first round of visits to Valley Forge, Dibble, and Old Farms. The reports they submitted were, on the whole, favorable, but they also pinpointed specific areas of weakness and offered suggestions on how these might be overcome.

One observation made by the consultant group was that the Army's standoffish attitude toward the established organizations for the blind was being passed on to the trainees. This was shortsighted, Peter Salmon warned Colonel Vail on his return from the first tour. For many of the men, he pointed out, the grandiose hopes for professional or commercial careers encouraged at Old Farms would prove empty dreams. They would need the more down-to-earth approach taken by agencies for the blind.

When the consultants made a second round of visits early in 1946, they found that most of their earlier recommendations had been followed, but that a host of new problems had arisen, many of them due to rapid changes of personnel now that the war was over. One by one, the military ophthalmologists and key staff people at Valley Forge, Dibble, and Old Farms, as well as those in the top echelons of the Surgeon General's office, were returning to civilian life. The guns having been silenced, no large new influx of blinded men could be expected. The military rehabilitation units were beginning to retrench and prepare for shutdown. If the Veterans Administration was ever to take hold of its end of the job, now was the time.

The Veterans Administration was then undergoing a vast reorganization following the retirement of General Hines and the appointment of General Omar Bradley as his successor. In the circumstances, the Army's Honorary Civilian Advisory Committee disbanded in mid-1946, but not before its members had volunteered to take on a comparable role with the VA. Their offer was promptly accepted by General Bradley. The VA's Advisory Committee on the Blinded Veteran was formally appointed in March 1946, with the same 12 members as the Army's advisory group, plus three additional persons: Navy Captain Howard H. Montgomery, commanding officer of the U.S. Naval Hospital in Philadelphia; Colonel Charles A. Pfeffer, successor to Colonel Thorne as commanding officer of Old Farms, and Raymond T. Frey, a blinded World War II veteran who, following his own rehabilitation at Valley Forge, had been employed as the "blind consultant" there. (Frey was subsequently replaced on the committee by another blinded veteran, Major John F. Brady.)

The driving spirit in the new advisory group was Father Carroll, whose firsthand knowledge of the blinded men exceeded that of any of the others except Frey's. A frequent visitor to Valley Forge and the Philadelphia Naval Hospital in addition to Old Farms, Thomas J. Carroll was a tall, Hollywood-handsome young cleric endowed with a logical mind, a fighting spirit, and so deep a capacity for empathy with the problems of blindness that the men in the rehabilitation centers fondly called him "Father Tom," while others, disregarding the fact that he was sighted, spoke of him as "the blind priest."

Born in Gloucester, Mass., in 1909, Carroll was a graduate of Holy Cross University and St. John's Seminary. His first assignment, following his ordination in 1938, was as assistant director of the small, newly founded Catholic Guild for the Blind operated under the aegis of the Archdiocese of Boston. In 1947 he was made director of the Guild and went on to become a commanding figure in the overall movement for the rehabilitation of the adult blind when the Guild established its St. Paul's Rehabilitation Center in 1954. Under his active guidance the center's 16-week residential program won a nationwide reputation for creativity and standard-setting; its governing principles were subsequently set forth by Carroll in a challenging book, Blindness: What It Is, What It Does and How to Live with It. Although his heavily psychiatric approach was regarded by many people in the field as extreme, particularly his emphasis on accepting blindness as "a death" which had to be followed by a conscious psychological rebirth, the book became one of the resource materials used in educational programs preparing students for work in the field of blindness.

Despite its sectarian auspices, Father Carroll's agency served blind people of all faiths; to reflect its nonsectarian nature, the name was changed in 1964 to Catholic Guild for All the Blind. It was changed once again on July 1, 1972, to the Carroll Rehabilitation Center for the Visually Impaired, in memory of Father Carroll, who had died in 1971.

Through his work with the war-blinded Father Carroll grew into positions of leadership in a variety of national movements for the welfare of blind people. That his keen insights were already present in 1946 became clear when, at the very first meeting of the VA's Advisory Committee, he posed a list of 51 specific questions on VA services for the blinded and asked the agency's officials for their answers. He then analyzed the responses in a cogent 21-page report which bluntly identified the areas of weakness, confusion, and malfunction that needed immediate attention if the VA were to fulfill its mandated responsibilities toward men who had lost the use of their eyes in the nation's service. Following review by the entire committee, the Carroll report was forwarded to General Bradley on October 3, 1946.

The basic problem in the Veterans Administration was neither ill-will nor indifference but generalized disarray. Brigadier General Hines, who had been appointed in 1923 to head the predecessor Veterans Bureau, had succeeded in 22 years in building a tight and tamper-proof organization. The price of this probity, however, was the psychological paralysis that so often accompanies an entrenched bureaucracy. When Hines retired in 1945, two Army officers who had distinguished themselves during the war were persuaded to invest a couple of years in updating and reorganizing the sluggish structure to cope with its swollen postwar responsibilities.

A formidable job faced General Bradley as VA administrator and General Paul R. Hawley as chief medical director. More than 16 million men had served in the armed forces during World War II; some 400,000 had died, three-quarters of them in battle, and some 650,000 men had been wounded. The task was so gigantic that the problem of blinded veterans held a low priority. Although classified as among the most seriously disabled, the war-blinded represented only 2 percent of the disabled men for whose rehabilitation the VA was responsible. A complicating factor was that the services needed for blinded men fell athwart the administrative divisions of the VA: proposals endorsed one day by the Medical Department were frustrated the next by the Training Department; measures approved at headquarters were ignored, misunderstood, or misapplied in the regional offices if, indeed, news of their approval ever managed to get through the choked channels of communication.

A rueful account of the administrative snarls that delayed the Veterans Administration in moving ahead with a viable program for rehabilitation of the war-blinded was given in 1969 by C. Warren Bledsoe, a pivotal figure in the frustrating paper chase. An affable, articulate man with unmistakable relish for the role of fascinated observer and discursive chronicler, he was literally born into work for the blind. His father, John Francis Bledsoe, was superintendent of the Maryland School for the Blind when the son, baptized Charles Warren but universally known by his middle name, was born in 1912. Following graduation from Princeton in 1934, Warren spent the next six years teaching at the Maryland institution, taking a year's leave of absence during this period to attend the advanced teacher-training course given at the Perkins School for the Blind. The writing and publication of a successful novel then occupied him until he joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. He was a technical sergeant stationed at Craig Field in Alabama when the call went out for servicemen with experience in work for the blind to be transferred to the eye center at Valley Forge Hospital. There Bledsoe spent two years working with his old friend and former colleague, Dick Hoover, in the cane travel program.

