Trusting Calvin by Sharon Peters

Author:Sharon Peters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2012-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

The Jewish Family Service Association arranged soon after the job-interview unpleasantness for Max to meet Lee Feldman, a counselor at the State Bureau of Vocational and Rehabilitation Services for the Blind. A visually impaired veteran of World War II, Feldman knew what kind of roadblocks would confront a blind man trying to find work, and told Max that if he was willing to undergo four or five months of instruction, he might be able to get hired as an X-ray darkroom technician.

It would be isolating work, consisting of nothing more challenging than following the same routine hour after hour, day after day, almost like being on an assembly line. But there was a demand for such technicians, he said, and Max’s obvious appreciation for structure made this a good prospect for him because it involved following prescribed steps, carefully timing everything, and moving quickly when the buzzer signaled it was time to slide the film from one tray to the next.

To prepare, Max would have to learn how to use a white cane, something he hadn’t learned since the Germans took a different approach to mobility training. And he would have to memorize bus lines and schedules so he could get to and from training and then the job, which might—depending on which hospital hired him (if one hired him)—be a long distance from his apartment.

Max was eager, he assured Feldman, to do whatever was necessary.

His mobility training began immediately.

The instructor, a blind chain-smoker named Jim, had a gravelly voice and a no-excuses approach to life. “When you walk down the street,” Jim said on their first day together, “and you bump into a pole and get a bloody nose, you have two options: Go back home, clean up, and start over again, or continue going wherever you have to go and clean up there. Big boys don’t cry.”

The two got on well.

Max began his technician training barely two months after arriving in the United States—nervous because his English was still halting, and also because he wasn’t sure how the techs in the hospital who were to teach him would react to having a blind man thrust into their operation. But the employees were friendly and patient and devoted themselves to helping him succeed. They spent their lunch hours encouraging him through conversations to help spur his English along, and one, thinking music might help (not realizing until it was too late that Max was tone-deaf), taught him the popular Irving Berlin song, “Blue Skies.”

When Max completed training four months later, Feldman reported that he’d found him a darkroom technician position at the Cleveland Clinic. The pay would be one dollar an hour, and Max would be on probation for six months rather than the customary ninety days, because there was discomfort among some at the hospital about his ability to do the job. Max accepted the job and the terms.

Feldman arrived at Max’s apartment soon after sunrise on October 20, 1952, to accompany him on the bus for his first day at work.

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