[Greater-baltimore] Miss Rovig is leaving the building, or Goodbye MD, Hello MN!

[gloria jackson]

Miss Rovig,

Well! Well! I have read every word. When I grow up, I want to be just like 
you and to do all the wonderful and impressive things you have  done.  Of 
all  your    accomplishments, my personal favorite is, your visit to the 
United Nations to represent National Federation of the Blind.  I have a deep 
admiration for the United Nations. I am sure that you  were excellent as 
always..  There is no one else in this organization more suited for such a 
project.    I am so proud of you.There are no words to adequately describe 
how I regard all that you have done.
I shall get in touch with you again Thank you for every thing..

With every good wish

Gloria Lewis Jackson
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
To: <david.andrews at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2014 10:23 AM
Subject: [Greater-baltimore] Miss Rovig is leaving the building,or Goodbye 
MD, Hello MN!


My Federation Friends,

It's time to let you in on my plan. I bought a
house in southern Minnesota because I'm retiring
from my work at the National Federation of the
Blind, and moving my membership from Maryland to
Minnesota. Not having done it yet, I'm not sure
how living on my retirement plan is going to work
out when it comes to the fun extras of life, so
the 2014 July convention in Orlando may be my
last national convention. Although, if the money
permits, I can see me coming back like former
students go to their high school reunion just to
enjoy being with their old friends. My last day
on the staff will be July 11, 2014. Now when did
this all start, you may ask. After all, I'm a sighted guy.

Back in the summer of 1975, I had decided not to
sign the contract to continue as the librarian at
a 500-student high school in southern Wisconsin
because I had nothing in common with anyone in
that small town. So, job hunting are us! One fine
summer day on a bulletin board in the multi-story
library school of the University of Wisconsin
Madison campus, from which I had received my
masters in library science degree, I saw a 3 by 5
typed card that said, "Librarian Needed. Must
have some knowledge of textbooks. Iowa Commission
for the Blind, Des Moines, Iowa, (phone
number)."  A teacher in the library school was
passing by just as I finished reading and I asked
her, "Have you ever heard of this library?" She
said she'd heard it was the largest library for
the blind in the country. Well! After a tiny high
school, that sounded interesting! And Iowa being
next to Wisconsin, I could drive back to visit my
family on the holidays. That it was "for the
blind" never really registered with me. I figured
a library was a library. Oh, my! Little did I
know how my life was changing from that very
minute. So I called and made an appointment to interview.

As it happened (here comes Fate dropping in
again), my brother was buying a house to be close
to his new job in northwest Iowa so he and his
wife and I rode in the same car. He dropped me
off in Des Moines, where I was to interview for a
few hours. Then I rode with them up to see their
new home, and would come back to Des Moines to
have a second interview "if" I was invited to do
so.  During the first interview -with Head
Library Florence Grannis, and Duane
Gerstenberger, her replacement in training, it
was all about my ability as a librarian. The Iowa
Commission for the Blind had a large library - a
point in its favor, and, when fully staffed, six
librarians serving patrons statewide! I was
interviewing to be in charge of obtaining
textbooks from APH or our own transcribers for
all (300?) of Iowa's K-12 and college-level blind
and visually impaired students and all the adults
who needed materials for their work, plus the
Braille collection, the large type collection,
and the small professional collections of print
books by blind authors or about blindness and the
historical collection of early Braille, New York
Point, Moon Type, and such books. Nope, I did not
know Braille; did not know anything about the
NFB, or about how blind persons handle things.
But I did instinctively know that "Gone with the
Wind" is still "Gone with the Wind" whether it is
in print or in Braille; and I passed Mrs.
Grannis's several tests of my competency.  So Mr.
Gerstenberger gave me a stack of banquet speeches
that agency director Kenneth Jernigan had made in
his other job as president of a federation for
blind people, and I was set up for a second interview. Hello Fate.

