[NFBMD] Jim Omvig

[Sharon Maneki]

Hello All,

Jim Omvig, a great leader in the NFB, passed away on Wednesday, April 27
after a long illness. He was president of the NFBMD from 1982 to the fall
of 1984. The below article by Gary Wunder is a great introduction if you
did not know Mr. Omvig. It is a great walk down memory lane for those of us
who had the privilege to know him. Enjoy.

At least we got to tell Jim over and over again that he was admired,
trusted, and loved. Here is what we wrote for him while he could read and
appreciate it:

*A Modern-Day Pioneer in Our Midst: An Attempt to Say Thank You to a Civil
Rights Leader for the Blind*

*by Gary Wunder*

One of my jobs as the state president in Missouri has been to deliver
eulogies for Federationists whose long service and love of the organization
deserve a tribute. I have written them for two past affiliate presidents,
several other leaders of prominence, and many friends. The honor in being
asked to deliver a eulogy is that you may be saying the most important
words that have been or will ever be said about someone's life. The sadness
is that it isn't being said to the person we are honoring. At best one must
take on faith that the remarks will be heard, felt, sensed, or known by the
one being honored, and at worse the comments come too late to matter to
that person.

What a pleasure it is when sometimes we are able to say thank you to a gem
while he or she is still around to appreciate it, correct us when we don't
quite get it right, and tell us just a bit more that we don't quite know as
we write the remarks to share their lives with those who may not have known
them as well as their family and friends. So it is that I have drawn an ace
from the deck and have the honor of putting down some part of Jim Omvig's
life story: an inspiration, a tribute to what can happen when one works
hard, meets the right people, is encouraged, and takes advantage of the
opportunities offered.

[image: Jim Omvig]Jim was raised in Slater, Iowa, and for a time attended
the public school there. Though he tried hard, much of his effort focused
on using vision he simply didn't have. Eventually he went to the Iowa
Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton. While competing academically and
athletically was made easier by the lack of emphasis on vision, the school
brought with it other difficulties. Foremost among these was the attitude
held by the school about its blind charges. Those with the most sight were
the most blessed: those called upon for giving the school tours, for
pitching the tents during scouting events, and for looking after “the
totals” (those without any usable vision). The school believed the blind
could be educated, but the fields in which they could participate were
quite limited, and, given this philosophy, the school provided vocational
technical training in the few jobs they believed their graduates could do.
The staff members were good, honest people, but they saw their calling to
be to teach the blind some academic skills, help them compete with other
blind people athletically, and acquaint them early on with the limitations
of blindness. These would not have been the words they used, but certainly
the attitude they conveyed to Jim and his fellow students.

After high school Jim lived at home almost eight years. Most of his days
were not so much living as existing, always waiting for that piece of
medical news that would change his life. His mother so wanted him to see
that she went to eye doctors, offering one of her eyes if only they could
give it to Jim so that he might have vision. Since no operation, regardless
of the sacrifice, could give him the vision he would need to be a
productive citizen, he and his family lived from day to day, with Jim doing
what little he could to help with family chores. Occasionally he got work
in a local creamery, where his strength could be used in moving butter and
loading trucks with products bound for the city. This was not the kind of
work that could provide a real income, but any extra money was helpful, and
so too was any reason to get up in the morning. This was not the life he
wanted, but it was the life he had been given, and people from Iowa knew
there was only so much time that could be given over to grief about what
one had lost and wanted back.

Jim lived what he now regards as an isolated life. Though tall and good
looking, he decided early on that it would be irresponsible to get involved
with women. In his mind a man's role was to be the provider, the leader in
his home. He believed that being blind precluded this, so there was no
reason to offer his heart or to ask for the heart of another.

When he was twenty-five, Jim was contacted by the Iowa Commission for the
Blind and invited to go to Des Moines to tour the agency. His sister Jan
was then a student and encouraged him to come. He figured he already knew
much of what there was to know about what blind people could do and become
from his time at the school in Vinton, but he agreed to visit if for no
other reason than for the brief change in daily routine the visit would
afford.