On discharge from the Army, Bledsoe accepted a position with the American Foundation for the Blind as editor of the Outlook. Simultaneously, however, he was asked to become a part-time consultant to the Veterans Administration in activating its program for blinded veterans. After a year of dividing his time between the Foundation and the VA, Bledsoe accepted a full-time appointment at VA headquarters as coordinator of services for blinded veterans. The establishment of such a post had been one of the major recommendations of the VA Civilian Advisory Committee, some of whose members also played a part in having Bledsoe appointed to the job after Hoover, the universal first choice, declined in favor of attending medical school.

It was during Bledsoe's year in this post that the VA's trailblazing center at Hines for treatment and training of blinded veterans was finally activated. He subsequently reverted to a consultant role and organized a comprehensive survey of the status of war-blinded veterans. In 1952, when the war in Korea brought about a new wave of blinded men, the VA reinstated a full-time position at headquarters and Bledsoe became chief of services to the blind in the central office. The position was abolished during a 1958 economy wave (it was reinstated the following year), but a comparable job opened at that point in the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation and Bledsoe joined Mary Switzer's staff in developing rehabilitation services for non-veterans. As of 1972 he was continuing in the service of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare as a special assistant in the Office of Services for the Blind and Visually Handicapped.

Warren Bledsoe's employment history accurately reflects the period's on-again, off-again course of events in the Veterans Administration. That agency's vacillating attitude during the immediate period was enough to cause Robert Irwin to write a testy letter in the spring of 1948 to Major General Carl R. Gray, who had just succeeded General Bradley as VA administrator. Announcing his decision to resign as chairman of the VA's Advisory Committee, Irwin's letter said: "Although this committee has been in existence for two years, we have very little in the way of concrete evidence that the VA is interested in our recommendations. The Veterans Administration service to the blinded veteran is about as ineffective as it was two years ago."

The letter drew a soothing overnight reply from Gray. "I am only here some 100 days," the new VA chief wrote. "This is the first indication that I have had that there isn't complete understanding between the Administration and your committee." He promised a prompt investigation. The general was as good as his word. Two weeks later he wrote that the medical department under Dr. Paul A. Magnuson, whom he had appointed to succeed General Hawley, was reorganizing the VA's program for the severely handicapped, including the blinded, in a way that would "straighten out this problem to everybody's satisfaction." Agreeing to defer his resignation, Irwin reiterated that success hinged on "selection of personnel—top personnel especially—who really believe that blind people can be rehabilitated."

This ultimately came about, but by then the Advisory Committee on the Blinded Veteran had dissolved through disuse and passed into history.

At the same time that leaders in work for the blind were reaping a harvest of disappointment in their efforts to influence policy through advisory committees, the war-blinded men were nonetheless benefiting on the operating level from the experience, goodwill, and resources of the professional organizations in work for the blind. In large measure this was due to the energy, brains, and personality of a remarkable woman named Kathern F. Gruber.

There were slow-moving bureaucrats who called her "hell-on-wheels." Less intimidated officials called her "amazing" and praised her "pleasing personality [which] made everyone relax." Bledsoe, who worked in close partnership with her over a number of years, termed her "most gloriously militant." As for the men who were the focus of her efforts, they later named her "Sweetheart of the Blinded Veterans Association" and renewed the title at annual conventions by toasting her to the tune of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." The one thing nobody called her was Kathern; it was always Kay.

A handsome woman in her late thirties, whose wardrobe drew admiring comments from men and women alike, Kay Gruber found her true metier when, at the beginning of 1945, she joined the staff of the Foundation to initiate its Service for the War-Blinded department. She had spent 15 years as a teacher of the blind in Minneapolis high schools, where her effective system of vocational placement and post-graduate followup of students foreshadowed the kind of personalized interest she was to take in the "graduates" of the rehabilitation centers for blinded servicemen.

A desire to do something for the war effort led Miss Gruber to write Robert Irwin in 1944, asking him how to go about getting a job that would make use of her experience. The letter came at a propitious moment. Irwin had already alerted his trustees to the need for a staff member to work with the war-blinded. "As an entirely civilian organization we are free to go to anyone from the Surgeon General down and make representation in behalf of the men."

The job Irwin offered Kay was one she would have to shape as she went along. "I am not quite sure just what is needed," he wrote her just before she reported for duty. "For quite a while your job is going to be to find out what the government is not doing and why not. You can then accumulate the facts which we can lay before the proper government officials and get things going [in] the right way."

It was not totally virgin territory Kay Gruber was expected to plow. The Foundation was already well and favorably known at Valley Forge, Dibble, Old Farms, and the Philadelphia Naval Hospital because two years earlier it had initiated the policy of presenting each blinded serviceman with a braille watch. The rationale for this service was reported by the Foundation president at the 1943 annual meeting:

Learning to tell time on these watches is almost the first step in the readjustment of these boys to their new life. We feel this is extremely important because time weighs heavily on their hands. Some of them report they "look" at their watches a hundred times a day. To meet this need the Foundation has placed orders for watches which will necessitate an investment of $8,000.

That first $8,000 investment was more than quadrupled in the years that followed. By 1950 the Foundation had presented 1,464 blinded servicemen with personalized braille watches. (It had also "redeemed" three such watches which had found their way to pawnshops in different sections of the country.)

Finding the money for the watches was in some ways the least of it. During the war years, there were few watches for sale to civilians and many of the first to be distributed were dredged out of bureau drawers and attic trunks by sympathetic citizens in response to public appeals. They were then cleaned and repaired, and tiny metal or glass dots were added around the face.

