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In this absorbing episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA speaks with Peggy Chong, The Blind History Lady, about how a 1979 job clearing out the files of a closing Minnesota home for the blind turned into a lifetime of recovering the lives of blind Americans. Peggy describes finding a board member’s letter mentioning “our blind congressman,” tracing it to Thomas David Schall, and calling him her first blind ancestor. She explains why she prefers storyteller to historian or archivist, and why she insists on telling the ordinary and the unflattering lives alongside the celebrated ones, because blind people are a cross section of society, crooks and murderers included.
The conversation moves through a Colorado cigar merchant who took a railroad to the state Supreme Court in 1909 and helped seed the white cane laws, a Depression-era Iowa man who sold men’s suits door to door using a tape measure his seamstress mother had stitched with tactile marks, and a blind Minnesota milkman turned piano tuner who navigated Minneapolis by the bumps in wagon ruts. Peggy closes with a direct answer to anyone who has given up hope, that no amount of schooling or money separates the blind people she researches who succeeded from those who didn’t, only the decision to try, fail, and try again, and invites listeners to join her monthly email list.
TRANSCRIPT
Podcast Commentator: Greetings, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA, invites you to listen to her biweekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills, and expertise in access, technology and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Remarkable World Commentary. I am Donna J. Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound, through touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate and accessibility consultant, an author. I am also a lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind. You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November of 2010, I won the landmark Charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its website accessible to every Canadian, not just to sighted ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June 23rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for her tireless commitment to removing barriers. When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal, and this is to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench, where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas. Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a change maker whose work is as every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. Peggy Chong, welcome to my Remarkable World Commentary. I am pleased and privileged to have you as my guest.
Peggy Chong: Well, thank you very much and I’m very pleased to be here.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, I’m just tickled that you have accepted our invitation and let’s get started. Okay, so. Hold on a second. Okay. Peggy, I’d like to begin with when your story begins. Back in 1979, you were helping clear out the files of a Minnesota home for the blind that was closing. And instead of tossing those papers in the bin, you stopped and read them. And you came across correspondence about a blind man who had served in Congress, someone who nobody had ever told you existed. Take us into that room with you. What did you find? Who did he turn out to be? And when did you realize that you were holding something that was about to redirect the rest of your life?
Peggy Chong: Well, I’ll tell you, I was given that job mostly because I had grown up in the blind community all my life. And the papers were files, records, stories, news articles, all written by all these old people. And they said, well, you’ll know who these people are and if we should keep anything or not. But they all have to fit into a file cabinet. Now there’s boxes and boxes and file cabinets and file cabinets full of stuff, and I have to get it into one file cabinet. And they said, you have to keep all the records of the minutes and the financials, and [unclear 00:05:47] reports in the newsletters. Now, the organization was founded in 1920. Started meeting in 1919. So I’ve got 60 years of records here to go through and they kept everything. So I’m sitting there trying to get rid of as much as I can, and every so often I would stop and I’d look at something, and I just ran across this letter when I was going through the 1920s material, which was the first few boxes that I went through. And there was a letter from one of the board members to another board member saying, I just met with our blind congressman and he is on board with the Robbins bill. And, you know, I’m still young enough. I’m in my 20s, but I’m still young enough to think that I still know everything. Right. And besides, I’ve been around forever and a day. Yeah. So I’m kind of shocked. First of all, what blind congressman? And what is the Robbins bill?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes, yes, yes.
Peggy Chong: So I set that aside and thought. But, you know, maybe I better look a little bit more at some of this stuff before I pitch it, and I started a nice little pile of these things. So I started asking, so who was the blind congressman in Minnesota? And everybody’s going, oh, there hasn’t been a blind congressman. There has only been one blind U.S. senator. That’s it. That’s all I’m thinking. Okay, that can’t be right. There’s, you know, something. So I had done some job training at the Minneapolis Public Library for a couple of summers because I had thought about becoming a librarian. And I went to some of the librarians that had been mentors to me and asked, so who was the blind congressman from Minnesota? And they’re like, I don’t think there’s ever been a congressman from Minnesota. However they were just as curious as I was and helped me get into some of the research rooms that would go through all kinds of good stuff and found Thomas David Schall, who was the blind congressman from Minnesota from 1914 to 1925, when he became the blind U.S. senator from Minnesota from 1925 until his death in 1935. And so he — I call him my first blind ancestor because he was the first one I ever really researched and learned about. And we’re talking, you know, this is before the internet and you have to do everything by hand. You had to go to the place where the records were kept.
Peggy Chong: You had to go through everything paper by paper, by paper. And it was kind of hard to find people to come with me to do that because it was very tedious. And you didn’t find anything. Many times the entire day you were there. But he was my first one, so I put him aside and he was my first research project. However, in those papers, I kept other documents talking about blind people they were working with in the 1920s and the 1930s from other states, and wondering how did they know about them? They didn’t go to the school for the blind in Minnesota. How did these guys network? So every time I would put together my list of questions of things to find out, I’d answer one question and there be ten more in its place. So I started with Thomas Schall, who was a very interesting man. He started out in a family where you can read a lot about him on the internet. And some of it’s true, and a lot of it’s not. And why is that? Well, that’s because he reinvented himself every time he turned around. Oh, so he claimed his father died and his mother remarried. Actually, his father deserted him and his mother. And she did remarry. He sometimes dropped out of school, sometimes not. However, he did finish high school and he became a lawyer. Now, when I’m talking to kids, I like to tell them that he became blind because he smoked.
Peggy Chong: And that’s true. Yeah, well, it is in a sense. He was trying a case in Fargo, North Dakota, and about 1910 or so and went to this cigar stand to buy a cigar, and tried out the new electric cigarette lighter. Oh yeah. It didn’t work too well. It gave him this terrible shock and threw him across the room, and he hit his head on the wall and went down. Now he was a little dazed. He got up. He went back to court after the recess and finished his trial. But within two weeks he was totally blind. And he had amassed quite a amount of wealth by this time, and he and his wife spent most of their money, just about all of it, trying to find a cure for his blindness. He hit rock bottom. They didn’t have any money. A few of his lawyer friends threw him a divorce case here and there. But they started saying, well, you know, you’ve got this big booming voice. Would you come and, you know, address the crowds at my rally or this political function or whatever, and he started to do that. Some people said, why don’t you run for Congress? He said, well, why not? And he threw his hat in the ring and he won. That was the first office he had ever held in his life was congressman for the state of Minnesota.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, God.
Peggy Chong: No. He went to Congress. He had a dog that was trained at a school for dog guides in Minnesota that predates other dog guide schools in the country. It went back and forth with him to DC all the time. They, of course, wanted to put the dog in the baggage car. And Thomas David Schall was — he was a very powerful man, not only just in his speech, but in his demeanor. And he just didn’t take no for an answer. And nobody said no to the congressman or the senator, depending on when he traveled and his dog was with him. He proposed legislation to allow dogs to accompany a blind person on public transit, both nationally and in Minnesota, which didn’t pass, you know. People weren’t used to seeing a blind person with a dog at that time yet. But he died in a hit and run accident just before Christmas. He and his chauffeur slash reader, they stopped to do some shopping, got out of the car, and this car started up and just zoomed on and hit them both. Thomas was killed. Thomas died a few days later in the hospital. His driver recovered. But the interesting thing is that the driver stopped, got out of the car and yelled, he shouldn’t have been in the street anyway. He went to court and they didn’t charge him with anything because he hit a blind guy, you know? So the blind guy should have been watching. His family swears that the mafia arm of the DFL party had him assassinated. And looking back, they’ve got some proof of that. The man who hit him was unemployed. We’re talking the heart of the depression. Yet within a few years, he bought a new house. He didn’t have a job. His kids went to private school. His kids went to college. Where did his money come from? Well, I interviewed his daughter in law and his grandson. And to this day, they do believe that he was assassinated. So kind of an interesting guy.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: My God. You could call yourself a historian or an archivist, and plenty of people do call you both, but you prefer the word storyteller. And I know from my own work that the word we choose for ourselves matters enormously. What does storyteller give you that historian does not?
