Seeing Eye weathering the storm in New Jersey

Reports I’m receiving from fellow Seeing Eye graduates tell me the Seeing Eye school, located in Morristown, New Jersey, was spared some of the more devastating damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. Training at the Seeing Eye usually includes a trip to the Morristown train station to learn to get safely on and off trains with your dog, and with so many trains not running, that may be eliminated for a while. Same goes for trips to New York City for urban work.

Every day last month the Seeing Eye posted a picture on Facebook of a graduate with a short anecdote about how Seeing Eye dogs change our lives, and my friend Jerry Smith and I were two of the 31 grads featured there.

That’s Jerry with his current partner Aztec.

You might recognize Jerry’s name – he lives in Ontario, and I talked about him in a post I wrote last October after his Seeing Eye dog Seymour died. Seymour and my retired dog Hanni were classmates at the Seeing Eye in 2001, and Jerry and Seymour were a particularly colorful pair. Jerry returned to the Seeing Eye earlier this year and is working with his sixth guide, a Golden Retriever named Aztec, now. He was paired with his first Seeing Eye dog, a male German shepherd named Val, in 1971, and wrote about that dog for his Facebook story:

This story happened soon after I was partnered with Val. We were hurrying to a meeting in a hotel in Toronto and I was pushing my partner to go faster and faster as I was very late. We went down some stairs and down a long hall when suddenly Val stopped. I urged him on but he stopped in front of me, blocking me from going forward. I was in such a rush I made a big rookie mistake: I ignored him, stepped around him, and went forward myself. I took a couple steps before falling down an open elevator shaft. I only fell a short distance and fortunately (for me) I landed on top of two workers at the bottom. No one was injured, and I had let go of Val’s leash when I fell so he was still up there. The workers told me he was standing at the edge, looking down at me as if to say, “You have learned the first lesson – always trust your guide.

My decision 20+ years ago to train at the Seeing Eye ended up introducing me not only to four fun, fabulous furry four-legged friends, but also to dozens of spirited blind people like Jerry who come from all over North America to train with Seeing Eye dogs. We all return home to travel safely and independently with our dogs, thanks to the hard work of hundreds of generous staff members and volunteers. Most of these people live in New Jersey, and my thoughts are with them, and the dogs in the Seeing Eye kennels, and the puppies living with volunteer puppy raisers throughout New Jersey, as they all weather the storm.

Faithful friends who are dear to us

Sometimes he thinks he's a lap dog.

Before we left the Seeing Eye last week (Wow! Have we been home a week already?) our instructor read me Harper’s “puppy profile.”. Each person who volunteers to raise a puppy for the Seeing Eye is asked to write up a little report. You know, to let us in on what our dogs lives were like before we met them. Here’s an excerpt:

Harper was attending classes at my university (including attending the graduation!), going on buses and trains, attending other club meetings, university equestrian team shows with 20+ horses, a trip to the airport — going on a plane but not taking off, emergency vehicles, malls, stores, fairs, the beach (his favorite), on a boat, in pools, overnight charity events, elementary school presentations, a retirement/recovery home, soccer, football, and hockey games.

Whew! Harper is one well-traveled dog – he did all that even before he was a year-and-a-half old! And yes, you read that right: he was raised on a college campus: he’s a Rutgers grad! An article on the Rutgers University Seeing Eye Puppy Raising Club web site describes these generous students who volunteer their time to raise puppies for us.

To truly stop and spend a few moments observing the volunteers of the Rutgers University Seeing Eye Puppy Raising Club, you’re struck too by their obvious affection for and commitment to their charges – cute, adorable puppies with names like Elroy, Yankee, Harper, and Oz.

Did you read that? The article mentions Harper! What a sweet little puppy he must have been – imagine the attention he got on campus! College students at Rutgers have been providing a welcoming home for Seeing Eye puppies since the year 2000, when the Rutgers chapter of the puppy raising program began. After leaving the Seeing Eye breeding station, seven- or eight-week old German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers, Labrador Retrievers, and crosses of these breeds are placed with puppy raisers until they are 16 to 18 months old. Raisers train the puppies in basic obedience, house manners, how to walk on a leash, and expose the dogs to real-life situations they might encounter once placed with a blind person like me.

But back to Harper’s puppy profile. His puppy raiser said Harper loves squeaky toys, so we knew to give him some of those when he came home to Chicago with me. She also said that he loves being talked to in a sing-song voice, so just imagine how much I sing to him now! My favorite part of Harper’s puppy profile:

He is the coolest dog I’ve ever had. His personality is a great combination of independence and affection.

Amen to that. THANK YOU, Harper’s puppy raiser. And thanks to all the other wonderful, generous volunteer puppy raisers out there. You are our heroes.

Why some Seeing Eye puppies don’t become Seeing Eye dogs

A young woman at our New Jersey book signing Sunday said she’d raised a puppy for the Seeing Eye in…get this…her dorm room! Any of you blog readers out there who are scrambling to find just the right college to attend, may I suggest Rowan University or Rutgers in New Jersey, or University of Delaware? All three host programs for students who’d like to raise a Seeing Eye puppy on campus. Here from the Rutgers University Seeing Eye Puppy Raising Club web site:

On campus we have fifteen designated apartments where the puppies are allowed in with either the raiser or the sitter. Puppies are allowed to attend classes with permission from the professor and can ride on the University buses.

