Beatrice born mobility visually impaired in 1944, blind in 1956, first O&M lesson in 1960

Safe Toddles Talks Orientation and Mobility

Beatrice weighed 2 pounds when was born into a family that already had four children. Her mom and dad didn’t have insurance and avoided hospitals. I don’t think my mother real…my mother or father realized how poor my vision was. She remembered that she was only able to see partially out of her right eye. She didn’t realize how little sight she had until recently when she remembered how she used to cry as a little girl because she couldn’t answer the questions in school. In the first grade, they’d have problems or something on the board and when they called on me, I'd just cry. And it was just because I couldn’t see it. I just felt like, how come everybody can answer these questions and I can’t answer anything. And then they realized that I really couldn’t see.
Beatrice was first introduced to independent O&M when she was in high school. The goal was so that she could begin taking the bus to school. There appeared to be little understanding of what she may or may not have understood conceptually – O&M instruction in the 1960s was centered on methods designed to teach adults who had become blind, not those who grew up blind or mobility visually impaired. Beatrice had good days and bad days dealing with the public and her family about her travel. That “horrible experience one time where the driver physically took her off the bus because he passed her stop and she had the temerity to point it out” and the bus driver who waved down a policeman who drove her across the street she didn’t feel confident crossing on her own. To her daughter who doesn’t want her to travel independently, but also doesn’t have the time to drive her. Beatrice reminds us that traveling as a blind person, there is a whole lot more to navigate than just stairs, doors, and street crossings there are the behaviors and attitudes of others.

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