All the long way to northeast Iowa I read the
speeches. Very interesting! And solid philosophy!
Those speeches just made sense to me. Of course
blind Americans should not be treated that way!
And I read them some more all the way back to Des
Moines. I got my second interview, this time with
Kenneth Jernigan.  I sat in the chair across from
Dr. Jernigan at his big desk and his assistant,
Mrs. Anderson (now Mrs. Jernigan), sat on a couch
to my right side. As I figured out later, this
was a subtle test of attitude­would I look and
speak to the sighted person or the blind boss?
Right. It just made sense to me to talk to the boss and, well, I got hired.

July 23, 1975, 8 a.m., I started work at the Iowa
Commission for the Blind as one of their six
librarians, and I continued working there for
nearly 13 years. I am proud to be part of "the
Iowa connection." I joined the NFB at the July
1975 chapter meeting. As part of staff training,
Dr. Jernigan had me reading several decades of
back issues of "Braille Monitor," in class with
Jim Omvig as our teacher for blind civil rights
history, and taking cane travel lessons under
sleepshades with Field Op counselor Dick Davis as
my instructor. I really liked cane travel. For my
graduation exercise, I walked a four-mile route
around Des Moines. No problem. I learned how to
do some other things under sleepshades too. All
of this got me started in understanding how a
blind guy handles whatever he or she wants to do.
And in September1975, President Jernigan invited
me to his annual Labor Day weekend NFB Leadership
Seminar at the old Randolph Hotel, where I met
Diane McGeorge and my first guide dog. I am a
proud alumna of the Bathroom Seminar, along with
Barbara Pierce, Barbara Beech (Walker Loos), and
many other current leaders of the Federation (not all of them named 
Barbara).

I went on many weekend protests against NAC,
driving for the first time ever a
huge15-passenger van to get to that hotel near
the O'Hare Airport, on the crazy Chicago
freeways, and this was before GPS was invented. I
marched on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. With
Tami Dodd (now Mrs. Jones), Eric Duffy, and
Sharon (now Monthei)­those three blind and all of
us wearing sleepshades to prove we weren't
peeking­I swung my cane and marched in our NFB
White Cane Marching Team in three town parades
and at one NFB national convention. I drove for
tons of candy sales. Thank goodness one of the
blind students that rode to Oskaloosa knew how to
change the tire on the van when it went flat
halfway there, surrounded by cornfields. None of
us in the van will forget the time I drove the
four-hour trip to the Minnesota state convention
and Curtis Willoughby and Bob Ray taught us songs
to sing in a bar, and I ran out of gas on that
Interstate superhighway, but coasted down the
miraculously appearing ramp right into a gas station and next to a pump!

After a few years, a new chunk got added to my
library work, I became the boss of Iowa's radio
reading program and along with one other staff
person would cut up the "Des Moines Register" to
precisely fit our time slot before being one of
our many readers on the air. We were proud to
know our radio service was one of only two RRS in
the country that operated on a public channel.
Thanks to using the radio station at the Des
Moines tech high school, we were heard as far as
50 miles out of the city! A truck driver told me
he listened as he made deliveries to farms outside the city.

Dr. Jernigan and his extraordinary Orientation
and Adjustment Center for blind adults went on
all around us in that multi-story building at 4th
and Keo. We'd find newly blind and scared cane
travelers lost in the Talking Book stacks or get
out of their way as after a few weeks they'd be
striding down the city sidewalks outside on their
errands. Students made wonderful smells (and some
not so much) come out of the kitchens; students
came to check out a first shortest book possible
to practice reading Braille. They'd be gathered
in our comfortable library reading room late into
the night, reading and talking.  We who were
there every day saw in the change in the
students, from their first day to their
graduation. We literally could see that the NFB
method of teaching worked splendidly. We saw
students learn a new positive attitude along with
their skills, and we saw those few students who
did not learn the NFB attitude toward blindness.
They would go home with their skills, more or
less, but sooner or later start again to be what
the sighted folks around them thought they should
be since, after all, they were blind. Students
that joined and got involved with their support
group, the National Federation of the Blind, were the adults that thrived.