Mr. Omvig remembers his first interview with agency Director Kenneth
Jernigan and the questions that set him on a path he never thought
possible. The first question was whether or not he was blind, and Mr. Omvig
gave what he regarded as a cutesy but accurate answer. "I am hard of
seeing," he said, at which point Mr. Jernigan asked "How many fingers am I
holding up?" and then told Jim unequivocally that he was blind. Jim
remembers that this answer cut deeply and stung bitterly. Mr. Jernigan
asked Jim his age. When Jim said he was twenty-five, Mr. Jernigan said,
"My, my, twenty-five. So a man your age can expect to live for another
fifty years. Jim, what are you going to do for the next fifty years?" As he
considered his answer, he remembers feeling sick at heart. Fifty years was
more a sentence than a promise. Jim's reply was that he didn't know, but
what he feared was that he did and that those years would be spent doing
just what he had done since high school graduation.

But the very asking of the question hinted that there were possibilities
beyond returning to Slater and living out his life as the dependent son and
brother. Kenneth Jernigan suggested that Jim come to the Orientation and
Adjustment Center for training and told him that a man with some motivation
and brains could be a productive citizen. Jim wasn't sure he believed it,
but he could clearly see that the man offering the opportunity did. What
was the risk? Unrealized hopes would hurt, but so would returning to
Slater, where nothing was happening or likely to happen for a blind man
named Omvig.

Although Jim agreed during his visit to come to the center for training, he
still had one hope—that he might regain his vision. Friends told him about
a doctor in South Dakota doing miraculous work, so he took all of his
money, got a friend to drive him, and once again got the sad news that
vision was not in his future.

Jim spent nine months at the center: learning Braille, cane travel, typing,
wood working, and engaging in challenge activities he had previously
thought to be well beyond what blind people could do. Nearing the end of
his training, Jim was asked what he would like to do with his future—what
he might like to do for a living. Full of enthusiasm for what he was
experiencing, he replied that he would like to run a training center and do
what Mr. Jernigan was doing to help the blind.

Mr. Jernigan responded with a question: "Mr. Omvig, do you want to go into
work with the blind and run a center because you think you would truly love
it and be good at it or because you really believe you can't succeed at
anything else and that getting into work with the blind will be easy?" When
Jim said that he didn't know if he could answer the question honestly, Mr.
Jernigan suggested that he consider another career.

What Jim had considered foolish and impossible only a year before was
reshaping his life. Those crazy people from the commission were offering
him the chance to go to college and promised financial support that his
family could never hope to provide. Beyond the financial support, they
convinced Jim that they believed in him, let him observe a few blind people
who were successfully pursuing careers and raising families, and suggested
to him that he could do the same. What he came to understand later was that
he was being given the opportunity to be a modern-day pioneer, to assume a
special place as part of a social experiment to determine if the philosophy
of the National Federation of the Blind was simply a fine-sounding theory
or whether it would prove to be true and could change lives in the way its
proponents proclaimed.

Jim finished his training at the commission, went to college, and was the
first blind person to attend and graduate from the Loyola University of
Chicago's School of Law. He recalls that 144 students entered the school,
and of those only thirty-six were granted law degrees. Having this degree
meant that the man who once had nothing to do and plenty of time to do it
in would find himself busy for the rest of his life, taking his place as a
senior warrior in the civil rights struggle of the blind and eventually
appearing before the justices of the United States Supreme Court to be
granted the right to practice law before that august body.

But, after graduating in 1966 with good grades and a degree from a
prestigious law school, Jim had to arrange and participate in 150
interviews before he landed a job. Even this took some political
intervention from his friend and mentor, Kenneth Jernigan. Mr. Omvig moved
to Washington, DC, and became the first blind employee of the National
Labor Relations Board. Although he was admired and well-liked by his fellow
employees, several did try to convince him that his long hours and
prodigious output raised the bar for them and let it be known that they
were none too happy about this. Jim told them that they were free to work
as much or as little as they liked, but he was there to do more than earn
an income and provide for himself: he was there to convince the world that
blind people could do high-quality work and do it as well as their sighted
coworkers. His fellows saw the logic in this, and it added to their respect
for him. But the secretary who had been assigned to him said, "Mr. Omvig,
you are a damned workaholic, and you're not going to make one out of me."
Given the friction, Mr. Omvig asked for a different secretary and got one,
and his former employee was transferred.

