Thunder Dog (6 page)

Although I mastered riding the streets, I came home more than once to find one of my parents on the phone, hearing yet again about their blind child out riding unaccompanied around the neighborhood. The calls always ended with the neighbors hanging up in frustration. My parents never gave in, and eventually neighbors got used to the blind kid riding his bike and the lack of outrage expressed by my parents and finally stopped calling.

I spring from stubborn and self-reliant stock. I also can only hope that my parents’ persistence served to educate my neighbors a little about what blind people can do. My father’s can-do attitude was a huge influence on me. His name was George Hingson, and he was born in 1914 in Dewey, Oklahoma. A quiet man with a grade school education, he left home when he was just twelve or thirteen years old. I’m not sure why. To support himself, he went to work herding sheep on the Idaho-Montana border in the Bitterroot Mountains, a subrange of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a beautiful, pristine wilderness with rugged peaks and steep canyons carved by glaciers, but not an easy place for a young boy to live outdoors for months at a time without home or family. Big game flourishes in the area, which means predators are about, so my father’s job was to protect his flock of sheep from wolves, bobcats, and mountain lions. He used to tell us a story about accidentally cutting off his thumb with an ax then burying it in the snow for three days until he was able to get somewhere where doctors could surgically reattach it. I never saw much of a scar, but he couldn’t bend his thumb at the first joint. So even my dad, the tough guy who always defended me, had accidents too.

Later, Dad worked as a cowboy, ending up in Washington State. He finally realized he didn’t want to chase cattle the rest of his life, so in his midtwenties he enlisted in the army. He served in the Third Infantry Division, which deployed to North Africa, Italy, Sicily, and Southern France during World War II. He was part of the Signal Corps, a branch of the service responsible for all military information and communications systems. Some of the Signal Regiment’s accomplishments during World War II included developing radar and FM radio for military use. The Signal Corps also developed the first FM backpack radio, allowing front-line troops to communicate reliably and static free, thanks to frequency modulation circuits. His military training in electronics would come in very handy back in the United States.

While serving overseas, my dad became friends with a man named Sam Keith. Sam’s wife, Ruthie, wrote letters to her husband and often included pictures of friends and family. One day, George happened to see a photograph of Ruthie’s sister, Sarah. She was a slight woman, blonde and pretty. He was smitten and asked Sam if it would be okay for him to write to Sarah. Sam agreed, and a wartime romance flourished in a flurry of red-and-blue–striped Air Mail envelopes.

Sarah Stone was not your average girl. A street-smart and independent woman, she originally hailed from New York City. She was a high school graduate, she loved to read, and she earned a beautician’s license and supported herself at a time when not many women did. She had lived and worked in both New York and California, finally ending up in Chicago. Sarah and George hit it off, and when the war was over, George went straight to Chicago and married Sarah in November 1945. These two strong and independent people fell in love and were happily married for nearly four decades, thanks to Uncle Sam, both the country and the man.

My parents set up house in an apartment on the south side of Chicago. My aunt Ruth and uncle Sam, my dad’s wartime buddy, lived in a nearby apartment. Next door to Ruth and Sam lived my mom’s brother, Abe, and his wife, Shirley. We were a tight family. We still are.

Dad and Uncle Abe pioneered a television repair business together back when TVs were rare and expensive. Because people invested $200 to $300 in their television sets back then ($1,500 to $3,000 in today’s dollars), they were willing to spend money to keep them working. It wasn’t a bad way to make a living.

My brother, Ellery, was born in 1948. Two years later, I was born on February 24, 1950, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Cook County, Chicago. I was two months early and weighed just two pounds, thirteen ounces. My mother always said I was rushing it, in a big hurry to get into the world.

The day I was born, Chicago was buried under a tremendous snowstorm, so my mom gifted me with a special, commemorative name: Michael Blizzard Hingson.

A
blizzard
usually means heavy snow and high winds, but the word can also refer to whiteout conditions. Snow and ice reflect incoming light, and objects, landmarks, and shadows are no longer discernible. Land and sky blend, and the horizon disappears into a white nothingness. True whiteouts can render a person temporarily blind. Unfortunately, my blindness would not be temporary.

