[NFBF-L] Article in the Daytona Beach news Journal about Brian Norton

Wed Apr 28 02:18:43 UTC 2021

This is a nice article.  I am proud to have him as a president for our chapter.

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From: NFBF-L <nfbf-l-bounces at nfbnet.org> on behalf of Peggy Fleischer via NFBF-L <nfbf-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2021 9:07:15 AM
To: nfbf-l at nfbnet.org <nfbf-l at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Peggy Fleischer <peninnah.fleischer at gmail.com>
Subject: [NFBF-L] Article in the Daytona Beach news Journal about Brian Norton

Daytona attorney who loses sight, then law license, has re-passed the Florida Bar exam
Son of renowned eye doctor lost sight, way
Mark Harper<https://www.news-journalonline.com/staff/3323889001/mark-harper/>
The Daytona Beach News-Journal

Growing up in Miami in the 1960s, en route to Harvard University and the University of Florida College of Law, Brian Norton was a swimmer.
>From seventh grade through 12th, nearly every day before school, he was in the water, where the trick to swimming fast is keeping one's head down, in the water, not lifting it up more than necessary.
It takes discipline, focus and faith to propel one's arms into water blindly. Those characteristics — discipline, focus and faith — eluded Norton later in his adult life, as he lost his sight, his career, his marriages and nearly his life due in large part to alcohol.
But in the sobriety of the past 10 years, life and purpose have returned.
Four years ago, Norton moved to Daytona Beach, home of the Division of Blind Services' rehabilitation center, where he learned new skills, graduated from the Daytona State College paralegal program and, at age 72 earlier this month, passed the Florida Bar exam — more than 40 years after clearing it the first time.
For Norton, life is again going swimmingly.
One day in Miami
Norton had a charmed childhood. Born in San Diego in 1949, his family moved to New York, then later Miami, following the career arc of his father, Dr. Edward Norton, an ophthalmologist who was on his way to founding the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami — today the U.S. News & World Report No. 1 rated eye hospital.
The Nortons ran a tight ship at home.
"We never could watch television," Brian Norton said. "From the time I can remember, my mother (Mary) would give me a book and my sisters a book. ... and we had to give a book report in front of our family at dinner on Saturday night, from the time I was 4 or 5 years old. My literacy was very good."
But in the early 1960s, Dr. Norton carried with him a terrible secret.
He had looked into his son's eyes and seen a discoloration, the telltale sign of retinitis pigmentosa.
"I was probably 12 or 13," Brian Norton said.
Mary Norton, a civil rights activist, would also later start losing her vision from the same disease and died at age 52.
Norton's younger brother Kevin, of Tallahassee, noted the paradox of a world-renowned eye doctor seeing his own family members experiencing vision loss.
"It's almost like Shakespearean in the irony of it," Kevin Norton said. "To have a wife and a son have this disease of the eye, and even with all of his great accomplishments, he was essentially helpless. There was not treatment or cure for it."
It was only years later that the ophthalmologist would tell his son what was going to happen. So Brian Norton enjoyed his years at Ransom Everglades High School, where he was valedictorian, student government president, editor of the school newspaper and one of the swim team's captains.
At the end of his sophomore year at Harvard, Norton was considering organic chemistry and talking to his father about what medical schools might be best. His father said he would fly up to Boston to discuss it.
"Brian, I don’t know how to tell you this. I’ve been putting off telling you this for a long time, but you really need to know now that you’re probably going to go blind. Maybe not right away, but it will probably be in the next 10 years or maybe in the next 20 years,'" Norton quoted his father as saying. "Being a doctor would not be a good career for you.”
Blinders before blindness
Brian Norton decided to go to law school instead, but otherwise ignored what his father had told him.
It was hard for me to go and really integrate it into my self-image," he said. "I had been brought up around lots of other blind people because of my father’s work, as a young child, and they kind of scared me.
“I did not really accept my blindness and I was very fearful of it. I had perfect vision. And so I didn’t’ deal with it. I didn’t tell anybody else," Norton said.
Married with his own son by then, Brian Norton moved to Gainesville to attend the University of Florida's law school, where he thrived and enjoyed a "hippie lifestyle." Raised Catholic, he said his faith morphed into "spiritual enlightenment through hippie. I was not big into it, but I had some great experiences with psychedelic drugs.”
He graduated from law school in 1974.
Norton's first job was as a law clerk for Appeals Court Judge James Walden in West Palm Beach. Then he moved on to clerk for a couple of Supreme Court justices in Tallahassee before landing a permanent job under Judge Joseph Hatchett, the first Black Supreme Court justice in Florida.