Following the puppy-raising portion of our puppies’ lives they return to The Seeing Eye, Inc. campus in Morristown, New Jersey for formal training. Upon arriving they spend the first month or two in one of the training kennels adjusting to kennel life and being evaluated medically. The Seeing Eye also evaluates dogs to incorporate into the breeding program at this time. Dogs that are not chosen for breeding are neutered or spayed and have various tests to determine whether the dog is healthy and physically fit enough to become a Seeing Eye Dog.

Puppy raisers give the dogs affection, teach them basic obedience, and expose them to social situations they might encounter as Seeing Eye dogs. Assuming, that is, they make it through to graduation — it’s estimated that only 50% of the dogs born at the Seeing Eye end up being placed with a person who is blind.

Another woman we met at our booksigning fit that statistic perfectly. Her family had raised two puppies for the Seeing Eye, but only one of them was a working Seeing Eye dog now. “Bedell is working with a blind man in Georgia,” she said. “Petey, the other one, lives with us at home.”

Standards are high for puppies, and the Seeing Eye is strict about which dogs make it through training. Fitzi, the puppy who was raised in a dorm room, was a very docile dog, easy to train as a puppy. In harness, however, Fitzi felt the immense responsibility of guiding his instructor across busy streets. He was withdrawn from training after only a month due to his fear of traffic. And Petey? “He refused to relieve himself on concrete,” his puppy raiser explained. “Seeing Eye dogs have to go on command, and Petey would only go on grass!” The Seeing Eye is careful not to call these dogs “rejects” or failures” – some of them go on to other working dog organizations, some go back to their puppy raisers, some are adopted by other families. All of them move on to make someone, somewhere, very happy.

Signing a book for one of my Fairview, NJ, fans.

It was fun visiting with people who lived so close to the Seeing Eye. The kids Hanni and I met on our school and library visits on Monday and Tuesday had all seen working Seeing Eye dogs before. Some of them even mentioned the statue of Buddy, the first ever Seeing Eye dog, in the town square in Morristown. During my talk at North Arlington Library on Monday I mentioned the puppy raisers I’d met the weekend before at Mendham Books. Sure enough, when it came to the Q&A, one woman in the audience asked how she could sign up to become a puppy raiser. I beamed.

Hanni and I had a great time in New Jersey and found the people there fun, smart and caring – even though they talk funny. I mean, c’mon. Who calls an Italian sub a “sangwich”?! We hugged our very gracious host and chauffeur (librarian Stephanie Balucci) goodbye at Newark on tuesday. Upon landing safe & sound in Chicago that evening, Hanni and I were reminded how important it is that a Seeing Eye dog be able to “empty” on concrete: there’s no grass at O’Hare!

Raising Puppies for the Seeing Eye

Our Friday flight from O’Hare had been delayed four hours. By the time Hanni, Mike and I got to Morristown, I was ready for a glass of wine. Or two. Or three.  “Will Merlot do?” Jim Kutsch asked. “If not, just let me know — we have a wine cellar in the basement.”

Yeesh! Jim and his wife Ginger both are blind, they’d held a myriad of major     

Ginger Bennett (L) and Jim Kutsch (R), great hosts and great guides to Morristown, NJ. (That

big-time jobs between them, they manage a household on their own, they both have Seeing Eye dogs, he’s now the President of the Seeing Eye. Isn’t that cool enough? They are wine connoisseurs, too?!

“We’re not collectors,” Jim explained. Our dogs were scrambling at his feet, acquainting themselves with each other. ” The cellar came with the house.” Keeping track of the wine in the cellar had been difficult at first. “I was feeling through all the shelves one day and it dawned on me,” he said. “The wines were arranged in a sort of grid.” And so, of course, he did what any other blind computer geek would do. He used his talking computer to create an excel spreadsheet of the cellar.

Other Reminders Our Hosts Were Both Blind

1. Ginger would pet a dog, then ask aloud, “Which one are you?” She’d feel for their necks (each of the three had different sorts of collars) and then she’d know for sure.

2. Jim set a talking timer when he put our burgers on the gas grill outside. When it chirped, he knew to turn the burgers over.

3. Ginger poured my first glass of wine and set it in front of me. She had no way of knowing where I might have set that glass after that, though. So when I ask for a second Merlot, she set the bottle near me and tapped it with her fingertips. I heard where the bottle was and could pour that second glass myself.

4. I heard Jim flip a switch as he led us into the room we’d be sleeping in. Then he asked Mike, just to make sure. “Is the light on?” The next morning we paraded to the Kutsches’ favorite coffeeshop for breakfast – Colby leading Jim, Peyton leading Ginger, Hanni and me bringing up the rear. Poor Mike had to walk alone.

