Surpassing Expectations: My Life Without Sight

By Lawrence Scadden

In high school, despite my passion for and acumen in math and science, I was counseled to avoid higher education in these fields because there would not be employment opportunities for a blind man in these disciplines. Surpassing Expectations: My Life without Sight is a memoir which describes the activities that brought me international acclaim as a scientist, policymaker, and advocate. Dozens of vignettes are included that portray my joyous and successful life despite having been blind since the age of five.

The book was written to be informative, entertaining, and, hopefully for some, inspirational. Many people have a disability or at least a functional limitation, and too many of them feel lost, not knowing whether life will ever be fulfilling for them. Often they are helped by learning about someone else with a disability who had the motivation, persistence, and tools that allowed him or her to overcome their difficulties and to attain a higher quality of life. My book is intended to serve this purpose.

Dispersed throughout the autobiographical material, I answer questions that people regularly pose to me:
What emotional crises did I face when adapting to blindness as a child?
What barriers did I encounter during my education and when seeking competitive employment? What techniques do I use to ensure safe independent travel especially in foreign countries?
What adaptations did I need to make as a husband and father?
What type of technological tools do I use to reduce the effects of blindness?
What imagery do blind people experience in their thoughts and dreams?

The memoir describes legislation that I drafted, which enhanced computer usability for people with disabilities. I also recount incidents that occurred during my numerous foreign travels, invitations to speak and advise in venues such as the White House and Universal Television studios, and my interactions with famous people from Swedish Queen Silvia to Geraldo Rivera. The book concludes with my thoughts on how I succeeded in my education and arduous career while enjoying an active life. I offer suggestions on how my formula for success and happiness can be emulated by others, especially young people who also have a disability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 22, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469102948

Lawrence Scadden

Lawrence Scadden spent his career working to improve the lives of people with disabilities through the application of appropriate technology and access to science and mathematics education. He was blinded in a home accident as a young child and knows firsthand the empowerment of technology and education. He held senior-level scientific, management, and policymaking positions in both the private and public sectors. Dr. Scadden is regularly invited to write and speak internationally on the topics of technology and disability and user-centered product design. He has published over one hundred professional and scientific articles, and has served on numerous national boards and advisory committees.

Book preview

PART I

Education and Career

1

Conflicting Expectations

Jim, you and Mrs. Scadden are doing Larry a disservice by encouraging him to attend college. This was the message a senior education administrator gave my father while they were attending a Kiwanis Club meeting. It was spring, 1956, not long before I was to graduate from high school in Stockton, California. The school administrator continued his advice to my father by saying that blind people would not benefit from a college education. If they were to contribute monetarily to their own support, they needed to receive appropriate training in some form of handicraft, probably at a special facility for blind people. This educator must have been aware that I had already been offered three scholarships, including the California State Scholarship, to cover my college expenses. Nevertheless, he felt it was his professional duty to express his low expectations regarding me, my abilities, and my future. His opinions most likely extended to blind people in general. Fortunately for me, university admission offices and organizations awarding scholarships didn’t necessarily hold the same low expectations. I don’t know what my father said in reply to the Stockton educator, but my parents disregarded his advice despite his doctorate in education from a notable graduate degree program.

Decades later, I am able to say without question that I surpassed the expectations of most people, not just that one prejudiced school administrator in Stockton. More than twenty years passed before my parents told me about the comments of the Stockton school administrator. By that time I was enjoying a successful career as a scientist. When disclosing this painful story to me, my mother added, I hope that man lived long enough to read newspaper clippings reporting on your work as a scientist. I, too, hope that he did.

I succeeded despite blindness and in spite of the attitudes and advice of people like that educator. Unfortunately, there are still far too many professionals today in education, business, and government who don’t realize what people with disabilities can do when given the appropriate training, tools, and opportunities. The long road that led me to a life filled with success, pleasure, and excitement took many twists and turns along the way. I had to overcome many obstacles and jump many hurdles even before my career ever was launched. I am taking this opportunity to describe some of the factors that allowed me to succeed as a scientist, executive, husband, and father. The following pages will describe many of these challenges and the things that lessened their negative effects. Hopefully some of my experience will help other people who have disabilities move forward in their lives, and I hope my comments will provide other people the knowledge that will change their expectations for those who have disabilities.

