Long before work for the blind proliferated to a network comprising hundreds of local, state, and national organizations, its leaders recognized that open channels of communication were essential if blind people as a group were to improve their lot.
It was in this belief that one of the responsibilities stipulated in the American Foundation for the Blind's articles of incorporation was to "assemble, systematize and disseminate all available data in any way relating to work for the blind." Among the items in Article VII of the 1921 bylaws was that the newborn organization was to issue an inkprint and an embossed magazine devoted to work for the blind, "or avail itself of the services of such periodicals already in existence."
The founders did not name the existing periodicals they had in mind, but everyone knew which were meant. The inkprint vehicle was the Outlook for the Blind; the embossed periodical was the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind. By coincidence, both had been started the same year although under separate auspices and in sharply differing circumstances.
The Ziegler had a slight head start, its first issue appearing in March 1907; the Outlook made its debut the following month. The events that began the former might have made the plot of a Horatio Alger story.
In 1906 a shy, middle-aged bachelor named Walter G. Holmes made one of his periodic business trips to New York from Memphis, Tennessee, where he was business manager of that city's Commercial Appeal. Leafing through the Herald, then New York's largest daily newspaper, he came across an item describing a legacy which bequeathed $25,000 each to organizations for the deaf, for the crippled, for orphans, and for several other charitable purposes. Impulsively, Holmes dashed off a short note to the editor. Why, his letter asked, had the blind been overlooked in this sweeping generosity? Blind people were greatly in need of benefactors; a great deal of good, for example, would result from a fund to finance the production of tactual reading material which cost far more than the average blind person could afford. He illustrated his point by noting that a book like Ben Hur, which sold for $1 in inkprint, cost $30 to $40 in embossed type.
Within 24 hours, Holmes' letter evoked a reply: "I saw your communication today and as I am interested in doing something for the blind along the printing line I would like to communicate with you. (Signed) E. M. Ziegler."
Holmes may have recognized the surname; it had been in the news just a few years earlier, when William Ziegler sponsored two unsuccessful Arctic expeditions to discover the North Pole. What did not occur to him was that E. M. Ziegler was a woman and, in fact, the widow of the millionaire industrialist who had financed the polar explorations.
This, and more, he discovered at his first interview with the delicate-featured, sixty-five-year-old Electa Matilda Ziegler. He learned that their mutual concern over the plight of blind people stemmed from similar causes: Mrs. Ziegler had a blind son, Holmes had a blind brother. As Holmes later recounted: "Mrs. Ziegler said that she had always wanted to do something for the blind and that if I would take charge of a magazine for the blind, as I already had some knowledge of printing as well as editorial work, she would finance it."
Throughout his nearly forty years of editorship of the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind, Holmes produced a periodical that admirably answered the needs of its readers. Thousands of letters came to "Uncle Walter"—letters seeking intimate advice as well as practical information, letters responding to the heart-to-heart personal opinions he voiced in his "Publisher's Chat" column, letters expressing gratitude for the magazine that, for many, was their major link with the world at large. A single word from the avuncular editor had fantastic motive power. When his column suggested that readers observe the 20th anniversary of the magazine's founding in 1927 by sending Christmas greetings to Mrs. Ziegler, more than 1,200 letters arrived, most of them bearing the postscript, "I typed this myself." The way Holmes' readers felt about him had come vividly to light earlier that same year when Robert Irwin, then president of the AAWB, conceived the idea of commemorating the magazine's milestone by a surprise tribute to the editor. Without Holmes' knowledge, Irwin sent a letter to the Ziegler readers asking them to donate from ten cents to a maximum of one dollar for the purchase of a gold watch to be presented to Holmes at the AAWB convention. The response was so overwhelming that, even though all gifts in excess of a dollar were returned to the senders, enough money came in to buy not only the watch but an automobile.
The presentation was made by Helen Keller in a warm and graceful speech in which she told Holmes, "you have a chimney corner all to yourself in our hearts." It was the perfect metaphor for the self-effacing man who had resolved, from the outset, to aim his magazine not at the gifted and the brilliant but at people of modest intellect and attainments. What Holmes produced was a monthly that paid little attention to blindness per se—"we know enough of that from experience," Helen had written in endorsing this approach—but whose contents came as close as possible to those of an inkprint magazine of general interest. His editorial formula consisted of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry reprinted from a wide variety of sources, a résumé of the major news of the month and, in almost every issue, a letter or article by a blind person describing how he or she had worked out the problem of earning a living, managing a household or achieving some other practical goal.
The Ziegler 's news résumés were a wondrous miscellany. The May 1937 issue, for example, contained a series of short paragraphs dealing with the passage of the Wagner Labor Act, easy divorces in Arkansas, the coronation of George VI of England, the status of the Loyalist war in Spain, sit-down strikes, a Suwannee River memorial to Stephen Foster, a fire in an Illinois church, the illness of Pope Pius, a new way of preventing colds, the drought in China, the accidental electrocution of a researcher in a cancer laboratory, the diary of two young men frozen to death in a snowstorm, an explosion in a Texas school house, the mysterious "curse" associated with those who had opened the tomb of Tutankhamen, the wedding of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., to Ethel DuPont—a veritable smorgasbord of news tidbits interspersed with a few jokes to freshen the mental palate.
In this same issue the "Publisher's Chat" dealt with Holmes' idea for a "friendship league," a plan by which mobile people, sighted or blind, would act as big brothers or sisters to visit, read to, escort, and render other friendly services for homebound blind persons. It was one of the rare instances in which Holmes, who usually avoided the role of crusader, attempted to stir up social action. He subsequently presented the idea at an AAWB convention, carefully pointing out that he was not advocating a new national organization but hoped for spontaneous local groups. The convention took no official stand on his proposal, but the idea did materialize in a number of communities.
Holmes' determination not to get involved in controversial issues was manifest from the beginning. The Ziegler's early years coincided with the period when the "war of the dots" was reaching fever pitch. Its editor took no sides. The magazine was issued in both braille and New York Point, the two type styles having approximately equal readership at the time. Although schools for the blind stopped teaching New York Point after 1917, the Ziegler Magazine continued to put out a Point edition until 1963 for the benefit of the ever smaller number of readers whose fingers knew only this style of tactile print. In 1934 a Moon type edition was added, in recognition that many elderly readers no longer had enough fingertip sensitivity to distinguish dot cells but could manage the larger and simpler linear outlines. It was kept going until 1965. As of the end of 1972 the Ziegler Magazine was appearing only in braille, but a recorded edition was under consideration.
Electa Matilda Ziegler lived long enough to see the 25th anniversary of the magazine in March 1932; she died six months later at the age of ninety-one. Well before her death she established a fund to ensure continued financing of the publication to which she had reluctantly given her name. The original plan had been to name it simply "Ziegler," but, as Holmes noted in the first issue: "To impress on the world that this great gift is from a woman, the friends of Mrs. Ziegler have prevailed on her to call it the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind. "
Although braille readers were steadily declining in number, the Ziegler Magazine, which at one time had a subscription list of more than 12,000, was still reaching 7,000 subscribers in 1972; its actual readership was estimated at more than twice that number since many copies were shared. In 65 years of existence, the magazine had only three editors: Holmes until 1946, Howard M. Liechty for the next 23 years and, beginning in 1967, Arthur S. Keller.