When I was born, my uncle Abe and aunt Shirley braved the storm and visited the hospital when I was just two days old. “The storm was bad,” my aunt told me. “You couldn’t see anything in front of you.”

Babies were kept behind glass in those days. “The nurse picked you up and held you so we could see,” Aunt Shirley said. “You were very, very small. You looked like a little chicken with a large head. They kept you in the incubator so your lungs could develop, and you were in the hospital for two to three months.

“When you came home,” she continued, “the family thought maybe you had a cataract because one eye looked a little glassy. I went with Sarah to every possible doctor you could imagine to see what could be done.”

Meanwhile, I gained weight and seemed normal in every other way.

One day, however, Aunt Shirley noticed something unusual. She was babysitting me while my parents and my brother, Ellery, were on a trip to California. “The second morning I was there,” she said, “I changed your diaper and got you all fixed up. I made you some Pablum for breakfast, took you in my arms, and we sat down at the table. There were three large windows nearby with venetian blinds. The sun was coming in so bright I picked you up again and stood up to close the blinds. The sun shone on your face, right into your eyes, and you didn’t blink. The light didn’t bother you at all.”

Aunt Shirley finished feeding me then put me in the crib. But she was horrified by what had happened.
Could Michael be blind?
She ran next door to tell my aunt Ruthie, and when my parents returned, she told them too. When I was six months old, the doctor finally made his diagnosis. I was blind, and it was irreversible. My parents announced the news to the family, and everyone cried. Briefly. Then they moved on.

From the beginning I was treated no differently than my brother. I also had my cousins around to keep me humble. Aunt Ruth and Uncle Sam had two boys, Steve and Robin. Uncle Abe and Aunt Shirley had two girls, Holly and Dava. The cousins all played together in the yard behind the apartment house, and I was allowed out with them, even when I was quite young. My parents trusted us, and we were allowed to explore the neighborhood without a grown-up in attendance. With Ellery and the cousins, I regularly headed to the candy store, where I always picked out penny pretzel sticks and orange soda pop. Sometimes I held on to someone’s hand in that absentminded way kids do. Other times I followed behind. Once in a while, I led. I couldn’t always find my way safely without help, but my cousins didn’t make a big deal about it, and neither did I.

“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 long I navigated the streets all by myself. I made it a game to find my way back to our house. I learned that each driveway had small but detectable differences in elevation, length, and in the number and shape of cracks. Our driveway was a bit longer and flatter than the others, and I learned to feel and hear the difference in the incline. In a perfect world, I would have learned how to use a cane at this point. But I didn’t know any other blind people, and I didn’t know anything about canes. Instead, my senses naturally sharpened as I explored the area, and I used touch and hearing to travel on my own.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, blind people do not magically obtain other heightened senses. We have to develop better hearing through practice, just like anyone else. And with practice, it wasn’t long before I learned to walk on my own to Yucca Elementary School, three blocks from our house. Soon after that, I began riding my bike and alarming the neighbors.

Several times during my early school years, my parents were called in to meet with the principal, who would strongly recommend that I be sent to the residential school for the blind in Berkeley, California, several hundred miles north of our town. My parents always refused. They wanted me at home and in regular classrooms, “mainstreaming” me before the term had ever been coined.

Finally, the summer between third and fourth grade, the school district hired a resource teacher to provide me and a few other blind children in the area with training in Braille. Her name was Cora Hershberger, and she helped me relearn Braille. I picked it up quickly and at last I could read for myself—the door to books and to learning now open. My curiosity and imagination ignited, and I fell in love with books as I explored the world through dots on a page, just as I had explored my neighborhood by learning the cracks and bumps of the sidewalks. Those exploration techniques I learned as a child came in so handy when we had to make our way out of Tower 1. I have always felt that every life experience helps us prepare for what is to follow.

Like using my ears to hear my driveway or to avoid parked cars when riding my bike, I developed the skills I needed to navigate the World Trade Center. I am as familiar with my building as I was with the cracks in my childhood sidewalk. And my early feeling of being an outsider still makes me strive hard to be part of the community, no matter the cost. I don’t rely unnecessarily on other people, and I never play the blind card.