2

Family History

The movie Born in East L.A. depicts an environment which has changed since 1939 when I was born there. It is now a part of a megalopolis that is dissected by a myriad of high-speed freeways. The similarities, however, are possibly far more dramatic than the differences. Ethnic diversity is pronounced; poverty, or near poverty, is commonplace. For decades, people from the east would flock to Southern California looking for new opportunities. Today’s migration includes Latin America and the Far East as well as other lands. The commonplace of time has been that the poor funnel through the economic colander of California society often landing in East Los Angeles. My parents both were dropped into the East Los Angeles milieu as teenagers in the early 1920s. The result of this process of socioeconomic geographical determinism undoubtedly affected their long-term attitudes toward the work ethic. They believed, as did their peers, that hard work could bring them into better environments.

My grandfather Scadden was Cornish. He came from a long line of Cornish miners. We have been able to trace the Scadden family back to my great-great-grandfather who lived in Gwinear Parish in Cornwall. My great-grandfather Thomas Scadden was baptized in the Gwinear Parish Church in 1837. He and his wife immigrated to the United States in the early 1870s. My grandfather James Scadden was born in Catfish, Pennsylvania, in 1875. Around the turn of the century, he took a Kansas bride, Zoa Koch, who had recently traveled by covered wagon to Southeast Colorado where my grandfather worked as a coal miner in the family tradition. They were soon married, and their five children were born there—four daughters and one son. The one son was the second child, James Irwin Scadden, my father, who was born in a ranch house in Burro Canyon, Colorado, in 1907. (He later changed the I in Irwin to an E in Erwin because it was easier to write.)

A mine cave-in trapped my grandfather when my father was still young. The other miners thought he had been killed and left the mine until the next day. Upon their return, they found him alive and that only his leg had been crushed. He lived the remainder of his life as an amputee wearing a crude wooden leg. That ended his mining career and forced my father at an early age to become a major contributor to the family income.

The family moved from place to place searching for work for my grandfather. In the early 1920s, they settled in East LA where my grandfather worked as a janitor, and my father held many part-time jobs while completing high school at night.

The years of coal mining finally took its toll in 1934 when my paternal grandfather died of cancer at the age of fifty-nine.

My mother was born in Puyallup, Washington, the first daughter of two surviving girls. My maternal grandparents were an All-American WASP mix-German, English, and Irish. My maternal grandfather was James Viemaster, an independent soul who drifted from place to place during his first forty-five years. For the final fifteen years of his wanderings, he took with him his wife and eventually two daughters, the oldest of whom was to be my mother. Early in the century, he worked in Southern California as a stage coach driver; later in Puget Sound as an underwater laborer building the foundations for bridges, still later as a lumber worker in Puyallup, a laborer in Vancouver, BC, a saloon and pool hall proprietor and ice-cream store manager in Wisconsin, and a laborer in San Francisco during the First World War. Finally, he and his family settled in East Los Angeles in the 1920s. In San Francisco, during the First World War, he could not find work; his name Viemaster made him stand out as being of German origin. Undaunted, he legally took his mother’s maiden name, Brewster, which he retained for the remainder of his life. In Los Angeles, my grandfather Brewster worked for the county department of public works for over twenty years, primarily as the driver of a street sweeper.

In 1929, my mother, a high school senior, the daughter of a street sweeper, met my father, the son of a janitor. My father to be was a young man who finished high school at night in 1925. He first saw his future wife when she was playing the trumpet while marching with her high school band in the Memorial Day parade. His sister knew her, and upon his request, she arranged a meeting between the two. Four years later, in 1933 at the height of the Depression, they eloped to Santa Ana to be married. Dad had just begun work with a company he would stay with for forty years, working as an office clerk, draftsman, office manager, salesman, and finally as west coast manager. Over the years, the company went from steel construction, to weapons manufacturer, to farm machinery, to changing names and ownerships several times throughout the midcentury along with so many other corporations. We always knew it, however, as Minneapolis-Moline.