A few of the war-blinded men could not use the brailled timepieces, having lost hands as well as eyes. For them, repeater watches were procured and specially adapted. The design for encasing these in a special frame, which a handless man could keep in a shirt pocket and activate by depressing a plunger with his stump or prosthesis, came from St. Dunstan's. The watch operated by means of a two-tone chime; the deeper tone struck the hour, while a higher tone told the quarter-hour so a man could ascertain the time within a 15-minute range of accuracy.

A braille watch had great meaning to a newly blinded man, and it also had special meaning for the Foundation. "We expect to set up a follow-up service with all these men, and the watch makes an excellent original contact," Irwin explained to an official of the Army Surgeon General's office. Kay Gruber expounded on this point when she told VA officials that "the boys will need most of our services after … they are back in civilian life making a living in competition with the sighted."

The Foundation continued to present every blinded serviceman with a braille watch throughout the Korean War and into the early days of Vietnam. The practice was terminated in 1963 as part of the policy decision to discontinue using Foundation funds for personal services or equipment that could be supplied through other sources. Once the Veterans Administration got a workable program under way for blinded veterans, men discharged from military service became eligible to receive braille watches and other devices from the VA.

In point of fact, blinded servicemen had been entitled to receive all types of tangible aids from the VA under the provisions of Public Law 78-309, enacted in 1944. The reason they didn't was that the VA could do nothing until they became veterans, and as has been noted, they were kept in military status until after the completion of basic rehabilitation training. Recognizing the importance of the earliest phase of rehabilitation, the Foundation stepped in to fill the gap not only by means of watches but through supplying typewriters, braille equipment and other aids. It succeeded in persuading the Army and Navy to buy some of this equipment for teaching purposes; other types of equipment were given to the military eye centers on loan, and still others, such as portable typewriters, were sold at less than half the Foundation's cost to men who wanted to buy their own machines.

Public Law 78-309 had a curious history. In the first wave of concern over war-blindness, eager legislators introduced bills calling for the appropriation of $5 million to supply dog guides to blinded men through the Veterans Administration. These early bills died in committee, but in early 1944 a fresh bill, reducing the amount to $1 million, was introduced by Hamilton Fish in the House and James J. Davis in the Senate. Even this sum, in the opinion of those who knew how small a percentage of blind people could make practical use of dog guides, was "about fifty times as much as [the] VA will probably need." However, since the bill seemed sure to pass, Robert Irwin decided it could be made really useful if its scope was enlarged to include money for "mechanical and electronic equipment." There was no difficulty in getting the bill amended along the lines of this suggestion, and it was enacted May 24, 1944.

The VA's administration of this law was one of the chief points of dissatisfaction among blinded veterans and those attempting to help them. Interpretation of the bill's provisions varied from one VA regional office to another. On the grounds that the VA's rehabilitation function was purely on vocational lines, some offices made grants only for specific occupational equipment, ruling out such objects as typewriters, braille writers, recording machines, even the $2.50 aluminum braille slates which blind men used to make notes.

Perhaps the source of greatest distress was an early administrative ruling that P.L. 309 was applicable only to totally blind men, rather than to all who met the commonly accepted legal definition of blindness. While this was eventually corrected in a revised ruling early in 1947, there had been a two-and-one-half-year delay between the law's passage and its usefulness to those it was intended to benefit.

During the war years, procurement of typewriters and braillewriters presented the same problems as the watches; there were simply none for sale on the open market. The public appeals that had succeeded with watches were also used to obtain an initial supply of used typewriters. About a hundred were donated and, after reconditioning, contributed to the adjustment centers. An effort was also made to collect used braillewriters, but there were few to be had, so with Army help the Foundation obtained priority ratings from the War Production Board to have a moderate supply manufactured. Priority ratings also helped to procure the new portable typewriters which the blinded men in the hospitals were eager to buy for their personal correspondence.

Initially, it was thought that the typewriters should be gifts, like the braille watches, but this idea was modified on the advice of the social workers at the military eye centers. The men were "hanging on to every ounce of self-respect permitted," a social worker at Valley Forge wrote the Foundation, so the policy adopted was to charge a nominal $25 for a personal portable, with the Foundation defraying the additional $30 cost of the machine. By the end of the war, more than five hundred portable typewriters and a smaller number of braillewriters had been furnished to war-blinded men on this basis.

There was one other way the Foundation had paved the road that it employed Kay Gruber to travel. It had sent Helen Keller and Polly Thomson on two "Purple Heart circuit" tours during 1944 and 1945. Helen, who began by visiting the centers for blinded men, was invited by the officers in charge to tour other wards in the same hospitals. Out of this experience came her wish to tour all the hospitals for the nation's war-wounded, and the Foundation agreed to defray the costs of the cross-country journeys that eventually took her and Polly to 70 Army and Navy hospitals in a six-month period.

The impact of these visits was little short of sensational. In one hospital after another, Helen Keller was hailed as the ultimate morale builder. The twenty-year-olds who filled the beds were astonished that this woman, whom they had read about in their history books, was still alive, and not only alive but vibrant, cheerful, and indefatigable. Helen did not spare herself. As Polly Thomson wrote to a friend in November 1944:

It's hard work, the hardest we have ever done, but it's worth it. We walk miles up and down corridors and wards. … We get up sometimes at 4:30–5:30 and begin at the hospitals by 9 o'clock and stay in until around 5 p.m . We literally tumble into bed exhausted. Don't speak to each other, too weary—our voices are tired. Up again following morning to start all over again. … Helen never did a finer work and I'm proud she has been privileged to do it.

Not only the wounded men but the hospital staffs appreciated these visits. Brigadier General W.R. Dear, commanding general of the Northington General Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Ala., put his thanks in terms that really appealed to the sixty-five-year-old Helen. "You are the most impressive and stimulating visitor we have had at our hospital and that puts you ahead of the Hollywood blondes, brunettes and play boys."

Helen herself reacted in equally exhilarated terms. "To be permitted to kindle even one light for the wounded or the despondent is an event as blessed as if I had my sight restored," she wrote Migel at the conclusion of her first tour. The trip inspired her as much as she inspired the men who came in contact with her. A visit to the gymnasium of an amputee unit led her to write the commanding officer that the men's "gaiety carried me back to my girlhood and almost before I knew it I was throwing a ball for them to catch, rowing in the boat and punching the bag as light hearted as the merriest of them."

