[Nd-talk] FW: Is he really Disabled

Mon Oct 1 12:20:23 UTC 2018

From: The Blind History Lady <theblindhistorylady at gmail.com> 
Sent: Monday, October 1, 2018 4:55 AM
To: mota1252 at gmail.com
Subject: Is he really Disabled

October is Disability Awareness Month 

.

.Greetings Blind History Lady fans:

October is Disability awareness month. At this time each year, I ponder the term disabled/disability. Through my research I find many who are blind that belie the term disabled. 

For me, the word “disabled” brings to mind a car on the shoulder of a freeway with its hood up, going nowhere while the world passes it by. I know that for many of our blind ancestors who did not have the courage or the opportunity to step up, this was the case. I sometimes wonder if the label unconsciously allows us to be off of the road, going nowhere. 

For the most part, I do not give the verbiage much thought. I am a blind person. I am not a disabled person. If others label me thus, well, that is their label for me, but not mine.

Today I want to share a brief story with you about another man who did not label himself as “disabled”. To be sure, he was most abled!

Clarence Homan was born in Iowa in 1900. He moved to northern Minnesota in his youth. By all accounts he had the normal childhood of a boy growing up in the farming communities of the Midwest. 

He married and had three children. All seemed picture perfect. Then in 1926, his wife died, leaving him with three small children, the youngest an infant. Clarence took the loss of his wife hard. He allowed his family to take the children until he could get back on his feet.

While blowing out tree stumps in March of 1931, he got too close and the charge went off in his hand. He lost his hand and much of his hearing. He also became totally blind. 

Clarence went to the summer school program for blind adults at the Minnesota State School for the Blind in Faribault, in the summer of 1932. During this time, that was the only option for rehabilitation for blind adults in the state of Minnesota. He learned how to make baskets, rugs  and handle tools as a blind man. The career option he was offered by the school was to take up piano tuning. Clarence gave it some thought. With only one hand, no musical ability to begin with, very poor hearing, What were they thinking!

Attending the summer school classes helped him pick up some blindness techniques, but more importantly, he met several blind men his own age that were working at many jobs. They became his “counselors”.

Some of them made and sold brooms for a living. Clarence did not know if he could make the brooms, but he could sell them. One blind man who had a big broom factory in Minneapolis offered him a job as a salesman. 

However, Minneapolis was saturated with blind broom salesmen. He would not be able to make enough money to get his children back and purchase a home. Being it was now the beginning of the depression, a large population were out of work. He found a sighted man who was out of work and then bought a truck. The two bought a truckload of brooms from the blind broom makers and headed out of town. For a couple years, through Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, he sold the brooms out of the back of his truck. Gas rationing and the depression were beginning to cut in on his business. 

With the money he saved, Clarence was able to buy a house and in today’s language, flipped it. He bought another and another house, making a good profit. He purchased a home of his own and asked his mother to come and live with him. Now, Clarence was able to support two of his three children, the oldest being adopted by a relative. 

Getting a bit older, Clarence became tired of climbing the ladder each spring and fall to change out his storm and screen windows and climbing the ladder several times a year to wash the windows. Blindness was not such a big problem, but balancing the windows on his arm without a hand was becoming harder. 

In 1945, Clarence submitted patent #US2411727 for a friction pivot steel arm for a window that would open inward for easy cleaning and he could even pull the screen window through the opening from inside of his second floor home. The patent was granted in November of 1946. In no time he was offered to sell his patent for an undisclosed sum of money. Taking the best offer, Clarence was set for life.

I wonder, for five years, as a sighted man, his children were being raised by others. Did his accident take him to the lowest point in his life where there was just nowhere else to go but up? 

Can you really say that Clarence Homan was disabled? We should all be so lucky.

www.theblindhistorylady.com

.

‌

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