Peggy Chong: Well, I’ll tell you, I didn’t like school very much and I didn’t like history. So for me, history was very boring. And I find a lot of people feel that history is boring. So if I’m a historian, I’m already in the boring category, and that doesn’t get you very far. I am an archivist in some ways because I have taken collections of material that I have found, I’ve seen to it that it is preserved. That means getting it scanned. That means getting it translated so that it can be saved for anyone else. And so that I, as a blind person, could access the records. There was a lot of selfishness in my efforts, but I think of myself more as a storyteller because I want these people to come alive. I want them to be real. Not just facts, not just dates. I want them to be somebody that a person, once they read my stories, read my monthly emails, say, wow, I can see where that man was really impressive. I can see how much that woman had to overcome, not just as a blind person, but as a woman, and how remarkable they were just to be able to accomplish the little bit that society probably doesn’t consider them successful. But we should look at them as a successful person because they supported themselves. They gave back to the community. They were people who took the challenges on and overcame them. They didn’t look at them as a problem. They looked at them as something to get past. And so when I say I’m a storyteller, I hope that people want me to come and address their groups and hopefully inspire others to do research on blind people. Hopefully that they look at blind people differently. They see them as potential contributors to society. [unclear 00:17:48] They would be contributors to their organization, to the things that they’re interested in as well.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I am certainly impressed by, you know, you telling about this congressman. I mean, I’m intrigued. Wow.
Peggy Chong: Well, when I was reading about him at first going through some news articles and some family histories about him, I thought, I’m not going to like this man very well. And probably I wouldn’t have. One of the things I noticed before he became blind is that he was a trial lawyer that handled like a lot of hit and run cases or personal injury cases. And it was interesting to me that the witnesses for many of the cases had the same name. And you gotta wonder how that could be.
Peggy Chong: So I kind of wondered if he wasn’t a little bit on the creative side in his defending of his clients. But when he went blind and was elected to Congress, he really took things seriously and did his research, talked to people, he went through the communities and he went door knocking. He, his children acted as guides in the summer when he would travel to these communities, get off the trains, walk to the farmhouses, take a horse and buggy and later a car. And just sit and talk to the farmers, the blacksmiths, the grocers to hear their side of the story. He was a Republican but didn’t always hold the Republican line. But he still used some of his creativity in his promotions of himself and the legislation that he had. He was interested in the blindness stuff, but he came at it as someone who went blind as an adult.
Peggy Chong: How do you, as a blind adult who there’s no training for you anywhere in the country. No, the schools for the blind won’t take you. You’re too old. And so the Robbins bill was written by a blind man who had gone blind in his teens. His last name was Robbins, and he wanted to start a nationwide program of rehabilitation for blind people. Now, there’s already this thrust of needing to train the blind vets who came back from World War One, and the Red Cross had started this program in Maryland. They called it Evergreen, and blind vets went there for about two years. It was closed down after about seven years, partly because they had done what they could for those blind vets, that defined group, but it was also very expensive, which was one of the reasons the government didn’t want to take on general population of blind adults. It costs too much money. The Robbins bill would start some specific training. And it’s interesting to note that one of the suggestions was like newsstands or cigar stands, that blind people would be trained to operate.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Peggy Chong: And so in a way, that was sort of the start of the Randolph-Sheppard program. It had to go another ten years before that would really catch on. But I am just amazed at how one thing ties into another when I start researching it. There’s no linear history story here. It is a web of wonderful histories together that I uncover, and it’s some of these people. It takes me ten, 15 years before the story comes to life where others, I can get a story out in six months or so because I want to check out as many possible ways as possible to research them, not just newspaper articles or stories in blindness publications, but family histories. I really enjoy talking to the descendants of these blind people and hearing their family stories.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You are certainly a wonderful storyteller. I mean, this interview is very, very different and I’m really enjoying it. And, you know, one of the things I admire most about your work is that you refuse to turn your subjects into saints. You have said out loud that blind people have been senators and bankers and also crooks and murderers, because we are a cross section of society. That is a brave thing to say in a field that loves an inspiring story. Why is it so important to you that the ordinary lives, and even the unflattering ones get told right alongside the celebrated ones?
Peggy Chong: When you look at the catalogue of books about blind people, a lot of those books are either sad, sappy stories, or they become almost saints. Angels. They can do no wrong. Everything they did was great. But life isn’t that way. Life is full of challenges and mistakes. And how we learn from those mistakes makes us who we are. When we take a big fall, how we get up, dust ourselves off and move ahead is very important. And if you are reading these books about these blind people who a lot of them are religious in nature, they find God and they learn to play the piano and live happily ever after. Well, believe me, I am not musically inclined. I will never play an instrument. Well, I’ve had lessons. And my poor [unclear 00:25:18] instructors. So many of the stereotypes about blindness, I think most of us cannot really relate to because they’re not like us. We need to hear the stories of people who are like us, who didn’t have the best education, or didn’t have enough money to start that first business, or totally failed because we had no idea what really went on in the real world in that profession. One of the interesting stories here in Colorado where I now live, I found about a gentleman who he went blind because he was in a parade celebrating — I believe it was an anniversary of the Civil War. And he was celebrating the Confederate side. Somebody threw a rock. Hit him in the head.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Peggy Chong: And he went blind. Now, this is in the 1870s, so there’s nothing for him at all in Colorado except going to a poor farm or, you know, just packing it up and pretty much burying yourself. The poor farms were sometimes worse than jails, and people did not want to go to a poor farm.
Peggy Chong: So what is he going to do? He’s got to make some money. He’s got to live. So he runs into a friend who says, well, you want to sell the cigars out on the street from my tobacco company? So he starts that. Pretty soon he’s involved in the business. Thinks I’ll start my own, starts a little tobacco store, buys the tobacco, rolls the cigars, gets out, sells them on railway stops up and down the railway line that he lived on. Gets more confident in his travels, starts traveling the state. His building burns down a couple of times because they’re wooden buildings in these small towns. You get a fire going in one building and the whole block goes down. He picks himself up each time, starts again. He is on a train about 1900, and it’s late at night. He has bought a sleeping car ticket, climbs up the steps of the train, and there’s supposed to be a gate on the back side. He misstepped. Fell off the other side and was injured. So he sued the rail company for damages and they said, oh no, because they had a policy that blind people could ride for free if they had a guide with him. Well, he said, I didn’t ride for free and I didn’t have a guide. So then they said, well, he should have had a guide no matter what. And he won in the lower court. The railroad appealed. They lost again. And they had all these reasons why a blind person shouldn’t travel. So he appeals all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court. It’s now 1909. So this guy’s got some chutzpah, and the railroad goes into the Supreme Court and said, you know, he was riding the train for free. And so he accepts his responsibility and he holds up his ticket that he paid for, for the sleeping car. So he wins at the Supreme Court level in Colorado and gets a much larger judgment than the lower courts had given him.