Walter G. Holmes died February 7, 1946, in a fall from the window of his New York hotel room. The mystery surrounding the circumstances of his death was never cleared up; there was nothing in the nature of the cheerful, even-tempered, eighty-four-year-old man to suggest suicide, and although he occasionally had spells of vertigo, an accidental fall through a window opened wide in New York's winter climate seemed unlikely. Some of his intimates were convinced, although police investigation failed to confirm, that the frail octogenarian had been pushed out of the window by a robber to whom he had trustingly opened his door. One reason for their belief was that Holmes, who normally carried a substantial amount of cash, had empty pockets when his body was found. If these suspicions were warranted, it was a sadly ironic end for a man whose life had been lived in the Lincolnesque tradition of malice toward none.
Howard M. Liechty, who had been Holmes' assistant since 1939, had a background in education and spent the first nine years of his professional career as a teacher in American-supported schools in the Near East. The depression brought him back to the United States and to a job at the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind, where he acquired an interest in blindness that made him receptive to the offer of a post with the Ziegler when Holmes decided it was time to groom a successor.
Liechty came to play a unique role in the blindness communication network. Five years after he assumed editorship of the Ziegler Magazine, he accepted a second assignment as managing editor of the Outlook for the Blind. This dual editorship, which lasted 14 years, enabled him to bridge the interests of the rank and file of blind people who read the former, and of workers for the blind who depended on the latter as their professional journal. Liechty retired from the Outlook at the end of 1965 and from the Ziegler in mid-1967. The intervening year saw him honored by his professional colleagues with the AAWB's Alfred Allen Award for Outstanding Service to the Blind.
Arthur S. Keller, who took over from Liechty at the Ziegler, moved into the post from the sales managership of the Aids and Appliances Division of the American Foundation for the Blind. He had been a government administrator before joining the Foundation's technical research staff in 1959.
Holmes' two successors maintained his traditions, both in editorial approach and in intimate, service-minded relations with readers. Early in the magazine's existence, it began the practice of supplying readers with brailled watches, clocks, and other tangible aids at cost price; the braille watch service was subsequently turned over to the Foundation, but as of 1972 the Ziegler Magazine was continuing to offer subscribers a few bargain items, notably typewriters and alarm clocks.
The net worth of the $600,000 endowment fund left by Mrs. Ziegler for the upkeep of the magazine grew over the years to the point where its income greatly exceeded the magazine's needs. The trustees of the Ziegler Foundation adopted the policy of using this surplus income for other services to blind people. It made grants to the American Foundation for the Blind for such purposes as a survey of library services in 1955 and a comprehensive study of New York State's educational facilities for blind children in 1956. It also channeled funds for educational or research purposes to the Industrial Home for the Blind, the Perkins School, Recording for the Blind, and other direct service agencies. Among its larger beneficiaries were the Lavelle School for the Blind, a Catholic residential and day school in New York City, which used the money to add high school grades to its curriculum; and the YMCA in Darien, Connecticut, for construction of a swimming pool and initiation of a swimming program for blind children. As of the end of 1972 the Ziegler Foundation's assets aggregated some $4,750,000 and were producing an annual income of over $250,000, of which about $70,000 was spent for continuing publication of the magazine.
Until his death in 1957, William Ziegler, Jr., headed the foundation established by his mother; its 1972 officers included Matilda Ziegler's grandchildren, William Ziegler III and Helen Ziegler Steinkraus, the latter maintaining her father's interest in the American Foundation for the Blind by serving on its board of trustees.
The first thing contemporary visitors to the Ziegler Magazine offices see as they step off the elevator is a large oil portrait of an elderly gentleman dressed in a conservative business suit. Radiating from the kindly face is the avuncular benevolence that led thousands of blind people who had never seen Walter Holmes or touched his hand to think of him as a treasured friend.
A pair of portrait busts flank the elevator in the main entryway to the American Foundation for the Blind's building complex. One is of Helen Keller; the other is of Electa Matilda Ziegler, to whom a blind physician once wrote, "I would rather do what you are doing for the blind than be President of the United States or the King of England."
Neither oil portrait nor statue of Charles Francis Faulkner Campbell is on view in any public place, possibly because the volatile founder of the Outlook for the Blind never sat still long enough to pose. Unlike Walter Holmes, who held the same job for 39 years, Campbell occupied seven different positions between April 1907, when the first issue of the Outlook appeared, and May 1923, when he turned the magazine over to the American Foundation for the Blind. The Outlook was the one constant thread in his life during this period, and its editorial desk moved with him from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania to Ohio to Maryland to Michigan.
There was no Electa Matilda Ziegler in Campbell's life to underwrite 100 percent of the cost of an inkprint magazine devoted to furthering the interests of blind people. Producing the Outlook was not only an unpaid moonlighting operation, but one which involved the editor in a constant scramble for funds.
As different as were the situations and the personalities of the two men who began publishing ventures within a month of each other, they had one essential quality in common: an unshakable faith in the capacity of blind people to live dignified and useful lives. Both had been brought up in the presence of blindness—Holmes with his older brother, Campbell not only with a blind father but in daily association with the blind children who attended the school his father headed, England's Royal Normal College.
Charles ("Charlie" to almost everyone) Campbell was born February 19, 1876, to Francis (later Sir Francis) Campbell and his second wife, the former Sophia E. Faulkner, whom he married in 1875 soon after the death of his first wife. Sophia had been among her husband's fellow teachers at Perkins; she was one of the first Perkins staff members released by Samuel G. Howe to help get the Royal Normal College started. Their son spent the first 16 years of his life within the walls of the college, an enthusiastic participant in its many sports activities. In 1892 he was sent to the United States for his secondary school education. He lived with an aunt while attending high school in Concord, Mass., and then entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 1901.
Apparently Charlie was never tempted to diverge from the field his parents were engaged in. Planning to become a teacher of blind children, he spent the next year in Leipzig studying educational methods, particularly in music. Then he joined the faculty of his father's school. A year there, part of which he devoted to making a collection of lantern slides and filming a "cinematograph" showing blind people at work and at play, led him to conclude that he needed a more rapid road to achievement. Even were he to wait for his father's retirement, still a decade away, his older half brother, Guy, who had been on the school's staff for more than twenty years, had precedence. In the United States Charlie could serve as a missionary for his father's distinctive ideas on how blind children should be prepared for life.
There was also a more personal fascination tugging at him from across the Atlantic. During his stay in Boston he had fallen in love with the attractive and accomplished art teacher Wilhelmina Dranga. That her suitor was a few years her junior did not keep Wilhelmina from responding to the lithe and wiry young man whose deep-set dark eyes under bushy brows, firm chin, and neatly-trimmed military moustache surmounting a wide, mobile mouth conveyed an aura of optimistic self-assurance. They were married soon after his arrival in 1903.
