[il-talk] Emailing: Advocate for blind ran City Hall concession stand CHICAGO SUN-TIMES Obituaries.htm
Charlie Dennis
chasbo88 at comcast.net
Mon Feb 8 23:06:09 UTC 2010
Advocate for blind ran City Hall concession stand :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Obituaries
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This article was in the Sunday Sun-Times. Several people where I work saw it and said it was nice. That article in the Herald is priceless.
Charlie
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Advocate for blind ran City Hall concession stand
CARMEN DENNIS | 1946-2010
February 6, 2010
BY EMILY JURLINA Staff Reporter
Carmen Dennis loved word games. Scrabble, anagrams -- you name it, she'd play it. And she'd probably accuse you of cheating if you beat her too many times.
It didn't matter that Mrs. Dennis couldn't actually see the letters on the board. She never let her blindness stop her from doing anything -- from operating a concession stand, to raising a family, to volunteering to help others.
Mrs. Dennis, 63, died Jan. 24 at Swedish Covenant Hospital from health complications after suffering a stroke.
She was born with Rieger's syndrome, a genetic disease that can sometimes result in eye deformations.
As a child growing up in Joliet, she was told by doctors that by the time she was 16, she would be completely blind. When Mrs. Dennis was 21, she had her left eye completely removed, while vision in her right eye gradually faded.
Mrs. Dennis enrolled in the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired in 1956 at the age of 10, where she first learned to read Braille. Her sight was not yet that bad, so her teachers would blindfold her so she could still learn how to get around using her ears rather than her eyes.
"Being blind didn't stop her from doing anything," said Kristy Dennis, Mrs. Dennis' younger daughter. "She would always tell people that there isn't anything that you can't do, you just have to try."
Mrs. Dennis moved to Chicago when she was 19 to attend the Chicago Lighthouse School, another school for the visually impaired. In the late 1970s, she joined a bowling league for the blind. There she met her husband, Charlie, who was born with cataracts and is legally blind. They were married Aug. 2, 1980.
"[Carmen] was just so easy to talk to," Charlie Dennis said. "She dressed well, and she was just very friendly, and it was easy to get into conversation with her."
Mrs. Dennis would eventually bring her warmth to City Hall, operating a concession stand there for nearly 10 years that sold everything from pantyhose to frozen treats. She finally retired in 2006.
"The [City Hall] concession stand was her life," Kristy Dennis said. "She loved doing it, she loved waiting on customers."
Mrs. Dennis also loved working with the blind. She was a lifetime member of the National Federation of the Blind. Whenever the organization held welcome meetings for new members, she could always be counted on to show up with gallons of her homemade chili.
"She liked helping other blind people and people who were losing their vision," Kristy said. "She wanted to help them adapt to their blindness and to like and love themselves for who they are."
Even after Mrs. Dennis' health problems left her using a wheelchair, she continued to help the federation for the blind.
"She didn't always have the energy for other things, but for them she was a mile a minute," her husband said.
Other survivors include another daughter, Penny Laney; five sisters, Kathryn Gonzales, Angela Tamayo, Frances Garcia, Nickie Barbos and Mary Lou Carreno; two brothers, Manuel Sepeda Jr. and Alfonso Sepeda, and four grandchildren.
Services have been held.
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