Peggy Chong: So he starts his own tobacco company in a larger town, and it grows. Pretty soon he’s employing several salesmen who travel. He’s now got a shop where he’s hiring people to roll the cigars. He has a shop where he’s hiring people to sell his loose leaf tobacco. And he’s becoming not wealthy, but he’s certainly one of the more wealthier people in town. And then comes along the late 1920s. He’s already fought the battle for riding a train as a blind guy. So he’s crossing the street in town and a man who’s got two horses on a sleigh — it’s a wintertime — is trying out his sleigh. And they’re galloping down the street.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Peggy Chong: And he’s hit by the horses. And again is injured and in the hospital. So he tries to get that person arrested for dangerous driving. And the first response is, well, you know, you should have had somebody helping you cross the street. And he’s thinking, now wait a minute. I crossed this street every day. So he ends up suing, going to court, demonstrating that the sleigh the man was riding, no matter if you were standing in the seat, you couldn’t see over the head of the horses. So he shouldn’t have been driving it in the street and he finally wins. He doesn’t get much money out of it, which really wasn’t his point. What he really wanted was to make sure that there was some protection for any pedestrian in the street, that drivers of sleighs, horse and buggies, and the new automobile that he didn’t like at all, that they had protection and a right to cross the street and that the drivers had a responsibility to look. And that was some of the beginnings of some of the white cane laws. At least here in Colorado — they date back earlier in some other states, but here in Colorado, that was sort of the beginning of the white cane laws because white canes weren’t very prevalent. Most men used a walking stick like sighted men used. They weren’t white. They were fashionable canes.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Peggy Chong: Women didn’t use them because they were a man’s walking stick. And in the early 1900s, 1800s, women didn’t go out alone anyway.
Peggy Chong: Because that would mark you as a loose woman.
Peggy Chong: Prone for gossip. So, yeah, sighted women always went in twos. So blind women went with sighted women as travel companions. And to the market and to the dress shop, just like the sighted women did. But blind men did travel alone, and they found a walking cane to be very helpful in that as well, which, you know, we’re talking in the 1880s, 1890s, there’s many blind men who are noted as tapping along with their cane. And I find that fascinating because we often think of the white cane as an invention in the 1920s and 30s, when the white part was. But the cane part wasn’t.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Are you there?
Peggy Chong: Yes. I’m here.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. This is truly a lesson in history. And you know what? I hope our listeners are agreeing with me that this interview, you know, depicts a blind person in so many different ways, not just the stereotype blind person. Right?
Peggy Chong: Correct. And one of the things that I often ask myself when I’m researching, because I want to be able to tell my readers of my monthly emails how they did their tasks. What techniques did they use as a blind person? What did they adapt? How did they adapt it? And to do that, I often have to interview a lot of people to find out what they did. And I find it interesting when I can get family who have memorabilia of that person and they’ll say, oh, my grandfather read in Braille, or my great uncle read Braille, and I have his slate, and they’ll send me the slate, or they’ll send me a picture of it. And the picture is of two cells high and four across, and that tells me it was New York Point, not Braille, because for some of the people I’m researching, Braille wasn’t introduced in this country until 1860. And so if a — specially an adult was blinded in the 1870s, 1880s, the chances of them learning Braille was almost slim to none. Because it was New York Point was what was being taught.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Peggy Chong: And so it’s fun for me to find those little artifacts. We look at Braille now, the word Braille as sort of the all encompassing of the reading methods of blind people. When Braille to many of these people meant reading in Moon type. If they wrote it was either in New York Point or it was in Braille. But I’ve also found many examples of blind people who hand wrote their letters, their correspondence, their bills, because the Ohio School for the Blind, the first state school for the blind for decades — you know, Braille wasn’t invented, wasn’t here in the United States yet. And New York Point wasn’t really used either in Ohio. They said that print — and we’re talking handwriting — was the business language of the country. And if you want to be a business person, you have to learn the business language of the country. And they would spend hours every day, the students learning to write in script or learning to write their print letters. And so you have this [unclear 00:36:53]. People who went blind in their 30s and 40s, print was the only thing they knew. So they continued that. And they continued to practice writing every day so that they wouldn’t lose that skill. The typewriter, when it came to this country, came to the schools for the blind as a literacy tool for blind people. It was the blind people use of the typewriter that introduced it into the business community and took off like a shot, which always makes me laugh a lot when I see these new inventions, these keyboards for the blind to help you learn to type. Because typing is so hard to learn as a blind person. Yes. When actually the typewriter was an invention for blind people.
Peggy Chong: And so the material and the artifacts and the photographs that people send to me of their ancestors — when I’m looking at those photographs, I’m looking at what’s around them, the different typewriters, the different Braille apparatuses. What’s on the shelves behind them? Did they have Braille rulers? There was a story that I had about a blind man from Iowa who had no idea what he could do, but he found an ad in the newspapers. This was the depression time, for selling men’s suits door to door. And he thought, well, what have I got to lose? So his mother was a seamstress. And so he said to his mom, I have to sell suits. I have to take measurements. How am I going to do this? So his mom took one of her tape measures, and she made stitches in it. Several stitches for one inch at the inch mark, a few stitches for half and a quarter and an eighth. And so he took that along with him. And knowing very little about men’s suits, he presented himself as an expert and took the measurements.
Peggy Chong: And he actually won awards from the company because fewer of his suits went back for alterations. Wow. Because he had measured so well. Now, one of the techniques that he used for measuring was telling people, oh, did you hear that out the window? And they would turn and their bodies would relax better. And so he would get a more accurate measurement from the shoulder down. And he had some other little tricks that he used for measuring as well. Or he would sometimes take a string and cut it and then recheck it. And that was his measurement. Then he would put it on the measuring tape. He actually made enough money where he could support his mother and own a home and everything. During the depression, when other blind people were having a lot more difficulty, and he did this selling men’s suits. Now, he didn’t continue to do that, but it was how he got started. And it boosts his confidence so much that he was able to move on to other things. And I find those kinds of stories fascinating because here’s this man who’s desperate for a job. Nobody will hire him and he takes on a job. He has no idea how he’s going to do the job, the techniques that he’s going to do. He makes it up as he goes along and becomes an expert at it, better than the sighted men and women doing it in the county at the same time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So what you are storytelling to our listeners is that blindness does not hold people back. If they want to do something and they find what I call workarounds to do it. Is that right?
Peggy Chong: That is correct. Yeah. When it comes down to, you know, like when I first started doing this, some of the questions I wanted to answer for myself was what makes a successful blind person? I’m still working on that question because it changes all the time. But what amount of schooling did they have to have? What amount of blindness training did they have to have? Money? And sometimes what I am finding with some of these blind people is that they had to hit rock bottom first and have no way out. It’s either try this or go to the poor farm, try this or go to jail. And jail was a refuge for a lot of beggars. They went especially on a long weekend. They’d try to get arrested Friday night because they knew the judge wouldn’t be in town till Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. So they were guaranteed several nights in a warm bed and meals. Which I don’t recommend, but you know, if you didn’t want to have a criminal record, you would try anything, whether it be driving a horse and buggy. How are you going to do it? I don’t know, pray the horse knows where he’s going. And in some cases they trained horses to be like their dog guide. There was a blind milkman in Minnesota who delivered the milk from his family’s farm, and he used his horse and buggy to do it. The family said, why not? I mean, he’s blind. It’s dark. And if he can do it without using the extra oil for the lamp, that just means we have more oil for the rest of the farm usage.
