From: Kelly Pierce
Subject: one woman's war
This was in the congressional Record of Thursday, February 13. It is an
article from milwaukee magazine entitled "one Woman's War." it is a
portrait of the life and activism of Bonnie Peterson of milwaukee. It
was read into the record by Representive Klegzka, a Democrat from Wisconsin.
I particularly like the info near the end on adjustment to blindness
training. maybie it might be because I am a graduate of Blind, Inc.
kelly
Congressional Record dated Thursday, February 13, 1997
Extensions of Remarks Section
----------------------------------------
Tribute by KLECZKA (D-WI): SALUTE TO AN OUTSTANDING MILWAUKEEAN
[CR page E-261, 21 lines]
Attributed to KLECZKA (D-WI)
SALUTE TO AN OUTSTANDING MILWAUKEEAN
----------
HON. GERALD D. KLECZKA
OF WISCONSIN
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Thursday, February 13, 1997
Mr. KLECZKA. Mr. Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to salute one
f
Milwaukee's outstanding citizens, Bonnie Szortyka Peterson.
Ms. Peterson is featured in February's Milwaukee Magazine in a story
called
"One Woman's War." It's an appropriate title for a remarkable woman. The
article calls Ms. Peterson "the State's staunchest advocate for the blind"
and "the toughest critic of the system built to help them." I'm sure those
who read the article will agree.
I ask that the article be included in the Record.
----------------------------------------
Text Inserted by KLECZKA (D-WI): One Woman's War
[CR page E-262, 692 lines]
One Woman's War
(By Mary Van de Kamp Nohl)
The state's staunchest advocate for the blind is the toughest critic of
the
system built to help them. How Bonnie Peterson became a rebel, "the blind
bitch" and the last hope for those who are about to give up hope.
Long after the other teens at the sleepover party had stopped talking
about
the job fair at New Berlin High School and dozed off, 15-year-old Bonnie
Szortyka lay awake. It was 1968, and Bonnie had dreamt of becoming an
airline
stewardess, but now the dream was dead. A stewardess had to have perfect
vision.
She thought of becoming a teacher, but no, a teacher had to see a student
with his hand raised and Bonnie could see a hand only if it was held a foot
from her face. A teacher had to keep up with all of the paperwork and
onnie
could not.
As hard as she had worked to hide her blindness, the truth was catching
p
with her. Her Herculean effort to eke out passing grades by putting in
hree
times the hours her classmates did, writing with her nose scraping across a
page until the headaches became intolerable, the endless hours spent with
her
mother reading schoolwork to her--all of it was for naught.
Visions of careers, husbands and children filled the heads of the
slumbering teens around her, but as dawn approached, Bonnie could not
imagine
any job that would allow her to leave home and have a life of her own. Just
taking up space and air and food without giving anything back, she thought,
was no life at all.
The next night, knowing that it was a sin that would send her straight to
hell and disgrace her family, but unable to pretend anymore, Bonnie
zortyka
chocked down the contents of a giant economy bottle of aspirin. She went to
bed and waited to die.
Her body began to shake uncontrollably, but it was the sudden deathly
silence, the nothingness of death that terrified her and she dragged
erself
to the living room where her parents were watching TV. Bonnie didn't die,
but
the girl released from West Allis Memorial Hospital the next day to her
sobbing father had changed. She didn't want to die anymore; she wanted to
fight.
Born of despair and nurtured by anger, the seed planted that night would
grow into a lifetime crusade. Today, at age 44, Bonnie Szortyka Peterson,
n
adjunct public speaking professor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside
and
president of the National Federation of the Blind of Wisconsin (NFB),
battles
negative attitudes toward blindness and the low expectations and wasted
lives
that grow out of them.
Yet those negative attitudes--held by both the sighted and the blind--are
the bedrock of the system Wisconsin has built to help this state's 50,000
legally blind individuals, Peterson ways, "a system that makes the disabled
more dependent instead of independent."
Says Peterson: "What happens to blind people in Wisconsin today is just
like what happened to the black slaves. We're being kept in our place . . .
kept from reading, writing and connecting, from moving up."