Armed with his newest slides, Charlie began immediately to seek audiences for the "cinematograph and lantern lecture" he called "Seeing by Touch; the Practical Training of the Blind." Innate qualities of humor, enthusiasm, and genuine conviction, along with a natural flair for salesmanship, made him a winning public speaker who could evoke a response from every kind of group. One of his first lectures, given before the Twentieth Century Club and Women's Educational Industrial Union of Boston, yielded immediate results. It brought about a new organization, the Massachusetts Association for Promoting the Interests of the Adult Blind, and with it, a job for Charles Campbell as field agent and executive officer.
The newborn organization became the platform from which he exerted leverage to open new opportunities for blind adults. It was under its auspices that in 1904 he launched an "Experiment Station for the Trade Training of the Blind," one of the nation's first industrial training and placement ventures to look beyond the traditional "blind trades." So effective was it in demonstrating that blind workers could be guided to produce salable articles of practical and artistic merit, and that capable blind persons could even be placed in open industry that, when the Association's next goal was achieved—that of having Massachusetts establish a permanent state commission for the blind—one of the commission's first acts was to take over the training station and name Campbell as its superintendent.
Never at a loss for ideas, Charlie then proposed that the Massachusetts Association pioneer in a new direction by sponsoring a magazine to provide a continuous communication link among workers for the blind all over the country. He was keenly aware of the need for such a medium by dint of his personal role in activating the American Association of Workers for the Blind in 1905 and his acceptance of its secretaryship. If those engaged in serving blind people were ever to become a potent force, they needed a more regular mode of interchange than a biennial convention.
Thus was born the Outlook for the Blind, a quarterly whose purpose was clearly stated in the opening editorial of Volume I, Number 1, April 1907. It was to be "a forum for the free and open discussion of all topics connected with work for the blind. … We have no theories of our own to advocate, no projects to exploit. Our only desire is to be of service to the great cause of helpfulness to the blind."
It was not literally true that Campbell had no theories of his own to advocate. He harbored fervent convictions on many subjects, particularly on the educational methods used in schools for the blind, but with scrupulous self-discipline he kept the pages of the Outlook impartial, giving space to all sides of all questions. Considering that the periodical made its appearance during a period when the "war of the dots" was racing toward a climax, he succeeded admirably in maintaining an unbiased editorial stance. The Outlook, wrote the California educator Richard French, was an "active synthesizing agent, … a place for discussion away from the heat of personal conflict," with "the very impersonality of paper and ink becoming essential factors contributing to a final solution."
The first issue of the Outlook was a creditable effort for a man with no previous publishing experience; Charlie's sole helper was Wilhelmina, who designed the layout and placement of illustrations. Among the contents was a roundup of recent news, a report on the work of the newly formed New York City Lighthouse along with the text of the speech given by Helen Keller in its behalf; a historical survey by Dr. Robert C. Moon of the work of the Pennsylvania Home Teaching Society, an announcement of the forthcoming convention of the AAWB, and an extended survey of the principal European institutions for the blind.
Most of this material was reprinted from other sources, a pattern that was to characterize the Outlook throughout Campbell's editorship. In the absence of any sort of reportorial staff, the dearth of original material was unavoidable. But it was by no means a total liability. By culling the best and most relevant from a variety of sources, Campbell gave his readers an overview of information and opinion to which the average workers for the blind had scant access. He filled his pages with documents of lasting importance, sometimes stretching the lengthier ones over several issues. Nowhere else could the contemporary reader or the later historian find the full texts of the two public hearings before the New York City Board of Education in 1909, in which the arguments for braille and the arguments for New York Point were expounded and disputed. The Outlook devoted 46 pages in two successive issues to this material, and another page to reporting the Board's crucial decision in favor of braille.
Were it not for the Outlook, which published in installments the proceedings of the 1907 and 1909 conventions of the AAWB and held the type for later binding in pamphlet form, there might have been no record of what was said and done at those seminal conclaves. Nationwide distribution of the information was undoubtedly a factor in the doubling of attendance at each succeeding convention of the fledgling organization.
To the Outlook, too, belonged a share of the credit for the successful campaign against ophthalmia neonatorum and the formation of the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness to carry the fight against needless loss of sight to all parts of the country. Issue after issue carried bound-in reprints of documents put out by medical journals, hospitals, and social agencies stressing the need for state laws and community action to ensure the simple prophylactic measures that would halt the incidence of "babies' sore eyes."
To familiarize potential readers with the new magazine, copies were sent to every school and agency for the blind, to all members of both the AAIB and the AAWB, to the civic organizations Campbell had addressed during his wide-ranging lecture tours, and to everyone else he could think of who might be willing to invest 50 cents a year for a subscription. (By the fourth issue the price was raised to $1.) More substantial support came from a few sources—grants of $50 a year from each of the four largest schools for the blind, and donations from a few well-to-do private individuals. The first year's costs were fully underwritten by the Massachusetts Association for the Blind, and for the next few years the Massachusetts Association met the deficit between income and outgo in amounts averaging $1,000 to $1,200 annually. After nearly four years, a flyleaf printed in red ink was inserted in the Summer 1910 issue, warning readers that the Massachusetts Association was not committed to financing the magazine indefinitely and that unless other agencies found the publication sufficiently useful to support it through bulk subscriptions or annual grants, the Outlook would perish.
Campbell felt the magazine would have a firmer base, financially and in terms of prestige, if it had the official endorsement of the two professional associations in work for the blind. The question was taken up by the AAIB at its 1912 convention. Following a somewhat fence-straddling report by Olin Burritt, Eben Morford, then president of the AAWB, rose to declare: "You people here, the Instructors of the blind, have got first chance, and if you don't do it, the Workers will. The Outlook for the Blind has got to continue, it is going to continue, a way out is going to be found."
Both associations agreed to lend their names as sponsors, but it was not the "way out" because the sponsorship was purely nominal. The AAIB had little by way of funds, the AAWB had even less. However, some of the individual members did try to raise or contribute a little money. It was never enough; during the 16 years that the Outlook appeared under Campbell's editorship, its pages were punctuated with pleas for support laced with threats of collapse. In point of fact, Charlie never dreamed of giving up. The Outlook would continue, he wrote Edward Allen in 1912, "even if the magazine is reduced to a four-sheet pamphlet produced by some mimeographed process."
What genuinely distressed Campbell was the lack of realism in education of blind children that left the great majority of residential school graduates totally unprepared to earn a livelihood. "After Graduation—What?" was a key question he posed in publishing a survey of schools for the blind in the October 1908 issue. It was a question that went unanswered by most of the respondents. Few schools followed up their graduates, and fewer still were ready to face the implications of their failure to follow up. Campbell put his own thoughts on the subject in the letter to Allen: "The Outlook at least can bring forward some of the facts as shown by the pitiable condition of hundreds of graduates of schools for the blind throughout this country."
It is a foolhardy man who expects to be liked for forcing others to confront unpalatable truths. Charlie Campbell was no fool; he knew he was making enemies when he dwelt on the shortcomings of the schools. But, he told Allen, he and Wilhelmina had "long ago agreed that we would make any reasonable sacrifice in an effort to bring about a change."