My grandparents went through an unusual merger of their own in the 1930s before I was born. My paternal grandfather died in 1934 of cancer, and two years later my maternal grandmother died of kidney disease. The two surviving spouses, having met through their married son and daughter, were married within a year. Thus, by the time my brother was born in 1937, there was one set of grandparents, Jim and Zoa Brewster. My parents enjoyed shocking people by telling them that they had been married before their parents were.

When my brother, James Erwin Scadden, Jr., was born on October 1, 1937, a cesarean section was required after a long and difficult labor. So much anesthesia was used; the fire department had to be called to revive him. Eighteen months later, when I was due to be born, the fire department stood by during the cesarean section, but it was not needed this time.

My childhood was filled with exploration of my environment, both before and after I went blind. An accident in our home blinded me when I was five. Six months earlier, I had pulled a towel bar down in our bathroom, and porcelain holding the bar to the wall broke and deeply cut through my left eye as I lay on the floor where I had fallen. My loss of vision in the right eye was not caused directly from the accident in the bathroom. Sympathetic ophthalmia is a natural process that is unique to the visual system. When a body part is damaged, the body recruits all of its power to fight the injury, to resist infection, and attempt to restore function. This is the immune system at its best. Even today I know I am blessed with a strong immune system. I heal quickly from cuts, scrapes, and fractured bones. Injury to a human eye, on the other hand, can result in an immune system run amuck.

Sympathetic ophthalmia is the term that refers to damage to a good eye caused by the body’s attempts to fight trauma in the other eye. Often the lens or cornea of the good eye becomes opaque. With less light going to the good eye’s retina, other deterioration begins to occur including deterioration of the retina and the optic nerve. This unusual phenomenon blinded Louis Braille when he was about three, after he poked one eye with an awl that his father used in his leather shop. It also resulted in me becoming blind in both eyes as well.

Today the one medical intervention that will eliminate the onset of sympathetic ophthalmia is quick removal of the traumatized eye. But what doctor wants to tell parents that their child should have an eye removed? What parents with limited understanding of visual physiology let alone trauma want to jump to that decision rapidly? Few in either scenario! In my case, the decision to remove the left eye was not made for nearly four months. By then, my future blindness was already irreversible.

From the moment that my left eye was cut, everything was different for me. I was different—my thoughts were different, learning was different, play was different. People considered me different and had different expectations for me as a blind person. Life became a sequence of making adjustments to these differences. Nevertheless, five years of vision, active exploration of my various environments, and a vast storage of visual memories were valuable to me for the decades that followed.

3

Passion for Learning

My brother was eighteen months older than I. We spent a lot of time together as young kids. When I became blind, I continued to play with him and other neighborhood children, but my participation in their activities was soon curtailed and eventually eliminated almost completely. I could not be competitive in baseball or other sports that were highly visual in nature. Fortunately for my own psyche, I had never had a problem with playing alone. My brother had friends his age in the neighborhood, but I did not. Even when I was still sighted I was always considered the little brother who tagged along.

Adjusting to blindness assuredly is traumatic for anyone, but it is less so for younger people whose life patterns are not yet solidly developed. Young people commonly demonstrate rapid adjustment to a disability as they learn new skills and behavior patterns. Someone who is older, in contrast, typically has more difficulty adjusting. As a child, I adjusted quickly. I recall only two childhood activities now restricted by my blindness that evoked feelings of frustration: reduced participation in neighborhood games and inability to continue learning to read print.

In our bedroom, my brother Jim and I had a blackboard that stood on an easel. Above the black slate board was printed material that could be scrolled to show different text. We kept the scroll showing the twenty-six capital letters displayed above the twenty-six lowercase characters. By the time I was four and a half, I learned to identify all the letters and to recognize some words. Most of the word recognition ability came from evenings spent looking at the newspaper as our dad read the comics to my brother and me. Dad would sit down on the living room floor and spread out the comics. I would kneel down beside him on his left, and Jim would sit down on his right side. I would look at the print as he read and begin to recognize individual words. I often asked him to identify words that I didn’t know because I wanted to learn to read as soon as possible. I was more interested in the words than in the comics themselves. When I could no longer see the words, I found these sessions on the floor far less enjoyable. I would join Dad and Jim on the floor, but I didn’t pay much attention to what was happening or what was being said. I wanted to learn to read, and this wasn’t going to help me at all. I felt left out of the whole activity.