When I left there, he encouraged me to go and work in the area of civil rights," Norton said. After a couple of other stints, Norton started his own law firm with two other lawyers, centered on civil rights cases.
“That was a great time in my life. We won several cases up in federal appeals court,” he said.
One involved a Black teacher who had applied to for several administrative positions in the Liberty County public schools, only to lose out to less qualified applicants "for racial reasons, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals<https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/777/1431/117446/> for the Eleventh Circuit, which upheld a lower court's ruling awarding the plaintiff more than $144,000 in back and front pay, as well as compensatory damages.
By then, Norton had divorced his first wife and was starting to lose his eyesight.
He gave up driving at age 32, in 1981. He bought a house in downtown Tallahassee so his sons could walk to school and he could walk to his office.
"My central vision got narrower and narrower. I lost a lot of my peripheral vision," he said. "I couldn’t drive, but I could still read. I could still write."
His vision worsened until about 1995, when it was gone completely. He can sense bright sunshine, but otherwise sees only "gray and sparkling."
Leaving the legal profession
But then things took another turn for the worse. He married his legal secretary and it turned bad. He was drinking more and more. He started making mistakes.
By the 1990s, he started living with a third woman, Merry Frizzell, a sculptor, and retired from the law.
"She was a member of (Alcoholics Anonymous). I started trying to give up drinking then," Norton said. "We had an RV. She would drive. We would go around the country and see friends."
They had lapses and would return to AA meetings.
In 2006, Frizzell left to go to Portland for two to three months to tend to a family member, Norton said. When she returned, she told him she had been using narcotics, including Oxycontin. "I talked her into going to a methadone program," he said, but one night she was pulled over by police in a vehicle where, they alleged, cocaine was present. She was arrested and charged.
A public defender assigned to her case didn't want to take the case to trial, a stance Norton opposed. As they were looking for a new attorney to defend her, Norton was filing motions as her husband, not as her attorney, as as that would have been unethical. However, some of the legal papers he filed contained the title "attorney," a move seized upon by the state attorney, who filed a complaint with the Florida Bar.
Norton would lose his license to practice law.
And Frizzell suffered a massive stroke and died at age 53.
“I remember going home that day and asking my neighbor to go take me to the liquor store. I think I stayed drunk for the next few years," he said.
Reeling from tragedy
A few days later, Norton drank heavily at his son's wedding reception and "was very embarrassing ... according to my family," he said. "It was terrible. There are a lot of things I did when I was drinking I kind of regret.”
Kevin Norton, his brother and a clinical psychotherapist and substance abuse professional who had already overcome his own demons by then, described Brian's trajectory as a "descent."
“I don’t remember every day," Brian Norton said, "but I know I started my mornings with vodka.”
Before his death in 1994, Dr. Edward Norton attempted interventions and paid for his son to go to 28-day programs a couple of times, Kevin Norton said. But he didn't make it through those without lapsing.
For those of us who watched him, it was still a few years after that went by before what I consider the rock bottom, when he had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital because basically his organs were beginning to shut down," Kevin Norton said.
It was Jan. 29, 2011.
Brian Norton was diagnosed with Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, a type of brain damage due to a vitamin B1 deficiency.
"He was given six months to a year to live, and he spent several months in the hospital intensive care," Kevin Norton said. "They saw he was not getting any better, so they moved him to a nursing home, which was a horrible place."
Convinced his brother would die otherwise, Kevin Norton and his wife Linda took Brian into their rural home in Crawfordville, in Wakulla County south of Tallahassee.
Brian Norton looked like someone about to die. "He was in a wheelchair with diapers, a feeding tube and he weighed about 80 pounds," Kevin Norton said.
Linda, Kevin's wife, had lost her job at a nonprofit that closed during the Great Recession, so she was available to care for him.
