[NFBofSC] FW: Finding Goldie

Wed Jan 3 11:16:07 UTC 2024

Steve Cook

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From: The Blind History Lady <theblindhistorylady at gmail.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, January 3, 2024 5:00 AM
To: cookcafe at sc.rr.com
Subject: Finding Goldie

Finding Goldie 

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Happy New Year:

I am often asked to bring to you more stories about blind women. As a blind woman myself, I too want to know how blind women lived their lives, the different struggles and barriers they faced than blind men. 

There are many obstacles that hide our blind female ancestors from us. Most obvious is the name change when a woman marries. Nicknames also interfere with the research. Sadly, too many blind women, unable to support themselves, entered or were placed in state hospitals or homes for the elderly or poor where names were not always recorded, just a first name or number, much like the slave schedules from the South before the Civil War. Data given to officials was often quickly gathered, sacrificing accuracy, making it difficult to confirm or eliminate an individual.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a higher percentage of blind women were unemployed, working as unpaid family workers or living from family member to family member. Blind men had more opportunities to find employment or start their own businesses. Even in sheltered employment, blind men were hired over blind women. 

If not for a trip to Niagara Falls with a blind friend and his family in 1922, Goldie Rosenthal may have never been heard from again. A photo from the trip was saved in a family album and her name was included on the back by the Oliver Keeney family. Sadly, they did not include her last name. The Keeney grandchildren remembered meeting her when they were small, mostly because she had a talent for playing songs by patting her cheeks and opening and closing her mouth to change the notes and pitch. She entertained friends and their children with songs like “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Happy Birthday.” The grandchildren remembered she was about the same age as their blind grandfather and that she was Jewish. I did not have much to go on.

Not knowing her last name, I found census records and phone directories useless. Goldie’s name did not appear in local newspapers for any event. On findagrave.com there were several Goldie’s. One, buried in Baltimore in a Jewish cemetery, was about the right age. Now I had a last name. Was it the right Goldie? 

After more digging, I found two early biennial reports for the Maryland Workshop for the Blind (MWB), established in 1908. There was a Goldie Rosenthal in the list as one of the blind workers. I went back to the 1910 census and there she was, listed as a knitter in a workshop for the blind.

The Goldie Rosenthal in the Keeney family picture was born in Germany in 1877. She came to Maryland at the age of 11 with her parents and older brother and younger sister. Eventually, her father owned his own butcher shop. Goldie worked as a clerk during her early twenties alongside her brother, suggesting she was sighted until this time. She never married or had children.

Unlike most sheltered shops for the blind at that time, the MWB offered a guaranteed wage of $3.00 a week in addition to a percentage of profits from the sale of items they made. Not a livable wage, but enough to find a cheap room in a family home. Goldie entered the sheltered shop within the first eighteen months of its grand opening. Goldie received training in handicrafts. The workshop also offered training for switchboard operators for white blind women. If Goldie took the training, she did not pursue it as a career. Later she specialized in caning chairs at the shop. Goldie remained an employee of the MWB for more than 25 years. 

The MWB offered training and employment for almost two hundred white blind men and women and a small percentage of Black men during its first decade of operation. Goldie received classes in reading braille and other blindness skills. The MWB stressed in its early reports that learning to read and write braille was important to securing and keeping a self-supporting job. But there are no records to indicate if Goldie became a fluent braille reader.

Goldie’s mother passed away sometime before 1910. Her brother Adolph married and began his own general store. Her sister Sophia married a man who owned his own shoe shop, and for a time, Sophia and her husband lived with Goldie and their father Louis. When their father retired, Goldie moved to a boarding house with several other blind women. For a short time, she took a job as a laundress, but soon was back at the MWB. 

Family supported Louis and took him into their homes until his death. Goldie either chose not to live with family or was not offered a room in her sibling’s homes. A blind person in Maryland in the first four decades of the twentieth century was required to prove their family were unwilling to support them before any local or state pension or welfare was provided. There is no indication that Goldie took any government assistance until her retirement in the late 1930s. 

Questions remain in my mind about Goldie. How did she meet Oliver Keeney, the successful blind piano tuner? They did not go to the school for the blind together. Oliver never worked at the MWB as a shop worker or instructor. Oliver was Lutheran and Goldie was Jewish. Goldie did not seem to have any musical talent other than patting her cheeks. They did not live in the same neighborhood. Contrary to the beliefs of many sighted people, blind people do not all know each other.

Were there social groups for the blind they both belonged to? Did they have a mutual friend? Did her religion bar her from other employment options? So many more questions are unanswered about Goldie. If not for the fond memories and a family photo, Goldie would have been lost forever. 

Because of Goldie’s name in the MWB reports, I found the names of other blind women and men from the workshop and added them in my lists of blind ancestors to research. So far, even less about them have come to light. 

One day, another photo with a partially identified blind friend will show up and another puzzle piece will fit in place. The more puzzle pieces in the mosaic of the blind I hope to create, the bigger and multi-dimensional the mosaic becomes.

Peggy Chong is a 2023 Jacob Bolotin Award Winner.

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