Nearly a full year passed after I was blind before I entered school in February 1945 in the Los Angeles 32nd Street School for the Blind. During the interim, my parents investigated the education options opened to me. Most blind children in California attended a residential school for blind children in Berkeley, four hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Blind children within Los Angeles attended the 32nd Street School for the Blind. Special buses transported the blind children to the school in the morning and delivered them home in the late afternoon.

During the war, the buses did not serve Montebello where we lived. In time, however, an agreement was reached between our local school district and the school for the blind in Los Angeles that allowed me to attend as long as someone would bring me to school. My mother did not know how to drive, but my dad taught her so she could drive me the eleven miles to school each day and return later to pick me up. The drive was limited to surface streets because there were no freeways in Los Angeles in 1945. Fortunately for her, she only needed to drive me to school for one semester. At the end of the war that summer of 1945, bus routes were extended farther into the suburbs to transport more children to the school. At the outset, each bus was picking up around twenty children for the school for the blind and for some schools that had programs for children who had low vision. With the relatively large number of kids to pick up, buses had a long, circuitous route to follow before reaching the 32nd Street School. I was the first child picked up, and for the first year of this transportation program, I rode the bus for two hours each way. I was picked up at six thirty in the morning and was dropped off at home around four thirty in the afternoon. It was a grueling day for a six year old.

I remember my first day in school. The class consisted of about a dozen children who were in the first and second grades. No kindergarten opportunities existed at that time for most blind children, so this was the first educational experience for most of the class. That was unfortunate for many of them because they had not enjoyed the developmental opportunities that I had playing games with my brother and his friends and running through the orchards and fields in my neighborhood. Many had not learned to move about on their own. I remember some who did not even know what the word jump meant. Socialization with other children was a major developmental need for many of these young children.

My first day in school was disappointing because my teacher did not begin teaching me to read as I had hoped. Sometime in the previous months, I was given a copy of the Braille alphabet. Knowing the names and order of the letters, I learned to recognize the Braille characters by touch before my first day of school. On my second morning in school, my mother told the teacher about my disappointment and explained that I knew the Braille alphabet. That morning, my teacher, Miss Bingham, put a page of words in Braille on my desk and asked me to feel the letters and to identify them if I could. I still remember that the first word was ball, the second was kitten, and the third was house. She was pleased and praised me. I was ecstatic. I was beginning to read again, and learning new things would be possible for me now.

Learning was already a passion of mine before I attended school. During my first year without vision, my mother read to me daily from our children’s encyclopedia that was filled with interesting things about ancient civilizations, science, and nature. Every topic was fascinating to me, and I became a sponge for everything presented to me then and later in school.

Mathematics was already exciting to me. One day several months before I entered school, I went with my mother to a neighbor’s house. While they talked, I wandered around this familiar home and sat down by an electric wall heater that was turned off. A metal grid covered the heating elements. The grid was comprised of an array of square openings. I counted the rows and columns over and over and began to count the individual squares. Suddenly it occurred to me that one corner of the array consisting of three rows and three columns of squares had nine openings. I went to the adults and announced that I had just discovered that three times three equaled nine and that three plus three plus another three also equaled nine. They were probably shocked that I was demonstrating innate interest and understanding of simple mathematics. They praised me for my observation that addition and multiplication were related, the first reinforcement for my lifelong love of mathematics. Throughout my education, I continued to demonstrate an aptitude for mathematics.

