Karsten Ohnstad; I Wanted To Be A Teacher Just Like My Dad

By Peggy Chong

A teenage boy from McIntosh, Minnesota begins to lose his sight. His father, a local doctor, enlists the help of his fellow doctors across the state to save his son’s vision. After almost two years, Karsten and his father come to the conclusion that Karsten will be blind for the rest of his life. Everything must change, but what are the best paths to take? He struggles with the assumptions of others that his life-long goals can never be obtained, or can they? This book travels with Karsten as he becomes a blind man, makes choices, second guesses himself and finally learns to trust and rely on himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peggy Chong
• Release date: May 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463773413

Peggy Chong

Peggy Chong is a long-time researcher and Historical author of many articles on the blind in the United States. She has written for publications that include The Braille Monitor, Dialogue Magazine, Future Reflections, The Minnesota Bulletin and the Iowa History Journal. In her growing series, The Blind Lady Presents, she introduces to sighted and blind alike, the many average blind persons in the United States who had to overcome not-so-average barriers to lead a normal life, support their families and succeed. She recounts all they had to do to become chemists, newspaper editors, plumbers, barbers, piano tuners, boat builders, teachers, lawyers, politicians and so much more.

Book preview

The Blind History Lady Presents;

Karsten Ohnstad

I Wanted To Be A Teacher Just Like My Dad

By Peggy Chong

Edited by Marsha Dyer

Distributed by Smashwords

Copyright 2018

Look for other articles by the Blind History Lady through your local eBook retailer.

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Content

Introduction

Karsten Jerdee Ohnstad

Hospitals were his first classroom

Getting back to school

College Life

Honing Techniques

But I Wanted to Be a Teacher

A New Way to Travel—Flanders

I Can’t Do This the Rest of My Life

Goodbye Iowa City. Hello World?

Focusing on His Personal—Military Life

Finally…a Teaching Position

The Last Chapter of His Life

It’s What We Leave Behind

End Notes

Introduction

Almost 100 years ago, a young teen went blind in a northern Minnesota community. The family faced the possibility of blindness with mixed emotions. Because the father was a physician, their first contacts and search for answers were through the medical field. As you will read later, several physicians wanted to work their magic to restore the eyesight of their colleague’s child. But once it was clear there was little more that could be done medically, the doctors moved on, rarely looking back, to their next case. Today, that blind child and his family would have found several government and social service agencies reaching out to him to assist him and his family through his educational and adjustment process.

Our subject, Karsten Ohnstad, seemed to have been working his way through what little there was of the blindness system in the state of Minnesota at that time. He did not know yet that he benefited from the many educators, sighted and blind, who had gone before him and helped provide a quality education for him as a blind teen. He felt all alone.

Karsten was also entering the blind world at a time in Minnesota’s history when the torch was being passed to new people in the agencies and consumer groups. New leaders or professionals who had little connection to the past or the people who had gone before them were taking leadership roles in current and new agencies for the blind in Minnesota. Each of the new agencies was looking to establish its own and separate identity. Therefore, he did not have as large a benefit from the past experiences or the loosely-woven connections of those men and women who had built-up the educational and community-based support networks of the past in the state. The new torch showed the path of a more structured, professional agency approach to blind services.

For more than sixty years, blind Minnesotans had little in the way of information or services. To be connected at any part of the blind community was essential to find the next resource. Although not formal in structure, school officials, a few state employees who were tasked with assisting the blind, blindness-focused charities, sheltered workshops for the adult blind, and most importantly the working and educated blind of Minnesota, helped to provide employment opportunities, housing, and support for each other.

The professionals that you will meet throughout these chapters, such as Maurice I. Tynan of the state division for the blind, were new to Minnesota. John C. Lysen of the state school for the blind was a sighted man who came from the public school system and had little to no experience with blindness.

Through these chapters, we will walk with Karsten as he struggles to get his sight back. When all fails, we struggle alongside him as he tries to find his old self again only to realize that he will be a blind man for the rest of his life.

Next he is tasked with re-defining for himself what it means to be a blind person. Was it all of the stories and images that he brought with him from his childhood? Yet, inside him lay the old Karsten. Could the two be merged? All through his days at the Minnesota State School for the Blind and his years at St. Olaf College and at the University of Iowa, he found one challenge right after another that tested his self-esteem and challenged his new and fragile self-image.

Through his own writings, he put on paper his fears and wonderings that helped him to understand himself at a deeper level as he went back over each incident. For Karsten, the self-questioning would be a part of him for the rest of his life. The real test was to find out if this doubt would control him—or would he control the doubt.

His writings became a book, and the book became a best-seller. It was different from other books on blindness that were written by blind authors. His book told of his internal struggle that almost everyone could identify with, and they were drawn into the struggles of his blindness and how he grew into his new self. The book could have been one that the readers would have written had it been them who had gone blind.

