The Shadow World

At 8 one morning last week, Syndicated Labor Columnist Victor Riesel, accompanied by a bodyguard, reached his 15th-floor office in midtown Manhattan to begin another working day. Unassisted, he disengaged a system of multiple door locks and felt his way to his desk. Sitting alone, Riesel mulled over story possibilities; as ideas came to him, he wrote them down in a barely legible hand. He dialed a friend's number on the telephone. "Read me the Times," he said, and listened intently for about 15 minutes. Columnist Riesel, 45, cannot read the Times for himself: he has been almost blind since a New York hoodlum hurled sulphuric acid into his eyes four years ago.

By the time Riesel hung up the telephone, his assistants, Miriam Goldfine and Dulcie Ponon, had arrived. Dulcie clipped and read to Riesel portions of the news coming in on the U.P.I, ticker; she also read selectively from the other New York morning papers, including the Wall Street Journal.

Reporting with the Telephone. At about 9:30 Riesel began to gather, by telephone, the material for the day's column. While he placed calls all over the U.S.,

Miriam Goldnne consulted the office background file. All this took three hours. Over a sandwich and coffee at his desk, Riesel listened again while Miriam read aloud the accumulated story notes. Then he wrote his column, from time to time asking help: "Read me the citation in the Kefauver report ... I want exact figures on the Sun Valley land deal." It took him one hour and 3^ triple-spaced typewritten pages, each full page breaking neatly with a finished paragraph.

That evening, after the girls had gone, Riesel called in one of the ten readers he hires for after hours duty, for a session that lasted until 11:30. A voracious reader when he had his sight, Riesel is now an inexhaustible listener ("I've got listening down to a science"). He has kept hired readers working for as long as 15 hours at a stretch. Frequently, to save time, he makes Miriam and Dulcie read simultaneously from separate documents.

Dreaming with the Eyes. Riesel, who is built like a banty rooster (5 ft. 4 in., 150 Ibs., with a 42-in. chest) and has a disposition to match, does not consider his blindness a handicap. He lay in bed for six weeks after the night in 1956 when a thug, hired by labor racketeers whom Riesel had been writing about, threw six ounces of acid in his eyes. All the while, he vowed to get back to his office and on the job. "They knocked me out for six weeks," he says of his enemies. "And that's all."

The acid bath left Riesel in a dim world of shadows. The unimpaired retinas of both eyes receive vague images, projected through scar tissue as through frosted glass. Both lenses are gone. He can detect violent movements, distinguish a truck from a car. But to tell time he must feel the hands of his watch; when he is dining at the Men's Bar in the Biltmore, a favorite haunt, friends must help him find the hamburger on his plate --and sometimes even the plate.

A fulminating foe of labor racketeers before the attack, he has become even more outspoken. With his labor reportage often on the shallow or sensational side, Riesel was not the U.S.'s finest labor reporter either before or after his injury. But his audience has widened: he is currently syndicated in 287 papers--nearly 100 more than he had when he was blinded.

This helps strengthen his determination not to yield to his infirmity--a resolution not always easy to hold to. "Sometimes," he says, "when I'm ready to leave the office, not till then do I realize that I can't see. But it's a funny thing: I dream with my eyes. And it always comes as a surprise to wake up in the morning and find that I can't see."

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