Mathematics may be the most difficult subject to teach to blind children. Someone who is blind performs arithmetic and mathematical problems in a fashion that is very different from that typically used by someone who is sighted. It is impossible to use pencil and paper to perform mathematical functions, and Braille does not lend itself to a similar process. Most of the computations must be done mentally, and a blind child must develop a good memory for storing and retrieving the numbers generated during the computational process. For example, when I multiply thirty-two times seventy-three, I learned to multiply thirty times seventy and to retain in memory the resulting answer of 2100. Then I multiply thirty by three, seventy by two, and add the results (90 and 140) to 2100 to get 2330. Finally, I add the product of three times two to bring the final answer to 2336. I don’t find the process difficult when I am working with small numbers, but it gets difficult when I multiply or divide large numbers.

I frequently talk to groups of blind children and their parents. Once I wanted to demonstrate this process, so I asked for a pair of three digit numbers that I began to multiply while describing the process. I succeeded, but performing computations and remembering subtotals in my head while talking was a real challenge. I decided not to perform such circus acts in public again!

My purpose in demonstrating this feat was to promote mental mathematics. People continually comment on my excellent memory, and I am convinced that the many years of performing mathematics in my head contributed significantly to the development of my memory capacity.

Geography was another of my favorite subjects when I attended the school for the blind. It remained an interest of mine that was heightened when my international travels increased in the 1980s. The school for the blind had large wooden maps of the United States and the continents. We could remove political subdivisions—states, provinces, and countries—and examine them like puzzle pieces. I learned to identify all the states and countries in all the maps by touch and to know their locations.

In the spring of 1949, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was officially established, our school gathered to listen to the ceremony on the radio. As a fifth grader, I was honored by being selected as the student who would go to the world maps and remove each country piece as that nation was called to sign the treaty. I then passed the piece around and described where the country was located in relationship to other countries. The recognition I received for my knowledge again reinforced my desire to achieve academically.

By the time that I was in the seventh grade, many changes were under way in California for educating blind children. One small change was that our school library was updated. Many old books were to be discarded, and I was asked if I wanted any of them. I chose three books of poetry (one anthology of American poets, another of poems by Robert Service, and the other by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). I also obtained two ancient map books containing raised-line drawings. The maps were so out-of-date that much of Europe consisted of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even the Braille alphabet was different from the one that I knew, but using my knowledge of geography, I quickly deciphered this code using the names of countries and cities that were shown on the maps. Over fifty years later, I still turn to these map books occasionally to verify the relative positions of cities that I have recently visited in Europe or Asia.

I am appalled when I hear that American students score poorly on examinations that measure knowledge of geography. Unfortunately this educational gap is not limited to students. I have too often heard that senior government officials cannot locate places such as Iraq on a world map. I cannot comprehend such gaps in knowledge. Is this a result of poor education or low personal interest in geography or both? I have always loved to study geography and how it impacts culture, economics, and history. I don’t understand why others don’t share this interest especially in an age dominated by global economics and constant international tension.

Many years after I left the school for the blind in Los Angeles, I realized that the demographic makeup of the students enrolled in the school for the blind influenced my attitude toward racial differences. As I recalled my classmates from the seven years I attended this school, I calculated that approximately 50 percent of the students were Caucasian, 25 percent were Hispanic, 15 percent were African American, and the remaining 10 percent were Asian or Jewish. We knew the national origin and religious preference of our classmates, but I don’t think the students placed any importance on these differences. Skin color certainly didn’t affect the thoughts and attitudes of these blind kids. To one another, we all looked alike.

In the years that followed in my education and career, I never considered these differences to be a factor in establishing and maintaining relationships with my peers and colleagues. I know that the diversity within the 32nd Street School for the Blind contributed significantly to my open-mindedness.

One early classroom incident related to our diverse mix of students sticks in my mind. My second grade teacher asked us if we knew where our parents and grandparents were born and what we knew about our national heritage. Most of the Caucasian kids knew quite a bit and were able to give some information about their European ancestry. Most of the Hispanic children said that their parents and grandparents came from Mexico. The African-American students usually knew where their parents were born, but they didn’t know anything about the family history before that. My responses should have left me embarrassed, but none of the other students understood my response any more than I did. I knew where my parents were born,