The glow kindled in Helen Keller's heart by such experiences lasted a long time. This recharging of her spiritual batteries was assuredly a key factor in enabling her, in the years ahead, to undertake the exhausting overseas tours of war-stricken lands that climaxed her lifetime of work for the blind people of the world.

Kay Gruber wove these strong strands of good will into a tight and durable fabric. Unlike some other emissaries from the field of work for the blind, she came not to criticize the staffs of the military medical and rehabilitation units, but to help them do the best job they could. She took infinite pains to listen to their problems and furnish useful clues and helpful suggestions: the names of potential candidates for staff vacancies, lists of books on blindness, information on where to procure equipment, tips on rehabilitation techniques successfully tried out in other centers. Careful note was also made during her field trips of the blinded men's personal requests, and items large and small were followed through conscientiously. A voluminous correspondence resulted from these visits as well as from the many office interviews conducted with blinded veterans or members of their families.

Beginning in 1946, with the hostilities at an end and most of the blinded men discharged and back home, the Foundation's activity focused increasingly on the Veterans Administration. An offer to help indoctrinate the staffs of the VA's regional offices, to which veterans now had to apply for all services, was readily accepted, and four intensive training courses, each three weeks long, were given to acquaint regional personnel with the necessary philosophy and techniques. A total of 127 VA employees attended these courses, which were held in New York and included, in addition to lectures and discussions, field trips to a typical voluntary agency for the blind, a sheltered workshop, the Foundation's technical laboratories, the Seeing Eye dog guide school, the Army's rehabilitation center at Old Farms, and the Navy's program at the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind.

The courses did an excellent job; unfortunately, much of the effect was dissipated when a number of VA staff members who had attended were transferred to assignments not involved with the war-blinded (one such transfer took place less than two weeks after completion of the course) and their replacements were not offered the opportunity of similar orientation. Efforts were made with the Veterans Administration to have the course repeated for newcomers, or to establish other methods of familiarizing regional office staff with the special needs of the blind, but these came to naught. This situation constituted one of the major complaints of the VA's Advisory Committee.

Another complaint was that ignorance, indifference and internal pressures caused by heavy workloads were resulting in inequities in the VA's treatment of war-blinded men. One, which was still in force in 1972, had to do with the arbitrary distinction made between men who had suffered anatomical loss of both eyes and those who were equally sightless but whose eyes had not been enucleated. The first group received appreciably larger disability compensation awards.

An additional flaw in disability compensation payments concerned the eight thousand or so men who had lost the sight of one eye in the service. Men in this category were awarded compensation on the basis of 30 or 40 percent disability. Long experience prompted workers for the blind to alert the VA to the likelihood that some would sooner or later lose the sight of the remaining eye. Even though this might come about through a wholly unrelated accident or illness, the resulting total blindness was entitled to be adjudged and compensated as service-connected. By 1947, when more than 15 such cases had already occurred, the men were still receiving compensation for only partial disability. Eventually, legislation straightened out this inequity.

The terms "disability compensation" and "pension" are often used interchangeably, but they actually represent two different ideas. Disability compensation is paid for a service-connected injury which impairs a man's earning capacity; it is not a reward for services rendered but an effort to insure that the injured veteran's future standard of living will not suffer by reason of his diminished earning ability. Disability compensation is not related to economic need; a veteran disabled in service is entitled to receive it whether or not he is gainfully employed.

Pensions, which are regarded as recompense for services to the nation, are paid to men who have served in the armed forces and who, by reason of non-service-connected illness or disability, or because of advancing age, are in temporary or permanent need of financial assistance.

The laws governing rates of payment for both disability compensation and pensions are complex and have been subject to frequent upward revision. Thus the disability compensation rate for anatomical loss of both eyes, which was $265 per month in 1945, was $371 in 1954 and $770 in 1972.

Troublesome as individual inequities might be for the affected veterans and for people like Kay Gruber and Father Carroll who were trying to help straighten them out, they ranked second in importance in the opinion of leaders in work for the blind to the need for the Veterans Administration to formulate and execute a permanent plan for the future social adjustment of blinded veterans. The Army and Navy rehabilitation units were closed down by mid-1947. A large number of blinded men had been discharged from military service without any sort of rehabilitation training, an even larger number had not derived sufficient benefit from such training as they did receive, an unpredictable number had marginal vision at the time of discharge that would undoubtedly deteriorate into blindness in future years, and a similarly unpredictable number might be expected to incur blindness-producing injuries during peacetime military service. At this point no one even dared to think about the possibility of future wars.

Obstacle after obstacle impeded the VA's initiation of a rehabilitation program for blinded veterans and, one by one, they were cleared away. In the spring of 1947 the federal Budget Bureau raised a question over whether the VA was legally empowered to give anything other than vocational services. To settle this point an executive order was issued by President Harry S. Truman on May 31, 1947, specifically assigning responsibility to the Veterans Administration for social rehabilitation training of blinded veterans. This, Bledsoe was to write, "should have been enough to make the most inveterate shilly-shallyer shamefaced." But it wasn't. There was still resistance in some of VA's top administrative echelons to getting a rehabilitation center under way. "Why all this fuss about the blinded veteran? He will be just as blind three years from now," was the cynical comment of a ranking executive at VA's central office on one occasion.

There was also uncertainty over where a VA rehabilitation center should be located. At one point it was to be Fort Thomas in Kentucky; a little later, Framingham, Mass. For a time, too, there was talk that the Federal Security Agency might set up a national rehabilitation center for the blind that could serve both veterans and civilians; although the idea failed to materialize, it served as one more excuse for deferring VA action. In the closing days of 1947, however, the VA finally decided to establish a training center for blinded veterans that would be located in a suburb of Chicago at Hines Hospital, which had a strong physical medicine and rehabilitation service in operation.

What may have tipped the scales was the fact that Carl Gray, the VA administrator, was himself functionally blind. According to the memoirs of Dr. Paul Magnuson, whom General Gray appointed as the agency's medical chief: "Carl Gray could not see. In one eye he had only a little lateral vision, and he had not been at the head of the Veterans Administration long before he developed a block of central vision in his other eye. He was unable to read a typewritten word."