Dr. Jernigan did not just hang out in his fancy
office. He taught you, whether you were student
or staff, and not just about blindness. He was
funny, wise, eccentric, surprising, demanding,
giving, super-smart, super-educated, totally
plugged in to Iowa politics, and sometimes
ignorant of current cultural icons (like John
Denver and his music!). He read 420 words of
Braille per minute­I timed him, and he was a
terrifically good cane traveller. We were walking
downhill on Keo one day at his cane-swinging,
lickety-split speed and me in my two-inch heels
nearly sprinting to keep up, until one of my
heels broke and he hammered it back on with his
cane handle.  That man did more work in a day and
night than three other people. Of course he had
two full-time jobs­simultaneously the elected
President of the National Federation of the
Blind, building the Federation and working on
serious issues nationwide, and the Director of
the statewide vocational rehabilitation center
for the blind, which included the training center
for blind adults, the field services department
with offices around the state offering home
teachers and counselors, a store for products
handmade by (agency-inherited) elderly blind
women, the statewide Business Enterprise Program
(which went from the previous popcorn and
packaged candy counters to full-service
cafeterias), the statewide regional library for
the blind and physically handicapped, the lending
office for NLS Talking Book machines, the
textbooks for the blind program, the volunteer
Braillists program (including for a number of
years an operation in Iowa's biggest prison), the
volunteer readers making open reel masters which
became cassette books at our building, and the
radio reading service.  We were everything for
the blind except the school for the blind at
Vinton, Iowa, and the checks from Social Security.

About three years after I was hired, Dr. Jernigan
resigned his state job and moved the headquarters
of the National Federation of the Blind to
Baltimore, Maryland.  A series of blind directors
followed him; none making innovations worth
commenting on and the NFB no longer recommended
to students, nor, in some years, even mentioned
in a favorable way.  I continued to be a steady
member of the NFB, attending local meetings, the
state conventions, and the national conventions.
One day in July 1987, I got a phone call from
Baltimore. It was Dr. Jernigan. He said, (read
this in a deep, deep voice), "Miss Rovig, How
would you like to be director of Job
Opportunities for the Blind?" I said, "But Dr.
Jernigan, I'm not blind." And he said, "Miss
Rovig, How would you like to be the director of
Job Opportunities for the Blind?" Not being dumb
twice, I said, "Yes sir, I would." I was the director of JOB for 10 years.

At various times during that decade, Dr. Jernigan
also put me in charge of the single staff person
cleaning all the bedrooms in our bedroom wing (I
personally cleaned every toilet we owned many
times), cassette production (which, if I remember
right, was more than 60,000 copies per year); and
for a very brief period back in 1975, I was the
reader and first engineer of the brand new NFB
studio. Larry McKeever, "the voice of the Braille
Monitor," designed it to be, as he told me, equal
to a big-time studio in Nashville. He taught me
how to run the giant board and all the equipment
over a couple days. As time went on and the
monthly "Presidential Release" was recorded, Dr.
Jernigan and I discovered I was an okay reader
but a poor engineer. Yes, I lost that piece of the job. (Whew!)

JOB was a big part of my job. The NFB's
innovative program, Job Opportunities for the
Blind, was funded by the U.S. Department of
Labor. Mary Ellen Reihing (now Mrs. Gabias) and I
used the NFB studio to produce six cassette
newsletters per year. Half of it was articles
about blind workers (I usually did the interviews
and wrote them up) plus job hunting advice, and
half of it was reading real job listings for all
kinds of jobs all over the country­as long as
they were not specifically to hire a driver of a
vehicle or a life guard at a swimming pool. My
all-time favorite came from the "Baltimore Sun"
and said, "Seamstress needed. Steady work. Baltimore Casket Company."