While rewarding, his job in DC primarily involved doing administrative
research and paperwork. But Jim wanted real courtroom experience and
requested a transfer. It was granted, and he moved to New York to continue
his work with the agency. He found the work more rewarding, but it posed
some challenges he had not faced in DC. He had relied primarily on
volunteer readers in his first appointment, but when, as a field attorney,
he began serving as a hearing officer, there were times when he was
presented with written material and required to decide whether or not it
should be admitted into the record. In these cases it is traditional for
the hearing to be recessed while the hearing officer studies the material.
It was not practical for Jim to send the material out for recording or to
expect a volunteer to sit with him throughout his workday. The solution he
arrived at was ideal: he asked that the stenographer, who was already being
paid, act as his reader during the recess, and in this way he had access to
printed documents without incurring additional cost or inconvenience to
himself or his employer.

As he settled into his job, Jim began to be asked by President Jernigan to
visit state affiliates as a national representative. He appreciated being
asked, thrived on being able to serve, and gladly took up the task. What he
found surprised him. At some level he knew that Iowa represented something
tremendously different in rehabilitation than could be found in the rest of
the country, but knowing this wasn't quite the same as seeing firsthand the
denials that blind people were facing when they sought to become
self-sufficient and to exercise some control over their education and
careers.

Jim recalls meeting a woman from New Hampshire who had always wanted to be
a teacher. Having gone blind in her teens, she approached the
rehabilitation agency there and was told by her counselor that her goal was
unrealistic and that certainly he would not approve the college education
that teaching would require. Having read in the *Braille Monitor* about
Judy Young, a blind teacher in Iowa, the woman in New Hampshire took her
case to the agency director. He agreed with the counselor, telling her that
a college education was unrealistic and that any thought of landing a
teaching job was foolish. When she told him about the article she had read
in the magazine of the National Federation of the Blind, he said that he
knew about that Jernigan guy, a crazy man who was setting blind people up
to fail. He, the agency director, would have none of it, and he suggested
that she continue at the workshop, where she was making twenty-four dollars
a week. In this case, like so many, Jim knew that the answer was not for
everyone to move to Iowa, but to build and strengthen the Federation in
each state and then to bring about the changes that the National Federation
of the Blind and the Iowa Commission for the Blind were proving possible.
Encounters such as these pushed Jim in the direction of trying to answer
the question Mr. Jernigan had posed to him on his graduation from the
orientation center.

Eventually Jim gained enough self-confidence to say to Mr. Jernigan that he
really did want to learn to direct a training center, that he had convinced
himself and others that he could cut it alongside his sighted colleagues,
and that his turning to the blindness field for employment was not to hide
but actively to contribute to what had so changed his life and the way he
would spend the most productive years of it. Jim wanted to be a part of
encouraging blind people to dream and to see those dreams become reality.
Mr. Jernigan agreed, and Jim moved back to Iowa, first to work as a
rehabilitation counselor and later to head the orientation center.

While in training to become a counselor, Jim accompanied coworkers to learn
the ropes. Knowing that his primary job was to observe, Jim nevertheless
wanted to become involved in the sessions so clients would come to know
him. One day he asked a client how long he had been blind. The newly
blinded client was angered and put off. On the drive to their next
appointment, Jim learned from his coworker that coming to understand that
one is blind is often a gradual process and that asking how long the client
had been having trouble with his vision would have been more appropriate.
Coming to understand and admitting that one is blind is crucial to
acceptance and getting on with one's life, but for some people the subject
should be approached with gentleness and understanding. Jim took the advice
as sound and has tried to be mindful that the journey to accepting one's
blindness and a new understanding of what it means to be blind sometimes
takes a firm, direct approach and that sometimes it takes time, patience,
and gentleness.

Although Jim's return to Iowa put the right man in the right place, the
transition was not without difficulty. He had decided that he could be a
provider and that risking to become involved with another was not precluded
by being a blind man. He married Jan, a fellow Iowan, and together they
brought Jamie Omvig into the world in 1966. But their marriage ended in
1972, and the door that closed led to the opening of one that would lead
James Omvig and Sharon Lewis to find that they were soul mates. Meeting for
a casual drink one evening in the fall of 1973, they found that their
talking kept them for hours. Sharon describes their courtship and marriage
this way: "It may not have been the love story of the century, but I'm sure
it was the love story of the decade." On January 31, 1974, Jim and Sharon
Omvig were united in marriage, and since then they have been inseparable in
their faith, love, and work. From the time they became two hearts beating
as one, any mention of Jim could, if not for the cumbersomeness of the
construction, be Jim and Sharon or Sharon and Jim.