Peggy Chong: So they set him out on the road and he got to listening for groves of trees or the change in the wind to let him know he should turn here. And he delivered the milk for a few years for his family farm in Minnesota in the 1870s, when there’s no corner light, no farm light. The only thing you would have would be a gas lantern or a kerosene lantern on your buggy or wagon or whatever. And so he figured, you know, it’s dark anyway. Everybody else is doing it in the dark. I can too. He went on to be a piano tuner. He rode bicycles to his jobs. He was totally blind. How did he do that? He taught other blind pianists to ride their bicycles as well. Because you’re talking pre paved roads. And so he would get his bicycle in the track of a wagon. And he would count when you kind of like railroad tracks when you get to a corner. Now the buggy tracks are going different directions. So it’s like bumpety bumpety bump. Okay. That must be Marquette Street. And the next one is Saint Paul Street and blah, blah, blah. And so he could judge by the bumpity bumps in the road as well as the sounds, the smells as to where he was in the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
Peggy Chong: He could carry his 67-pound piano tuning kit on the back of his bicycle and go much farther than having to walk that or hire somebody to drive him there with either a horse and buggy. So he used the techniques that other people were using, but he found as a blind person, different ways to interpret how he was getting there. Like the bumps in the road, the smells, the sounds. And, you know, getting to know a lot of people along the street so he could say hi to the policeman on the corner and say, this is so and so street, right? Yeah. Oh, have you seen so and so lately? Yeah. So they’re over at such and so cafe. Great. I’m looking for them. Or he would hear the school bells and he would have people who would be willing to help him when he would get to a residential community for finding the houses. And he was a very talkative gentleman, so he’d walk up to the door. Hi. I’m tuning pianos in your neighborhood, and I’m going to be tuning for the such and so house. That’s just a couple doors down from you, right? They say, oh no, it’s actually on the next block. Well, you know, if you’re interested in tuning your piano, I would be glad to tune it for you. Here’s my card. So while he was trying to find his way to his location, he was also picking up business as he went along the streets.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, this interview, listening to you as a great storyteller — you’ve given us several stories of inspiration that, yes, you are blind, but you know what? There are ways to get around it. There are ways to use your other senses to do what you want to do. Don’t just sink into the doldrums. That’s not a reason. That’s not an excuse. You can do it. So with the clock ticking down in just a few more minutes, I wanted to ask you this final question. What message of inspiration would you have for anyone who says, well, I’m blind, I can’t do anything. While I’m blind, I give up hope. Give our listeners a few words of inspiration based on the stories that you have shared with us today.
Peggy Chong: You know, I’ve had that conversation with many people and it kind of depends. I often ask them, well, how do you want your children to remember you by? Do you want to be remembered as the grumpy old blind man in the chair or the grandma who just sits around on the rocker? But then I asked them about what their dreams were and bring up a story, because there’s a blind person who has done almost everything. Or I’ll say, well, you know, you can sit here all you want, but it certainly isn’t going to make life very happy. And I can — if I had took on that attitude, I’d be living in public housing and on welfare, and my credit card just cannot tolerate that type of a lifestyle, and I want you to feel that way as well. I will tell them about things that I’ve just done. I will tell them, well, you know, you could sit there and feel sorry for yourself or you could have been with me. And for example, I just came back from a US-Canada cruise sailing the Great Lakes. And we had a great time. And yes, it was about bird watching. Yes, it was about watching the hot air balloon that went up for the NOAA weather stations. Yes. It was about watching the videos of what was happening under the water when the boat dropped the basket that had the fish bait in it and the video cameras to monitor what the fish were doing.
Peggy Chong: But you know what? It was also about, especially for my husband, going on the bird watching small boat tour because he wanted to ride that boat that bumped all over the water and could go 40 miles hitting all those waves on the Great Lakes. But it was also about learning new things and meeting new people. We went to the lectures and learned about the interesting birds along the Canadian border and the US border. We learned about the lock systems and how locks all worked. We learned about, especially along the Great Lakes, all the shipwrecks that took place, the conditions that the ships sank in, and how that water is so cold today that you can look down and see those boats intact. And there was so much to learn. And we had a great time meeting new people. We had a great time eating new foods. We had a great time listening to music. And if you’re going to feel sorry for yourself, you’re going to miss all that. So you have a choice. And it is your choice because all the people that I have researched, there is no one set of criteria or need or amount of schooling or amount of money. There’s no characteristic, one characteristic that stands out that made the people that I consider successful, successful. What does make them successful is that they said, I will try, I will do it. And if I fail, I’ll get up and do it again, or I’ll try something else.
Peggy Chong: And it’s up to us. It’s what’s inside us that makes us who we are, that makes us successful, that makes us happy. That makes us feel fulfilled. And just because you don’t think you can go back and do the job you did as a sighted person, doesn’t mean that what you learned as a sighted person isn’t beneficial. You can go back and use those same skills and knowledge in different parts of your profession, whether it be a teacher, whether it be a trainer, whether it be a coordinating volunteers in that profession, whether it be volunteering yourself, whether it be writing up manuals. There’s so many different options that you can choose. But you have to choose them, and you have to find your way to fit in. And you may have some false starts. You’re going to have to learn to do things differently. But isn’t life all about learning new things? Haven’t many people said that you have to learn something new every day? And I think that’s what we have to remember, is that now, as blind people, we still have to learn something new every day. It’s just different than what we would have learned as a sighted person or what our families are learning. And we can do that and we can be successful. There are blind people who have become fast Braille readers learning Braille when they were in their 70s. Because they chose to do it, they chose to learn it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: This has been an interview of pure inspiration and motivation, and I want to thank you for having taken the time to come out and share your perspective with listeners. It is refreshing and it is something I hope our listeners would take heed of. And, you know, any time they say to themselves, well, I can’t do it. Listen to what Peggy has said. And so I want to thank you for having come. Well.
Peggy Chong: Thank you very much. And anyone who wants to receive one of my monthly emails, I send them out once a month. They can just send me an email to theblindhistorylady@gmail.com. That’s the blind history lady, all one word, @gmail.com. And I’ll be glad to add you to my list. And you’ll hear these stories about people, the trials, the triumphs, the successes that they had. And once in a while, a murderer who was shot by the police.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Please add me. Add me to your distribution list.
Peggy Chong: I will be glad to.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’m. Especially the one. The one who was caught for murdering somebody.
Peggy Chong: Oh my goodness. That was the 1980s in Minneapolis. And the police shot him because he was in jail for murdering his fiancee. And that was the second time he’d murdered his fiancee. And not the same woman. Different one. And while he was in jail, he had this girlfriend where he — when she escaped from jail, he went to her house and he assaulted her, kidnapped her kids, and were holding him hostage. So his wife — now, you’ve got to understand, he got married while he was in jail after this woman married him after murdering the fiance. She’s on the screen pleading, a blind person. He’s blind. He couldn’t hurt anybody. And she wanted all these blind organizations to step in and get the police to not shoot him. Not a blind organization would do that. The cops didn’t see him as a blind man. They saw him as a man twice convicted of murder, who was holding two children hostage by knife at their throat, and they shot him in the head.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you very, very much for this very inspiring and insightful interview. Thank you. And please, please add me to your.
Peggy Chong: I will do that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And we will stay in touch.
Peggy Chong: Thank you very much. This has been fun.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Thanks, Peggy. You take care now. Bye bye.
Peggy Chong: Bye bye.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
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Related
Remarkable World Commentary Episode #108: Interview with Peggy Chong, The Blind History Lady
🎙️ Listen to this Podcast.