Much the same motivation led Campbell to accept any job that seemed to hold the possibility of effecting progress. In 1910 the Pittsburgh Association for the Blind was organized and Campbell was offered its directorship. He moved himself, his family, and the Outlook to the steel center in June of that year, expecting to launch a comprehensive statewide program of help for blind adults. To emphasize the statewide compass, his first move was to get the agency's name changed to the Pennsylvania Association for the Blind. However, the realities of the assignment proved so much narrower than his expectations that when, a year or so later, he was offered the job of organizing the work of the newly established Ohio Commission for the Blind, he was off to Columbus. Approaching the new task with characteristic energy, he initiated so broad a spectrum of programs that the commission's budget tripled in five years.
Columbus was also the site of the Ohio State School for the Blind, of which Edward Van Cleve was superintendent. When Van Cleve left to become principal of the New York Institute, Campbell applied for the vacated position. He was appointed in 1916 and had barely started on what he regarded as a mission of educational rejuvenation when the United States entered World War I and he was irresistibly captivated by the plans for the Red Cross Institute at Evergreen. Leaving his wife, who held the title of assistant superintendent, to finish out the school semester, Campbell took off for Baltimore.
At this point Charlie's wife was not Wilhelmina Dranga Campbell but her younger sister, Mary. Wilhelmina had died of pneumonia in late 1911, leaving three small children ranging in age from three to seven, and their aunt had come to the bereaved household to care for them. She and Charlie were married the following year. "Aunt Mary" admirably filled her sister's shoes in all respects but one: marital love. That this second marriage was not a happy one may well have been a major factor in propelling Campbell to Evergreen in 1918, there to remain for more than three years until the Red Cross closed out its program, Evergreen was taken over by the Veterans Bureau, and Mary had secured a divorce.
Financially the Outlook had suffered even more than usual during the war years; it also suffered from the pressures on its editor during the immediate postwar period, when Campbell was putting it out from Baltimore simultaneously with the Evergreen Review. To give the latter national distribution he bound the two publications together in a manner confusing to the reader and even more bewildering to later researchers. There must have been many moments when he was tempted to let the Outlook lapse, but he held on in the hope that the Red Cross Institute would become a permanent body and the Outlook its official organ. No sooner had this particular dream been extinguished than another was kindled—that some kind of national organization would soon materialize, although different in compass from what had been visualized for the Institute. By the time Campbell accepted a new job in Detroit, the American Foundation for the Blind was a corporate reality; from then on, it was merely a question of keeping the magazine going another year or so until the Foundation opened for business in 1923.
In 1922 Charles Campbell married his former secretary, Zelma Leath, and became executive director of the Detroit League for the Handicapped, a vocational agency whose program embraced workshops, home industries, and social services for all types of physically handicapped persons including, but not restricted to, the blind. As noted earlier, he had hoped to be head of Evergreen but was passed over for the top job. He had probably hoped, too, to be named to the staff of the Foundation, but this did not happen either. As responsible as anything else for these near misses was the gossip surrounding his marital situation. The feelings he had ruffled in entrenched circles of power by his persistent attempts to reform work for the blind now found a convenient outlet in whispered moral outrage. For public consumption, Campbell's forced retreat from work for the blind was attributed to his frequent job changes. Latimer put it as diplomatically as he could when he wrote: "Essentially a promoter, restless by nature and restive under restraint, this intrepid leader was swept on irresistibly by visions of things worth doing, so rapidly from one environment to another as to thwart the complete fulfilment of any one of his noble ambitions."
If Charlie was wounded by rejection, he did not show it. It was not in his nature to nurse resentments. Irrepressibly optimistic, he plunged into his new assignment with vigor and imagination. Helen Keller was to say of him that "wherever he went, he started things moving; he always knew what to do, and before the sun of his spirit obstacles melted away. … "
It must have been a particular source of satisfaction to Campbell that in Detroit, under the aegis of a generalized agency, he was able to accomplish a project he had repeatedly and unsuccessfully advocated during his two decades in work for the blind. This was a residential training program in domestic science for blind girls. With the support of the Detroit Junior League, late 1930 saw the opening of a rented house, the hiring of a housemother, and the movement into the residence of seven blind children, ranging in age from nine to thirteen and selected from pupils in Detroit's public school classes for the blind. They were to have a year of continuous residence in the League house, while attending public school classes and spending weekends and holidays at home so as not to lose contact with their families. The children included boys as well as girls; younger children would be trained in activities of daily living, while the older girls got actual homemaking experience.
Campbell saw this program as a bridge between residential school and day school education, one which skirted the pitfalls of institutionalization on the one hand and the inability of families to provide practical instruction on the other. The idea was sound, but the timing unfortunate. The depression soon choked off financial support for League activities, and in late 1933 Campbell moved over to the Detroit Community Fund's public education department. He died on December 28, 1935, a few weeks short of his sixtieth birthday, "worn out but not rusted out," as Edward Allen put it in the six-page obituary article which led off the Campbell memorial issue of the Outlook in February 1936.
Complicating the production of this tribute to the magazine's founder was an incident that was a revealing postscript to Charles Campbell's life. When Campbell left work for the blind and went to Detroit in 1922, he regarded the move as the opening of a clean new page. Whether it was his wish, or the wish of his bride, the impression was allowed to grow that Zelma was his second wife and not his third. So far as his new associates were concerned, "Aunt Mary" had never been anything but that. As soon as word reached Zelma Campbell that preparations were in progress for a memorial issue of the Outlook, she wrote Robert Irwin an anguished letter, pleading that any biography of her late husband omit reference to his marriage to Mary. At least, she begged, no such reference should appear in those copies of the magazine that went to subscribers in Detroit. She would be willing to meet the costs of printing an expurgated edition for circulation there.
This request landed Irwin in an awkward spot. The issue then in preparation was scheduled to contain two major biographical articles—one the lengthy obituary by Allen, and the other a piece by Latimer (actually a chapter from his forthcoming book of memoirs) which dealt with all seven members of the Campbell family who had been of significant service to blind people. By no means the least of these seven was Mary Dranga Campbell who, after her divorce from Charles, had gone on to build an independent, nationally known, and highly respected career in work for the blind.
Irwin had no trouble persuading Allen to incorporate the information about Charlie's marriage to Mary in a single paragraph that could be dropped out without breaking the article's continuity. The piece by Latimer, however, could not be handled so simply. Irwin wrote explaining the situation and asking if, as a last favor to Charlie, Latimer would be willing to condense his article to deal "only with the Campbells who had passed on": Sir Francis and his second wife; his elder son, Guy, who had succeeded him as head of the Royal Normal College; Charlie; and Charlie's first wife, Wilhelmina. The two survivors to be omitted would be Mary and Guy's wife, Louie Bealby Campbell, who had held the principalship of the college for five years after her husband's death.
Latimer did not take kindly to the proposition, answering that he preferred to withdraw his article altogether. Now it was Irwin's turn to demur. He and Evelyn McKay, who was then editing the Outlook, devised another solution. The Latimer piece was printed in the memorial issue as an unpaged insert, not listed in the table of contents and slipped out of the expurgated copies sent to Detroit. Latimer was not told of this in advance; by the time he saw the issue, it was too late to do anything except send a dignified protest to Irwin, who responded with a not-quite-truthful explanation:
The photographs in your article needed to go on smooth paper, and as we needed additional reprints of it, it was decided to run the entire article on shiny paper and put it in the center of the Outlook. … It was for the sake of economy in making additional reprints that the pages were not numbered.
