From the President’s Desk
by Barbara Pierce
As I write the title of this column for the last time, my mind riffles
through an entire generation of newsletter memories. By the time the next issue of
the Buckeye Bulletin goes to press, another person will be president of this
affiliate and will be writing some sort of column from the president’s perspective.
I am not going away; the time has simply come for someone else to lead this
organization.
Twenty-four years is a considerable time to be the point person for a
consumer organization with the mission to improve life and opportunities for blind
people. I was elected president in October of 1984 in Canton. At the time I was not
at all sure I could do the job, but Bob Eschbach was a candidate for a job that he
would not be offered if he was the president of the NFB of Ohio. So he stepped
down, and I became president with Charles Davis as my first vice. Eric Duffy had
only just joined the organization and would not attend the Washington Seminar or
the state convention until 1985. J.W. Smith was not yet a resident of Ohio and had
not even begun work on his doctorate. The blind children whose families now
comprise the parents division had not been born, and those parents had no notion
that they would ever have an interest in blindness issues.
The affiliate treasurer was George Gilbert, who lived in Oberlin, so, when I
needed to have him write checks, Bob and I jumped on our tandem bike and rode
across town to deliver the vouchers. One of my early crises was George’s decision
not to run as treasurer in 1986, or maybe 1988. I counted myself lucky when Paul
Ingram, a vendor in the southern part of the state, said that his wife was a
bookkeeper and would consider becoming NFB-O treasurer. I have lost track of how
long she held the job, but she was never very happy doing it, and she soon decided
not to run again. Pat Eschbach agreed to fill in for a while, but she was convinced
that we should and could find a blind person to do the job. When she and Bob left
Ohio in 1994 because of a job change, Kathy Arthurs, then president of the parents
division, took the job for two years.
But in 1996 Pat’s conviction that I could find a blind person with the
ability and commitment to do the treasurer’s job was proved right. I didn’t have to
look further than my own chapter. Sherry Ruth had been a bookkeeper before losing
her sight, and she still has a bookkeeper’s mind and memory. Looking back, it seems
to me that, about the time Sherry joined our team, we hit the big-time. She has the
integrity of a saint and the sense of responsibility of an ICU nurse. One of the
greatest gifts I leave my successor is a financial officer who is efficient,
accurate, and accountable down to the penny.
During the early years of my administration I was working days for Oberlin
College, though I devoted almost all of my evenings and vacation time to Federation
work. I found it challenging to spread myself across the state and nation to do
Federation work while raising three teens and holding down a fulltime job. I
commuted to Chicago once a quarter to sit on the publication board of a magazine
for the blind. I served on and eventually became chair of the BSVI Advisory
Committee till RSC decided to collapse all advisory committees into the Consumer
Advisory Council. I ducked the job of chairing that body, but I managed BSVI
matters and the nominations process behind the scenes. As far as I could tell, all
this took time and produced virtually nothing constructive for the blind community.
By this time (1988) I had been hired away from Oberlin by the NFB to edit its
national magazine, the Braille Monitor. This simplified my life, though it
increased my workload. I told myself that, at least when I took vacation days, I
would not be spending them doing NFB work. The only flaw in this plan was that
publishing a monthly magazine left almost no opportunity to use my vacation days.
Then, in 1993, Eric Duffy, who had been first vice president since 1988,
approached me with an intriguing idea. He could come to work for the NFB as our
fulltime employee. It would mean resigning from the board, but he and I worked
together well, practically reading each other’s mind, and this seemed an intriguing
way to raise the affiliate’s profile in the state and among those who needed the
skills and advocacy the NFB offers. Any affiliate enters dangerous waters when it
begins spending lots of money on infrastructure, be it offices, personnel, or
vehicles. How can you really be certain that the funds invested in those fixed
expenses are being spent in a way that will do the most good for blind people? I
was worried that we might be stepping into quicksand, and so were our national
leaders. Eventually Dr. Jernigan commented to me that, if any state could make such
an experiment work, it was Ohio. We were facing growing responsibilities in this
affiliate, and we had to find new ways of getting the work done. We decided to make
the experiment of hiring an employee to do the day-to-day work that I would be
doing if I lived in Columbus and did not have a demanding and time-consuming job.
Now that both Eric and I are preparing to depart from our prominent positions
in the affiliate, I think I can say that the fifteen-year experiment has been a
success. This is almost entirely because of Eric’s talent, intelligence, and
diplomacy. His complete understanding of and devotion to the NFB’s philosophy have
meant that I could turn him loose like a guided missile and know that he would work
his way unerringly to the heart of any issue. The world is not yet a healthy and
competitive place for blind people. BSVI and RSC seem to be in freefall, and it is
impossible to guess how much damage will be done to rehabilitation for blind
Ohioans before the program levels out.
But we have kept faith with those seeking better instruction for their blind
children and the adults demanding effective rehabilitation. We have counseled
seniors losing vision and conducted inservices for professionals of various kinds
who serve blind consumers. NFB-NEWSLINE® has been alive and growing in Ohio for
more than a decade. We are engaged in a mentoring pilot program that we hope will
help demonstrate how valuable to blind young people the mentoring they receive from
blind adults can be. We have established five divisions, and hope to get the
student division off the ground yet again.
As I step down, I recognize that in many ways we have just begun our work.
Many areas of the state have no NFB presence, and we should be stronger everywhere
we are present. We must find a way to increase the public funding of NEWSLINE. We
seem to have beaten back the latest threat to the school for the blind, but it
looks very much as if forces are gathering to try to subsume rehabilitation under a
large umbrella, which means that services for blind people would have even less
specificity. The libraries for the blind are losing funding and will soon be
consolidated into one program. Such a move will require close observation. In
short, we face dangers on every side in the months and years ahead. I plan to take
an active part in meeting these challenges, but I leave it to those who are younger
and more energetic to blaze the trail. Plenty of work remains to be done, and I
intend to do my share. I trust that my successor can count on you to carry your
part of the load as well. Thank you for the support you have given me through the
years of my presidency. This is the moment for all of us to redouble our efforts.
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