Mark and Pat Maurer
Transcription
Mark Mauer: I am Mark Maurer, and I’m the president of the National Federation of the Blind. I’ve been the president since 1986, I have been a blind person all of my life, and I’ve been a member of the National Federation of the Blind since 1969. I am a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University Law School, and I have been a lawyer since 1977.
Pat Maurer: And I have been blind all my life, and Dr. Maurer and I have been married for, I don’t know, thirty-some years now. We have two children who’re grown, and I think that there are many many parents across this country today who have raised children, sighted and blind children. But there was a time when it wasn’t very often the case, and so we feel very blessed that we’ve been able to have our own family and raise our own children. I’m a former school teacher. I taught elementary school as a blind person. The first teaching job I got was to teach sighted kids to read. It was teaching third and fourth grade in a small school system in Iowa. I used Braille, and the children used print. I went from that job into some teaching when [while?] we lived in Indianapolis, and then running a rehabilitation program in Baltimore, Blind Industries and Services of Maryland. And then for the last twenty years or so I’ve worked at the national headquarters of the Federation at the Jernigan Institute now, and managed the committee relations program there. I like that very much. So that’s a little bit about us, I guess.
How do you use Braille in everyday life?
MM: I use braille every day. I read reports that people give to me in braille. I make recordings of events that are happening within the national federation of the blind. And in order to make recordings about those events I expect the people who are conducting those events to give me a notice about them in braille. I look at financial documents for the organization and for some other organizations and in order to get a comparison of financial performance I use braille statistics so that I can have my fingers on the Braille performance for different years or maybe more than two years. I give speeches and in order to do that I very often want the text of the material that is going to be included in the speech under my hands. And I read Braille for fun. I read books. Some of them are non-fiction. I have recently read one about the financial circumstance of the United States in the 1980s which said that the possibility of a bubble in the housing market was remote. It might have been in the 1980s but in the first decade of the 21st century we experienced such a bubble. But I also read material in braille for enjoyment. Things like Huckelberry Finn and the like.
PM: My use of braille is some different in that a lot of the fiction and non-fiction books that I read I use audiobooks. But I use braille everyday in my job for a variety of things. I produce some documents that we use that we use at the Federation or that we take to conventions and give to people so, including the menus at the national conventions, so I proofread a lot of materials and produce a lot of materials in Braille, but every day one of my jobs is to take calls from people that call in and they want literature, they want our suggestions on things, so I have a great deal of compu. . . of material that I’ve produced over the years that I’ve put together and kept so that I can look things up for people including names and addresses and phone numbers and that kind of thing, and then of course I write their information down so I can send things out to them and I do that in Braille and I don’t think I could be without my Braillewriter to get that stuff written down or my slate and stylus– you know, once I’ve got it written down, I may put information into the computer and I may not keep the card that I wrote the information down on because I’m done with it. So it’s not a permanent record that I’m keeping, but you know an individual name and address that I need right now and I want to write down quickly.
Another thing that I would do in Braille and probably wouldn’t do any other way is recipes. I can’t imagine cooking from information on cassette tape or in any other way than from a Braille recipe book.
At Christmas time the Federation does the Santa Letter Program. We have letters to blind and low vision kids in Braille and large print that we send out. They can go to the NFE website at NFE.org and just type in their information their families can do it or the children can do it and get a letter back from Santa. So we’ve been doing this for three or four years and have learned about a lot about families this way who have blind or low vision kids. Also, don’t tell the kids, but of course, the letters come from Santa with our help.
[Laughter]
MM: She is also in charge of proofreading our braille letters. We got lots of letters from people. And a lot of times they come in braille. When the letters come in braille, we respond to them in braille. And just as we have a proofreading requirement to send out printed letters to people, we also have a proofreading requirement for braille letters. We never send anything out unless it’s been through the proofreading process. And Pat is our braille proofreader for that part of our effort.
How did you learn braille?