That same day he wrote Charlie's son, Francis, who had been an uncomfortable intermediary in the conspiracy of kindness: "I hope I never again get mixed up between two women in a similar situation."
It was the only time in the Outlook 's history that its pages were used in any but the most straightforward way, and it is difficult to think of anyone other than Charles Campbell for whose sake any kind of deception, however well meant, would have been entertained for a moment.
Survivorship was the principal characteristic of the periodical turned over to the Foundation early in 1923. The personal and professional stresses which preoccupied Campbell's last years of editorship were reflected in the magazine's paucity of content and irregularity of appearance. Some of the final issues held little more than the Evergreen Review sandwiched between a few pages of scattered news notes.
The fledgling Foundation was not much better prepared to do a professional job of magazine production. The first issue under its auspices appeared in May 1923 as Number 1 of Volume 17. It employed a larger type face and used illustrations more lavishly than Campbell had been able to afford, but it was amateurishly written and edited. It was not until Charles Hayes, for whom putting out the magazine was only one of many responsibilities, hired a former newspaperwoman as assistant that the Outlook began to assume distinctive shape and tone. These differed noticeably from the past. Campbell's Outlook had perforce been a journal of news and record, its target audience those professionally engaged in work for the blind. The Foundation saw the periodical as a medium for reaching beyond this limited circle; its purpose, the agency's first annual report declared, should be broadened to include material "which would also be of interest to friends of the Blind who have no professional connection with the work."
Following this guideline, Hayes used the magazine as a tool in the Foundation's campaign of public education, emphasizing themes of hope and encouragement. He filled its pages with success stories about blind people making good, not merely in such traditional professions as law and music but in widely varied occupations: ice and coal delivery, poultry raising, manufacture of bird houses, invention, journalism, advertising, the performing arts. So carried away was he by this accent on the affirmative, he even reported the "success story of a blind dog" which had been the subject of a feature article in a popular magazine.
Distribution of the Outlook during these years reflected its expanded purpose. Campbell had never succeeded in lifting the paid circulation to more than 1,000, although his press run went to a few hundred extra copies for promotional use. By 1927 the print order had risen to 9,000, the subscription list having been swelled by inclusion of the magazine as a perquisite of a $10 membership in the Foundation. The need to economize during the depression years led to discontinuance of this practice, and circulation never again came close to the 9,000 figure. Even during the dozen or so years, beginning in the early Fifties, when a subscription at a nominal fee was included in the membership dues of, first, the AAWB and later the AAIB as well, the total paid circulation never went much beyond 4,000. As of 1972, when these arrangements were no longer in force, the paid list for the inkprint edition was just over 3,000. A braille edition, initiated in 1931, and a recorded edition, begun in 1959, added fewer than 1,000 subscribers to the total.
Once the Outlook had dropped its Foundation membership subscription category, it altered its focus to concentrate on the bread-and-butter concerns of service to blind people. When it began publication of the Teachers Forum in 1928, the Foundation had discovered that there was a genuine hunger for substantive professional material among educators. A comparable hunger was becoming manifest in other phases of work for the blind and the Outlook now set out to satisfy it. In so doing it could hardly overlook the fact that the activities of the Foundation itself were among the most fertile breeding grounds of professional progress. Considerable space was given to reporting the Foundation-sponsored conferences, workshops, legislative initiatives, books and reports on subjects of professional concern.
During World War II the Outlook added a monthly feature, "News and Views of the AAWB." Since travel restrictions precluded the holding of conventions, it was useful to have a major channel for communication with the scattered members of the organization. Once the war was ended, News and Views became AAWB's independently issued house organ.
Editorial policy was one of the matters which came under scrutiny when M. Robert Barnett became the Foundation's director. As part of his strategy of cultivating teamwork with the two professional associations, both the AAIB and the AAWB were asked to appoint official correspondents for the magazine. A group of advisors summoned to a conference on editorial policy recommended that news of Foundation activities be deemphasized and more space be devoted to articles by practitioners with ideas or experiences to share.
To underscore the changed direction, the word "New" was added to the magazine's title as of 1951 and a sprightlier format was introduced under the aegis of a new editor who, in the January 1952 issue, described his policy:
The New Outlook for the Blind shall be a vehicle for the dissemination of information and knowledge, for the free expression of findings and experiences, of valid theories identified as such, and of opinions, all within the limitations of courtesy and good taste, high professional standards, and respect for other opinions.
Repeated invitations were issued over the years for articles that fit into this formula, but the field of work for the blind was slow to accept the thought that the magazine was something more than a Foundation house organ. Surgical removal of all Foundation news was recommended by the Service Advisory Committee in 1965 and a new quarterly vehicle for the excised material, the AFB Newsletter, was launched the following year, leaving to the New Outlook the single role of professional journal. A completely revised format emphasized the change.
The austerely professional New Outlook of 1972 was no longer the all-purpose medium Charles Campbell had envisioned 65 years earlier, and even less the cheerful messenger of high hopes and glad tidings that it became under Charles Hayes. Most of its contents were of a technical nature, often research-oriented and couched in the kind of esoteric professionalese that rejoices the heart of the doctoral candidate but glazes the eye of the general reader. Because it devoted minimum space to news per se, it no longer served as a running chronicle of changes in professional personnel, program developments in individual agencies, retirements and deaths of old-timers. News of legislation was now consolidated in the Foundation's quarterly Washington Report. Major papers given at professional conventions could be found in proceedings or collections of selected papers published by the respective organizations. The subject matter formerly covered by a "Research in Review" column was issued in greatly expanded form in the Foundation's Research Bulletin series. Those in search of news of people in the field had to turn to the house organs of the professional associations and their subgroups.
Such fragmentation was not unique; the same splintering characterized communications in other fields of human service in which the growth of professionalism produced ever-narrower specialization.
One reason, perhaps, why the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind remained unaltered in content, format, and purpose during the same 65 years that the Outlook underwent repeated changes was that the Ziegler had long continuity of editorship. Such was not the case with the Outlook.
Following the first 16 years under Campbell, the editor was Charles B. Hayes from 1923 until his death in 1936. As of April 1931 the name of Evelyn C. McKay appeared in the masthead as associate editor. She kept this title even during the five years following Hayes' death, when she was in sole charge. At the end of 1941, when the Outlook absorbed the Teachers Forum, the Forum 's editor, P. C. Potts, also became an associate editor of the merged publication. Simultaneously there appeared a managing editor, Lucille (Lucy) Goldthwaite, a retired librarian who had long edited the Braille Book Review. It was during her brief editorship (she resigned in June 1944) that the magazine became a monthly, appearing ten times a year (it wasn't published during July and August), a schedule maintained ever since. Originally a quarterly, it had been stepped up to five issues a year in 1933.
