RIP: Anita Blair (1916-2010) and Betty G. Miller (1934-2012)

Two obituaries came to my attention this morning. Both women died more than a year ago, but I'm just seeing these now. If I write about them here, I won't forget to follow up with getting Wikipedia entries going about them, when the time allows.

I first mentioned Anita Lee Blair (pictured at left, a white woman dressed in a dark suit, in a portrait with her guide dog Fawn) at this blog a few years ago, when David Paterson had become Governor of New York, and the topic of blind elected officials was in the news.  Anita Blair was born in 1916, and became blind after head injuries sustained in a car accident, not long after graduating from high school (no seatbelts or safety glass in the 1930s).  She graduated from the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy; later she earned a master's degree as well.  She was the first person in El Paso to receive a guide dog, a German shepherd named Fawn; she even made a short film about Fawn, to use on her lecture tour.  Fawn and Anita made headlines in 1946, when they escaped a deadly hotel fire in Chicago.  As far as anyone can tell, she was the first blind woman ever elected to any state legislature--she served one term in the Texas House of Representatives, 1953-55.  (Here's a Time Magazine article mentioning that she won the Democratic nomination for that race.)  She was also the only woman appointed to Harry Truman's Presidential Safety Committee, the first person to bring a service dog onto the floor of the US Senate, and later was a familiar presence in El Paso, vocal on talk radio and at city council meetings.  Anita Lee Blair died in 2010, just a couple weeks before her 94th birthday, survived by her slightly younger sister Jean.  Upon her passing, the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution in tribute to their former member.  There's a video of Blair talking about her life on youtube (not captioned), and her El Paso Times obituary included a photo gallery from news files.

Betty G. Miller's obituary turned up in this month's Penn State alumni magazine.  (Miller is pictured at right, a white woman wearing a hat and glasses, with a big smile.) She was a deaf child of deaf parents, and learned ASL as a child at home, but was sent to oral education programs also, an experience that became a theme in her works.  Betty Miller was an artist, an art educator (she had an EdD from Penn State, and taught at Gallaudet), an author, and by her own account the first deaf person to receive certification as an addiction counselor.  In 1972 she had her first one-woman show, "The Silent World," at Gallaudet.  Further shows followed over the next several decades, and a large-scale neon installation by Miller is in the lobby of the Student Activities Center at the Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf.  She was survived by her partner, artist Nancy Creighton.  Some of Miller's works can be seen in this Wordgathering article by Creighton and at this Pinterest board.

Apparently, this is post #1000 at DSTU, according to Blogger (I suspect that count includes some drafts that didn't ever get posted, for various reasons).  Happy 1000 to our readers, then!

Another "hilarious" blind cartoon character ?!?!?

[Visual description: animation still; the human character is an African-American woman wearing a white headscarf, shawl, and dress, sunglasses, bracelet, ring, and large gold earrings; she's holding the head of a large snake in her hands, and smiling at it.]

Hoo-boy. Get ready for Mama Odie, the fairy godmother in Disney's new feature, "The Princess and the Frog." She's a 200-year-old swamp-dwelling seer and she's blind (get it? get it?). She has a "seeing-eye" snake. Yeah, that won't confuse any children about the work of service animals...

Sylmar Fires and Guide Dogs

The fires here in Southern California are wreaking more than their usual havoc--it's bad this time, so many houses destroyed and people evacuated and highways closed, and the air quality is rotten for millions (worst I can remember, in our part of LA). They're saying we might also have power outages over a wider area of the county, in connection with the fires. One of the many places threatened yesterday was the California headquarters of Guide Dogs of America, in Sylmar. (One of the major fires right now is centered on Sylmar.) There are emergency shelters for dogs and horses and other animals set up--but just like with people, this event has to be disruptive and stressful for them, and hazardous to the health.

The LAFD has a blog (who knew?) with constant updates for specific places, including Sylmar--seems like a good place to check if you know which neighborhoods you're worried about.

February 19: Amy Tan (b. 1952)

[Image description: Amy Tan, wearing a purple and black blouse and a chunky pendant]

I have neuropathy, which makes it difficult to walk. At one point I thought I would be in a wheelchair. That's the reason for the funny shoes; they are orthopedic shoes, and they do enable me to walk – and I'm determined now to walk many miles in Bhutan. I have set my goals differently these days; I can struggle through pain and limitations if I find the right motivation. I also have seizures. I can't drive. I have to be careful if I do certain things and I'm by myself, but I'm not going to let that limit me in certain ways. I just have to adapt my life in other ways. One of my adaptations has been to have a constant companion, my dog. And I have trained my dog to do certain things to help me, to not walk into streets when I'm not paying attention, or to get help from my husband or to let me know that what I see in front of me is in fact not real. (Quote from a 2004 interview, found here.)

Popular novelist Amy Tan was born on this date in 1952, in Oakland, California. Readers who enjoy her fiction may not be aware that Tan has experienced significant neurological impairment from undiagnosed Lyme disease in 1999, as described in the quote above. She has a page at her website detailing her medical odyssey toward a diagnosis and appropriate treatment, and the everyday lasting effects of late-stage neuroborreliosis. It's also one theme in Tan's 2003 book of essays, The Opposite of Fate.

May 30: Dorothy Harrison Eustis (1886-1946)

Today is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Dorothy Harrison Eustis, born this date in 1886 into a prominent Philadelphia family. Both of her husbands were interested in animal breeding--her first husband experimented with breeding cows for increased milk production, and she ran a dog breeding program in Switzerland with her second husband, selecting for intelligence to train dogs for police, military, border patrol, and similar purposes. Dorothy Eustis learned about German dog training programs to train guides for blind WWI veterans. She wrote about the approach for the Saturday Evening Post in 1927, saying:

The future for all blind men can be the same, however blinded. No longer dependent on a member of the family, a friend or a paid attendant, the blind can once more take up their normal lives as nearly as possible where they left them off, and each can begin or go back to a wage-earning occupation, secure in the knowledge that he can get to and from his work safely and without cost; that crowds and traffic have no longer any terrors for him and that his evenings can be spent among friends without responsibility or burden to them; and last, but far from least, that long, healthful walks are now possible to exercise off the unhealthy fat of inactivity and so keep the body strong and fit. Gentlemen, again without reservation, I give you the shepherd dog.

Morris Frank, a young American insurance salesman who was blind, contacted Eustis after the article appeared, and proposed that they join forces to start a similar school in the US. From their alliance, the Seeing Eye organization was founded. Eustis trained "Buddy" as Frank's guide dog (Frank, Buddy, and Eustis are pictured at left). By the time Eustis retired from the presidency of Seeing Eye in 1940, the program had trained and placed more than a thousand dogs for guide work. (The organization still trains and places nearly 300 dogs a year.) There was a television movie made by Disney that tells a version of the Frank and Eustis story, titled Love Leads the Way (1984), based on a book by Morris Frank.