PM: I learned braille at sixteen which is kind of late opportunity for braille. I grew up in a rural area in Iowa and I wasn’t close to where the school for the blind was. And, I had quite a bit of residual vision, not a lot, I mean, but I had something I could read large print as a small child. So, nobody knew anybody that could teach me braille, nobody ever really considered teaching me braille. And, people read to me, my parents read to me, my friends and, you know by the time you get into middle school and you’re trying to do mathematics just by somebody reading to you and then you doing the problem in your head and then getting somebody else to write it down because you can’t really see to write it down anymore. This is the time when you realize that you have got to find another way. And I sought out the Commission for the Blind in Iowa. And Dr Kenneth Turnigan(sp?) was directing the, the programs there and I called him on the telephone. And I was about fifteen when I did this. And said, I need to find a way to learn braille. And he said, you know you’re not, this program is for adults, but he said, we can find a way. So he got the braille teacher to, during the summer, teach me braille in her spare time; I just went in in the morning at eight o’clock, stayed all day, and she taught me braille all day long and I learned it in a summer. You know, I learned all of the alphabet, all the contractions, everything about braille and then I could use it the next fall when I went back to high school, and my first braille textbook was a French textbook, which I didn’t learn much about French because… but I learned a lot about braille that next year. And I think my real memory of all of that was that finally I had a way to read and write. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t, before that I hadn’t ever read much by myself because I couldn’t. By the time I was in second grade I couldn’t see any of the print anymore. And so, I was finally able to read for myself and she taught me with a slate and stylus so I was able to write things down for myself. And I, I didn’t get a braille writer ’til I graduated from college. So I took all of my notes in college with a slate and stylus which is a real good way to get good and fast on the slate. So, those are I guess my memories, and, and really it just has meant a great deal to me to have braille all these years.
MM: I first met braille when I was in the first grade. I was sufficiently blind that the notion that I might read print was an impossibility, so everybody knew I would be a braille reader. And, I sat in the first grade in a classroom with sixteen students. there were eight of us in each row. I was the sixth person back in the first row. We got our Dick and Jane primers and we were told to open the cover of our primers, and to look at page one. And the first kid in the first row was asked to read page one And as the lesson went forward the teacher corrected the kid. And the second kid was asked to do the same, so by the time the teacher got to me and we had been over page one 5 times. I put my fingers on the page and recited the words on page 1. The teacher to my astonishment called me to the front of the room. She said that I was a magnificent student and she put a gold star on page one of my book
I did not object of course the teacher was the person who was supposed to be in charge and I was just a student
She told me that weekend. I was returned from the school for the blind that weekend but not all students did, but I did
She told me to take my book home with me and show it to my mother. My mother is a suspicious woman. She took the book. She had already learned Braille herself because she thought she might need to know it. And She watched me doing the reading of page one she asked to borrow the book and she took it away and, she came back later with a piece of Braille paper that she asked me to read I could not read it and she told me that it was an exact copy of page one of my book
When summer came after my first grade experience she sat me down again in the living room of our house for an hour every day and she required me to study Braille. And she taught me. I found this annoying because my brothers and….. didn’t have to learn any
They were not in school in the summer time. I was the only one. But by the time summer was over I knew Braille and I went back to the School for the Blind and between the beginning of second grade and the end of fifth grade, when I left the School for the Blind, I had read everything in the library that the librarian would give me. She said that some of the books were too old for me. Made me curious about what was in them, but I read everything else. I would take the book out of the library and I would take it back to the dormitory and I would slide it under the bed, and then the house parent would walk by and I knew the house parent’s shoes. When the house parent went by to check the rooms to see that we were all sleeping, then I reached under the bed and got out the book and I began to read. And I read until I fell asleep. And this happened every night, which is how I got through the books. But I, I learned that reading braille is fun. A lot of people don’t think of braille as a thing that can bring fun to your life, but I still know that it can. So, I read poetry and I love to read the cadence of the words in such a way that I can give them voice, and if they’re under my hands, I can do it. It’s not somebody else’s voice, it’s mine. I can give them the kind of rhythm that I think they deserve. And I read prose and I read nonfiction, all of that. It is a joy to be able to get at words and to make them readable. And then if you’re on a plane and they tell you to put away all your electronic devices and you’ve still got your braille handy, then no problem, you can keep at it.
PM: Still got your book. [Laughter]
What’s the hardest part of learning braille?
PM: I think for me it’s the amount of practice it takes to build speed. I don’t think there was anything for me that was hard to learn. But, its just, you know continuous practice to build speed and I think that’s what makes others maybe get discouraged when they’re reading at twenty or thirty words a minute and they’re learning to read with both hands really helps with that. But I think that is one of the things that makes it hard for people, is just that building speed. The time it takes to build speed.