Evelyn McKay's name disappeared from the masthead with the issue of May 1943; she was replaced by Enid Griffis, formerly a member of the fund-raising staff, who was given the official title of associate editor in tandem with Potts. The two carried on without benefit of a top editor until November 1946 when Miss Griffis left and Warren Bledsoe was named editor. His tenure was the shortest on record; after putting out nine issues he took a leave of absence to work with the Veterans Administration in rehabilitation of the war-blinded and then decided to stay on in federal service. Potts was left alone to put out the magazine until October 1951 when Howard M. Liechty, already managing editor of the Ziegler Magazine, was given the same title for what had by then been christened the New Outlook. Liechty stayed on until his retirement in 1965; at the beginning of the following year the managing editorship was transferred to Patricia Scherf Smith, who was continuing in the post as of 1972.
As of February 1955, the name of M. Robert Barnett began to appear in the masthead as editor-in-chief. It was more than a titular honor; Barnett reviewed all the magazine's contents and wrote many of its editorials, in addition to contributing his signed column of personal opinion, "Hindsight," from October 1956 to January 1964.
Change of editorship was often accompanied by change of format. Campbell's Outlook was booksize (6 × 9 inches); its cover was a typographical arrangement featuring a list of the issue's major contents. This remained the basic design until the Foundation became publisher. For the next dozen years the cover of the Outlook was a four-color illustration, "Lifting the Veil of Darkness," which depicted an angelic-faced woman unshrouding the head of a bare-throated young man, his mouth open in eager anticipation of the pile of books on the table before him. Contributed by Percy Van Eman Ivory, a pupil of the famous illustrator Howard Pyle, the painting was typical of the art nouveau style of magazine and calendar illustrations of the period.
Discontinuing inspirational content in favor of professional material made this sentimental cover inappropriate, so the magazine reverted to a starkly simple typographic arrangement in 1935. In 1951, along with the change in title to New Outlook, the cover typography was revised. Further changes were made in 1955, but the most drastic format alteration came in January 1964 when the page size was enlarged to 8½ × 11 inches. Three years later saw the introduction of an entirely new look, inside and out, featuring abstract two-color cover designs and a different, more modern style of page layout, marked by liberal use of white space.
The subscription fee also underwent change over the years. Campbell's price of $1 a year remained in effect until 1920, when it went up to $1.50. When the Foundation took over three years later it raised the rate to $2 and kept it at that level for more than thirty years. In May 1956 the price went to $3, where it remained until the beginning of 1968. At that point, following a cost analysis which showed that publication of the inkprint edition was costing the Foundation more than $10 per subscription, a total price structure revision was introduced. The braille edition had long been offered at $1.50 a year, the recorded edition at $5. Under the new structure, all three editions were priced at $6 each. These rates did not make it possible to break even on costs, but they did effect a lowering of the annual subsidy.
Advertising income, which had been important in balancing Campbell's books, was inconsequential to the Foundation when it took over; an early decision was to eliminate the kind of ads that had filled as many as fifty pages of an issue in Campbell's time. These were largely from the Boston area and offered men's furnishings, ostrich feathers, bakery products, undertaking and embalming, Turkish baths, dry-cleaning, and other local goods and services. There was also a sprinkling of patent medicine ads: "Camphorated Saponaceous Dentifrice"; "Geneva Water" for stomach, liver, and kidney troubles; "Dr. Green's Nervura"; and the like. Campbell had nothing to do with soliciting the ads; they were totally within the province of C. Bradford Mudge, a blind Bostonian who earned a living from commissions on the advertising he secured for the Outlook, and possibly for other periodicals as well. No doubt Campbell knew the advertisers were making more of a philanthropic gesture than an investment in merchandising, but he may well have rationalized that the ends—a source of livelihood for a blind man and a needed financial prop for the magazine—justified the means.
The 1923 resolve of the Foundation executive committee that "advertising be limited to that specifically helpful to the blind" was still in effect as of 1972.
Charles Campbell left one other enduring legacy to work for the blind: the useful compendium that eventually became the biennial Directory of Agencies Serving the Visually Handicapped in the United States. Its 18th edition was being readied for publication at the end of 1972. The directory originally came into being because no sooner had Campbell begun publishing the Outlook than he was besieged with questions about facilities for blind people. His first editorial surveys, printed in the form of fold-out tables, were the fruits of fact-finding questionnaires he sent out in 1908. "Industrial Establishments for the Blind in the United States," which appeared in the July 1908 issue, listed data on 16 workshops in 12 states: date of founding, amount of floor space, kinds of goods made, annual sales, number of blind wage earners, average weekly wage, whether or not a boarding home was maintained for the workers, etc. The next issue saw a comparable table on schools for the blind, detailing the number of students and teachers, subjects taught, reading system or systems used, library contents, physical training facilities, and follow-up programs in respect to graduates.
The enthusiasm with which this hitherto unavailable information was received led to the idea of compiling a comprehensive directory. In 1916 Charles and Mary Campbell published Institutions for the Blind in America, with plans for periodic updating, but complications in their personal and professional lives kept the latter idea from materializing.
Production of an updated directory was one of the early goals the Foundation set for itself. It came off the press in 1926. The second edition was issued in 1931 and the third in 1938. A biennial publication schedule was subsequently adopted and maintained.
The directory was the first book of substance published under the Foundation imprint. Two others appeared in a 1929 publication list—The Blind Child and His Reading by Kathryn Maxfield, and Blind Relief Laws—Their Theory and Practice by Robert Irwin and Evelyn McKay—along with seven staff-written monographs on aspects of education, vocations, and legislation.
A major publishing venture was the Proceedings of the World Conference on Work for the Blind, which appeared in 1932. That same year saw publication by the Foundation of its first book written by a non-staff member, From Homer to Helen Keller—a Social and Educational Study of the Blind by Richard S. French, principal of the California School for the Blind. Five years later came H. Randolph Latimer's memoirs, The Conquest of Blindness.
What of the Blind?, a symposium by a score of authors on various aspects of blindness and services for blind people, appeared in 1938; a supplementary volume was issued in 1941. Both were edited by Helga Lende, who during the same period compiled Books About the Blind, an annotated bibliographical guide published in 1940 under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. A revised and updated edition, issued in 1953, listed 4,200 entries, many in the form of unpublished masters' and doctoral theses in the Foundation library collection.
As work for the blind moved toward greater professionalization, publications grew increasingly technical in nature. Most of the material issued during the Fifties consisted of conference proceedings or staff-edited material drawn from them. Beginning near the end of that decade and continuing into the Seventies, an increasing number of research studies dotted the publication list. As of 1972, a total of 26 volumes in the research series had been issued. Other books and monographs in the catalog of 70 Foundation publications then in print dealt with psychological studies, education, multihandicapped children, rehabilitation problems, attitudes among and toward blind persons, vocations, and social work services.
Listed in the same catalog were more than forty pamphlets and fliers available free of charge as public education materials. They covered a wide range of subject matter: Facts About Blindness, Blindness and Diabetes, Dog Guides for the Blind, brief biographies of Louis Braille and Helen Keller, Careers in Work for the Blind, Why Not Hire a Blind Person?, Toilet Habits, Suggestions for Training a Blind Child.