In any event, 1948 saw the turning point. With the appointment in late February of Russell C. Williams under the title of Chief, Physical Medicine Rehabilitation of the Blind, Hines Hospital, there at last came into being a permanent government facility where blinded veterans could be trained in personal and social adjustment through a carefully designed, time-limited program which utilized and improved on everything that had been learned at Valley Forge, Dibble, and Old Farms.

The initial program at Hines was designed to be very small and very selective. Only nine men at a time were to be trained in an 18-week program, and for these there was to be a nine-person staff, a one-to-one ratio. Finding and training staff and equipping the center took several months. The first patients were admitted in July.

Within a year, the Hines program was recognized as a model of excellence, its quality of which was due largely to the unwavering standards established and maintained by its chief. Once again history had provided the right man in the right place at the right time.

A few months away from his thirtieth birthday when he came to Hines, Russell Williams was a blinded veteran who had achieved his own rehabilitation at Valley Forge and Avon and had then returned to Valley Forge as blind consultant when Raymond Frey left to begin the study and practice of physical therapy. A Hoosier by birth, Williams held a degree in education from Indiana's Central Normal College and was a teacher and athletic director at the Dillsboro, Indiana, High School when he was called up for military service in 1942. In August 1944, two months after his field artillery unit landed in France, an exploding shell tore across Williams' face, destroying both eyes.

Although neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist by training, Williams was endowed with an instinctive understanding of human behavior that was constantly enlarged and enriched as he developed the program at Hines. His empathy for the men who came to the rehabilitation center as patients was more than that of one blind man for another. He regarded himself and every other blinded veteran as a person struggling for growth, and was able to communicate this kinship of need not only to the trainees but to every member of his carefully chosen staff.

These were all sighted men, some with a few years of experience in work with the physically handicapped, but none specifically knowledgeable about blindness. With help from Kay Gruber and Warren Bledsoe, who spent months at Hines assisting in the personnel screening and indoctrination process, Williams looked for "sincere, healthy minded, emotionally balanced persons, with varied interests, sufficient security to respect their fellow workmen and the patients with whom they would come in contact."

It is doubtful whether Williams could have articulated, at this early stage, just what he meant by "sufficient security." Many years later, after he had moved to Washington to become VA's national chief of blind rehabilitation, he was able to formulate this essential quality as the subordination of the staff member's emotional needs in favor of building the client's ego.

To motivate such an attitude, the indispensable element was what Williams called "a pivot person"—a leader who firmly believed "that when sight is diminished or lost, life can be pursued in effective ways and pleasure gotten out of it." His unremitting personal demonstration of this belief was what enabled the rehabilitation therapists at Hines to push on despite seeming stalemates or setbacks and to become believers themselves.

Williams trained his staff "as thoroughly as a coach trains a team for a big game" by emulating the methods developed at Valley Forge—methods which became the core of teaching programs for rehabilitation therapists. Training took place under a blindfold, and encompassed both self-care functions and orientation and mobility skills. The blindfolded instructors (called "orientors") were taught how to orient themselves in space by touch, smell, and hearing; how to travel erectly, rapidly, and safely with the use of the long cane; how and when to ask for sighted help. It wasn't easy. According to John D. Malmazian, one of the first staff members at the Hines center and later its chief:

There were numerous occasions during mobility lessons when they became disoriented and walked into the streets. One man walked into an open garage and was unable to get out without assistance. … The men frequently were anxious and occasionally panicked when they were confused and lost but did not remove their blindfolds. Instead, they shouted for assistance. … Each experience taught them better to appreciate and use their newly acquired skills and command of their remaining senses to select and interpret environmental clues.

By the time the first patient arrived on July 6, 1948, all the orientors … had acquired enough experience to believe that the techniques were valid and would, if used properly, enable a blind person to travel safely, efficiently and independently in almost any type of environment.

Flexible but firm in his judgments, Williams was capable of resisting the outside pressures that in any way threatened to impede the work of the center. And pressures there were. Some were trivial. Residents of the nearby community of Maywood who saw the trainees and their orientors practicing mobility techniques on the streets called to complain that the latter were heedlessly risking the safety of blind men. Now and again a citizen, sure that something sinister was afoot, would notify the police that a blind man was being followed by a mysterious stranger.

More serious was the fact that many people in influential positions regarded the center's omission of specific vocational training as a mistake. Williams, however, held to the principle that the blind rehabilitation unit at Hines was essentially "an environmental therapy in which the patient learns how to deal with the effects of blindness" and that specific vocational preparation could and should take place only after this fundamental goal had been attained.

Still a different set of problems arose when regional VA offices referred men who lacked the necessary emotional or physical strengths to benefit from such environmental therapy. "Our program is tough," Williams explained over and over. "Its keynote is hard work." Only men in sound health, able to undergo a regimen of physical reconditioning after years of inactivity, could be considered. Good physical tone was essential for successful training in independent travel. "A blind man needs extremely strong feet and ankles if he is not to be thrown by the pebbles, sticks and unexpected depressions the ordinary person unconsciously sees and avoids. Even though the cane weighs only six ounces, its use requires a strong, flexible wrist and an untiring arm," he told a reporter for the Chicago Herald-American in one of the few newspaper interviews he permitted.

Avoidance of publicity was deliberate. During the first year or two, while the Hines program was being refined and shaped, very few visitors were permitted. The only welcome exceptions were Bledsoe and three consultants appointed by the VA's Department of Medicine and Surgery who came regularly to advise and assist. These consultants were Kay Gruber, Richard Hoover (by then an M.D.) and Harry Spar, an able blind man who was the industrial training specialist of the Industrial Home for the Blind in Brooklyn. Spar, who later became IHB's associate director and in 1972 held the title of associate director of the IHB-operated National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults, helped set up the manual arts shops in which the Hines trainees developed their sense of touch through manipulation of various materials and machines.