In this absorbing episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA speaks with Peggy Chong, The Blind History Lady, about how a 1979 job clearing out the files of a closing Minnesota home for the blind turned into a lifetime of recovering the lives of blind Americans. Peggy describes finding a board member’s letter mentioning “our blind congressman,” tracing it to Thomas David Schall, and calling him her first blind ancestor. She explains why she prefers storyteller to historian or archivist, and why she insists on telling the ordinary and the unflattering lives alongside the celebrated ones, because blind people are a cross section of society, crooks and murderers included.
The conversation moves through a Colorado cigar merchant who took a railroad to the state Supreme Court in 1909 and helped seed the white cane laws, a Depression-era Iowa man who sold men’s suits door to door using a tape measure his seamstress mother had stitched with tactile marks, and a blind Minnesota milkman turned piano tuner who navigated Minneapolis by the bumps in wagon ruts. Peggy closes with a direct answer to anyone who has given up hope, that no amount of schooling or money separates the blind people she researches who succeeded from those who didn’t, only the decision to try, fail, and try again, and invites listeners to join her monthly email list.
TRANSCRIPT
Podcast Commentator: Greetings, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA, invites you to listen to her biweekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills, and expertise in access, technology and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Remarkable World Commentary. I am Donna J. Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound, through touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate and accessibility consultant, an author. I am also a lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind. You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November of 2010, I won the landmark Charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its website accessible to every Canadian, not just to sighted ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June 23rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for her tireless commitment to removing barriers. When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal, and this is to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench, where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas. Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a change maker whose work is as every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. Peggy Chong, welcome to my Remarkable World Commentary. I am pleased and privileged to have you as my guest.
Peggy Chong: Well, thank you very much and I’m very pleased to be here.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, I’m just tickled that you have accepted our invitation and let’s get started. Okay, so. Hold on a second. Okay. Peggy, I’d like to begin with when your story begins. Back in 1979, you were helping clear out the files of a Minnesota home for the blind that was closing. And instead of tossing those papers in the bin, you stopped and read them. And you came across correspondence about a blind man who had served in Congress, someone who nobody had ever told you existed. Take us into that room with you. What did you find? Who did he turn out to be? And when did you realize that you were holding something that was about to redirect the rest of your life?
Peggy Chong: Well, I’ll tell you, I was given that job mostly because I had grown up in the blind community all my life. And the papers were files, records, stories, news articles, all written by all these old people. And they said, well, you’ll know who these people are and if we should keep anything or not. But they all have to fit into a file cabinet. Now there’s boxes and boxes and file cabinets and file cabinets full of stuff, and I have to get it into one file cabinet. And they said, you have to keep all the records of the minutes and the financials, and [unclear 00:05:47] reports in the newsletters. Now, the organization was founded in 1920. Started meeting in 1919. So I’ve got 60 years of records here to go through and they kept everything. So I’m sitting there trying to get rid of as much as I can, and every so often I would stop and I’d look at something, and I just ran across this letter when I was going through the 1920s material, which was the first few boxes that I went through. And there was a letter from one of the board members to another board member saying, I just met with our blind congressman and he is on board with the Robbins bill. And, you know, I’m still young enough. I’m in my 20s, but I’m still young enough to think that I still know everything. Right. And besides, I’ve been around forever and a day. Yeah. So I’m kind of shocked. First of all, what blind congressman? And what is the Robbins bill?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes, yes, yes.
Peggy Chong: So I set that aside and thought. But, you know, maybe I better look a little bit more at some of this stuff before I pitch it, and I started a nice little pile of these things. So I started asking, so who was the blind congressman in Minnesota? And everybody’s going, oh, there hasn’t been a blind congressman. There has only been one blind U.S. senator. That’s it. That’s all I’m thinking. Okay, that can’t be right. There’s, you know, something. So I had done some job training at the Minneapolis Public Library for a couple of summers because I had thought about becoming a librarian. And I went to some of the librarians that had been mentors to me and asked, so who was the blind congressman from Minnesota? And they’re like, I don’t think there’s ever been a congressman from Minnesota. However they were just as curious as I was and helped me get into some of the research rooms that would go through all kinds of good stuff and found Thomas David Schall, who was the blind congressman from Minnesota from 1914 to 1925, when he became the blind U.S. senator from Minnesota from 1925 until his death in 1935. And so he — I call him my first blind ancestor because he was the first one I ever really researched and learned about. And we’re talking, you know, this is before the internet and you have to do everything by hand. You had to go to the place where the records were kept.
Peggy Chong: You had to go through everything paper by paper, by paper. And it was kind of hard to find people to come with me to do that because it was very tedious. And you didn’t find anything. Many times the entire day you were there. But he was my first one, so I put him aside and he was my first research project. However, in those papers, I kept other documents talking about blind people they were working with in the 1920s and the 1930s from other states, and wondering how did they know about them? They didn’t go to the school for the blind in Minnesota. How did these guys network? So every time I would put together my list of questions of things to find out, I’d answer one question and there be ten more in its place. So I started with Thomas Schall, who was a very interesting man. He started out in a family where you can read a lot about him on the internet. And some of it’s true, and a lot of it’s not. And why is that? Well, that’s because he reinvented himself every time he turned around. Oh, so he claimed his father died and his mother remarried. Actually, his father deserted him and his mother. And she did remarry. He sometimes dropped out of school, sometimes not. However, he did finish high school and he became a lawyer. Now, when I’m talking to kids, I like to tell them that he became blind because he smoked.
Peggy Chong: And that’s true. Yeah, well, it is in a sense. He was trying a case in Fargo, North Dakota, and about 1910 or so and went to this cigar stand to buy a cigar, and tried out the new electric cigarette lighter. Oh yeah. It didn’t work too well. It gave him this terrible shock and threw him across the room, and he hit his head on the wall and went down. Now he was a little dazed. He got up. He went back to court after the recess and finished his trial. But within two weeks he was totally blind. And he had amassed quite a amount of wealth by this time, and he and his wife spent most of their money, just about all of it, trying to find a cure for his blindness. He hit rock bottom. They didn’t have any money. A few of his lawyer friends threw him a divorce case here and there. But they started saying, well, you know, you’ve got this big booming voice. Would you come and, you know, address the crowds at my rally or this political function or whatever, and he started to do that. Some people said, why don’t you run for Congress? He said, well, why not? And he threw his hat in the ring and he won. That was the first office he had ever held in his life was congressman for the state of Minnesota.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, God.
Peggy Chong: No. He went to Congress. He had a dog that was trained at a school for dog guides in Minnesota that predates other dog guide schools in the country. It went back and forth with him to DC all the time. They, of course, wanted to put the dog in the baggage car. And Thomas David Schall was — he was a very powerful man, not only just in his speech, but in his demeanor. And he just didn’t take no for an answer. And nobody said no to the congressman or the senator, depending on when he traveled and his dog was with him. He proposed legislation to allow dogs to accompany a blind person on public transit, both nationally and in Minnesota, which didn’t pass, you know. People weren’t used to seeing a blind person with a dog at that time yet. But he died in a hit and run accident just before Christmas. He and his chauffeur slash reader, they stopped to do some shopping, got out of the car, and this car started up and just zoomed on and hit them both. Thomas was killed. Thomas died a few days later in the hospital. His driver recovered. But the interesting thing is that the driver stopped, got out of the car and yelled, he shouldn’t have been in the street anyway. He went to court and they didn’t charge him with anything because he hit a blind guy, you know? So the blind guy should have been watching. His family swears that the mafia arm of the DFL party had him assassinated. And looking back, they’ve got some proof of that. The man who hit him was unemployed. We’re talking the heart of the depression. Yet within a few years, he bought a new house. He didn’t have a job. His kids went to private school. His kids went to college. Where did his money come from? Well, I interviewed his daughter in law and his grandson. And to this day, they do believe that he was assassinated. So kind of an interesting guy.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: My God. You could call yourself a historian or an archivist, and plenty of people do call you both, but you prefer the word storyteller. And I know from my own work that the word we choose for ourselves matters enormously. What does storyteller give you that historian does not?