MM: There’s a technical and a nontechnical answer for my point of view. If you want to gain speed in learning braille the objective is to learn with more than one finger. Some people read with one, either on the right or the left hand and its usually the index finger. If you could use three on one hand and two on the other maybe. The first three on the right hand is the way I do it, and two on the left hand. These five fingers make it faster for me to get the material under may hands and to get it soaked up and into my head.
The second thing that I would do is this: I would expect students to read out loud. Part of learning braille is to get enough speed to make it practical to do it for the public things that need to be done. And at the beginning of reading, everybody reads slowly, so if blind kids read slowly in the first and the second grades this isn’t a problem because they fit right in. By the time they get to be eighth grade/ high school if you expect a blind kid to read its so embarrassing to the kid, the kid’s so shy about the inability that you can’t get it done. But if you expect the blind student to read aloud that will give enormous encouragement to build speed and with speed comes the enjoyment of it. You stop learning to read and you start learning by reading. And the reading becomes an incidental matter. At the beginning everybody who is learning to read is learning to manipulate the symbols that are reading material. And after a while, you learn what’s in the book from the reading rather than learning to read from what’s in the book.
Looking back now, what’s your opinion of how you were taught braille?
PM: Well, I loved my braille teacher. She’s no longer living. She was a wonderful person. She would sit with her… I don’t know… usually have 3 or 4 students in there I think. And, you know, I was an extra because I was… and I was still in high school, and, of course, all the other people were adults in the program.
So I would come in, and she would sit down, and she’d get her book out, and she’d be reading her own book and just let people read out loud from their textbooks. So she had… Sometimes she’d have to stop and show us our place or give us an explanation of a braille rule or a different letter or so on. But she was very relaxed and she was a little past middle age when she was working with me so, you know, I really was very comfortable with her and I loved her and I really enjoyed learning from her.
So I don’t know if there was anything about the way that I was taught that was unusual, but it certainly was relaxed and, you know, I didn’t feel nervous or pressured or any of that kind of thing. So it was very enjoyable.
MM: Well, my braille teacher was my mother, and loving your mother is not too hard [laughter] although being annoyed with her while she was teaching you braille is certainly possible [laughter].
I don’t remember the lessons nearly as well as I remember the reading afterward. The lessons were there, and I was annoyed by them, but then they were gone, and the books were there, too. And my hands were giving me the chance to explore exciting worlds that would never have been a part of my life except for the literature that was under them. So, how I was taught was a very brief part of my time. That I was taught has made the possibility of using Braille such an enormous benefit to me. I have taken testimony from people in court; I have made arguments to courts of appeals; I don’t dare walk into a courtroom without a sheaf of Braille in my briefcase that tells me what the legal arguments are going to be, what the testimony will consist of, and how I am to go about the process of defeating my opponent. There’s no way I know how to do this unless I’ve got written material that I can touch. If I were to try to listen to it on some recording device, sitting in the courtroom, it would distract me from knowing what’s going on and I couldn’t afford it. This is an enormous benefit, one that makes it possible for me to do the job that I like and to expand opportunities for me and for others.
The statistics show that something between 80 and 85 percent of people who know Braille well find a way to get meaningful employment. They also show that about 70, somewhere between 70 and 74 percent, of blind people who are seeking employment are unemployed. In other words, Braille is so valuable to getting a job and becoming a part of the society in which we live, and not only that, reading it is fun.
Some say that listening to books is not an example of literacy/and that only by reading Braille can a blind person be considered literate/ What’s your opinion?
MM: I think there are different kinds of literacy and that you could not assert that a person is uneducated by listening. But, the fullness of literacy comes on with the ability to manage the written word. To read it and to write it. How do you create the language that will pass from generation to generation unless you know this word? So, I think braille is a vital part of literacy for the blind.
PM: If you take an example of a person who has never written anything down or read anything, because they couldn’t see the print well enough to do that, then its gonna be very hard for that person to remember how to spell things or to be able to spell things. And of course this is one of the things that happened to me is that, you know, I learned my spelling words along with everybody else and after, I guess, around fourth grade or so, what they decided to do was to teach me to type so I could use a regular typewriter. And I could write them down, but because I didn’t continually see them (one way or another?) a lot of them I just forgot how to spell. So, spelling has always been an issue for me and I’m always either asking somebody or looking stuff up. And spell check is a help, but it doesn’t solve all these problems, you know you have to know which word to use and there’s different spellings for the same words and things like that. Really, to be literate you really do have to have a way to literally read and to write.
