We’re back! This past week my Seeing Eye dog Luna and I visited three different schools in person to talk with third graders about guide dogs and what it’s like to be blind. Pretty wonderful to be back with the kids in person, but I gotta be honest: two years without any in-person visits to schools left me a little rusty.

As always, lots of questions from the kids. (photo by Jamie Ceaser)

During our first presentation, the one at Indian Trail Elementary, I forgot to give Luna the “Outside” command at the end so they could see how well a Seeing Eye dog maneuvers around obstacles (including 3rd graders sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor) to guide me to the door to the hallway.

At the second presentation, the one at Braeside, I never took the Braille version of “Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound” out of my bag to show them how Braille works.

Third time’s the charm, though: the kids at Ravinia Elementary School got the whole show. And here’s the good news:no matter what I did or did not remember to do in those three presentations, the questions the kids asked afterwards were as thoughtful and sweet as ever. Here’s a sampling from the third-graders Luna and I met at Indian Trail, Braeside and Ravinia elementary schools this past week:

• So is going blind like closing your eyes for the rest of your life?
• Do you remember what colors looked like when you were a little kid and could still see?
• Was it hard to make friends after you were blind?
• You said you only see the color black, but if you got really, really close to a bright light, would you know the light was on?
• How do you swim if you can’t see where you’re going?
• So if you see the color black, but you can tell close up if something is white, does it look brown?
• Did you ever drown?
• When you drive, do you, like, have to use a navigator thing or something?
• So if you still remember colors, then when you are imagining things, do you see them in color then?
• I know we’re not supposed to pet your dog when she’s working, but when you pet her, how does she know it’s you who is petting her?
• If you don’t drive, then, well, do you, like, do you take a taxi?
• How do you get on the plane if pets aren’t allowed on planes?
• Where does your dog go when you take a taxi?
• Is your dog blind, too, or just you?
• Do you inspire other people?

With all of us wearing masks, some of the questions were hard to hear. Did that little boy just ask me if I inspire people? How do third-graders even know the word “inspire?” Repeating his question out loud gave me time to think about how to answer that.

These schools all participate in a weeklong ”Disability Awareness” program, and from what I’ve observed, it really works.

Days before my visit, the kids had met a para-olympian who uses a wheelchair to win track and field medals. During her presentation she showed them how her prosthesis works. “It was awesome!” one of the third-graders told me. After I left they’d be learning to say “hello” and “My name is…” in sign language. “It’s pretty cool to meet people with disabilities,” one of them said.

That was my cue.

Do I inspire people? “Well, I do a lot of things, you know, like go to concerts and eat out at restaurants and swim at the health club and travel in taxis and airplanes. Maybe getting used to seeing me out and about having fun will inspire people to make friends with people who have disabilities,” I said. “Because like you already know, we can be pretty cool.”

And you know what? Those kids inspire me. They’re pretty cool, too.

A note from Greg Borzo, the organizer of the Author’s Night event at Half Sour:

Good morning,

I regret to say that we’ve had to postpone the South Loop Neighbors’ Authors Night on 2-2-22 at Half Sour. The snow is building and expected to continue until Wednesday evening. The timing could not be worse! Five to nine inches are predicted, with winds up to 30 mph. Bummer. We could push through and have the event, but the snow would drastically decrease the turnout. And we wouldn’t want to take the chance that someone might get hurt coming to the event.
Thanks for your understanding,

Greg Borzo, South Loop Neighbors board member
gregborzo54@gmail.com
Author of “Chicago’s Fabulous Fountains”

Please note: Half Sour at 755 S. Clark in Chicago will be open for food and drinks tonight, it’s just the Author’s Night that won’t be happening. Greg is hoping we do Author’s Night on a Wednesday later in February — I’ll post information about that here on the Safe & Sound blog once it is scheduled. In the meantime, be careful out there!

It was a Friday night in the fall of 1977. I was a junior in the journalism program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Earlier, I’d gotten an essay exam back during one of my hardest—and favorite classes. I aced it. So, that afternoon, off I went to happy hour at a campustown joint called the Round Robin.

I trust Checkbook’s evaluations because I know how much work is behind them.

I got home around 7:30—home being a classic old rundown house that I shared with seven housemates. Nobody was home when the phone rang. When I picked it up, I heard the voice of Robert Krughoff for the first time. I can say, without exaggeration, that call changed my life for the good, and for ever.