The man who once believed that he could never share his heart not only has
enjoyed a wonderful marriage but has composed two songs in honor of his
soulmate. One of them, titled, “She’s My Wife,” says:

Have you seen her?
She's the loveliness of spring.
Have you seen her?
She's the song that I sing.
With her tender lips and her glowing eyes,
Her smile is a wondrous thing.
And her arms can make a man a king.

You should know her.
She's an angel from above.
With a heart that's filled with love.
Oh, you should know her; she is my life.
She's my lady, she's my lover, she’s my wife.

Before leaving the National Labor Relations Board, Jim learned from a
colleague that a decision of the NLRB made in 1960 declared that blind
people did not enjoy the same rights as other workers when it came to
organizing and being represented by a union. He highlighted this unfair
segregation of the blind in a speech delivered at the NFB convention in
1969. Appearing with him were prominent members of the AFL-CIO (American
Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) who agreed,
after some tough questioning from President Jernigan, to help the blind
change laws forbidding blind people from organizing.

Work started that year to build a Sheltered Shop Division in the NFB and to
find blind people who wanted to be represented by a union. Mr. Omvig warned
that gaining the right to organize and be represented would take a long
time. A request to organize had to be made and rejected, and an appeal
would have to be made to the members of the National Labor Relations Board.
It took more than half a decade, but in 1976 the NLRB reversed itself and
said that blind people, like other workers, did indeed have the right to be
represented by a union if they chose. This delightful news came the day
before Jim was to attend the national convention in Los Angeles, so he
hurriedly constructed and delivered a speech at the convention.

The Federation knew from long years of experience that blind people were
the victims of discrimination in the sale of insurance. Deciding to test
the waters for themselves, Jim and Sharon went to the ticket counter prior
to their trip to the Los Angeles convention, purchased insurance for Sharon
in the amount of $350,000, and then tried to purchase insurance for Jim. To
his surprise, Jim learned that he could purchase insurance, but the maximum
amount he could buy was $20,000. The ticket agent could offer no reason for
the rule, and arguments that Jim did not want to fly the plane but only
ride on it were wasted. Rules were rules.

On his return from Los Angeles Jim contacted the insurance commissioner for
the state of Iowa, Herbert Anderson, and convinced him to accept a charge
of unfair discrimination against the blind using the Iowa Unfair Trade
Practices Act. The commissioner conducted a survey of all insurance
companies doing business in Iowa, and the findings were so disturbing that
he caused regulations to be created prohibiting discrimination against the
blind by any company licensed to do business in the state. Mr. Anderson
then took his findings to the National Association of Insurance
Commissioners, and that organization passed a resolution condemning such
discrimination. Just as it did with the Model White Cane Law, the national
body of the Federation drafted a model insurance regulation and encouraged
its enactment by state insurance regulators. Jim was extremely helpful in
providing guidance to state affiliates and even testified before state
insurance commissions in support of the prohibition.

As Fredric Schroeder observes: "Today, we do not think much about the
ability to purchase life insurance, and that is due in large part to Mr.
Omvig. In the 70s and 80s, many blind people were denied life insurance on
the assumption that blind people were more likely to die as a result of
accidents. Mr. Omvig understood that assumptions about blind people were at
the heart of lost opportunities: lack of access to a good education, lack
of access to employment, lack of access to renting hotel rooms, and lack of
access to buses and trains. In short, Mr. Omvig knew that discrimination
was the major barrier facing blind people, and discrimination in all its
forms had to be opposed."

After nine wonderful years working at the Iowa Commission for the Blind,
Jim accepted a Federation assignment and moved to Baltimore to work for the
Social Security Administration. At the time about 150 blind people were
working for the agency, but they were limited to answering telephones and
fielding questions from the public. James Gashel, the head of the National
Federation of the Blind's Washington office, was instrumental in convincing
officials of the agency that the way to greater employment opportunities
for the blind and avoiding a lawsuit from the Federation lay in hiring
someone who could look at the procedures of the agency and figure out how
to open other employment opportunities. It seemed to President Jernigan and
Mr. Gashel that Jim would be the perfect fit, being a lawyer and having
previous experience in the federal government.

