San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Blind man’s memories guide him through S.F.
Jerry Kuns has a special feeling for San Francisco, a city he cannot see. Kuns, who is totally blind, lives in a bright and cheerful house just above Noe Valley and just below Twin Peaks. He goes for a walk through the city every day with friends, and once a week or so he walks along Ocean Beach from the zoo to the Cliff House and back — “about 6 miles round trip,” he says. “I know San Francisco,” he said the other afternoon. “It is my city.”
He used to lead sighted people on tours of the city — listening to what they told him they could see and then offering his sense of the city. “I still show off San Francisco any time I get the chance,” he said. For a while, he ran a small tour business as kind of a sideline. He billed himself as Jose and called it Jose Can You See Blind Guided Walking Tours.
Kuns is part educator, part entrepreneur, part salesman and part tactile artist, and he lives life on his own terms. He is a tall lean man with unruly gray hair and a Vandyke beard. He recently turned 80. “An octogenarian,” he said with a wry smile.
Like a lot of San Franciscans, he grew up somewhere else — in his case on a farm in northern Ohio. He was visually impaired as a boy, essentially blind, but he learned self-reliance. He was one of four children, and the only one with vision problems. “My father said, “I don’t know what you can do, but why don’t you try?” So he did. “I did the farm chores. I brought up the coal out of the cellar. I milked cows when I was 7. I fed the chickens. Everybody in the family had to help out on the farm, so I helped out.”
School was a problem, so Kuns went to an Ohio school for the blind. But he was uneasy. “As a
Jerry Kuns, who became completely blind in 1978, uses his other senses to make up for his lack of vision.
blind kid in Ohio I saw my future as one of those blind vendors in the lobby of some dusty county courthouse,” he said. He made a small grimace.
A bit of luck. His family moved West, was living in Southern California, and enrolled Jerry at the California School for the Blind in Berkeley. He had a sense of independent adventure and went to visit friends in San Francisco one day, riding the old Key System train over the Bay Bridge and a Muni bus out to the Excelsior district. But on the return trip he got confused, got off the bus at the wrong stop and missed the last train to Berkeley.
He was 14, a blind kid lost in San Francisco in the middle of the night. It sounds like the plot of a movie. “Yeah,” Kuns said. “It does. So I wandered, mostly by feel, across Market Street, up Grant Avenue, in Chinatown, over by Broadway, into North Beach by some jazz places where there was music. It was
Stan Kenton playing. Stan Kenton himself. I knew his music, and I had wandered into this San Francisco scene. This was in 1956, and I knew this is where I wanted to be.” He made his way to Washington Square, hoping to sleep on a church pew, when a kind San Francisco couple took him in for the night. That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Kuns grew up visiting the city, staying there when he could. As you can tell, he is not shy, and he hung out in North Beach in the coffeehouses and bars during one of those golden ages the city has from time to time: “I knew Kerouac, and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti,” he said. “I went to the Jazz Workshop and Enrico’s, the Committee comedy club, the Fior d’Italia, all those places,” he said. He got to know the city. More importantly, he got to know the feel of the city. “Not that I could see it,” he said. “I felt it.”
He made friends. He
enjoyed walking, but also took up running — 5K runs mostly. Also a bit of sailing and skiing, mainly cross-country skiing. “I had to learn to fall down properly,” he said.
He rides public transit a lot in the city. “I listen when they call out the stops, but I know the routes the buses take, and on the trolley bus I can tell where we are by the sound the electric buses make on the overhead switches.”
Sometimes he takes tour guests on a cable car ride. “I always ride on the running board, outside,” he said. “Once I entered the cable car bell-ringing contest,” he said. “I did pretty well, too, but finished second. The other guy had a top hat or something.”
A San Francisco story. More importantly, Kuns did other things. He had several careers, as a rehab counselor, an employment development specialist, a vice president for sales for a firm that made computer products that blind and visually impaired people
could use. He taught as well. He showed off a device that uses Braille to connect with the internet. He had a hand in what’s called blind assistive technology. He is an advocate for Braille and people who can’t see. His latest project: interpreting the Smuin Ballet for the blind.
He was visually impaired in a shadow world of vague shapes until 1978, when he went completely blind. He uses his other senses — hearing, smell, touch and memory — as compensation. He can remember the smell of a particular North Beach restaurant — “the U.S. Cafe, remember that?” — or the smell of the ocean breeze, the shift in the wind that brings the afternoon fog. The taste of a really good martini. “Louie, the bartender at John’s Grill made the best Martinis. He had some kind of foreign accent I never could figure out.”
Kuns has tactile maps to get the sense of how the city is laid out. “I love maps,” he said. He took out one, a threedimensional map of San Francisco, held it in his hand. He has long, slender fingers, like a pianist. “Here is the Eureka Valley,” he said, touching the map, “Here is the Noe Valley with the hill between,” he said. “And here we are. Right?”
His house is full of tactile art, some of which he made himself. One of his favorites is a wall hanging of hands and circles shaped in wires. Another is a portrait of himself, holding a wooden sculpture. He had Naomi Rosenberg, an artist who makes tactile maps and graphics at San Francisco’s Lighthouse for the Blind, produce it so that he can feel the picture, in effect see himself.
He has a custom-made garden in the back of the house with gently curved gravel paths with plants he can touch and smell.
His house is an older place, a survivor built in 1896 as a stable. He rebuilt it with his wife, Theresa Postello, a teacher he met at a dinner party hosted by his friends Carol and Mark Agnello. They were together for 27 years; she died five years ago.
He speaks of her often with sadness. He also feels regret about the changes in the city. It’s different, he says, it’s not as open and friendly as it was. But he is not a sad man. He smiles easily. “I’d like to take a walk with you,” he said. “I’ll show you the neighborhood.”