EMERGING FROM THE ‘SHADOWS’
Memoir chronicles growing up in New Mexico while persevering over a vision impairment
Thank Elaine Carson Montague for pushing and pushing her husband Gary Ted Montague to talk about his life. “It took me 50 years to get him to tell the story. He said he lived it once, and he didn’t want to live it again,” Elaine recalled in a phone interview.
Well, Gary yielded. Finally. And readers will be pleased he did.
The result is Gary’s vivid, welltold memoir, “Victory from the Shadows: Growing Up In a New Mexico School for the Blind and Beyond.”
The “victory” was Gary’s courage amidst the “shadows” that were his impaired vision and in general society’s obstacles to the handicapped.
The Montagues co-authored the book. He dictated his remembrances to his wife, and she wrote them on a computer in story form.
It took them nine years to complete it. They received help from three editors, a graphic designer and 12 beta readers, people who volunteered to work on the manuscript.
“I was driven to do this project. It was a mission,” said Elaine, an Albuquerque resident. “People need to know what the challenges some people overcome in order to be citizens contributing to our economy.”
Gary was born with visual impairment. “We know his optic nerves never developed beyond infancy,” Elaine said.
His twin sister Jo Ann had no visual defects. They grew up on a farm/ranch near San Jon, between Tucumcari and the Texas state line.
Gary’s cowboy-dad, nicknamed Tood, treated his son like a trusted, sighted hired hand.
In 1944, at his mother’s insistence, the 8-year-old Gary left home to attend the New Mexico School for the Blind in Alamogordo. After 11 years as a resident of the boarding school, he graduated.
The book gives intimate snapshots of Gary’s busy, enriched life at the school. He struggled to learn Braille. He learned to swim, to play the violin, to sing in the choir, was on the wrestling team. He learned to make brooms and baskets in shop. He learned to speak Spanish by listening to some of his dormitory mates. He made friends. He “wrote” home about the good times like Halloween parties. He described teachers he liked and those he didn’t.
And 8-year-old Gary dealt with days of homesickness. This is one passage in the book on the subject: “Dad’s smell of cigarette smoke and sweat was gone. Also absent were farm odors: stock, cut hay, leather saddles and harnesses. I missed even cow patties and droppings the animals left behind. They all meant home, but I began forgetting exactly how each one tickled my nose in a different way.”
“It surprised me that I missed Dad’s questions, like ‘Hey Boy! What’d ya think about this?’ He would poke me in the ribs … Poking was his way. I saw him do that with other cowboys and farmhands.”
Gary, a country boy, met Elaine, a city girl, at the University of New Mexico. She was one of those who read aloud to Gary from his schoolbooks. It was a service of an independent sorority named Town Club.
Gary went on to graduate from UNM with a degree in secondary education.
He retired from Sandia National Laboratories after 32 years. Gary died in 2020 at the age of 84.
Elaine retired from Albuquerque Public Schools as a teacher and peer advisor after 31 years.
The book’s prologue, which would have fit better as an epilogue, is titled “Why Shine A Light on This Life Now?” Gary enumerates 16 answers to that question. Among the short answers are — to celebrate the human spirit, to encourage those facing a barrier, to urge perseverance with integrity whatever the challenge, to demonstrate that persons with little or no vision can live fulfilling lives.
Gary appears on an Historic Albuquerque Inc. oral history video on YouTube. In it, he talks about attending the school in Alamogordo and, Elaine added, that his mother’s insistence that he enroll there “was the best decision his mother made for him. He said it took years for him to appreciate it.”
The book is used as a resource by doctoral students in special education at UNM and for teacher training in the specialty of visual impairment at New Mexico State University, Elaine said.
She said the book has won a number of literary awards, including prizes from the New Mexico Press Women and the National Federation of Press Women for Best Biography, and the Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the categories of parents and family, and of e-book. And the book has been nominated for inclusion in the 2024/25 reading program for the United Women in Faith of the United Methodist Church.
Elaine is also a poet. “Writing poetry is more freeing than being tied up in a long book,” she commented.