Jim was hired, and in 1981 the glass ceiling preventing blind people from
accepting other positions within the agency was shattered. Nearly three
years of work resulted in the following policy statement being read by the
newly appointed director of the Social Security Administration: "Today, I
wish to announce a clarification of the policy which affects employment and
promotional opportunity for otherwise qualified partially and totally blind
SSA employees. I have determined that there are no significant factors
which make it impossible for blind persons to perform the full range of the
GS 10 claims representative (CR) position. Therefore, it is SSA policy that
otherwise qualified partially or totally blind individuals may be promoted
to the journeyman GS 10 CR position within the standard CR position
description . . . . I am committed not only to providing equal employment
opportunity for blind persons, but also for all qualified handicapped
individuals." This breakthrough was significant not only for the Social
Security Administration but for other agencies in the federal government
that had good, quality jobs blind people were capable of performing.

In the late 1970s the National Federation of the Blind found that
regulations which had been passed to assist the blind and otherwise
physically disabled in air travel were being used to limit them. Many
Federationists were arrested for insisting on their right to use and keep
with them the canes that provided independent mobility. Some of us were
asked to sit on blankets, the logic being that some handicapped people had
accidents and soiled airline seats. Mr. Omvig was one of those who were
arrested, and he and many others testified at hearings sponsored by the
Federal Aviation Administration. As a result of those hearings blind people
can now travel with their guide dogs and canes; there is no limit as to the
number of blind passengers who can fly on an aircraft; there is no
requirement that we sit on blankets or other items used in dealing with
incontinence. We are prevented from sitting in exit rows, but the
frustration we encounter with airlines today is far less than it was, and
this is due in no small part to the work of Mr. Omvig's talent in writing,
speaking, and developing important relationships with the policymakers of
that era.

After five years working for the Social Security Administration, Mr. Omvig
once again returned to the pursuit of his dream to direct an orientation
and training center. This took him to the state of Alaska in the fall of
1984. When he arrived, he found himself in charge of an agency that was
housed in a World War II Quonset hut. Bleakness and despair were in
evidence in the blind people seeking services. In January of 1985 Mr. Omvig
went to the governor and the legislature, and the funds to run the agency
were doubled. A new five-unit apartment building was purchased and
remodeled to become a residential training center for blind adults. It
contained sleeping rooms for twelve residents, one staff apartment, and
administrative offices. Putting the building into service as a training
center required asking the city of Anchorage to rezone the property, which
they did. In the spring of 1986 governor Bill Sheffield dedicated the
Alaska Center for Blind Adults. Though the willingness of state officials
to purchase and remodel the center was commendable, they did not provide
funds to furnish the building. To Mr. Omvig and other leaders of the NFB in
Alaska fell the task of going to Lions Clubs with the request that they
help in furnishing the center. Through the work of individual clubs and the
statewide body, the center was furnished and began serving students.

In 1987 Jim found himself troubled with bad health, and by the end of that
year his doctor told him that he had no choice but to stop working. It
would take several years for Jim to be diagnosed with a rare condition
known as porphyria. Jim and Sharon moved to Arizona, and both became active
in the affiliate, assisting significantly and advancing its legislative
agenda for providing better services to blind people. He continued writing
about the value of separate agencies for the blind and what proper training
in those agencies could do, and, as he began to exert better control over
his health, he was asked to visit many states to evaluate their programs
and make recommendations for improvement.

Although one of the goals of the Federation is to see that quality
rehabilitation is available to all blind people regardless of where they
live, the reality is that not all rehabilitation centers are equal, and not
all of them are guided by the positive philosophy of the National
Federation of the Blind. In 1992 amendments to the Rehabilitation Act were
passed and signed into law. One of those amendments introduced the concept
of informed choice into the act, providing in federal law the opportunity
for recipients of rehabilitation services to decide where they would go to
receive service. In theory this would mean that a person living in Montana
could go to a rehabilitation center in Louisiana, or that a person living
in Maryland could go to Colorado or Minnesota. Practically speaking,
however, rights guaranteed in federal law have been slow to be implemented
in the states, and they have strongly favored either rehabilitation centers
that they fund or centers with which they have done business in the past.
Implementing informed choice in practice has often meant finding people who
want to go to a center outside their state, helping them to appeal the
denial of the rehabilitation counselor, and getting and winning a fair
hearing. Mr. Omvig has used his skills as a lawyer and an advocate in
helping to draft these appeals and has traveled extensively to participate
in these hearings.