The greatest challenge to the Hines staff lay in the trainees themselves. They were different from the eager, enthusiastic, newly blinded men, so many of whom had succeeded brilliantly at Valley Forge and Old Farms and had gone on to establish themselves in new life patterns. The men who came to Hines in 1948 and 1949 had been blind for four or five years and had not yet learned how to come to terms with that fact. Some had tried and failed; others had not even tried but had spent the years in debilitating inactivity and mounting despondency as the glamor of being war heroes wore off. Williams made it his business to get to know these men intimately; he came to know their family situations, their personal hangups and the behavioral defenses they had erected to protect their damaged egos. He spent time every day with every man, sensing when to soothe, when to encourage, when to challenge. He was kind and understanding but at the same time strict in his insistence that a man respect the discipline of the training program and that he work ceaselessly to rise to his own potential.

The one eventuality not foreseen when the Hines program was established on such a miniature scale was that American servicemen would soon be fighting on a new battlefield. When the Korean conflict began to produce its tragic harvest of blinded men, the United States was prepared at last to do something about them without having to start all over again.

Early in 1951 authorization was given for the capacity of the Hines program to be tripled to 27 beds, and for a 13-bed preliminary adjustment unit to be established in the hospital's ophthalmology ward. This expansion, which also meant 20 new staff members to be recruited and put through blindfold training, was accomplished within the year. The nature of the Korean War, with its close hand-to-hand fighting, resulted in many more multihandicapped casualties than World War II. The Hines program's emphasis on physical fitness had to be modified. The staff, by this rime, had acquired sufficient expertise to tackle the adjustment of men who had sustained serious injuries in addition to blindness. Adaptations of training procedures and prosthetic devices were evolved to enable amputees and neurologically impaired men to learn how to cope with lack of sight. The Korean toll ultimately came to 500 men, the highest ratio of blindness—more than 5 percent of all casualties—in any American war up to that time.

Sadly, the Foundation reactivated its Services for the War-Blinded department. At the request of the Defense Department Kay Gruber, now one of the Foundation's three assistant directors, once again went to military hospitals treating the eye-wounded and provided their administrators with information about Hines and other facilities and services which could be of help to the men. There was, however, an important difference in the Foundation's approach to its responsibility for this new group of blinded veterans. It no longer tried single-handedly to untangle the men's individual problems. Many were turned over to a new and increasingly potent ally: the Blinded Veterans Association.

From a psychological viewpoint, the men who went through the World War II program of social adjustment fell into three categories: (1) those who accepted their blindness and strove to overcome its limitations; (2) those who refused to accept the fact of blindness and were confused and depressed as a result; (3) those who sought to escape the reality of blindness through resort to alcoholism and other denial mechanisms.

It was the men in the first category who genuinely profited from the training that taught them the techniques of living as blind men, and it was this group that realized that, no matter what benefits and assistance might be offered them by society, the key to successful rehabilitation lay within themselves. This was the motivating force that led to the establishment of the Blinded Veterans Association, which adopted as its motto: "that the blinded veteran may take his rightful place in the community of his fellows and work with them toward the creation of a peaceful world."

The Blinded Veterans Association was born at Old Farms in March 1945, when about a hundred able and determined men, knowing they would soon be dispersed to their homes, agreed they could help one another in the future. They sensed that the true battle for acceptance in a sighted world would begin only after they had left the protected environment of Old Farms and faced the personal, social, and economic realities of making a place for themselves in society. In this struggle they could not only draw moral support from one another but, through exchanging experiences, learn from one another.

Several midwives assisted in the birth of the BVA. Two, Father Carroll and Kay Gruber, were predictable. A third, who came from outside the professional field of work for the blind, was the mystery writer Baynard Kendrick.

Kendrick's interest in war-blinded men stemmed from a World War I experience at St. Dunstan's, which he had frequented as a volunteer while stationed in London as an American enlistee in the Canadian Army. One Saturday afternoon a young blinded Tommy had astonished him by fingering the emblems and insignia on Kendrick's coat and then rapidly and accurately reconstructing his entire war service record.

Kendrick had originally called at St. Dunstan's to see an old school friend, also a volunteer with the Canadian Army, who had been blinded in action. On returning home, this friend turned into what Kendrick later described as "an alcohol-soaked cabbage," who became utterly lost following his over-protective mother's death. The contrast between the helpless friend and the British soldier who had so deftly demonstrated what a blind man could discern with his fingers stayed in Kendrick's memory for twenty years and ultimately led to a series of mystery novels featuring Captain Duncan Maclain, a blind detective, who, as Kendrick said, "would never perform any feat … that couldn't be duplicated by someone totally blind, always presuming they had the necessary brains and will power to train themselves and try it." To make sure he knew just what blind people could and could not do, Kendrick read extensively in the literature and visited a number of schools and organizations for blind people.

As author of the popular mystery series, Kendrick was invited to speak to the war-blinded in the military hospitals; his speech at Old Farms made such an impression that the commanding officer urged him to accept a dollar-a-year job conducting a writing class there. He also arranged for Kendrick to receive an official assignment to write a history of the Army's blind rehabilitation program, but what Kendrick wrote instead was his first serious novel, Lights Out, which, using Valley Forge and Old Farms as its setting, told in fictional form the story of one young soldier's struggle to overcome the fear and despair of finding himself suddenly plunged into blindness. Later made into a successful motion picture titled Bright Victory, the novel was dedicated "to Lt. Lloyd Greenwood, U.S.A.A.F., who has vision."

A B-24 pilot flying over Vienna when he was blinded by flak, Greenwood was one of the nucleus of spirited men at Old Farms who founded the Blinded Veterans Association. Kendrick, rightfully regarded as the association's prime catalyst, was named honorary chairman of its board, the "honorary" reflecting the fact that, unlike all the other board members, he was not a blinded veteran.

The other catalytic force in establishing the BVA was Kay Gruber, who interested the Foundation in supporting it. As an initial step, Robert Irwin agreed to furnish the BVA with office space and the services of a secretary. He went further after Kay read the galley proofs of Lights Out to him on a train journey from New York to Washington. Impressed by the novel and assured by Kay that Kendrick was selflessly interested in the cause of the BVA, Irwin proposed to the Foundation board that a grant be made to get the organization on its feet. The board accepted his recommendation and, at its November 30, 1945, meeting, voted $10,000 to help BVA through its first year. The money was personally contributed by M.C. Migel, a lifelong believer in self-help.

