Thunder Dog (8 page)

On my birthday, Mr. Herbo invited me to Foster’s Freeze for a banana split, and we made it an annual event. He was amazed when the servers couldn’t tell I was blind. Even though my eyes are not functional, the structure of my eyes is intact, and so are the muscles that move my eyes and my eyelids. I have learned to look at people, using their voice and movements to cue in on their locations and heights, so when you talk to me, you will probably get the impression that I am looking at you, even though I have no vision. Blind people have eye colors that range the spectrum. My eyes are a light, milky color. I like to think they match my strawberry blond tresses.

One day I invited Mr. Herbo to my house to see my ham radio setup. My dad and I were licensed ham operators, and with our high-frequency radios we could talk to people on any part of the globe. My parents had given me a small room in the house to set up the equipment, and when Mr. Herbo came over, I took him back to show it off. I went in first and started booting up the system. I was busy and didn’t notice that Mr. Herbo hung back.

“I can’t see what you’re doing,” Mr. Herbo said. I was working in pitch black.

“Sorry, Mr. Herbo,” I said. “I forgot you can see.”

Mr. Herbo and I stayed in touch for many years. He came to my wedding and visited Karen and me several times. At one point we lost touch for a while. Finally Mr. Herbo looked up my number one day and gave me a call, out of the blue. When I picked up the phone, he said, “Hello, Mike.”

“Hi, Mr. Herbo!” It had been fifteen years, but I will never forget his voice. I always end our conversations with, “Just remember, Mr. Herbo, I’ll always be younger than you.”

While many of my teachers were as encouraging and accommodating as Mr. Herboldsheimer, my high school experience was not without obstacles. In the spring of my freshman year, I was called into the assistant principal’s office. “We have a problem, Mike,” he said. He opened up the Palmdale High School student handbook and began to read: “No live animals of any kind are allowed on school buses.” I had been riding the bus to school with my very first guide dog, Squire. We were both still new and building our handler–guide dog relationship, but Squire was doing a great job. He minded his own business on the bus and had never caused any problems. The other kids were interested in him for the first few days, but after the novelty wore off, they went back to discussing kid stuff, and everything went back to normal. So I was shocked and confused. The law is clear. Certified guide dogs can legally go anywhere a blind person goes.

I went home and checked the handbook for myself. That I even had access to the handbook was due to the work of a wonderful local group called the Antelope Valley Braille Transcribers. At that time, not many Braille books were mass-produced, so many books and other printed materials had to be transcribed into Braille, page by page, by volunteers. Later on, in the late ’60s, transcribed books began to be mass-produced using a thermoforming device. It was a slow process whereby the bumps on a Braille page were transferred to a special sheet of plastic. The plastic sheet was heated and then used to imprint a sheet of paper, resulting in a duplicate page of Braille. The process was something like a printing press, but it was revolutionary and meant that books and other printed materials could be produced cheaper and more quickly, a page at a time. But at this point, we didn’t have access to this type of device and that meant most school-related materials had to be laboriously hand transcribed.

I pored over my hand-inscribed Braille student handbook and found the school bus rules. It was right there under my fingers. According to the handbook, Squire was not allowed on the bus.

Guide Dogs for the Blind had given me a special card to carry. It read, “California law guarantees a blind person the legal right to be accompanied by a specially trained dog guide in all public accommodations and on all public transportation.” But the card wasn’t any help now.

As irritated as my dad had been when the neighbors called to complain about the blind kid riding his bike, he was a hundred times more incensed now. He called the assistant principal that evening and asked if there had been a complaint about Squire. There had not. The school offered me alternate transportation; they planned on hiring a car and driver to take me to and from school. But this idea, besides costing the school district unnecessary expense, went against everything my parents had tried to do. My entire childhood was about finding a way for me to fit in and function in the community, not separating me and treating me as special or disabled.

My dad requested a special school board meeting to discuss the issue. Meanwhile, the district hired a private car and driver to ferry me back and forth to school. The Saturday before the school board meeting, my dad spent the day in the Palmdale Public Library, scouring
Black’s Law Dictionary
, known as the most widely used law dictionary in the United States and the reference of choice for definitions in legal briefs and court opinions.

California law was clear: “Any blind person, deaf person, or disabled person who is a passenger on any common carrier, airplane, motor vehicle, railway train, motorbus, streetcar, boat, or any other public conveyance or mode of transportation operating within this state, shall be entitled to have with him or her a specially trained guide dog, signal dog, or service dog.”
⁴

The question my dad was researching was, is the school bus operated by the public school district considered a “public conveyance”? Dad reasoned that Palmdale High School was a public high school and all children in the district boundaries were allowed to attend. The school bus was a vehicle utilized by the school district to transport children to this public facility, so in his mind it qualified as a common carrier. My dad’s library research bore out his assumption.

Mom, Dad, and I attended the meeting at the school district office in the public meeting room. It smelled like chalk dust, Old Spice, and Brylcreem. There were six or eight rows of chairs, and we sat in the front row. The school board members sat across the front of the room with the chairman in the middle. Squire rested quietly at my feet. I was nervous and excited.