With so many new technologies for listening to the written word do we still need braille?
MM: I could not do my job effectively today without braille. I could not give the kinds of speeches that I do that last sometimes as long as an hour without having the written under my hands. I could not comprehend as much information without braille. I know that I can listen to material and learn from it, I do it all the time. I listen better when my hands are on the words that I’m trying to absorb. I know the material more thoroughly when I do it that way. Does everybody learn the way I do? Of course not, but that’s one of the most important for me to learn. And its also important for me to transmit information. Sometimes I teach classes in writing, in order to do that I have to have the written material in braille. How can I do it without that? In other words, braille is important and technology can help with it. It’s easier to produce braille today than it was thirty years ago. And I have technology that provides braille to me in refreshable form, which is to I’ve got a display and when I want to understand braille I can hit a dot on the display and move to another portion of the braille that’s in the electronic file that is there. So, sometimes you can get braille using this kind of advanced technology. In other words, you don’t have to use the technology of former times, but the braille is no less important to me.
PM: I can’t imagine making any kind of a presentation without some kind of notes to remind me what I’m going to be talking to people about, and I’d have those notes in braille. I’ve seen people who can stand on the platform with the earphone in their ear and listen to their own voice in their ear, reminding them about what they’re going to talk about, but I just can’t imagine doing that. I don’t think I could do that. Of course, I have another option, I know braille.
What tools do you use to read and write?
PM: I use them both. I use a brailler, I use a slate and stylus, I use the refreshable braille display on the PK, which is the Humanware product. But, it takes all of those for me and if I had to give up something, … I hope I don’t ever have to because I don’t know what I’d choose.
MM: This is my braille slate and I used it today to give some of the blind students who where here telephone numbers. I wrote them and handed them over, one of the students who came could read them and one could not, so he took it in a different form, but I use this to write things. Tomorrow, I’m going to be on an airplane. I need to be able to figure out what the number of the flight is and what gate I’m leaving from. I will get that information and put it on a card and put it in my pocket so that when I want to be reminded of this I just reach into my pocket and there it is. And, at the moment I have here some notes that I keep in my pocket. These particular notes I give very brief inspirational speeches to individuals in chapters of the National Federation of the Blind. And this is a set of notes for one of those speeches. I keep it in my pocket because I don’t know when required to do that and if I have a prepared speech ready in note form I don’t have to worry about whether I’m ready. I’m always ready, I’m ready at the drop of a card you might say. With braille on it. [Laughter].
Once you have a first draft, how do you edit what you’ve written?
MM: When I want to create a speech, I write some of it and then I braille it; it is prepared on the computer and then I braille it, and then I read it aloud because part of writing is to get the ideas on paper and part of writing, especially for public presentation, is the sound of the language. And the sound of the language, if it is to be as impressive as it can be, would hope to have the right meter in it, anapestic meter, or iambic meter, or whatever it might be. And I want to look at the words to make sure that they come out with the right emphasis on the right syllables, and I have to read it aloud in order to know whether I think that the sound is good enoug. If it is, I can leave it alone. If it's not, then I revise it on the computer.
As a child, did you have any adult role models who were vision impaired?
MM: I didn't know anybody I admired as a child until I reached the age of 18. At the age of 18, I met a man, Dr. Kenneth Jernigan, who was the president of the National Federation of the Blind, and he startled me, challenged me, demanded that I be educated, urged me to exceed my own expectations, urged me to consider that limitations that I had regarded as part of blindness could be discarded, and demanded that I go and find the most exciting part of a life that I could. He was a tremendous teacher, and he had great generosity, but he had a magnificent mind, and he demanded that I use mine.
PM: It's really the beauty of the National Federation of the Blind that we have 50,000 members, and we all are out there to help each other, so we all can find, you know, through all of our programs friends and role models, and the children's programs. All the kids, many of them come to conventions, and they can meet and they can meet blind adults, you know, who are traveling through the convention who have jobs, who can answer their questions, and can talk to them. And, one of Dr. Maurer’s favorite things at the convention is to get together with the kids on the first morning of the parents meeting and talk to them about the things that they want to talk about.
