Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [18]
“I always knew you were blind,” said my cousin Dava Wayman, “but I never thought of you being any different. You were doing everything my other cousins did. You were treated like any other kid. Nothing held you back.”
My big brother, Ellery, used to chase me around the apartment, not taking much pity on my youth or size. He remembers strategically placing my beloved pedal car in my path then chasing me until I ran into it.
Once in a while I got to ride along on TV repair service calls with my dad, and I loved visiting the shop. One day I put my hand inside a live TV and got the shock of my life. My dad used the experience to give me my first lesson in basic electricity: never use both hands to touch a live circuit. Always keep one hand in your pocket so as not to become a ground for the current. After that, I was safe around open, running televisions.
When my parents enrolled me in kindergarten at Perry School in 1954, they decided they wanted me to learn Braille so I could learn to read and write. Back then public schools didn’t offer specialized classes, but my parents, along with a group of other parents of prematurely born blind children, pushed hard for it, and the school ended up hiring a Braille teacher. I began to learn Braille, starting with the alphabet. I practiced writing on a Braille writer, a special device something like a manual typewriter that produces Braille characters on paper. I picked it up quickly, and by the end of the school year, I could read and write Braille at a good, basic level.
After kindergarten, we packed up and moved to Palmdale, California, about sixty miles north of Los Angeles, out in the Antelope Valley. My parents had yearned to live in the Golden State, and my dad found an engineering job at Plant 42, a government facility later operated by Lockheed Martin.
But at my new school in California, I was the only blind kid, and for several years I had no Braille teacher. I was at the mercy of my teachers and my parents, who had to read my assignments to me. When the other kids colored, drew pictures, or did other visual projects, I waited. And waited.
My parents knew I was bright and worked with me at home. My father was mostly self-educated, picking up electronics and electrical engineering on his own along with a few technical courses he picked up along the way. I probably learned much more from my parents than I learned at school those first few years.
My dad taught me how to do algebra in my head when I was six. I not only got the answers to the problems, but I knew why I got the answers. Mom worked with me on my other assignments and with most of my learning taking place at home, I was often bored at school. The teachers couldn’t involve me because I couldn’t read printed materials or look at diagrams or pictures. There were no books for me to read, and I was often left to my own devices. I felt detached and separated from the rest of the kids and often wandered over to the window and stood, listening for what was happening outside.
One day in class, the teacher asked us to draw a picture. I sat with my blank sheet of paper while the other kids drew. The teacher told me the other kids would help. I kept asking the kids at my table for help, but they were too busy with their own drawings. Finally, one boy got fed up with me, grabbed my piece of paper, and crumpled it up. He dropped it in front of me and said, “Don’t bother us.” I got the message. It was the first time I remember my blindness provoking hostility.
Outside of school, Palmdale was an exciting place for a boy to grow up. Edwards Air Force Base nearby was the testing ground for top-secret military aircraft with Chuck Yeager and the rest of The Right Stuff guys breaking through the sound barrier and creating tremendous sonic booms, often over the general’s house.
At first I wandered around the quiet neighborhoods with my mom and brother, but before