Thunder Dog by Michael Hingson Page B

translate the received information into the Braille marks. The minicomputer acted as a controller for the Braille terminal.
    “It wasn’t fast, but it did the job,” said Dick, who went on to earn his PhD and spend his career as a human factors engineer. His project was written up and published in 1972 in a journal for the Association for Computing Machinery.
    Dick and I kept in touch and batted some ideas around on other sorts of Braille displays, and Dick went on to be involved in developing electronic mail (or e-mail , as we call it now) as a communications aid for deaf adults, way back in the late ’70s when most people had never heard of e-mail yet and the Internet was still called the ARPANET. Smart guy. He loved my pachinko machine.
    The pachinko was a mechanical Japanese gaming device that was similar to a vertical pinball machine. You shot small balls up into the machine, which then cascaded down through a mass of metal pins, sometimes landing in special pockets for bonus points.
    “What’s a blind guy doing with a pinball machine?” Dick once said.
    “Wait until you see me play darts,” I replied.
    Dick’s Braille terminal helped ignite my love affair with technology, and one of my passions is helping to put the latest, most powerful, and most easy-to-use technology in the hands of blind people. The technology we have available today has changed the rules of the game and given me and other blind people more independence and access to information than ever before. It’s an exciting time to be blind.
    When I graduated from UC Irvine with highest honors, my parents and my brother were in the audience, watching. Besides my brother, I was the first one in the whole family to earn a college degree. Well, besides Squire, my aging guide dog. Chancellor Aldrich awarded Squire a degree too. Only instead of physics, his degree was in “Lethargic Guidance,” a nod to his propensity for frequent naps now that he was in his sunset years.
    I stayed on at Irvine and earned a master’s degree and a teaching credential. I also took some business courses that I thought might be useful out in the real world. But I did run into one roadblock at school. As I began to consider pursuing a doctorate degree in physics, I ran into some pushback, from certain professors, that seemed to be related to my blindness. I did some work with a lawyer and in the process gained access to my file in the physics department. We discovered a shocking letter. It read, “A blind person cannot do the high level work necessary for an advanced degree in physics.”
    At first I was stunned. Then I got angry. But those feelings passed pretty quickly, and I was left with a two-word response.
    Why not?
    As it happened, I ended up landing a great job right out of grad school, so I decided not to pursue a doctorate. But, I also decided to live out the rest of my life on the “why not” principle.
    And those two words are my secret, the secret behind blind power. Why not? Why not ride a bike or drive a car or play darts or earn a PhD in physics? Why not try it all, just to see if I can do it?
    Here’s a great Milton Berle quote from my vintage radio show vault. He sums it up perfectly: “I’d rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star. I’d rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might-have-been has never been, but a has was once an are.”
    I think there is truth to the observation that your life passes before you when you face death or a very stressful situation and so I remembered my college life as I descended the stairs on September 11, 2001. I constantly looked for memories that could help me survive whatever happened to Roselle and me in our time of terror.

    The temperature inside the stairwell continues to climb. I’m feeling more upbeat, so I try another joke. “All this walking is a great way to lose weight.” Laughter again. Other quips filter back up to me.