It may have been at Migel's instigation that Irwin then addressed a cautious inquiry to Kendrick's publisher, William Morrow & Company, as to the writer's reliability. The reply was reassuring: "There is no question about Kendrick's complete sincerity and integrity. Any cause that he is interested in becomes a holy cause to which he devotes himself with passionate intensity." Forwarding this letter to Migel, Irwin observed that Kendrick's business responsibility seemed sound enough. "I think Mr. Kendrick is a little temperamental," he added, "but that goes with being an author, I guess."

The reason for checking on Kendrick was that the Foundation grant was to be used to pay him a salary while he went about the tasks needed to get the BVA started: mailings to blinded veterans inviting them to join, founding a monthly publication, the BVA Bulletin, to serve as the organization's channel of communication with its constituency, speeches to community groups and on radio programs, applications for financial support in various quarters. Kendrick was a whirlwind, but, like other tempestuous forces of nature, he left a certain amount of destruction in his wake. An internal squabble over his role resulted in his resignation from the BVA post in June 1946.

Fortunately for the infant organization, Kendrick had done an excellent job of training two of its key members. Working side by side with him during those early months were Lloyd Greenwood, who served as BVA Bulletin editor beginning with its first issue in April 1946, and Raymond Frey, the association's first president. Greenwood, who aspired to a writing career, continued issuing the Bulletin after Kendrick's resignation; following the BVA's first convention in September, he was hired as its executive director. The funds to pay his salary and that of a small staff came from the BVA's first outside "angel"—the Women's International Bowling Congress, which pledged $25,000 a year for three years. With this, plus some other funds from philanthropic sources, the Blinded Veterans Association was on its way.

That first convention also elected new officers, with John F. Brady of Brooklyn succeeding Frey as president. It voted Father Carroll into the position of official chaplain* and heard the eloquent priest, in his address to the closing banquet, urge the men of the BVA to serve as "a flying wedge" to effect change in the "unreasonable and unreasoning attitude of the sighted public" toward blind people.

By the time BVA held its second annual convention in September 1947 there was impressive progress to report. It had been authorized by the VA to represent blinded veterans in formal appeals and claims; it had moved to larger quarters; the staff had been expanded; a number of state and regional chapters had been established and more were in formation. Elected to a second term as president, John Brady—a cavalry major blinded in action in Munich—took an extended leave of absence from his job, which was then that of employment specialist on the staff of the Industrial Home for the Blind (he later became its executive director), and spent the next years formulating a plan for the BVA to bridge the vital gap of actual job placement in services to blinded veterans. A survey had shown that, three years after the war's end, nearly half the nation's blinded veterans were neither employed nor in vocational or educational training. In some parts of the country, Brady reported, job-ready veterans had been waiting for over a year for the VA to place them.

Brady's proposed solution was a five-year program, estimated to cost $1 million, in which BVA would place ten men in the field, each serving a specified region, to seek out every unemployed blinded veteran, get him into training if necessary and then find a suitable job for him. It was a bold dream—too bold for a few hundred young people who were not only inexperienced but had scruples about how they would raise the needed funds "quietly, without general appeal, because of the maudlin sympathy such a drive would excite."

The BVA moved to Washington in 1948. It saw legislative advocacy as one of its major roles, and gradually gained experience and sophistication in the ways of lawmaking and government. It testified before Congressional committees, developed contacts with the policy makers at the Veterans Administration, and worked closely with them, cajoling or prodding as the occasion demanded. Its membership grew; there were 900 dues-paying members in 1960 and 1,200 in 1971.

The one respect in which the organization fell short of its goals was in fund-raising. The optimistic plan to raise $1 million proved unattainable, and the BVA had to turn back to its original sponsor, the Foundation, for survival grants. These ranged from relatively small sums—$5,000 in 1949 to pay for publication of the Bulletin—to larger subsidies. It was a Foundation appropriation of $30,000 in 1954/55 that furnished the seed money which finally launched the BVA's field service program; the sprouting money came from the federal Office of Vocational Rehabilitation as a demonstration grant to show how the services of federal, state and community agencies could be coordinated on behalf of individual blinded persons.

In the course of the next ten years or so, BVA's six field representatives contacted some two thousand blind veterans. Men who had never undergone adjustment training were persuaded to apply for admission to the Hines rehabilitation center. Job finding efforts, which included on-the-spot demonstrations of how blind people could perform in specific tasks, opened up a number of vocational opportunities. Hundreds of veterans were made aware of the variety of benefits and services available and guided through the red tape involved in making use of them.

Lloyd Greenwood remained as BVA executive director until 1954; he was succeeded by Irvin P. Schloss, who had previously been editor of the Bulletin. When Schloss resigned in 1958 to join the Foundation staff as its legislative analyst, the BVA saw a series of short-term executives come and go until chronic shortage of funds left the position vacant and the program attenuated.

However, like the men it represented, BVA refused to allow financial and organizational reverses to weaken either its sense of purpose or its determination to prove that blind men could shoulder both the rewards and the burdens of participation in society. It continued to be governed by a board of directors made up of 10 blinded veterans and to receive guidance from a national advisory committee whose membership in the early Seventies included Senator Jennings Randolph, M. Robert Barnett, and Kay Gruber. Miss Gruber, who left the Foundation staff in 1963, moved to California, where in 1972 she was maintaining a consultant practice and continuing to be actively involved in BVA work. Over the years American bowlers continued their financial support of BVA; the initial three-year grant from the Women's International Bowling Congress was followed by sizable annual contributions from the Bowlers Victory Legion and, later, the National Bowling Council.

The first follow-up study of World War II veterans was made in 1952–53 by the Veterans Administration, when social workers in 70 regional offices conducted structured interviews with 2,000 veterans whose service-connected blindness had been incurred in that war and in Korea. The demographic and social data accumulated in the interviews were set forth in a book edited by Bledsoe, War-Blinded Veterans in a Post-War Setting, issued by the VA in 1958. The findings amply supported the conclusion that rehabilitation training had "paid dividends, both psychologically and economically." While approximately half of the total group was employed, a much higher employment percentage was found among those who had completed rehabilitation training. Other criteria used to evaluate adjustment and acceptance into society were marital status, family structure, home ownership, social activities, attitudes to self and toward society. These, too, not only substantiated the conclusion that rehabilitation had paid off, but helped demolish the oft-expressed opinion that liberal compensation awards to wounded veterans were bound to destroy motivation for normal, job-centered lives.

