Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [22]
“What great training that was for me as a new teacher. I think I learned as much or more from you than you learned from me,” Mr. Herbo told me. “You could do calculations in your head faster than the kids in class could on paper.”
On my birthday, Mr. Herbo invited me to Foster’s Freeze for a banana split, and we made it an annual event. He was amazed when the servers couldn’t tell I was blind. Even though my eyes are not functional, the structure of my eyes is intact, and so are the muscles that move my eyes and my eyelids. I have learned to look at people, using their voice and movements to cue in on their locations and heights, so when you talk to me, you will probably get the impression that I am looking at you, even though I have no vision. Blind people have eye colors that range the spectrum. My eyes are a light, milky color. I like to think they match my strawberry blond tresses.
One day I invited Mr. Herbo to my house to see my ham radio setup. My dad and I were licensed ham operators, and with our high-frequency radios we could talk to people on any part of the globe. My parents had given me a small room in the house to set up the equipment, and when Mr. Herbo came over, I took him back to show it off. I went in first and started booting up the system. I was busy and didn’t notice that Mr. Herbo hung back.
“I can’t see what you’re doing,” Mr. Herbo said. I was working in pitch black.
“Sorry, Mr. Herbo,” I said. “I forgot you can see.”
Mr. Herbo and I stayed in touch for many years. He came to my wedding and visited Karen and me several times. At one point we lost touch for a while. Finally Mr. Herbo looked up my number one day and gave me a call, out of the blue. When I picked up the phone, he said, “Hello, Mike.”
“Hi, Mr. Herbo!” It had been fifteen years, but I will never forget his voice. I always end our conversations with, “Just remember, Mr. Herbo, I’ll always be younger than you.”
While many of my teachers were as encouraging and accommodating as Mr. Herboldsheimer, my high school experience was not without obstacles. In the spring of my freshman year, I was called into the assistant principal’s office. “We have a problem, Mike,” he said. He opened up the Palmdale High School student handbook and began to read: “No live animals of any kind are allowed on school buses.” I had been riding the bus to school with my very first guide dog, Squire. We were both still new and building our handler–guide dog relationship, but Squire was doing a great job. He minded his own business on the bus and had never caused any problems. The other kids were interested in him for the first few days, but after the novelty wore off, they went back to discussing kid stuff, and everything went back to normal. So I was shocked and confused. The law is clear. Certified guide dogs can legally go anywhere a blind person goes.
I went home and checked the handbook for myself. That I even had access to the handbook was due to the work of a wonderful local group called the Antelope Valley Braille Transcribers. At that time, not many Braille books were mass-produced, so many books and other printed materials had to be transcribed into Braille, page by page, by volunteers. Later on, in the late ’60s, transcribed books began to be mass-produced using a thermoforming device. It was a slow process whereby the bumps on a Braille page were transferred to a special sheet of plastic. The plastic sheet was heated and then used to imprint a sheet of paper, resulting in a duplicate page of Braille. The process was something like a printing press, but it was revolutionary and meant that books and other printed materials could be produced cheaper and more quickly, a page at a time. But at this point, we didn’t have access to this type of device and that meant most school-related materials had to be laboriously hand transcribed.
I pored over my hand-inscribed Braille student handbook and found the school bus rules. It was right there under my fingers. According to the handbook, Squire was not allowed on the bus.
Guide Dogs for the Blind