[Nfb-history] Blind Vet

[Peggy Chong]

During the month of November, we take a special day to honor our Veterans.
The Blind History Lady once again wishes to highlight a blinded veteran of
wars past.  This year, we honor a New Mexican, Jessie Earl McCord, a veteran
of the WWI.

 

Earl as he was known to his friends and family grew up around ranches and
loved horses.  He was a real cowboy in every sense of the word.  Earl worked
on a Socorro County ranch in New Mexico when the first World War broke out.
When Uncle Sam called him, Earl put his chapps aside and went off to war.

 

As a Private, he was assigned duties in the Medical Corp of the army.  There
he helped the doctors and the Red Cross workers care for the sick and dying.
He carried the stretchers on the battlefields and did what he could.  The
work seemed endless, with a steady stream of wounded men passing before him.
With a "special discharge", in June of 1919,   he was soon on his way back
to New Mexico.  

 

When he returned from the war, he went back to Socorro County and worked on
a ranch as a laborer.  But his sight began to fail.  It was quickly
determined that the cause of his eye trouble was from the exposure to the
poison gases such as Tear gas and mustard gas, while in the field.  This was
our first war where chemical weapons were used, causing injuries that were
new to the medical profession, in and out of the military.   Earl was forced
to  leave his job on the ranch.   

 

A life of nothing to do was not a life that Earl could accept.  He applied
to the Army for rehabilitation services and was sent to the Evergreen School
for blinded Veterans in Baltimore Maryland, operated by the Army and the Red
Cross.  There he learned to read braille, to type on a typewriter and to
travel as a blind man.  He also learned basketry and had several classes in
music.  Earl was sent home and was told to make a life for himself.  

 

The next move for him was to head back to Albuquerque.  His father had
passed away and his mother came to live with Earl.  She wanted to care for
her blind son, but it was he who was the one who would financially support
them.  

 

Taking what he learned in Maryland, he wove baskets, small furniture,
clothes hampers and lamps out of reed material.    He tried to sell the
items he made out of his home by himself, but it was not enough.  In 1926,
Earl once again turned to the Veterans Administration for help.  Mr. R. R.
Gibson, a Regional Manager for the Veterans Bureau listened to Earl's
concerns. 

 

Gibson reached out to the community for help.  Edith S. Wetmore and her
partner, Irene Fisher,  owners of the Gingham Dog Gift Shop, in Albuquerque
offered their shop window to display and help sell the many articles that
Earl had made.  The shop would sell the items that ranged from waste
baskets, tables, hampers and  trays  to lamps,  for Earl over a period of a
few weeks during the month of September in 1926.   A similar arrangement was
made for Earl a longer period of time at the Blind Veteran's Home  

 

Earl passed away from health complications on March 9, 1934 in Portales
where he had moved to in 1933. Thank you Earl for your service. 

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