Ten years later a second follow-up study was launched. This project, executed by the American Foundation for the Blind with VA financial support and with the Blinded Veterans Association serving as technical consultant, dealt with a smaller sample and used different research techniques. Its outcome was proclaimed in the title of the volume which reported its findings: 851 Blinded Veterans: A Success Story. Bearing out the title were conclusions such as these:

The group is relatively well educated. Those who took advantage of the GI Bill—especially in college training (mostly whites) and vocational training (mostly Negroes)—have increased their employment opportunities. Their general socioeconomic status is high because they are well educated and upward or laterally mobile occupationally (those in the labor force, that is) and because they receive generous disability compensation payments. …

Age is a problem, especially in employment, as it is for the all-veteran population. Those in the labor force are unemployed in about the same numbers as all unemployed males in the labor force. Like most American males of their age [the median age was 46], they own their own homes, don't move much, live with their wives in small primary family units averaging about 3.5 persons per household, and consider themselves heads of their households. … [They] would probably be indistinguishable if it were not for their visual and other impairments; they are middle-age, middle-class American family heads who live "next door" in a comfortable average neighborhood.

Like the previous survey, this one also yielded discoveries that called for action. One of the most important was that half of the men studied had not had an eye examination in five years, that a substantial group had hearing loss, and that others were neglecting a variety of other health problems. Since regular eye care to halt further deterioration was essential for those not totally blind, and hearing loss clearly constituted a serious threat to people who had to depend on their ears for environmental clues, these findings helped jolt into existence an outreach program the Veterans Administration had been considering for several years.

Under the Visual Impairment Services Teams (VIST) program initiated in 1967, the names of all veterans receiving disability compensation or pensions for any degree of visual impairment were sent to regional VA outpatient clinics, which were instructed to make personal contact with those within their jurisdiction and arrange for periodic reviews of their medical conditions and needs. Each multidisciplinary team—consisting of a physician, a social worker, and other appropriate personnel as needed—scheduled an annual physical examination for each of these blind veterans. The physical, which included ophthalmic and audiological tests, also served as the occasion for the social worker to review with the veteran the full range of aids, equipment, benefits and resources to which he was entitled. As of 1972 there were 71 such VIST units in operation with 5,500 visually handicapped veterans on their registers.

The year 1967 also saw the opening of the Western Blind Rehabilitation Center, comparable to Hines, at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California. Two years later a third unit, the Eastern Blind Rehabilitation Center, was established at the West Haven, Connecticut, hospital. The three centers, with a combined capacity of 70 beds, were all professionally affiliated with nearby universities and served as clinical training centers for graduate students in various rehabilitation disciplines. They also participated in field-testing the various electronic reading and mobility devices developed under sponsorship of the VA's Prosthetics and Sensory Aids Research and Development Division.

In the late Sixties the three VA Blind Rehabilitation Centers launched programs designed to overcome the problem of transition back into society. As described by John Malmazian, director of the Hines unit,

a month before the veteran leaves, the wife or mother is invited to the center. They come on a Sunday night with the travel, the motel, meals and local expenses paid. The veteran then stays with his wife at the motel. On Monday the wife arrives at the center. She is put on a program which includes observation, going to classes with the veteran, observing the veteran in his activities, discussing with the staff members the veteran's progress, his potential and his limitations. She then meets with the psychologist, the social worker and the veteran. Another part of the program is training for the family member in basic skills. The family member is taught how to use a sighted guide, how to familiarize a person with an area. They put a blindfold on the family member, and then the next day the family member instructs a staff member, who blindfolds himself.

The $200 cost of this five-day program of observation, consultation, and direct experience was defrayed through non-VA funds; in the case of the Hines center, the subsidy came from the Military Order of the Purple Heart.

At all three VA centers, priority for admission was given to Vietnam veterans, whose number was estimated in early 1972 to be 550 to 600. Concern that a discouragingly large percentage of these newly blinded young men seemed uninterested in social adjustment training prompted a two-day conference jointly sponsored by the Foundation, the BVA, and the VA in April 1972. Various approaches were explored as to how to serve this badly battered group of men, who had suffered a higher percentage of multiple disabilities than the men in any previous war.

Many of the Vietnam veterans, it was recognized, would have been fatalities instead of casualties were it not for the airborne rescue teams which brought them in for prompter medical care than was possible in pre-helicopter days. Of the 363 blinded Vietnam veterans who had passed through the VA's rehabilitation centers as of early 1972, 235 had one or more additional disabilities, ranging from bilateral leg amputations to hearing loss and brain damage. They also bore the psychological burden of public attitudes toward the war in Vietnam. As one VA social worker noted: "Instead of the respect and acclaim given to World War II veterans upon their return home, the Vietnam veterans are oftentimes met with indifference or derision."

Paralleling this rejection by the community was hostility felt toward "the Establishment" by some of the veterans themselves, often exhibited in a refusal to have anything to do with government agencies. The prevalence of disenchanted viewpoints in a wide spectrum of American youth, veterans and non-veterans alike, offered perhaps the severest challenge of all to those concerned with helping the newest group of war-blinded men find satisfying roles in society.

One positive approach took shape in November 1972, when the Veterans Administration awarded a one-year contract to the Blinded Veterans Association to revive the outreach program which would send three BVA representatives into the field to seek out newly blinded veterans and encourage them to take advantage of the rehabilitation and other helping services available to them. This, it was hoped, would help to instill in the men who gave their eyes in the least popular war in American history the determined spirit that enabled so many blinded veterans of a previous generation to rise above their disabilities.

*Later, two other chaplains were added to reflect BVA's interdenominational nature: Rabbi Michael Aaronsohn of Cincinnati, a blind veteran of World War I, and the Reverend Harry O. Anderson, a Baptist minister in California, who had served as chaplain to the men at the Dibble eye center.

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