Weeks before the phone rang that night I’d applied for an internship in Washington, D.C. through an agency that shopped potential interns around the Capital—everywhere from congressional offices to federal agencies to lobbyists—and to various nonprofits.

Robert had called to interview me. Now, the first thing I should’ve thought about was this: It was a Friday night at 7:30 CT, 8:30 ET—and Robert was still at the office. But I was so excited that someone was interested that all I could do is answer his questions as best I could. It was like a 45 minute call.

Somehow, I must have done OK. I was offered the spot and by January of 1978 I was living in a shared apartment on Rhode Island Avenue and 14^th NW.

A year or so earlier, Robert and a partner had founded Washington Consumers’ Checkbook. At some point, after a bad experience with a car repair shop, Robert concluded that there should be something like Consumer Reports—but instead of products, it would rate services.

Today Checkbook operations serve seven metropolitan areas with ratings and advice on choosing services like roofers, plumbers, repair shops of all ilks, and the like. It also evaluates health care providers—surgeons, hospitals, dentists, and veterinarians.

That may sound quaint today when we have customer ratings everywhere online. But it was novel back then. And Checkbook’s work still stands superior, in my view, to any popular online ratings sites. That’s because it surveys only its and Consumer Reports subscribers—there can be no ringers or ballot stuffers. It uses actual survey research science in its methodologies. In addition, it does exhaustive price comparisons, and researches complaints (or lack thereof) against firms it rates.

I’m still a subscriber, and still use it regularly.

Robert was an exacting editor and researcher. As my friend Kevin (current executive editor) once said: “Do not ever answer a Robert question unless you are absolutely sure that you know what you’re talking about.” Otherwise, as I learned way back when, you would undergo an exhaustive grilling that would expose you for not knowing your stuff. I can still hear Robert’s deep voice, and his distinctive stammer, as he picked my work apart. It wasn’t cruel, but it was tough.

Robert graduated from the University of Chicago Law School—where he discovered he really didn’t want to practice law. After working at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW—later split into Health and Human Services and the Department of Education), he founded Checkbook in 1976.

Robert was precise by nature and by necessity: when you publish information that makes a business look bad, that information better be perfectly accurate.

I interned through June of my junior year. A year later, after my senior year, they offered me a full time job—in the 1979 economy, jobs were hard to come by so I was grateful.

I spent three years driving around the D.C. metro area, visiting supermarkets and hardware stores and other retailers, carrying a clipboard doing market basket price surveys. More than once I was shooed out by managers. I made countless calls posing as a consumer getting price quotes for specific repair jobs. I visited local consumer offices around the region and camped out for days at a time to go through physical files of complaints that had been lodged. I wrote articles—on a typewriter. I stayed late to call subscribers for donations in the evening hours. I even knocked on doors to solicit donations a couple times.

To borrow from an old Peace Corps slogan, it was the toughest job I’ll ever love. And the experience has served me throughout my career stops.

I share all this because I just learned that Robert Krughoff just retired. He left with his organization in great shape. The magazine is just part of the operation now. There is a health care research unit whose clients include federal and state governments, as well as large insurance companies. Way back in my day, Checkbook sued to make public data about health outcomes—data that helps consumers make better choices and that previously had been closely guarded by the industry. (I actually used that data when my dad was looking at open heart surgery.)

You can learn more about my old boss by reading this press release, and/or his open letter. All I can tell you is he had enormous positive impact.

Including on me. Thanks Robert.

PS: Checkbook serves these metro areas:

Chicago
San Francisco Bay area
Delaware Valley
Minneapolis-St. Paul
Boston
Seattle/Puget Sound
Washington, D.C.

If you live in any, check Checkbook out.

A journalist contacted me a few months ago. “I’m working on a story about restaurants and accessibility,” she said. “Would you be willing to meet me for an interview?”

Of course I said yes.

We met at our local, Half Sour, and after introducing herself she asked, ““Do you want me to tell you what I look like?”

I’m getting that a lot lately. People asking me if I want to know what they look like. More and more people giving panel discussions on Zoom, leading presentations at libraries, introducing themselves at lectures are describing their looks out loud after introducing themselves.

I’m Beth. This is my back. I have a red coat.

I answered the reporter’s question with a question of my own: Why would I?