After breakfast we spent a glorious day at the Seeing Eye’s Family day for Puppy Raisers — a day of dogs, demonstrations, videos, free lunch and ice cream to help puppy raisers realize the rewards of their dedication. Nearly 2000 volunteers showed up for the fun, and the Seeing Eye ordered caseloads of special copies of Safe & Sound for the event. Puppy raisers lined up to have me sign (and Braille) my name into each book. Hanni’s pawprint was rubber stamped on each copy, too, of course. Ramona, the wonderful Seeing Eye staff member who’d been tracking our flight delay the day before, was assigned to help with the signing. “I’m glad you guys made it!” she said with relief in her voice. “Those O’Hare-Newark flights are notorious for being late.”

She led me to a signing table and we got started. A few minutes later she was already so busy opening containers of books that she couldn’t help me rubber-stamp Hanni’s pawprint. Mike was called to action and was a good partner — he had no trouble hurrying me on if the line got too long. Anyone who has been to one of my book signings knows how I LOVE to chat with everyone who comes to the table.

A Surprising Thing Mike & I Learned from the Puppy Raisers

I thought puppy raisers might secretly hope that in the end their puppies wouldn’t make it into class. Dogs removed from consideration as a guide are offered to the volunteer who raised the dog as a puppy. If the puppy raiser cannot take the dog, the dog becomes adoptable to others. But as the puppy raisers counted off the number of puppies they’d raised, I could hear their voices fill with disappointment when naming the ones who hadn’t made it. “He had toileting issues,” one little girl told me. Another dog was too protective. One lab suffered from chronic ear infections. As the event was drawing to a close, I asked a member of the Puppy Placement Department what the hardest part of her job was. I expected her to say it was taking the dogs away from the families to start training. “Oh, yes, that’s hard,” she acknowledged. “But the families all know that is going to happen.” The hardest part, she said, was phoning the families whose dog had been removed from the training program. “They take it hard,” she said.

One of Many, Many Examples of Nice New Yorkers

Booksigning over, we were whisked to the train station in Morristown for an overnight in New York City. Hard to imagine where NYC got the reputation of being rude — everyone was so kind to us. When Hanni, Mike and I exited Penn Station, Mike told a transit cop the address of our hotel. “Is it possible to walk there?”

“Too far,” the cop said. We headed to the taxi cue. All of a sudden we heard that same cop calling out to us. “Over here!” he said. He had hailed a cab four us himself.

The whole weekend was fab, from staying at the home of the Seeing Eye president and his wife in Morristown on Friday night to hanging out with Ramona and meeting all those dedicated puppy raisers during the day Saturday to our night at the “Desmond Tutu Hotel” in Chelsea. When I emailed Ramona today to thank her for all her hard work, I told her the good news about our flight back: it actually left Newark on time. “You oughta buy a lottery ticket,” she said in her email message back to me. “You’re awfully lucky.”

She’s right.

Odd Man Out

Hanni heads off to Doggie Bath House again this Thursday. She needs to look – and smell! – good for our trip To New Jersey. We’ve been invited to the Seeing Eye’s annual “Family Fun Day on Saturday –it’s a day to honor the puppy raisers and other volunteers who do so much to make our guide dog partnerships possible. The Seeing Eye ordered FIVE HUNDRED special copies of Safe & Sound for the volunteers, and Hanni and I will be on hand to sign my name (plus rubber stamp Hanni’s pawprint) inside each one.

A car will meet us at Newark Friday to drive us to the home of Jim and Ginger Kutsch. Jim – or perhaps I should say, ahem, Dr. James A. Kutsch, Jr. – is the first blind person to be named president of the Seeing Eye. I learned a lot about Jim while writing a profile of him for the Illinois Alumni Magazine. Jim lost his sight when he was 16 years old, then ended up getting a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois.

Jim Kutsch hoped the chemistry experiment would impress his high school buddies. When his homemade explosives backfired in a fiery blast, however, the explosion not only left the 16-year-old totally blind, but also resulted in the amputation of half his right hand.

Thanks to friends leading him through school hallways and relatives and neighbors reading textbooks to him at night, the determined teenager from Wheeling,
W. Va., managed to graduate from high school on time. After finishing his first year at West Virginia University, Kutsch traveled to Morristown, N.J. to train with his first Seeing Eye dog, a German shepherd named Sheba.

Thirty-six years, three college degrees and five dogs later, Dr. James A. Kutsch, Jr. doesn’t need outlandish science experiments to impress his friends. A career that has taken him from academic professor to the high-tech business world does his bidding for him. This year another achievement has been added to his list: In September, Kutsch became the first blind person to be named president of the Seeing Eye.

Jim’s wife Ginger Bennett Kutsch was the Associate Manager of Development at the Seeing Eye before Jim took his position there. Ginger is blind, too — the pair met while training with new Seeing Eye dogs. Jim’s German Sheppard Anthony couldn’t keep his eyes off Peyton, Ginger’s yellow Lab/golden
Retriever cross. The rest, as they say, is history.

Mike is coming along with Hanni and me on the trip. Poor guy, I’m afraid he might feel left out Friday night. After all, he’ll be the only one at the Kutsch’s house without a guide dog!