Peggy Chong: Well, I’ll tell you, I didn’t like school very much and I didn’t like history. So for me, history was very boring. And I find a lot of people feel that history is boring. So if I’m a historian, I’m already in the boring category, and that doesn’t get you very far. I am an archivist in some ways because I have taken collections of material that I have found, I’ve seen to it that it is preserved. That means getting it scanned. That means getting it translated so that it can be saved for anyone else. And so that I, as a blind person, could access the records. There was a lot of selfishness in my efforts, but I think of myself more as a storyteller because I want these people to come alive. I want them to be real. Not just facts, not just dates. I want them to be somebody that a person, once they read my stories, read my monthly emails, say, wow, I can see where that man was really impressive. I can see how much that woman had to overcome, not just as a blind person, but as a woman, and how remarkable they were just to be able to accomplish the little bit that society probably doesn’t consider them successful. But we should look at them as a successful person because they supported themselves. They gave back to the community. They were people who took the challenges on and overcame them. They didn’t look at them as a problem. They looked at them as something to get past. And so when I say I’m a storyteller, I hope that people want me to come and address their groups and hopefully inspire others to do research on blind people. Hopefully that they look at blind people differently. They see them as potential contributors to society. [unclear 00:17:48] They would be contributors to their organization, to the things that they’re interested in as well.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I am certainly impressed by, you know, you telling about this congressman. I mean, I’m intrigued. Wow.
Peggy Chong: Well, when I was reading about him at first going through some news articles and some family histories about him, I thought, I’m not going to like this man very well. And probably I wouldn’t have. One of the things I noticed before he became blind is that he was a trial lawyer that handled like a lot of hit and run cases or personal injury cases. And it was interesting to me that the witnesses for many of the cases had the same name. And you gotta wonder how that could be.
Peggy Chong: So I kind of wondered if he wasn’t a little bit on the creative side in his defending of his clients. But when he went blind and was elected to Congress, he really took things seriously and did his research, talked to people, he went through the communities and he went door knocking. He, his children acted as guides in the summer when he would travel to these communities, get off the trains, walk to the farmhouses, take a horse and buggy and later a car. And just sit and talk to the farmers, the blacksmiths, the grocers to hear their side of the story. He was a Republican but didn’t always hold the Republican line. But he still used some of his creativity in his promotions of himself and the legislation that he had. He was interested in the blindness stuff, but he came at it as someone who went blind as an adult.
Peggy Chong: How do you, as a blind adult who there’s no training for you anywhere in the country. No, the schools for the blind won’t take you. You’re too old. And so the Robbins bill was written by a blind man who had gone blind in his teens. His last name was Robbins, and he wanted to start a nationwide program of rehabilitation for blind people. Now, there’s already this thrust of needing to train the blind vets who came back from World War One, and the Red Cross had started this program in Maryland. They called it Evergreen, and blind vets went there for about two years. It was closed down after about seven years, partly because they had done what they could for those blind vets, that defined group, but it was also very expensive, which was one of the reasons the government didn’t want to take on general population of blind adults. It costs too much money. The Robbins bill would start some specific training. And it’s interesting to note that one of the suggestions was like newsstands or cigar stands, that blind people would be trained to operate.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Peggy Chong: And so in a way, that was sort of the start of the Randolph-Sheppard program. It had to go another ten years before that would really catch on. But I am just amazed at how one thing ties into another when I start researching it. There’s no linear history story here. It is a web of wonderful histories together that I uncover, and it’s some of these people. It takes me ten, 15 years before the story comes to life where others, I can get a story out in six months or so because I want to check out as many possible ways as possible to research them, not just newspaper articles or stories in blindness publications, but family histories. I really enjoy talking to the descendants of these blind people and hearing their family stories.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You are certainly a wonderful storyteller. I mean, this interview is very, very different and I’m really enjoying it. And, you know, one of the things I admire most about your work is that you refuse to turn your subjects into saints. You have said out loud that blind people have been senators and bankers and also crooks and murderers, because we are a cross section of society. That is a brave thing to say in a field that loves an inspiring story. Why is it so important to you that the ordinary lives, and even the unflattering ones get told right alongside the celebrated ones?
Peggy Chong: When you look at the catalogue of books about blind people, a lot of those books are either sad, sappy stories, or they become almost saints. Angels. They can do no wrong. Everything they did was great. But life isn’t that way. Life is full of challenges and mistakes. And how we learn from those mistakes makes us who we are. When we take a big fall, how we get up, dust ourselves off and move ahead is very important. And if you are reading these books about these blind people who a lot of them are religious in nature, they find God and they learn to play the piano and live happily ever after. Well, believe me, I am not musically inclined. I will never play an instrument. Well, I’ve had lessons. And my poor [unclear 00:25:18] instructors. So many of the stereotypes about blindness, I think most of us cannot really relate to because they’re not like us. We need to hear the stories of people who are like us, who didn’t have the best education, or didn’t have enough money to start that first business, or totally failed because we had no idea what really went on in the real world in that profession. One of the interesting stories here in Colorado where I now live, I found about a gentleman who he went blind because he was in a parade celebrating — I believe it was an anniversary of the Civil War. And he was celebrating the Confederate side. Somebody threw a rock. Hit him in the head.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Peggy Chong: And he went blind. Now, this is in the 1870s, so there’s nothing for him at all in Colorado except going to a poor farm or, you know, just packing it up and pretty much burying yourself. The poor farms were sometimes worse than jails, and people did not want to go to a poor farm.
Peggy Chong: So what is he going to do? He’s got to make some money. He’s got to live. So he runs into a friend who says, well, you want to sell the cigars out on the street from my tobacco company? So he starts that. Pretty soon he’s involved in the business. Thinks I’ll start my own, starts a little tobacco store, buys the tobacco, rolls the cigars, gets out, sells them on railway stops up and down the railway line that he lived on. Gets more confident in his travels, starts traveling the state. His building burns down a couple of times because they’re wooden buildings in these small towns. You get a fire going in one building and the whole block goes down. He picks himself up each time, starts again. He is on a train about 1900, and it’s late at night. He has bought a sleeping car ticket, climbs up the steps of the train, and there’s supposed to be a gate on the back side. He misstepped. Fell off the other side and was injured. So he sued the rail company for damages and they said, oh no, because they had a policy that blind people could ride for free if they had a guide with him. Well, he said, I didn’t ride for free and I didn’t have a guide. So then they said, well, he should have had a guide no matter what. And he won in the lower court. The railroad appealed. They lost again. And they had all these reasons why a blind person shouldn’t travel. So he appeals all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court. It’s now 1909. So this guy’s got some chutzpah, and the railroad goes into the Supreme Court and said, you know, he was riding the train for free. And so he accepts his responsibility and he holds up his ticket that he paid for, for the sleeping car. So he wins at the Supreme Court level in Colorado and gets a much larger judgment than the lower courts had given him.