Peterson's personal war has taken her to testify before the state
Legislature and U.S. Congress. It has made her an enemy of the state
teachers' union and a critic of Wisconsin's school for the blind. She has
targeted the state's vocational training programs and battled sheltered
workshops for the disabled. Her candor has made her both villain and hero.
Civil servants call her "the blind bitch"; members of the blind community
call her their "last hope."
It's said that blindness and death are the things people fear most, but
Peterson ways blindness need not be any more limiting than shortness or
obesity. "It just requires alternative ways of doing things: Braille
nstead
of print, a cane instead of using your eyes to get around." With her long
white cane, she navigates the maze of state offices with such finesse that
less skilled visually impaired civil servants suggest she is faking her
blindness. "It is so hard for them to imagine a successful blind person,
they
have to think that," she says.
A person is legally blind when his vision is 20/200; that is, he has one-
tenth the visual acuity of a normal sighted person. Medical records show
Peterson's vision, at 20/300, is worse than that. There are 6.4 million
visually impaired individuals in the United States: Twenty-seven percent
re
legally blind like Peterson. Only 6 percent have no vision at all. For
ost,
blindness is not a black-and-white issue, but a shade of gray.
Like the country's revolutionary founders, Peterson believes that an
overbearing government eats out the substance of a man. Last fall, when
state
agencies staged a seminar for rehabilitation workers and their clients, one
session was called "Sexuality and Disabilities." Says Peterson: "Most
eople
have sex with their eyes closed anyway, but these people think we're so
helpless we can't even make love without them helping us. It makes me want
to
cry."
But Peterson doesn't want compassion. When an area charity offered to
raise
money for the Federation by showing helpless blind children in order to
tug
at the heart-strings and loosen donors' purse strings," she turned it down.
"We don't need more pictures of pathetic blind people."
Peterson vowed to fight her war without them. But she is fighting a
attle
against entrenched special interests. She is battling bureaucratic
rrogance
and incompetence at a time when the public has become so numb to government
scandal it may barely notice. But none of this will make Bonnie Peterson
stop
fighting.
BIRTH OF A REBEL
Bonnie Szortyka was only a few months old when her parents, Chet and
Adelaine, realized that their baby's eyes did not follow them when they
moved. When Bonnie was 3 years old, a doctor at Mayo Clinic gave them no
hope. " 'You have to consider her totally blind and send her away to a
school
for the blind. Period. That's it,' " her mother recalls the doctor saying.
The Szortykas could not bear to send the eldest of their three children
away.
They raised her the only way they knew, like a normal child who just
happened
to have very bad vision.
It was the 1950s and Milwaukee Public Schools faced an epidemic of blind
children. Most, like Bonnie, had been born prematurely. The oxygen that had
helped their underdeveloped lungs function was blamed for destroying their
fragile optic nerves. Bonnie was legally blind, but she had enough vision
o
keep her from getting into MPS' school for blind children immediately. At
age
5, she was on a three-year waiting list.
Adelaine worried about what her daughter's future would be if she didn't
get a proper education. "Is there a Braille class I can take to teach her?"
she asked MPS officials. "They said, 'Not here, maybe in Iowa.' "
The Milwaukee Catholic Archdiocese's schools had no special-education
classes, but the nuns at St. Stanislaus School were willing to help. By
second grade, Bonnie was reading with a book pressed to her face, focusing
laboriously on one word, then the next. Bonnie drank gallons of carrot
juice;
she visited a faith healer. Doctor after doctor told her parents, " 'I've
never seen a girl with this bad of vision [who is] this well-adjusted. She
doesn't act like a blind person,' " her mother recalls.
Bonnie was the great pretender. On the Polish South Side of Milwaukee,
First Communion Day was a family event. The Szortyka's living room was
crowded with relatives when an aunt insisted that Bonnie read her Communion
cards aloud. But when Bonnie held the card to her eye to see it, the aunt
berated her, "Don't make fun of people like that!" Bonnie burst into tears.
Alone in her room, she thought, "I am one of those people. Why don't they
know that?"
By sixth grade, severe eye strain caused constant headaches. "I didn't
even
know that everyone didn't have this pain until I was 30 years old," she
says.