” I don’t know,” she said with a nervous chuckle. “I just read on the internet that I should describe my physical appearance when I introduce myself to someone who can’t see.” I hated hearing this. I have no idea where this declaration started, but it sure has sprouted up on a lot of “disability etiquette” lists lately.

Maybe it has something to do with all the Zoom meetings people have been on the past couple of years? Did some disability advocacy organization decide this is a way to “equalize” the experience for people who are blind? The one thing I do know is this: they didn’t ask me for my opinion on the matter!

In the past year or so I’ve attended more and more events (live and virtual) where the speakers or participants are told to “self-describe” themselves before starting their presentations. You know, for the “benefit of people in the audience who have a visual impairment.”

For me? I’d rather not know. Asking people to describe what they look like is awkward. And let’s be real. Can I trust anyone’s self-assessment, anyway?

In Mike’s “Mondays with Mike” post earlier this week he wrote about the passing of our dear friend Janet Smith. Janet’s husband Jim Loellbach worked with University of Illinois Chicago staff and graduate students all last week to set up and present a virtual celebration of Janet’s life this past Sunday. More than 300 Colleagues, students, family and friends zoomed in, and being virtual and all, people living everywhere from Beirut to Hamburg, Miami to Walla Walla Washington could celebrate Janet with us, too.

I felt honored to be one of the dozen attendees asked to give a short presentation at the event. Knowing Janet’s co-workers and grad students were responsible for the technology assured me it’d all be accessible – I’d be able to “mute” and “unmute” using my screen software.

And I was right. It was.

When I sent an email their way the next day to thank them for their technology prowess, one of them responded with an apology. “I am glad you felt the event was accessible,” they wrote. “I was a little concerned about that, wondered if we should have had all the speakers describe themselves first.”

Argh! I’m sorry they felt this way. Self-describing takes time , and I was much more interested in hearing what people at the celebration had to say about Janet than hearing what the people telling the stories think they look like.

During my short presentation about Janet, I mentioned that one advantage of being blind is that you get to walk arm-in-arm with friends a lot. Janet and I walked arm-in-arm everywhere – to the Chicago River, the Chicago Lakefront, Printers Row Park, Millennium Park, nearby restaurants, bars, and the wine shop. Walking arm-in-arm makes it easier to hear each other, and the conversations we had –especially in these past two years – are a gift from Janet to me.

Another advantage of being blind? not knowing what people look like. In the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., I live in a sensory world where “people cannot be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I’m left to judge others by what they say. And what they do.

Something about this new emphasis on having people self-describe themselves seems counter-intuitive to efforts to become more diverse. Do I need to know what people look like to judge what it is they are saying? I’d rather have them introduce themselves by saying their name and what it is about them that prompted the event to invite them as a presenter.

Which is exactly what happened at Janet’s celebration Sunday. Tears were shed, yes. We laughed some, too. Friends and colleagues spoke with Italian accents, English accents, Scandinavian accents and in all sorts of American dialects. I suppose we all looked pretty different from each other, but who cares? The one thing we have in common is far more important: our love of — and gratitude for — our friendships with Janet.

This just in: public health officials reported this morning that the number of COVID hospitalizations are continuing to decrease in Illinois. With covid “in retreat” now, we’re hoping people will feel more comfortable attending South Loop Neighbors’ Authors Night in person next Wednesday, February 2 at Half Sour, 755 S. Clark in Chicago.

The event is free, and four local authors will give ten-minute talks about our books and our lives as writers. Keeping the talks short should allow some time for questions after the presentations.

The event includes an hourlong social hour with a cash bar from 6 to 7, then our little talks at 7 pm. It all takes place in the “back room” at Half Sour, a large, lovely, open room with plenty of space for social distancing. Books will be available for purchase and we authors will be more than happy to sign copies for book buyers.

Very flattering to be one of the chosen authors along with Amy Bizzarri (111 Places in Chicago that You Must Not Miss), Sylvester Boyd (The Road from Money), and Greg Borzo (Chicago’s Fabulous Fountains).

Can’t make it in person? Watch us online instead. Here’s the zoom info:
Topic: SLN Speaker Series: Author Night
Time: Feb 2, 2022 06:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82425447490?pwd=OW5VWjlGUWJTTHRqa1JtVWRlSzh2Zz09

Meeting ID: 824 2544 7490
Passcode: 517444