Peggy Chong: So he starts his own tobacco company in a larger town, and it grows. Pretty soon he’s employing several salesmen who travel. He’s now got a shop where he’s hiring people to roll the cigars. He has a shop where he’s hiring people to sell his loose leaf tobacco. And he’s becoming not wealthy, but he’s certainly one of the more wealthier people in town. And then comes along the late 1920s. He’s already fought the battle for riding a train as a blind guy. So he’s crossing the street in town and a man who’s got two horses on a sleigh — it’s a wintertime — is trying out his sleigh. And they’re galloping down the street.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Peggy Chong: And he’s hit by the horses. And again is injured and in the hospital. So he tries to get that person arrested for dangerous driving. And the first response is, well, you know, you should have had somebody helping you cross the street. And he’s thinking, now wait a minute. I crossed this street every day. So he ends up suing, going to court, demonstrating that the sleigh the man was riding, no matter if you were standing in the seat, you couldn’t see over the head of the horses. So he shouldn’t have been driving it in the street and he finally wins. He doesn’t get much money out of it, which really wasn’t his point. What he really wanted was to make sure that there was some protection for any pedestrian in the street, that drivers of sleighs, horse and buggies, and the new automobile that he didn’t like at all, that they had protection and a right to cross the street and that the drivers had a responsibility to look. And that was some of the beginnings of some of the white cane laws. At least here in Colorado — they date back earlier in some other states, but here in Colorado, that was sort of the beginning of the white cane laws because white canes weren’t very prevalent. Most men used a walking stick like sighted men used. They weren’t white. They were fashionable canes.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Peggy Chong: Women didn’t use them because they were a man’s walking stick. And in the early 1900s, 1800s, women didn’t go out alone anyway.
Peggy Chong: Because that would mark you as a loose woman.
Peggy Chong: Prone for gossip. So, yeah, sighted women always went in twos. So blind women went with sighted women as travel companions. And to the market and to the dress shop, just like the sighted women did. But blind men did travel alone, and they found a walking cane to be very helpful in that as well, which, you know, we’re talking in the 1880s, 1890s, there’s many blind men who are noted as tapping along with their cane. And I find that fascinating because we often think of the white cane as an invention in the 1920s and 30s, when the white part was. But the cane part wasn’t.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Are you there?
Peggy Chong: Yes. I’m here.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. This is truly a lesson in history. And you know what? I hope our listeners are agreeing with me that this interview, you know, depicts a blind person in so many different ways, not just the stereotype blind person. Right?
Peggy Chong: Correct. And one of the things that I often ask myself when I’m researching, because I want to be able to tell my readers of my monthly emails how they did their tasks. What techniques did they use as a blind person? What did they adapt? How did they adapt it? And to do that, I often have to interview a lot of people to find out what they did. And I find it interesting when I can get family who have memorabilia of that person and they’ll say, oh, my grandfather read in Braille, or my great uncle read Braille, and I have his slate, and they’ll send me the slate, or they’ll send me a picture of it. And the picture is of two cells high and four across, and that tells me it was New York Point, not Braille, because for some of the people I’m researching, Braille wasn’t introduced in this country until 1860. And so if a — specially an adult was blinded in the 1870s, 1880s, the chances of them learning Braille was almost slim to none. Because it was New York Point was what was being taught.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Peggy Chong: And so it’s fun for me to find those little artifacts. We look at Braille now, the word Braille as sort of the all encompassing of the reading methods of blind people. When Braille to many of these people meant reading in Moon type. If they wrote it was either in New York Point or it was in Braille. But I’ve also found many examples of blind people who hand wrote their letters, their correspondence, their bills, because the Ohio School for the Blind, the first state school for the blind for decades — you know, Braille wasn’t invented, wasn’t here in the United States yet. And New York Point wasn’t really used either in Ohio. They said that print — and we’re talking handwriting — was the business language of the country. And if you want to be a business person, you have to learn the business language of the country. And they would spend hours every day, the students learning to write in script or learning to write their print letters. And so you have this [unclear 00:36:53]. People who went blind in their 30s and 40s, print was the only thing they knew. So they continued that. And they continued to practice writing every day so that they wouldn’t lose that skill. The typewriter, when it came to this country, came to the schools for the blind as a literacy tool for blind people. It was the blind people use of the typewriter that introduced it into the business community and took off like a shot, which always makes me laugh a lot when I see these new inventions, these keyboards for the blind to help you learn to type. Because typing is so hard to learn as a blind person. Yes. When actually the typewriter was an invention for blind people.
Peggy Chong: And so the material and the artifacts and the photographs that people send to me of their ancestors — when I’m looking at those photographs, I’m looking at what’s around them, the different typewriters, the different Braille apparatuses. What’s on the shelves behind them? Did they have Braille rulers? There was a story that I had about a blind man from Iowa who had no idea what he could do, but he found an ad in the newspapers. This was the depression time, for selling men’s suits door to door. And he thought, well, what have I got to lose? So his mother was a seamstress. And so he said to his mom, I have to sell suits. I have to take measurements. How am I going to do this? So his mom took one of her tape measures, and she made stitches in it. Several stitches for one inch at the inch mark, a few stitches for half and a quarter and an eighth. And so he took that along with him. And knowing very little about men’s suits, he presented himself as an expert and took the measurements.
Peggy Chong: And he actually won awards from the company because fewer of his suits went back for alterations. Wow. Because he had measured so well. Now, one of the techniques that he used for measuring was telling people, oh, did you hear that out the window? And they would turn and their bodies would relax better. And so he would get a more accurate measurement from the shoulder down. And he had some other little tricks that he used for measuring as well. Or he would sometimes take a string and cut it and then recheck it. And that was his measurement. Then he would put it on the measuring tape. He actually made enough money where he could support his mother and own a home and everything. During the depression, when other blind people were having a lot more difficulty, and he did this selling men’s suits. Now, he didn’t continue to do that, but it was how he got started. And it boosts his confidence so much that he was able to move on to other things. And I find those kinds of stories fascinating because here’s this man who’s desperate for a job. Nobody will hire him and he takes on a job. He has no idea how he’s going to do the job, the techniques that he’s going to do. He makes it up as he goes along and becomes an expert at it, better than the sighted men and women doing it in the county at the same time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So what you are storytelling to our listeners is that blindness does not hold people back. If they want to do something and they find what I call workarounds to do it. Is that right?
Peggy Chong: That is correct. Yeah. When it comes down to, you know, like when I first started doing this, some of the questions I wanted to answer for myself was what makes a successful blind person? I’m still working on that question because it changes all the time. But what amount of schooling did they have to have? What amount of blindness training did they have to have? Money? And sometimes what I am finding with some of these blind people is that they had to hit rock bottom first and have no way out. It’s either try this or go to the poor farm, try this or go to jail. And jail was a refuge for a lot of beggars. They went especially on a long weekend. They’d try to get arrested Friday night because they knew the judge wouldn’t be in town till Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. So they were guaranteed several nights in a warm bed and meals. Which I don’t recommend, but you know, if you didn’t want to have a criminal record, you would try anything, whether it be driving a horse and buggy. How are you going to do it? I don’t know, pray the horse knows where he’s going. And in some cases they trained horses to be like their dog guide. There was a blind milkman in Minnesota who delivered the milk from his family’s farm, and he used his horse and buggy to do it. The family said, why not? I mean, he’s blind. It’s dark. And if he can do it without using the extra oil for the lamp, that just means we have more oil for the rest of the farm usage.