Eye strain led to nystagmus, a continuous jerky involuntary movement of
Bonnie's eye muscles, making reading even more daunting. Bonnie slept with
her nose pressed into the pillow, hoping to flatten it and thus get closer
to
her books.
When Bonnie was 12, a Milwaukee doctor told her parents he could make a
special pair of eye glasses. Bonnie eagerly donned the thick lenses and
began
to read the eye chart. Her mother was ecstatic. The doctor seemed
elighted,
but then, as she read further, his voice changed. "What's wrong?" her
other
asked. "She's memorized the chart," the doctor said.
"My mother was so mad at me. I was only trying to make her happy. She was
always so sad when the doctors couldn't help," Bonnie remembers. "I said,
'Why can't you just love me like I am now?' "
Her father said there would be no more eye exams. Still, Bonnie was
expected to do chores like everyone else. She scrubbed the floor, and if
he
missed a spot, her mother would say, " 'You missed something. Rub your hand
over the floor to find the spot or wash it all over again until it's done,"
Bonnie remembers. "You don't find excuses, you find a way to get it done
right. . . . My mother told me, 'You can do anything you make up your mind
to
do.' "
But at school, that wasn't enough. "They'd praise me for being able to
write my name--that's how low their expectations were for me," she says.
"The
other kids knew I was getting praise for things every one did. They called
me
'blindy.' " The only way to get her teachers to demand as much of her as
they
did from her sighted peers, Peterson says now, was to "get them mad." By
eighth grade , she was a master at that.
Remembers her teacher, the former Sister Dorothy Roache: "We had constant
terrible, I mean really terrible, arguments. I told Bonnie she needed to
learn Braille. She wouldn't consider it. She wanted to be like everyone
lse
and she insisted on keeping up with the class, earning good grades in spite
of herself."
In high school, Bonnie made friends, dated boys, won gold medals for her
singing. She was a finalist in the Miss West Allis pageant. A girlfriend
ho
sold makeup taught her how to apply it. "That girl didn't have any special
training in teaching the blind * * * but no one ever told her blind people
can't use makeup." Bonnie soon sold Vivian Woodard cosmetics, too. "I
couldn't tell people what colors looked good on them, so I said, 'You can
experiment.' It turned out no one like being told what to do, and I sold so
much I kept winning sales awards," she says.
But as well-adjusted as Bonnie appeared outside, the suicide attempt left
her parents with lingering fears. During the summer of 1971, a counselor
from
the Wisconsin Department of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) told the
Szortykas that Bonnie needed to attend a three-week residential college
rep
program at the century-old Wisconsin School for the Visually Handicapped
(WSVH) in Janesville. The counselor was blind himself. "I could hear him
writing Braille as fast as my mother could talk, and for the first time, I
thought, 'I might want to learn this,' " Bonnie remembers.
But when the Szortykas arrived at the school, "students were groping
around, making weird undignified gestures, bumping into things," says
Bonnie.
Her mother didn't want her to stay, but Bonnie shouted over her shoulder,
"These are my people now."
Bonnie asked about Braille but was told she didn't need it. Many of the
students at the school for the blind were doubly disabled. Coddled by their
parents and teachers they had never been expected to observe even
rudimentary
rules of decorum. The boy across the table from Bonnie ate with his hands,
making loud slurping sounds. "Can't you teach him to use silverware?"
onnie
demanded. "He was a smart guy, but how was he going to have any friends at
college if he ate like that?"
Bonnie noticed another dichotomy. There were two "classes" of students:
the
"partials," who had some sight, and the "totals," who were completely
lind.
The "partials" had more freedom; they were the leaders. "Totals," like a
woman Bonnie befriended named Pat, spent their days in their rooms. "They
only led her out to eat, just like a dog," she says.
"All they cared about was how much people could see, not how much they
could learn," says Bonnie, who refused to let anyone know just how bad her
vision was. She couldn't see the steps in front of her, but she marched up
the staircase with the "totals" hanging onto each other behind her. She
carried serving dishes to the dinner table, where one of the "totals"
anged
her fork on her plate, demanding Bonnie serve her some peas. "I couldn't
believe it," she says. "These were adults and they were treating them like
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