"Everybody who saw him knew he would have died if he had stayed in that nursing home," she said.
Kevin Norton said his home in the country offered many pluses for Brian's recovery: "It's quiet. There's lots of inspiration from being in the outdoors a lot. Lots of exercise, good nutrition. Those things helped, but so did a commitment to not using alcohol or drugs."
Brian Norton narrowed it down.
"I was able to recover by three things: Good nutrition, exercise and a spiritual outlook on life," he said. "I thought that God had given me a chance at a new life, that I was blessed by Him giving me a new life. That I should do things that maybe God wanted me to do all along.”
'A spiritual awakening'
His return to AA meetings eventually brought him back to a belief in a higher power.
“Even if you don’t have a belief in God, if you work in their program, you start to have a little bit of a feeling that there is a God," he said, "and when that becomes a part of you, that’s called a spiritual awakening.”
Brian Norton lived with his brother and sister-in-law for six years, getting stronger to the point where he wanted to learn new skills to live more independently as a blind man.
He got involved with the National Federation of the Blind, and learned of the Florida Division of Blind Services rehab center in Daytona Beach. It was a fight to convince the state to accept him — then a man in his late 60s — but he moved to Volusia County and started there in April 2017.
"At that time I didn’t know how to type or use the internet or use anything about computers," he said.
He mastered those skills and had a thirst for more. So he enrolled in Daytona State College's paralegal studies program.
"He has an unstoppable enthusiastic attitude that inspires all around him. He always has time to help and encourage others, and is an active and involved leader as the president of the Student Paralegal Association," Linda Cupick, the program's assistant chair, wrote in a recommendation letter for Norton. "Brian is a true motivator. He has motivated others with challenges to go back to school and pursue employment goals. His enthusiasm and can-do attitude motivate all of us."
His professors steered him toward his latest accomplishment: passing the Bar exam.
"I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot by just becoming computer-literate," Norton said. "And then on top of that, I've spent thousands of hours in the past few years studying all the subjects I studied in law school plus all the changes."
'Marry me'
One of his first teachers at the Division of Blind Services rehab center, Peter Cerullo, took an interest in Norton shortly after he moved to Daytona Beach, where he didn't know a soul, and invited him to a function for the National Federation of the Blind.
There he overheard Besse Earline Outman, whose son Bill had been blind and autistic since birth. It was love at first sound.
Norton asked Cerullo about her.
"She’s a gorgeous, blue-eyed, long-legged blond. I’m gonna set you up on a date," Cerullo replied.
Norton and Outman — a widow — started dating and then moved in together.
A couple of years ago, on her birthday, Norton asked her what she wanted.
"“She said, ‘I want a new car.’ So I did. I picked out a BMW. I’m still paying for that," he said.
This past November, he asked again, "What do you want for your birthday this year?"
"She said, 'Marry me,'" Norton said. "So we had a wonderful wedding down at First Christian Church.”
Both are elders at that Daytona Beach church.
His AA sponsor, Patti, said when she first met Norton at meetings about six months after his hospitalization, his sharp memory and dedication to the program impressed her. Patti requested to be quoted only her first name, as she has a strict view of the "anonymous” part of Alcoholics Anonymous.
"He continues to take a spiritual path and a spiritual journey probably enhances his ability to do a lot of the things he’s doing right now for himself and for others," Patti said. "He is an inspiration."
Working the 12-step program and going back to church has made Norton "grateful for the blessings that I have and not be consumed by the things I don’t have or the things I’ve lost."
In Earline Outman, he's found a partner with a similar attitude.
"We at least try to be kind and caring to other people during the day," Norton said. "If you make some type of a daily effort, it may seem insignificant but those days build up and if you look back a year later and say, ‘look at what I’ve accomplished.”

Peggy Fleischer
Vice president
Greater Daytona Beach  Chapter
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