APH 150th Anniversary Essay Contest
First Place Winner: Adult Consumer
Deborah Kendrick
MY FRIEND ANDY
His name was like a rectangle, a perfect rectangle in dots: Andy. The "and" contraction made one half of the box, the "y" made the other. As a second grader, I looked forward each week to his letters, letters from a little boy I imagined to be just like me but in another school far away, and who cared enough about me to write me letters each week signed "Your friend, Andy."
The letters were very short, of course, but to a seven-year-old, brevity is not a problem. It seems to me that they carried news of his school, his family, maybe a pet dog. What mattered (and what remained in my consciousness) was that there was a bigger world out there, and that I could access that world through words, words written to me by another person, a person who would write them in Braille -just for me!
The letters were not personal letters, of course. They were included in the Braille edition of My Weekly Reader, and Andy's address, or so I believed, was the American Printing House for the Blind, 1839 Frankfort Avenue, Louisville, Kentucky.
Everything that was most important to me as a child had that same address: 1839 Frankfort Avenue. At home, I played alone - with my dolls, with the piano, zooming up and down our block or round and round our basement on my roller skates. I hung upside-down on the swing set in the back yard. My world was very small, but when I began to read, it grew.
Through books from the American Printing House for the Blind, I learned what was not possible for a blind child in a working class family to learn at home. I came to know Jane and Michael Banks, lucky wards of the amazing Mary Poppins. While entering their magical world, I was also learning about England and its customs. In my fourth grade reader, I learned about children who lived in houses made of logs and, because I could read the words, I saw those houses in my mind's eye. I saw log cabins, stage coaches, trees way too big to put your arms around. I learned to imagine princesses and their lovely dresses, and I could see in my mind's eyes their jewels and their toys and their pretty bedrooms.
At home, there were no books, Braille or otherwise. But I knew by the time I was seven or eight that reading Braille was my ticket to a one-way trip into the grand and glorious world. Each new book was such a treasure. I opened it reverently, felt the smoothness of that first empty page, then read the title page, always bearing that beloved address: 1839 Frankfort Avenue.
One issue of the Weekly Reader carried a raised-line map, and so it was that I was introduced to visualizing a world that extended beyond my reach by tracing a "picture" of its streets and buildings with my fingers. The city depicted was Columbus, Ohio, and I can still envision with precision High Street's line running straight up the middle, with North at the top and South at the bottom. (How it came to be that a Braille publication produced in Louisville introduced maps with one of Columbus, I've never known. At the time, it seemed completely unimportant and logical.)
By second grade, part of my school day was intermittently tutoring the other blind children with reading and writing Braille. By third grade, having read every book in our classroom multiple times, I took to reading the Worldbook Encyclopedia, a tome that, in Braille, filled two large bookcases at the front of the room. Countless blocks of my free time were spent lying on the floor in the nook formed by the Worldbook's bookcase and the corner of the room, six-inch thick volume open on my tummy, to read about Guatemala, Nigeria, banana trees, irrigation, horseback riding, or the workings of a violin. Often, one of my classmates would lie on the floor, too, happy to hear me read aloud about any entry that caught our fancy.
When I was ready for high school, my family had moved to a district where services for blind students were not yet on the agenda. Bravado and my fluency in Braille for note-taking with a slate and stylus were the tools that made attending that school possible. When advanced algebra proved more than I could hold in my brain, a student teacher found a source for help: again, it was the American Printing House for the Blind. This time the solution was a raised-line drawing kit, called a Sewell board. It reminded me of the magic slate I had loved as a small child, but the "magic" of this board was that drawing on it produced raised lines, lines that enabled my teacher to communicate some of the more remote concepts to me through my fingers.
As a college student, (and the first one ever in my family), my understanding of the role the American Printing House played in the lives of blind people grew clearer. I became a solver of problems for my own needs and those of other blind people, recognizing that often the solutions were available from Frankfort Avenue in Louisville, Kentucky. My lifelong hunger for words, information, and knowledge was more adequately sated as I learned that I could order dozens of magazines and books from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, many of my favorites produced by APH. As a young mother, I subscribed to Better Homes and Gardens, then produced in Braille by APH, and found what peers gained by observation -- directions for cooking, decorating, making baby clothes and mail order shopping.
In 1995, after years of using safety pins, dymo tape, and various mnemonics to identify the colors of my clothes, my children's clothes, household linens and more, I learned that the American Printing House was offering the first color identifier sold to blind people in the United States. The cost was $600, a significant amount of money in 1995 or now, but the independence that tool gave me was worth every penny and I soon wondered how I had managed without it.
So many tools of independence and liberation in my life have originated at the American Printing House. As a freelance writer, I struggled for years without an accessible dictionary. Not surprisingly, it was APH that produced a dictionary on cassettes, with entries separated by voice indexing. While this technology is now obsolete, replaced by electronic versions of dictionaries that are much faster and even more extensive, The Concise American Heritage dictionary on some 50 audio cassettes was revolutionary in its time.
In more recent years, Newsweek Magazine, produced in the APH Talking Book studios, has long been center stage among my tools for keeping current with a broad spectrum of news and entertainment issues.
APH not only produces a recording that is unsurpassed in quality, but distributes it in a timely manner, so that I am reading the same issue at approximately the same time as sighted peers. And of course, the talking books themselves have led to independence in every area of my life.
Since the early 1980s, technology has opened doors for blind people in education, employment, and personal enrichment that were unfathomable in my childhood. I have ridden the technological wave with tremendous joy - and APH has been right there in front, among the leaders in innovative ways to harness the power of technology for blind people. The introduction of the Book Port was so remarkable and offered so much independence in its portability for carrying audio books and computer files that I made a special trip to Louisville to buy one, just before beginning radiation treatment for several weeks in 2002. The size and flexibility of this remarkable device made it possible for me to carry reading material with me throughout all of my long periods of waiting and medical testing.
When I read those letters from my friend Andy 50 years ago, I didn't know exactly where my own road would lead me. But I knew that the availability of words, words in Braille that I could read, was leading me somewhere I wanted to go. After 50 years, the friendship continues. The bond is stronger, the gratitude deeper, and the independence the friendship provides me seems to grow exponentially.
The treasured friend, of course, then and now, was not actually Andy. It was always "my friend, APH."