Navigating Pittsburgh with aplomb
Each of us has a story. This one made the paper. To suggest someone, email uscolumn@post-gazette.com.
Twin babies born three months premature in 1952 were placed in a hospital incubator with high concentrations of oxygen, as was the medical practice at the time.
But the oxygen adversely affected their undeveloped eyes in a condition known as “retinopathy of prematurity.” They went blind.
More than 67 years later, I met one of those twins by chance at a Bloomfield diner.
Jimmy Wiseman of Oakland was sitting at the counter and exuding such joy over a bowl of cornflakes that I moved next to him, hoping he would infect me with his good mood.
As it turns out, he’s an urban adventurer. To navigate his way to the diner, he caught the right bus, crossed busy streets, including ones with no chirping crossing signals, and negotiated cracks, bumps, traffic cones, trees, tables, chairs and bikes that pock and block city sidewalks. He did it all with three tools — a trained brain, a broken cane and unbroken resolve.
Then and there I told him I wanted to write about him. I wanted to witness how this Gulliver travels. That proposal shook his bottle, causing him to gush with excitement.
So I spent four hours with him and his brother, Larry, who schooled me on how people without eyesight can live and thrive. The experience made even me smile when I remembered one moonless night inside our pitch-dark rural farmhouse. I went to the bathroom but ended up in another bedroom patting the wall for a light switch.
Now, don a blindfold and make your way from Oakland to Bloomfield — or the city morgue. There are risks.
Jimmy once had the end of his cane snapped off by a car that didn’t stop. He required help to get home. Another time, a car knocked him onto the pavement. He wasn’t hurt, but he was forewarned. He has been a victim of impatience, rudeness and even cruelty. At a stop in Ohio en route to Cincinnati, the bus driver refused to allow him back on the bus because he was late returning from the restroom.
And yet, there he was smiling.
Born first, Larry is more reserved. He moved 2½ years ago into Moorhead Tower Apartments on North Craig Street, where Jimmy has lived since 2007. It has braille door numbers and post office boxes and talking elevators. Occasionally, they get together but mostly lead independent lives three floors apart.
At intersections with no chirping signals or verbal instructions, they stand statuelike and listen until traffic begins traveling parallel rather than perpendicular to them. That’s when they cross the street, tapping their canes side to side like marching-band rim shots.
They very much appreciate assistance.
Jimmy explained how the ambience and the balance of sound give him clues. He knew when he was passing a beer distributorship and later announced, “Turn here,” exactly at the apartment building entrance. A faster walker, Larry was 20 yards ahead. But his cane isn’t broken.
Our senses join forces when one is lost, and, as Larry said, “You can’t miss something you never had.”
So the Wiseman twins listen at bus stops for the voice announcing its number. They have memorized bus numbers and where each is headed. Once on the bus, they can tell you each intersection, all while talking with friends. They get off the bus one block from the G M Dog N’ Burger Shoppe in Bloomfield but walk the block and cross Liberty Avenue (without the chirping).
“You have to have your mind on it,” Jimmy advised. “You have to always listen.” Later he added, “My brain is a computer.”
They don’t dream. Apparently, you need an archive of images to dream. On a rare occasion, Larry hears a dream voice that awakens him.
They listen to radios and read Braille. Their apartments are spare. No decor. They have but don’t use lights, reminding me of the 1967 thriller, “Wait Until Dark,” when Audrey Hepburn, as a young blind woman, gains advantage over a killer inside her apartment by unplugging the lights.
The twins attended DePaul Institute in Mt. Lebanon, then graduated from the Western Pennsylvania School for the Blind. Each have held jobs, with Larry once making political buttons for 50 cents each.
Leaving the diner that afternoon, they went straight to the bus stop, where they stood side by side on the curb, faces angled a bit skyward. They stood still, listening. I watched the handsome, meditative, even childlike faces basking in a brightness they knew not of.
What I couldn’t see were those brains churning, analyzing, interpreting every last clue to understand the cacophony of the modern world — a world too often indifferent and too seldom helpful to these urban adventurers whom their apartment building supervisor describes as “the fabulous Wiseman brothers.”