Blind Deeds

Forty-seven years ago, in June, Helen Adams Keller was born, at Tuscumbia, Ala. For a year and a half she was a healthy and good natured little absurdity; then, in her second winter, some jealous deity reached out his hand toward Helen Keller. She had an illness, "acute congestion of the stomach and brain"; afterward she was as deaf and as blind as an idol. For five years, "a peevish, unmanageable little animal," she squirmed in the horror of an endless gloom. Then the wise fingers of Anne Sullivan Macy, tracing with infinite patience signs and symbols upon her hand, brought Helen Keller along a lane to light. Years later she could read and write. Years later still, when she was an author, lecturer, philanthropist, Mark Twain could say that the two most interesting characters of the 19th century were Napoleon and Helen Keller.

To this Helen Keller, living now in Forest Hills, L. I, last week were sent three thick volumes from the New York Public Library. We, famed Colonel Lindbergh's account of his most famed escapade, had been translated into braille type for blind readers; these were the first impressions of the translation. Helen Keller read them slowly because, carrying her police dog puppy downstairs a few days before, she had fallen and hurt her arms. A dog sat beside her as she read, looking with bright uncomprehending eyes at the book she held. Last May, when the world was in an uproar over Charles Augustus Lind- bergh's flight, Helen Keller had been informed of the incredible fact with frenzied nudges, incoherent pummelings. Now she was able to picture to herself the plane caroming through the darkness above the sea. Her sentient fingers touched the tiny mountain range that led across her page. Now he was over the green meadows of Ireland. Helen Keller smiled. When he landed, she could imagine herself hearing those cheers in a Paris twilight.

Braille is familiar, but too few people know its history, understand how blind people use it. In 1771, Valentine Haiiy, a Frenchman, saw a troupe of blind beggars performing tricks in the street. Touched by the spectacle, he determined to find some way to aid blind people, some way in which, if they could never see, they might at least learn to read. His method, a system of printing books with embossed letters, was developed and improved by Louis Braille. The code which bears his name is an alphabet in which the letters are represented by raised dots, differing in number and position.

To a person who is able to see, language seems entirely a visual idiom. The gigantic concept of enabling those who cannot see, to imagine the meanings of the words they read, was the beginning of an extraordinary change in the condition of people who had heretofore been only a little less tragically useless than lepers. Now competent organizations function to aid the blind. In Mount Healthy, the Trader sisters, one blind, both with foresight, have established the Clovernook Press. There, by subscription, are printed books in braille. Kindly senators pass laws; a beneficent government charges no postage on books mailed to the blind. Workers from the American Foundation for the Blind apply their efforts to the readjustment of other sightless persons, collect funds for the work, conduct surveys in order to discover what occupations are most suitable to blind persons,-- arrange with clubs or with individuals to have books printed in braille.

Indubitably, this work has been enormously aided through the publicity as well as by the personal efforts supplied by blind, mute Helen Keller. Impressed with the miracle which made doubly terrible Homer's cry, "O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, irrevocably dark, total eclipse without all hope of day," she could pity Milton, "upbraiding the world in high astounding terms," whose "light was spent ere half his days." She could doubt, in her heart, that it was a Nemesis who, that faraway, forgotten winter, had laid his hand upon her eyes. She could sense, perhaps, a certain graciousness, a certain ironic but charming delicacy in the fate which permitted Helen Keller who had been deaf and blind almost since her birth to read, last week, the story of a compan- ion pioneer, a man who, like herself, had moved quickly through a dangerous dark.

*Tentative results of this survey show the most common occupations to be: factory work (assembling, packing, inspection, glass-cutting, working punch and drill presses); piano tuning; store & stand keeping; salesmanship (especially insurance); teaching; music (organ, radio concert work, vaudeville, orchestra). Less fre- quent occupations: osteopathy, journalism, poultry raising, stenography, law, operating dictaphones.