I got calls from all over the US­blind job
seekers asking advice and, occasionally, an
employer worried about the new ADA. What helped
folks the most was our rock solid belief in their
goal, and introducing a blind job hunter to
someone who was blind and already at work in that
same field or one with similar requirements.
Networking built that essential positive attitude
and provided the practical advice that one who is
in a field knows.  Once a year I wrote a
four-page "Employer's Bulletin" like the one in
1995 called, "Employer Nightmares about Hiring
Blind Employees." It started like this, "This
bulletin is for employers who have hidden worries
about hiring a blind person."  Some bulletins are
still posted on the NFB website, but they surely need updating.

Then we had the three-hours long JOB Seminars at
national conventions for a live audience of two
to three hundred NFB members.  I was the MC for
our lineup of blind speakers. I'll never forget
the presentations by John Fritz on doctoring his
Wisconsin dairy herd; Doug Lane of Nebraska, a
professional baker for a large hotel; Joe
Urbanek, owner of a B&B for newlyweds; Lloyd
Watts, house parent in a group home for adult men
with low IQs; Carla McQuillan on childcare in the
home (before she started her Montessori school);
Allen Schaefer of Illinois, a public high school
music director and teacher (whose students went
all the way to state several times), so many
others. But, golly, my number one favorite was
Robert Munz of Long Island, New York, telling us
about his interview and his job working the Price
Club fast food counter. He got the job of
defrosting the pizzas and warming the big dough
pretzels when he told the sighted HR lady that he
cooked a meal for 40 as part of his training at
the Louisiana Center for the Blind, and she said,
"I couldn't do that!" and Bob said, "You could if you tried."

I am proud to say I started the JOB convention
breakfast meetings targeted to different
professions. Out of that networking, people found
each other and they grew our NFB divisions for
science and engineering, for voc rehab workers,
and for medical fields, among others.

One day, Dr. Jernigan asked me, "Miss Rovig,
would you like to go to the United Nations?" The
NFB was invited to run an information table in
the lobby of the UN in New York City alongside
other self-help groups because it was The Year of the Disabled.

And one very memorable day, Dr. Jernigan asked
me, "Miss Rovig, how would you like to go to
Japan?" Of course, I said, "Yes sir, I
would."  The Japanese government office that ran
training centers to train blind persons for
employment asked for a keynote speaker to come to
their convention to explain how the NFB worked on
employment issues. Their chief push was to teach
the use of the Opticon. Unfortunately that was
the last year the machine was manufactured.
Anyway, what a wonderful trip and what an honor
to be chosen. I heard later from our contact,
Chuji san, that my speech had been translated and
published in the main Tokyo daily newspaper with my photo.

Well, after I'd done this job for ten years, DOL
decided we'd been funded way longer than they
normally would fund any program (normally only
two or three years!) and ended our funding, so
Dr. Jernigan switched me to being the
writing-driving-reading assistant to our staff in
the IBTC, the International Braille and
Technology Center for the Blind. Working this job
for two years, I learned a lot about modern
equipment for blind persons.  I loved the time
Robert Jaquiss and I drove to several high tech
companies and saw the amazing, new, 3D printing machines.

After a while my several layers of bosses and I
discovered I was an editor and proofreader.  My
job changed to working in our Advocacy and
Protection Department, mostly proofreading print
documents that leave our building­letters,
emails, petitions, invoices, language in new
legislative bills, posters, website pages, fact
sheets, and official reports. I helped proof the
opus, "Walking Alone and Marching Together"­all
thousand-plus pages of it. I wrote the wording
for the Bolotin Award online under Jim Gashel's
direction. I began to proofread the "Braille
Monitor" and "Future Reflections." This is what I've done for the last 
decade.