In all of the assignments he has been given as a Federation member, none
was more difficult than the one that brought him to work to advance the
rights of blind people working in sheltered workshops. President Maurer and
other colleagues in the National Federation of the Blind believed we needed
someone to work from the inside to make changes in the system that employed
thousands of blind people at wages that were far below their productive
capacity. Mr. Omvig was persuaded to apply for and was appointed by
President George W. Bush to the President's Committee for Purchase from
People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled. He was initially appointed in
2003 and was reappointed in 2007. During his tenure Mr. Omvig served on a
number of important subcommittees and task forces and was elected as vice
chairman of the committee.

When accepting his newest Federation assignment, Jim knew that there was
little the National Federation of the Blind and what would come to be
called the AbilityOne Commission had in common. Certainly each group had
little respect for the other. What the organizations knew about one another
they didn't like. The committee viewed the NFB as a group of malcontents
and rabble-rousers who knew nothing about running businesses that employed
the blind. The NFB believed the committee to be composed of self-serving
agency directors who cared less about uplifting the blind people they were
to serve than they did about increasing their own prestige and income. In
the opinion of the Federation, these were people who may have come to do
good but who stayed to do well. Their salaries and their place in the
community came on the backs of hard-working blind people, who got little
from their effort in money, benefits, or their productive work.

When Mr. Omvig began his work with the committee, he followed a strategy
that had evolved from a question Dr. Jernigan had once asked him and his
fellow students: "What is the purpose of a speech?" The answer was "To get
people to love you. If you can't get them to love you, they won't pay much
attention to what you have to say." This became Jim's compass. He would not
go to make war—soldiers on each side knew full well how that could be done.
Instead, he would go as an ambassador, a man in search of friends, a human
face that would go the first few steps in dispelling the myths about
Federationists as unreasonable, militant, and foolish dreamers who believed
in a future the blind could never have because they weren't capable enough
to earn or retain it. Jim would build relationships based on common traits
and would show that this commonality could be used as a foundation to build
trust. On that trust he and his new-found friends could begin to make
change that might one day revolutionize the sheltered workshop system where
thousands of blind people worked and sometimes lived.

But the Omvig strategy was not obvious to some of his Federation colleagues
and disappointed more than a few of his friends. He had gone to the
committee to represent the Federation, so where were his protests? Why
wasn't he using his seat to make changes so long overdue? Because Jim was a
part of the Federation family, some who loved and cared about him and who
cared deeply about rights for shop workers came to him with their concerns.
Although he appreciated the chance to clarify his strategy, to explain his
understanding that most fundamental changes take time, and to show the
incremental changes his participation was having, the idea that he might
not be trusted hurt, and carrying out this work proved to be one of the
hardest assignments he ever undertook. He gave nine years of his life to
traveling, negotiating, and trying to change how those in the system felt
about blind people.

Even with his sadness at having his motives—or at least his
strategy—questioned, Mr. Omvig is proud of the change in workshops he has
witnessed over the past forty years and is proud to count among his friends
people who once thought that he and his fellow Federation members were
meatheads—people who were dead from the neck up. He is proud of the
expanded employment opportunities that have resulted from his service on
the committee, and he is proud to have played some small part in National
Industries for the Blind paying at least the minimum wage in all of its
sheltered shops having AbilityOne contracts and requiring that any agency
doing business with it do likewise. In its most recent move, National
Industries for the Blind has decided that no person affiliated with a
workshop that holds a section 14(C) certificate can hold a position on its
Board of Directors.

Jim has been active in a number of other efforts to help in the education
and rehabilitation of the blind. He has served on the board of directors of
the Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness at
Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana. This is the first institute
of its kind to implement the philosophy of the National Federation of the
Blind in teacher-training programs. In addition to needing better teacher
training, Jim and other Federation colleagues realized that the certifying
authority for providing training to the blind often used vision as a
requirement for certification. And so was born the National Blindness
Professional Certification Board (NBPCB), whose purpose was to develop
standards that did not discriminate against the blind and which also
emphasized competence in teaching the skills that were most likely to lead
to an education, a job, and a life equal to those enjoyed by sighted
Americans. He also served proudly on this board and has also been
instrumental in helping to develop the policies and standards of the body.

