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

[David Andrews]

It's not me -- it's Miss Rovigg!

Dave

At 08:55 AM 5/7/2014, you wrote:
>Content-Language: en-US
>Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
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>boundary="_000_AC04835F2DED5742B3742405D5482DA02DE7C96636ESCEEVS01doel_"
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>David,
>
>
>Thanks for everything.  You’ll be missed.
>
>Gail Cephas
>Washington DC Affiliate
>
>From: Nfb-dc [mailto:nfb-dc-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of David Andrews
>Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2014 11:24 AM
>To: david.andrews at nfbnet.org
>Subject: [Nfb-dc] 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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