The school board took several hours to work through its agenda while we waited for our item to come up. Mom left to have a smoke a couple of times, and Dad’s foot tapped quickly, shaking the bench. Finally it was our turn.

The superintendent began with a pronouncement: “The Board of Education has set a rule that no live animal will be allowed on the school bus. As a board, we are tasked with enforcing the rules. We will not make an exception to the rule.”

My dad stood up, facing the board, was recognized, and asked, “Did anybody complain?”

The superintendent answered no.

“Did my son or his guide dog misbehave?”

No, again.

“The fact is, under California law it is a felony to deny access to public transportation to a blind person with a guide dog.”

Go, Dad
. I was proud.

“You can have all the rules you want, but you are violating the law.” He was getting heated now. “If you guys keep this up, somebody’s going to spend time in the penitentiary.”

The superintendent was quiet. The atmosphere in the room was thick with tension. My dad’s challenge lingered in the air. Then the superintendent turned to the chairman of the board who worked as a lawyer and asked, “Is that true?” His voice was laced with arrogance. The lawyer said yes, it was true.

Pause again. Then an answer. His voice was loud and clear. “Well, we have our rules, and we have to go by our rules. Our local rules supersede the law because it’s a school situation.” My dad pointed out that since the school district had hired a car and driver to ferry me to school, that made that car a school bus under the law. The board chose to ignore his arguments and voted 2 to 3 in favor of supporting the school board rule. We had lost. Squire and I had been officially kicked off the school bus. My parents fumed all the way home.

My dad was not yet done. His next step was a direct appeal to Edmund “Pat” Brown, the governor of California. Governor Brown was an advocate for progressive and populist causes, including education and fair housing, and his tenure was marked by social change. Dad wrote a letter to the governor explaining what had happened and requesting my reinstatement on the school bus. His plea was supported by a careful, detailed argument, the fruits of his library research. He ended the letter with “This is wrong. The school board is discriminating against my son.”

Dad mailed his letter off to Sacramento.

Next thing we heard, the superintendent of the Antelope Valley School District was summoned to a meeting at the state capitol. He went. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall in that room.

A few days later I got called into the assistant principal’s office once again. This time, the news was better. “Well, you’re back on the school bus,” the principal said. “Your dad made it happen.” He clapped his hand on my shoulder. I smiled, big.

I was proud of my dad. Chalk one up for a man who never went beyond the eighth grade but who could wield a law dictionary when necessary. I learned that it is appropriate to take a stand and to defend a principle even if you have to knock on the governor’s office door in the process. Sometimes the little guy wins.

High school went smoothly after that. I was pretty quiet and a bit of a nerd. Dad and I loved our ham radios and were part of the Civil Defense network called RACES, as well as the Military Affiliated Radio Service (MARS), the network of amateur radio operators who helped military personnel overseas communicate with loved ones here in the States. I kept busy with Boy Scouts, church choir, and academics. I joined the math club and became a mathlete, part of a mathematics team that participated in team competitions solving difficult math problems. I did all the work in my head and was pretty competitive.

I loved big band music, and my favorite singing group was the Kingston Trio. I also loved musicals, and my cousin Rob and I drove our parents crazy singing the songs from
Music Man
at the top of our lungs in the car on a family trip to Yosemite. There was a lot of “Trouble in River City” on that trip.

Then I fell in love. Not with a girl, but with old radio shows. I loved Jack Benny and Fred Allen. Their quick and self-deprecating brand of humor tickled me. I listened to a military show called
Command Performance
featuring performers such as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, and the Andrews Sisters. The Beatles were just getting popular, but I loved the old stuff. I still do. I also listened to action shows like
Gunsmoke
;
Yours Truly
,
Johnny Dollar
; and
Have Gun, Will Travel
. When I got to college, I made some serious money through my love for old radio programs. My dad let me use his tape recorder to tape radio shows. I created a database of my collection and sold copies of old shows to collectors. I still enjoy them and have more than fifty thousand vintage radio shows in my collection. Decades later, the shows never grow old, and they never stop making me laugh. As Jack Benny would say, “Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

I was too busy with school and scouting to think much about girls yet, although my parents made me take dance lessons. I also learned how to play piano, but I wish my piano teacher had let me play by ear. I hated having to read music by Braille because you had to play one-handed while the other hand read the notes. Michael Blizzard Hingson did not like to slow down.

Even so, there are times when leaping out in front may not be the best choice. One day, many years later, a trip down the stairs would require a 100 percent team effort.

In the stairwell I start using an old trick the Boy Scouts taught me, checking the heat by touching the fire doors on each floor. I loved being a scout. I’m an Eagle Scout and a member of the Order of the Arrow, Scouting’s honor society. Two million young men have earned the Eagle Scout designation, while only 180,000 have earned the right to don the Order of the Arrow sash, which recognizes cheerful service to others. Once an Eagle, always an Eagle.