MM: I get the little kids who are four and five and six years old and I sit on the floor with them and they, sometimes, show me their stuffed animals and I talk to them about what they’re going to be doing at the convention. One time I said to them at the convention, “you know, a lot of times when you’re a blind person you’re going to be lost. And this can be scary, but if you understand it, it isn’t scary, it’s a chance to find out new things. Don’t worry about being lost. I’ve been lost many times and I found my way to where I needed to go. And sometimes I learned some important things that I didn’t know and it was lots of fun to be out there exploring,” and as I left the room I heard one little kid talking to another little kid and one of ‘em said to the other, “Are you lost?” And the other one said, “Yes. I’m lost, but Dr. Maurer said it’s OK.” [laughter]And I just have great fun talking to these guys. Don’t be afraid of your life. Look at your life as an adventure and it will become an adventure for you. Lots of people can talk to you about being afraid of your life but don’t believe in that. That’s not where your life is exciting. Your life is exciting because there are many things to do in it, and lots of ‘em can be just plain good times.
PM: We have a Braille carnival, too, at the convention where the kids come and play all kinds of Braille games, and they love that. And then we had a Braille book flea market where people bring all their Braille books, and we just put ‘em all out there and the kids come and get them and you know, they trade books and it’s a– we have ‘em, we send ‘em all to the hotel before convention and then we have volunteers come in and lay ‘em all out and then the kids just come get their books. They get like- the only kids like to get the recipe books and things and the younger kids like the Twin Vision, the print Braille books and it’s a lot of fun to see ‘em come in there and find books.
MM: She was 28, I believe, when I was born and she learned Braille because she thought it would be very important to be able to help me with my work. So, she became a transcriber for the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress runs a volunteer program in which you can learn to hand transcribe books. You take Braille paper, you roll it into a Braille writer, this is the way it used to be, I think it’s done on a computer now.
PM: Yes it is.
MM: But you roll it into a Braille writer and you Braille each word of a book and when the pages are correct then you send them in. They are sent off to a bindery and the bindery makes Braille volumes. My mother Brailled two different books for the Library of Congress program in order to become expert in Braille. And she did it before I was five years old, so she did it by the time she was 33. I don’t know how long it took her to do that. By the time I began attending the school for the blind she knew enough about Braille that she could write to me letters in Braille, at least she could after I learned Braille, which she taught me. And she still knows Braille fairly well, probably ten years ago now she decided to write me a Braille letter. There weren’t very many mistakes in it, but there were a few. So her capacity to maintain Braille- she hasn’t written it for a long time- has deteriorated a little, she’s now in her mid 80’s. We have two kids, one who’s 26 and one who’s 22.
And are they sighted?
MM: They are sighted.
Did they learn Braille growing up?
MM: They always said that they were thinking about it [laughter] but they never did.
PM: I think we started working on the alphabet with ‘em and they usually- you know, they could get so they could go maybe A through L or something, you know, but they never got beyond that. They never finished and they never used it.
MM: Sometimes your kids get to liking the same book, and after a while they know it as well as the book knows it [laughter] so you can’t ever skip any pages. We discovered this in reading Twin Vision books to them. We read to our kids after they got to be old enough to know words almost every day until they got to be old enough to read their own books.
PM: And you know, we, as they got older they, you know, they were interested in reading their own books and then of course they were doing their homework and you know, we would say to them, “well if you want help all you got to do is read to us what you need help with and we’ll try to help you.” Our son was like never mind, I’ll do it myself. It took too much time. But our daughter she was right into, especially getting her dad to help her with some things, and she would read to him and discuss things and she still does that with her job and stuff. But our son is, he’s a little more anxious to get things done. He’ll discuss, but he’s not gonna read much to us. He will read menus to us in restaurants though, he does that. [laughter]
MM: Well the National Federation of the Blind is the connection we have to South Carolina. The vice president of the National Federation of the Blind, when we joined it, or at least when I joined it in 1969 was Dr. Donald Capps, and he remained the vice president of the organization into the 1980’s and he helped to build the National Federation of the Blind. The first national convention that I attended was in Columbia, South Carolina in 1969, it was at the Wade Hampton Hotel, which I understand is no longer there, but it was a delightful convention and it taught me that my notions about how limiting blindness is were just plain wrong. There were so many blind people having a great time, enjoying themselves, and building their own lives.
PM: We’re very glad to be in South Carolina again and it’s- we see Don and Betty fairly frequently and we’re always glad to see them.