Peggy Chong: So they set him out on the road and he got to listening for groves of trees or the change in the wind to let him know he should turn here. And he delivered the milk for a few years for his family farm in Minnesota in the 1870s, when there’s no corner light, no farm light. The only thing you would have would be a gas lantern or a kerosene lantern on your buggy or wagon or whatever. And so he figured, you know, it’s dark anyway. Everybody else is doing it in the dark. I can too. He went on to be a piano tuner. He rode bicycles to his jobs. He was totally blind. How did he do that? He taught other blind pianists to ride their bicycles as well. Because you’re talking pre paved roads. And so he would get his bicycle in the track of a wagon. And he would count when you kind of like railroad tracks when you get to a corner. Now the buggy tracks are going different directions. So it’s like bumpety bumpety bump. Okay. That must be Marquette Street. And the next one is Saint Paul Street and blah, blah, blah. And so he could judge by the bumpity bumps in the road as well as the sounds, the smells as to where he was in the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
Peggy Chong: He could carry his 67-pound piano tuning kit on the back of his bicycle and go much farther than having to walk that or hire somebody to drive him there with either a horse and buggy. So he used the techniques that other people were using, but he found as a blind person, different ways to interpret how he was getting there. Like the bumps in the road, the smells, the sounds. And, you know, getting to know a lot of people along the street so he could say hi to the policeman on the corner and say, this is so and so street, right? Yeah. Oh, have you seen so and so lately? Yeah. So they’re over at such and so cafe. Great. I’m looking for them. Or he would hear the school bells and he would have people who would be willing to help him when he would get to a residential community for finding the houses. And he was a very talkative gentleman, so he’d walk up to the door. Hi. I’m tuning pianos in your neighborhood, and I’m going to be tuning for the such and so house. That’s just a couple doors down from you, right? They say, oh no, it’s actually on the next block. Well, you know, if you’re interested in tuning your piano, I would be glad to tune it for you. Here’s my card. So while he was trying to find his way to his location, he was also picking up business as he went along the streets.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, this interview, listening to you as a great storyteller — you’ve given us several stories of inspiration that, yes, you are blind, but you know what? There are ways to get around it. There are ways to use your other senses to do what you want to do. Don’t just sink into the doldrums. That’s not a reason. That’s not an excuse. You can do it. So with the clock ticking down in just a few more minutes, I wanted to ask you this final question. What message of inspiration would you have for anyone who says, well, I’m blind, I can’t do anything. While I’m blind, I give up hope. Give our listeners a few words of inspiration based on the stories that you have shared with us today.
Peggy Chong: You know, I’ve had that conversation with many people and it kind of depends. I often ask them, well, how do you want your children to remember you by? Do you want to be remembered as the grumpy old blind man in the chair or the grandma who just sits around on the rocker? But then I asked them about what their dreams were and bring up a story, because there’s a blind person who has done almost everything. Or I’ll say, well, you know, you can sit here all you want, but it certainly isn’t going to make life very happy. And I can — if I had took on that attitude, I’d be living in public housing and on welfare, and my credit card just cannot tolerate that type of a lifestyle, and I want you to feel that way as well. I will tell them about things that I’ve just done. I will tell them, well, you know, you could sit there and feel sorry for yourself or you could have been with me. And for example, I just came back from a US-Canada cruise sailing the Great Lakes. And we had a great time. And yes, it was about bird watching. Yes, it was about watching the hot air balloon that went up for the NOAA weather stations. Yes. It was about watching the videos of what was happening under the water when the boat dropped the basket that had the fish bait in it and the video cameras to monitor what the fish were doing.
Peggy Chong: But you know what? It was also about, especially for my husband, going on the bird watching small boat tour because he wanted to ride that boat that bumped all over the water and could go 40 miles hitting all those waves on the Great Lakes. But it was also about learning new things and meeting new people. We went to the lectures and learned about the interesting birds along the Canadian border and the US border. We learned about the lock systems and how locks all worked. We learned about, especially along the Great Lakes, all the shipwrecks that took place, the conditions that the ships sank in, and how that water is so cold today that you can look down and see those boats intact. And there was so much to learn. And we had a great time meeting new people. We had a great time eating new foods. We had a great time listening to music. And if you’re going to feel sorry for yourself, you’re going to miss all that. So you have a choice. And it is your choice because all the people that I have researched, there is no one set of criteria or need or amount of schooling or amount of money. There’s no characteristic, one characteristic that stands out that made the people that I consider successful, successful. What does make them successful is that they said, I will try, I will do it. And if I fail, I’ll get up and do it again, or I’ll try something else.
Peggy Chong: And it’s up to us. It’s what’s inside us that makes us who we are, that makes us successful, that makes us happy. That makes us feel fulfilled. And just because you don’t think you can go back and do the job you did as a sighted person, doesn’t mean that what you learned as a sighted person isn’t beneficial. You can go back and use those same skills and knowledge in different parts of your profession, whether it be a teacher, whether it be a trainer, whether it be a coordinating volunteers in that profession, whether it be volunteering yourself, whether it be writing up manuals. There’s so many different options that you can choose. But you have to choose them, and you have to find your way to fit in. And you may have some false starts. You’re going to have to learn to do things differently. But isn’t life all about learning new things? Haven’t many people said that you have to learn something new every day? And I think that’s what we have to remember, is that now, as blind people, we still have to learn something new every day. It’s just different than what we would have learned as a sighted person or what our families are learning. And we can do that and we can be successful. There are blind people who have become fast Braille readers learning Braille when they were in their 70s. Because they chose to do it, they chose to learn it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: This has been an interview of pure inspiration and motivation, and I want to thank you for having taken the time to come out and share your perspective with listeners. It is refreshing and it is something I hope our listeners would take heed of. And, you know, any time they say to themselves, well, I can’t do it. Listen to what Peggy has said. And so I want to thank you for having come. Well.
Peggy Chong: Thank you very much. And anyone who wants to receive one of my monthly emails, I send them out once a month. They can just send me an email to theblindhistorylady@gmail.com. That’s the blind history lady, all one word, @gmail.com. And I’ll be glad to add you to my list. And you’ll hear these stories about people, the trials, the triumphs, the successes that they had. And once in a while, a murderer who was shot by the police.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Please add me. Add me to your distribution list.
Peggy Chong: I will be glad to.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’m. Especially the one. The one who was caught for murdering somebody.
Peggy Chong: Oh my goodness. That was the 1980s in Minneapolis. And the police shot him because he was in jail for murdering his fiancee. And that was the second time he’d murdered his fiancee. And not the same woman. Different one. And while he was in jail, he had this girlfriend where he — when she escaped from jail, he went to her house and he assaulted her, kidnapped her kids, and were holding him hostage. So his wife — now, you’ve got to understand, he got married while he was in jail after this woman married him after murdering the fiance. She’s on the screen pleading, a blind person. He’s blind. He couldn’t hurt anybody. And she wanted all these blind organizations to step in and get the police to not shoot him. Not a blind organization would do that. The cops didn’t see him as a blind man. They saw him as a man twice convicted of murder, who was holding two children hostage by knife at their throat, and they shot him in the head.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you very, very much for this very inspiring and insightful interview. Thank you. And please, please add me to your.
Peggy Chong: I will do that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And we will stay in touch.
Peggy Chong: Thank you very much. This has been fun.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Thanks, Peggy. You take care now. Bye bye.
Peggy Chong: Bye bye.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
Turning policy into progress for people with disabilities.
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Published in Remarkable World Commentary