Increasingly over the last two decades Mr. Omvig has turned his attention
from writing articles to writing books. *Freedom for the Blind: The Secret
is Empowerment* has won widespread praise in the field of rehabilitation,
and many students credit this book with encouraging them to go into the
field. *The Blindness Revolution: Jernigan in His Own Words* has also
figured prominently in documenting the challenges and triumphs of what many
have called "the miracle of Iowa," but Mr. Omvig concludes that there was
no miracle there, only the application of good, solid attitudes and the
willingness to believe in blind people.

One of the things Mr. Omvig is most proud about is that his service extends
well beyond organizations of and for the blind. He became the founding
president of the Des Moines East Town Lions Club and was elected as
president of the congregation of the Grant Park Christian Church in Des
Moines. He was vice president of the Catonsville, Maryland, Lions Club and
was a deacon (which came with the job of serving communion) and a member of
the board of trustees of the Christian Temple in the Disciples of Christ
Church in Baltimore. He has also served as the president of the
International Air Crossroads Lions Club in Anchorage, Alaska.

Of all the honors and awards Mr. Omvig has received, none has touched him
more deeply than the Jacobus tenBroek award in 1986. He received this award
for helping gain the right of blind shop workers to unionize, for leading
the effort to eliminate insurance discrimination against the blind, for
helping to end discrimination against blind air travelers, and for his
writings on how to provide quality training to vocational rehabilitation
clients.

No single article can do justice to the life's work of Jim Omvig.
Thankfully there are others who have committed his story to paper and
places where he gives first-hand accounts of what it has been like to be
one of the pioneers in the civil rights movement for the blind. I can think
of no better way to conclude this article than with comments made by two of
Mr. Omvig's finest friends and admirers. Not surprisingly both have given a
significant amount of their energy to the field of rehabilitation, taking
the improvement of it as one of their Federation responsibilities and
assignments. About her friends, the Omvigs, Joanne Wilson says: "Jim and
Sharon worked with a tireless passion to give back to the movement what
they got from the NFB. They worked on systemic problems that would make the
lives of the blind better, but they also spent hours and hours talking with
individuals, both blind and sighted, over dinners in their home, at
conventions, on a plane, in a discussion group, and anywhere they
were—sharing the truth about blindness. They have truly dedicated their
lives to giving back what they learned about blindness so others could have
more enriched lives. Thanks for asking me to be a small part in giving them
this tribute."

And Fred Schroeder says: "When I think of Mr. Omvig, I think of kindness; I
think of a man with tremendous ability and one blessed with the power of
persuasion. Mr. Omvig knows how to lead, knows how to inspire others to do
more than they believe they are capable of doing, and knows what it means
to share the disappointment of exclusion and heartache that come from
society's low expectations. He is not a man to live according to the
assumptions of others; he is not content to build a life just for himself
and his family; he is a man who gives all that he has on behalf of blind
people. He is a role model, a mentor, a leader, and, most of all, a friend."

*Seize the Future*

The National Federation of the Blind has special giving opportunities that
will benefit the giver as well as the NFB. Of course the largest benefit to
the donor is the satisfaction of knowing that the gift is leaving a legacy
of opportunity. However, gifts may be structured to provide more:

   - Helping the NFB fulfill its mission
   - Realizing income tax savings through a charitable deduction
   - Making capital gain tax savings on contributions of appreciated assets
   - Eliminating or lowering the federal estate tax in certain situations
   - Reducing estate settlement costs

NFB programs are dynamic:

   - Making the study of science and math a real possibility for blind
   children
   - Providing hope and training for seniors losing vision
   - Promoting state and local programs to help blind people become
   first-class citizens
   - Educating the public about blind people’s true potential
   - Advancing technology helpful to the blind
   - Creating a state-of-the-art library on blindness
   - Training and inspiring professionals working with the blind
   - Providing critical information to parents of blind children
   - Mentoring blind job seekers

Your gift makes you a partner in the NFB dream. For further information or
assistance, contact the NFB.

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*Sharon Maneki, Director of Legislation and Advocacy*
National Federation of the Blind of Maryland
410-715-9596

The National Federation of the Blind of Maryland knows that blindness is
not the characteristic that defines you or your future. Everyday 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.
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