These materials, along with the six periodicals then being issued under Foundation editorship (New Outlook for the Blind, AFB Newsletter, Washington Report, Research Bulletin, Talking Book Topics, Braille Book Review) were produced by the agency's information department with a staff of 14 professionals. Of all Foundation units, this one had seen the largest proportional growth in the 50 years since the entire information staff consisted of Charles Hayes (who also doubled as director of field services) and a single assistant. Incorporated in the 1972 information department were the public education division, the publications division, the records center, and the Migel Memorial Library.
A circulating reference library that would make material on blindness readily available to professional workers had been one of Robert Irwin's early priorities. During his graduate years at Harvard, he had made extensive use of the "blindiana" collection at Perkins. However, few people were in a position to travel to Massachusetts for research purposes; what was needed was a system that could bring books to people. As early as 1925 Irwin voiced the hope that the Foundation could be instrumental in this. The following year he succeeded in persuading the trustees to appropriate $1,000 to begin a book collection, and by 1928 the Foundation was able to report that its library already comprised 800 bound volumes plus a sizable number of pamphlets, records, and manuscripts.
There were some antiquarian prizes in this early collection; the oldest was a two-part work published in London in 1684, Richard Standfast's The Blind Man's Meditations and A Dialogue Between a Blind Man and Death. Of less interest to the bibliophile, but far more useful for practitioners, were the materials donated by people like Ambrose Shotwell, who forwarded his 50-year collection of pamphlets, reports, and periodicals on work for the blind. Numerous other individuals and agencies also responded to the plea that they clear out dusty shelves and attic boxes and donate their contents to the new repository. The pioneer schools and agencies helped by supplying bound sets of their annual reports as well as quantities of duplicate materials from their own library collections.
So rapidly did the collection grow that a full-time librarian was needed, and in March 1929 Irwin hired Helga Lende, a recent graduate of what later became the Columbia University School of Library Science. She was a real find—a Norwegian, with a degree from the University of Oslo, who had a reading knowledge of German, French, and Spanish in addition to the Scandinavian languages. But, as Irwin confided in a private letter to Latimer, dated October 22, 1929, her English was "not all that could be desired." Furthermore, "Mr. Migel was not present at the meeting at which Miss Lende was elected and he has never quite approved of her." It would be up to those trustees who, as professionals, recognized the importance of a library, "to save Miss Lende's salary from elimination from the budget."
Latimer cooperated, Migel relented, and Miss Lende's English improved to the point where she became one of the Foundation's most prolific writers and editors as well as its librarian. In 1963 she savored the delicate irony of seeing the handsome new Migel Memorial Library wing dedicated in honor of the man who had perceived so little use for a library in the first place.
By the time Helga Lende retired in 1964, the Foundation library held close to 25,000 items in many languages: books and periodicals about blindness and work for the blind, books by or about blind persons, novels featuring blind characters, sociological and psychological works bearing on aspects of blindness. As of 1972 the collection stood at over 30,000.
The circulating function of the library, which enabled teachers, students, and researchers all over the country to borrow books by mail, was soon enlarged to include preparation of reading lists on specific subjects. As of 1972 some fifty different reading lists were available and readers' advisory services, rendered by the three professional librarians on staff, were averaging 3,000 requests a year.
In the late Thirties command of the publications division also fell to Miss Lende, when, following the death of Charles Hayes, stopgap measures were employed to cover his varied responsibilities. It was under her direction that, in 1951, a publications series was begun in nine categories which saw 56 titles issued—largely monographs and edited proceedings on aspects of legislation, vocational problems, preschool services, education, community planning, technical and social research. These were in addition to some major books published during the Fifties and early Sixties: Louis Cholden's A Psychiatrist Works with Blindness, a revised and expanded edition of Thomas Cutsforth's The Blind in School and Society, and Robert Irwin's As I Saw It.
One book that eluded publication despite years of effort was a biography of Sir Francis Campbell. Irwin, who had his heart set on having such a book written under Foundation sponsorship, opened negotiations with Edward Allen in the early Thirties, but nothing came of them. Even earlier, Charles Campbell had urged his mother to do the job, but Lady Campbell was diffident about her writing ability. Charlie himself should probably have done it, but he, too, had reservations about his literary skill.
After Charlie's death, his son Francis sent the Foundation for safekeeping a 100-lb. box of correspondence, reports, photographs, and other data—more than 10,000 items in all—pertaining to his grandparents. Charlie had accumulated these materials for use by a future biographer. The documents were stored until Irwin's retirement, when he took them to Puget Sound, no doubt planning to use them in the history he was compiling. Somehow he failed to identify the box as being on loan from the Foundation, with the result that, on his death, it was considered part of his estate. Irwin's sister, Mrs. Edna Irwin Davis, decided to donate the Campbell papers to the Library of Congress, where they have remained on file in the Manuscript Division since 1953, awaiting the creative touch of a writer who could do justice to the man who, his son said, "absolutely did not know the meaning of the word 'impossible.' "
The 1963 internal reorganization of the Foundation consolidated the publications division, the library, the public education division, the legislative office, and the central files into a single information department headed by Helga Lende until her retirement the following year. This administrative structure was still in effect as of 1972 except for the legislative unit, which had been moved to the office of the executive director.
The central files were included in this setup in recognition of their archival value. The classification and organization of the files had begun a dozen years earlier in what proved to be a fitting coda to the notable career of Mary Dranga Campbell. She was seventy-five years old when she took on the assignment of sorting, screening, and putting in order the thousands upon thousands of yellowed letters and documents stored in the basements and attics of the Foundation buildings. Undismayed by the accumulated grime of more than three decades, and drawing on her early library training as well as on a half-century of intimate knowledge of work for the blind, she salvaged vast quantities of source material bearing on past projects, legislative activities, and research efforts. She completed the task in three years and lived another three in retirement before death claimed her in 1957.
Taken all in all, Mary Dranga Campbell's contributions to work for the blind were not unworthy of either the man she had once married or the man who was briefly her father-in-law. Even before she became Charles Campbell's wife, she had begun to roll up a respectable professional record. After taking library training at Stanford University, she spent six years as cataloguer of the Indiana University Library, then entered the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy (later called the School of Social Service Administration of the University of Chicago) and did some research in eugenics as part of her field training. During her marriage to her widowed brother-in-law she was assistant editor of the Outlook and assistant superintendent of the Ohio School for the Blind. At the end of World War I, when her marriage dissolved, she spent three years abroad in charge of child welfare work in Serbia and another three years lecturing in the United States on the social welfare problems of the battered Balkan states.
In 1926, she came back to work for the blind, beginning as executive director of the newly created Council for the Blind in the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare. Three years later she was named executive secretary of the Missouri Commission for the Blind; after three years there, she became director of work for the handicapped in the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities. Toward the end of 1934 she resigned to take on what proved to be her longest job, as head of the social service division of the Seeing Eye. There she remained for 11 years, until retirement shortly before her seventieth birthday.
