By Maddie Orton
Arts Correspondent
“As I put my hand down on Buddy,” Morris Frank stated in an old video, “I knew that she was going to be my Declaration of Independence and give me back the freedom that I so desired.”
When Morris Frank started The Seeing Eye in 1929, the accessibility climate was very different.
“Prior to that, blind people always had some other human helping them — somebody helping them get where they needed to go,” explained President and CEO Jim Kutsch.
Kutsch said founder Morris Frank got the idea for a guide dog from Germany. Blind veterans used them after World War I. Thanks, in part, to Frank, the idea eventually took off in the United States. The Seeing Eye is now the oldest guide dog school in the world.
“Morris then had to do a lot of work in advocacy,” said Kutsch. “Working on access, being able to go in restaurants, on public transportation and so on with guide dogs and service animals. Morris just paved the road for all of the access that’s available today.”
Kutsch used a cane briefly before he got his first guide dog in college. He said they’re not for everyone — people prefer different means of transportation. But just as Frank had foreseen all those decades ago, having a dog has provided Kutsch with more independence.
“He does problem solving,” said Kutsch. “He can look ahead, he can see that there’s an obstacle in the way and take us around it very smoothly. He can watch for that car making the right turn on red in front of me. It just makes my life easier and safer.”
A lot has changed since Frank started The Seeing Eye. For one, dogs like Vegas are specially bred for this line of work. Training has progressed too. Dogs are taught to handle all sorts of modern-day situations and distractions. There are even a few felines in residence just in case a dog’s future family includes cats.
One thing that hasn’t changed though: the price of getting a guide dog. It’s the same as it was in the 1930s.
“We charge $150 for a person’s first dog, $50 for a successor dog and if the person is a veteran of U.S. or Canadian military service, all of those fees are reduced to $1,” explained Kutsch.
Though Morris Frank would no doubt be proud of how far his organization and the accessibility movement have come, Kutsch said there remains a lot work to be done.
“There are still, every week, cases where our graduates will call and explain that they’ve been denied access to a restaurant, they’ve not been allowed to rent an apartment because they had a seeing eye dog, or perhaps they’ve been denied a ride in a taxi cab,” said Kutsch. “Even though the laws are here today, the work to educate the public and to really allow a blind person to successfully go about their business without access issues will continue for a long time.”
The Seeing Eye will be there every step of the way. The organization celebrates its 88th anniversary later this month.