Dr. Jernigan had a dream of a national
headquarters for the National Federation of the
Blind, one that would work on all the different
issues, with room for things like a library to
educate the researchers and a research institute
run our way, an educational center figuring out
best practices, and lots of room for offices and
meeting rooms to cover all the different jobs the
NFB is doing and will want to do in the unknown
future. This is not a school, but a think-tank at
work to innovate ideas and train the trainers. We
had 18 million dollars to raise so I helped build
it. I had NFB accounting take a small portion of
my paycheck every month to give $5,000 to the
building of our National Center for the Blind,
200 East Wells Street at Jernigan Place,
Baltimore, Maryland 21230. Yup, my name is on the
wall in the Wells Street lobby.

Five years ago, President Maurer changed my job
again by appointing me to assist Anil Lewis, NFB
state president in Georgia, with all the
paperwork for our national scholarship program.
Under Anil's direction, I wrote the information
on our scholarship website; answered half a
zillion phone calls and emails, printed and filed
the 500 to 700 or so scholarship applications we
get each year, and handled lots of other
time-consuming details. After a couple years,
Anil accepted a staff position here in NFB's home
office and Patti Chang, Esquire, a full-time
lawyer in Chicago and president of the NFB of
Illinois, became my boss for this part of my
job.  It is so very strange to think this is my
last year working on this fun, important,
expensive program.  I so enjoy meeting our thirty
winners at convention and helping them find out
that what the National Federation of the Blind
offers to them goes way beyond a one-time check and a week in a big hotel.

I have been to every NFB national convention
since 1976. This convention will be number 39.
It's the most fun you can have in a week and
still be legal. I've been to every NFB state
convention in the state in which I lived (Iowa or
Maryland) plus some extra state conventions just
for fun: Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New
Hampshire, Virginia, and Washington, DC.  All
were so different and yet all were totally NFB.

There's never been a national convention that I
didn't have several jobs. I met and got to know
hundreds and hundreds of our members when I had
the job for many years of training and
supervising volunteers for the NFB Store.
Remember the time we had no customers at all, so
joking around we got Ellen Ringlein to do an
advertisement and demonstration for her table of
Braille tools in German and got Fatos Floyd to
advertise her Braille equipment in Turkish? Many
of our volunteers had a first Braille lesson,
many learned how to use the click rule and the
abacus, and many strangers became friends as they sat beside each other.

So many good times!

Looks like I'm writing a book here, and not a
goodbye! It somehow doesn't seem proper to say
only, "So long, and thanks for all the
fish."  Fellow members and friends, if you read
between the lines, you know I will always
treasure these things­getting to know the most
extraordinary man I've ever met­Dr. Jernigan;
having the chance to work, protest, and laugh
with the many wonderful, hard-working members
I've met since 1975; and, yes, I very much
treasure the fact that, using such gifts as I
have, I have helped the movement of all blind
Americans toward full equality.  The conclusion I
reached in a car crossing the hot summer
landscape of Iowa in 1975 hasn't changed­equality
for the blind just makes sense.  So see you in
Orlando! If you come to Minnesota's NFB events,
look for me there, or find me on NFB listservs.

With appreciation for the past and anticipation of the future,

Lorraine (also known as, Miss Rovig)

>Lorraine Rovig
>Assistant to Chairperson Patti Chang, Esq.
>
>Scholarship Program
>NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
>200 East Wells Street at Jernigan Place
>Baltimore, MD 21230
>Office: (410) 659-9314, x2415;
>Email: <mailto:scholarships at nfb.org>scholarships at nfb.org
>Website: <http://www.nfb.org/scholarships>www.nfb.org/scholarships
>
>The National Federation of the Blind knows that blindness is not the 
>characteristic that defines you or your future. Every day we raise the 
>expectations of blind people, because low expectations create obstacles 
>between blind people and our dreams. You can live the life you want; 
>blindness is not what holds you back.
>
>To make a donation to the National Federation of the Blind Imagination Fund 
>campaign, please visit 
><https://nfb.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=5>https://nfb.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=5.
>

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