A photograph taken when she completed her Foundation assignment in 1954 projected much the same image as one that had appeared in the Outlook 40 years earlier: a substantially built woman whose square-cut features, firm chin, and piercing eyes bespoke intelligence, determination, and large reserves of inner strength. "She was not an easy person," was the comment of a man who knew her in her prime. "She could be extremely critical of others, often to the point of intolerance, but no one could question her dedication or the high standards of discipline and duty she set for herself." Age softened her—those who came to know her in later years commented on a graciousness of manner and a youthful viewpoint that constantly enlarged the circle of people who fondly addressed this indomitable descendant of the Vikings as "Aunt Mary." Her professional accomplishments were twice recognized by her colleagues, once in 1950 when the AAWB gave her its Shotwell Award, and again in 1955 when the Foundation honored her with the Migel Medal.
The spadework done on the Foundation files served as the nucleus for the present-day records center, whose scope was enlarged when it became the repository for Helen Keller's private papers following her death on June 1, 1968. Bequeathed under Helen's will, which also made the Foundation residuary legatee of her literary rights and royalties, the collection consisted initially of some 32,000 items of private correspondence, manuscript texts, notes, legal documents, photographs, and press clippings, plus 36,000 pieces of fan mail. Cataloging of the Keller collection and its preservation was assigned to Marguerite Levine, supervisor of the records center. In 1972 an acquisition program was begun to fill gaps in the collection, notably those created when Helen's Connecticut home was destroyed by fire in 1946. Plans were also under way for microfilming the papers.
Important as it was to build communication and information resources that could strengthen services for blind people, it was at least as essential to enhance public understanding of those services and what they accomplished. The "Weeks for the Blind" conducted in the Twenties were early measures toward this end; so were the well-advertised public appearances of Helen Keller. But because so many of these efforts, whether national or local, were tied to appeals for contributions or legislative benefits, they tended to be counterproductive in their net effect on public opinion. Placement agents seeking industrial work opportunities for blind people repeatedly found employers readier to give checks than jobs.
The paradoxical effects of publicizing the needs of blind people had an impact on the beneficiaries as well. Hector Chevigny, who had strong feelings on the subject, declared that pity "is the luxury of the giver and the destroyer of the recipient." No one disagreed, nor was there any lack of insight into causes. Repeated studies pinpointed the origins of the stereotypes and the hidden hostilities aroused by the very thought of blindness. Understanding the problem, however, was only the first small step toward solving it.
Public relations had just begun to emerge as a professional discipline with its own set of ethics and structured procedures when, in the early Twenties, the Foundation approached the task of influencing public opinion. For the first two decades or so, the public relations function was regarded primarily as a handmaiden to fund-raising. In the mid-Thirties, in one of her periodic bursts of irritation at the Foundation, Helen Keller wrote Walter Holmes:
I doubt if any organization in America of the importance of the Foundation has such an ineffective, uninspired publicity department. Its endeavors are positively pitiful, and have the effect of confusing the public. It seems very strange that with all the able business people connected with our work nobody should point out that stupidity and cheapness usually go hand in hand … publicity of a high order demands brains, experience and ingenuity, and all these cost money.
Helen was reacting, in part, to the Foundation's refusal to go along with her and her teacher's scheme for manufacturing and merchandising a "Helen Keller Doll." As envisaged by Helen, the doll would have had a tiny booklet attached to its arm,
telling the wonderful Fairy Tale of how the Lady with the Golden Key had unlocked the dungeon of King Dark, released the little deaf-blind Princess and led her forth into the beauty and joy of the sun-warm world. Then there was to be a tender appeal to the children of the nation to help the grown-up Helen Keller to open all doors and shuttered windows in the lives of blind people everywhere. …
When the Foundation rejected the idea as impracticable, Helen and Anne considered carrying it out as a private money-making effort but were persuaded to abandon it as undignified commercialism.
The Foundation was probably right about the questionable taste of the doll proposition, but Helen was right, too, in her criticism of the Foundation's public education efforts at the time. Publicity specialists were hired for temporary periods (three or six months) and then released, a system which saved money but precluded continuity of planning. A more stable arrangement was effected in the Forties, when a full-time man was employed, but it was not until late 1952, with the advent of Gregor Ziemer, that a sustained public education effort got under way.
In April of that year Winthrop K. Howe, Jr., a blind man from Rochester, New York, who was a Foundation trustee and a member of the New York State Commission for the Blind, raised the issue of improving public education at an executive committee meeting. "All members present generally agreed that the need was evident but that the method for meeting it was not clear," the minutes of the meeting reported. Actually, the method was simple enough: hire a competent person, supply him with an adequate budget, and give him his head in exploring avenues of influence.
Ziemer filled the bill. He had behind him a long and colorful career as author, educator, foreign correspondent, and lecturer. Energetic, imaginative, and supremely self-confident, he was not in the least fazed by the scope of his assignment: "correcting and readjusting the misunderstanding of blindness in the mind of the sighted world." In the dozen years he spent as director of public education before retiring in 1964, he opened numerous new channels of communication in campaigns which twice won top awards from the American Public Relations Association. Under his direction there emerged a steady stream of press kits, spot announcements, taped radio and TV programs, and a variety of other informational materials for use by schools, service clubs, police departments, and many other outlets.
Aware that attitudes are more apt to be shaped indirectly than through outright propaganda, Ziemer prepared and distributed to the media, to writers and lecturers and other opinion molders, a list of "32 misconceptions about blindness." Sample items:
Blind people can eat without having to be fed. … Blind people don't feel people's faces to get acquainted with them. … Not all blind people can read braille. … Blind people are not all musical geniuses. … They can't foretell the future any more than any one of us. … Not all blind people become paragons of patience and resignation when they become blind.
Another insight was that constructive national educational campaigns could readily be undermined by poorly conducted local efforts. Much of the Foundation-produced material was therefore sent out to agencies for the blind for local adaptation and distribution. Supplying content was only half the job; the other half was to equip these agencies, few of which had public relations staffs, with knowledge of basic techniques. In 1957 the Foundation held the first of seven annual public relations workshops for local agencies. Following Ziemer's retirement, the idea lapsed for several years, but it was partially revived in 1971 when members of the Foundation's information staff addressed AAWB group sessions concerned with public relations.
During Ziemer's tenure an elaborate new dual format emerged for the Foundation's annual report. One version, with extensive text and pictures, was designed for the professional audience and major contributors; a shorter and more modest version keyed to fund-raising went to 250,000 annual contributors. After four years a simpler, less expensive, single edition served both audiences, but a hallmark of every Ziemer-produced annual report was that even the briefest managed to include a photograph of him. The backstage role customarily played by public relations people was one he airily rejected.
The Foundation's director of information in 1972 was Patricia Scherf Smith, who had joined the staff in 1965 as director of the publications division following ten years of experience as an editor and public relations specialist in the medical and hospital field. Under Mrs. Smith, who became head of the information department in 1968, a vigorous policy of public education was resumed, with special emphasis on the audio-visual field.
That decades of high-level effort had yet to succeed in shaping favorable public opinion was emphasized in 1971 when the Foundation's 50th anniversary symposium devoted major sessions to the subject of "Attitudes toward Blindness." These became the springboard for renewed attempts "to find rational ways of dealing with an irrational problem." The following year saw the holding of six regional meetings on attitudes, at some of which participants were blindfolded at luncheon so they could experience sightlessness for themselves. The goal of these and comparable projects was to create realistic knowledge that could loosen, and eventually replace, age-old prejudices born of ignorance.