Karsten addressed the stereotypes of blindness honestly. They were his own misconceptions, which were the same as the sighted because he had been sighted most of his life at that time. Through the many short stories, he walked the reader through how he dealt with or was surprised by his own discoveries in his new world. The fresh approach to telling the story of going blind brought the reader into Karsten’s world. The reader was not an outsider in Karsten’s struggles. There was no blame ladled through his tellings. There was an acceptance and a desire to move on, even when Karsten and his readers did not know where the paths were going to lead.

When a challenge or conflict presented itself, you will see how Karsten matured in his handling of each event. Although he never liked to face a conflict head on, he learned to look at each side, option, and possible backlash with clarity, devoid almost of emotion.

Through my research of the blind of Minnesota for the past several decades, Karsten’s name had never come up. In the Minnesota blind community, Karsten had left no visible footprint after his friends at the MSSB had passed away. Just as branches of families are forgotten when they move a great distance away or have a falling out, Karsten had moved away from the blind community, choosing a different lifestyle than his blind friends.

His life was parallel to the hundreds and hundreds of blind men and women of Minnesota I have gotten to know. Yet as I began to research his life, I found many intersections with others in my life. How sad it was that I never got to meet him even though he had lived just a few miles from me for more than two decades. I sold door-to-door on his street and may have even sold at his home while he lived in South Minneapolis.

His book is almost forgotten. We will not find it on the shelves of our local library or the recorded or Braille books available through the library for the blind. But just as Karsten wanted to keep the tales of his ancestors alive in his extended family, his story is just as important as one of our blind ancestors who we should celebrate.

Back To Top

Karsten Jerdee Ohnstad

Born September 17, 1912, in McIntosh, Polk County, Minnesota, Karsten was the youngest son of Dr. Jens and Mabel Ohnstadt. Both of his parents were first generation Americans; their families immigrated to America in the 1840s from Norway. The new Americans were proud of their family’s new adopted country, having several of the Ohnstad and Hooverson ancestors who served in the Union army during the Civil War.

Jens, born in 1868, first began his career as a teacher in Fillmore County, Minnesota. After saving enough money from teaching, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota where he earned a medical degree. In 1903 he moved to McIntosh, Minnesota, to become a doctor and surgeon for the community in a local, small office. There he stayed for the rest of his medical career. The local hospital was eventually named after Jens.

McIntosh was and still is a small community in Northern Minnesota along the Poplar River. The town was and still is less than a square mile. At the time of Karsten’s birth, McIntosh was only about 600 people. After a heyday of a population boom of just over 800 people in the 1940s, today McIntosh is back to about 600 citizens. Everyone in town knows each other.

Mabel and Jens Ohnstad raised their two boys in the Lutheran faith, attending church almost every Sunday as was the custom in the area for almost every citizen. Mabel’s faith was strong and important to her. She had attended Lutheran Ladies Seminary in Red Wing before she married Jens. Both sons, Peter Rolf (born in 1910) and Karsten (just two years younger), attended church with their parents.

In early September of 1917 the Ohnstad family was on their way to Cass Lake to visit relatives, about seventy miles east of McIntosh. This was a long drive back then through narrow country roads near what is now Highway 2. The roads skirted around many small lakes and rivers and through small towns in the area.

Jens was driving their family car, one of the few in the community. Near Lengby, only about a quarter of the way to their destination, the road was at a steep grade and had more than one sharp turn. Jens took one of the turns not as carefully as he should have, and the car skidded from the road and rolled down a hill. The two young boys escaped with just a few bumps and bruises, and their Aunt also escaped with little injury. But Jens was thrown from the car during one of the last rolls and was pinned underneath. Mabel was pinned inside the car by the steering wheel.

The children and Aunt went for help to a farmhouse about a half a mile away. When help arrived, they found that Jens had several injuries but would recover. However, Mabel had died. How traumatizing for such young children to be present at the time of their mother’s death! A strange irony of the situation was that Mabel’s father died when she was just a small child. Mabel would also leave two small children as well. Karsten turned five just days after his mother’s funeral.

At the age of five, scissors pierced Karsten’s left eye. The spunky little boy, who had just learned to tie his shoes, tied his shoelaces to a chair. When the scissors were brought to cut him loose, Karsten got too close too quickly, the scissors slipped, and Karsten’s eye was damaged.

This caused him to lose much of the sight in his left eye. But that did not stop little Karsten from anything. The sight in his other eye was fine. He played outdoors, hunted, attended to his chores, and did well in school.

Not long after his mother’s death, their father Jens (or John as the non-Norwegians called him) threw himself into his work and built the little hospital in McIntosh. The facility was small and included the residence for his family. The first floor was the reception area, doctor’s office, treatment rooms, and the other half was the family apartments. The second floor had several hospital rooms for those who needed to stay near the doctor or could not travel home.

The two boys helped their father in his hospital. They answered the telephone, greeted patients in the reception/waiting room, cleaned out the treatment rooms, accompanied their father when he made house calls in the country, and even got to crank up the first X-Ray machine his father had purchased. In many ways, Karsten grew up in the medical profession and literally in a hospital.

Life for the family