I would wager that none of the participants in this 1993 event would have
predicted that blind people would be able to browse the archives of the
newspaper just a few years later.  BOLD members will spend part of Sunday
at the controls of small aircraft taking off from our county airport.  I
wonder if the person who asked the article's final question was among
them.

--- forwarded article ---

   TITLE:   BLIND AMBITION REALIZED AT THE WHEEL

   AUTHOR:   BY BRIAN O'NEILL



   TDATE:   Sunday, August 29, 1993


   SECTION:   SUNDAY MAGAZINE

   PAGE:   14

   ILLUSTRATION:   DRAWING

   CAPTION:   Ted Crow/Post-Gazette

   MEMO:   LAST WORDS

   LEAD:   It started as kidding around. Bob Scullion, who lives down the
   street from the Wiseman twins in Bloomfield, would always drive the
   van on their ski trips. But almost always, on the way back from Seven
   Springs, Scullion would tell Jim Wiseman:

   "I'm too tired to drive. Why don't you drive?"

   REST:

   "You see what kidding around leads to?," said Larry Wiseman, 41 and,
   like his brother, blind from birth. "The real thing."

   The Wisemans were among roughly 25 blind men and women who spent a
   recent Sunday afternoon tooling around Bud Kunkel's 100-acre farm just
   off the Butler County Airport. These members of Western Pennsylvania
   BOLD -- Blind Outdoor Leisure Development -- have skiied, skated,
   hiked, camped, cycled, swum, fished, canoed and ridden horses before.

   But this is the first time any of them got behind the wheel of a '79
   Impala.

   I jumped in the back seat of the Impala when Terri Watson took the
   wheel. Her husband, Mike, was next to me and Dave Wantuck, a sighted
   BOLD member, was in the shotgun seat. Terri's task wouldn't be as
   difficult as Al Pacino's character's in "Scent of a Woman." He drove
   blindly through Manhattan. We were idling in the middle of a recently
   mowed hayfield.

   "Do you have a driver's license, by the way?" Wantuck asked.

   "We're working on it," Terri said.

   And we were off. Wantuck used the same signals the BOLD ski guides use
   -- hard left, soft left, hard right, soft right and stop -- and we
   bounced along at about 10 miles an hour, dodging dozens of hay bales
   scattered around the farm.

   OK, we bumped one. Hey, bales roll.

   "Hard left," Wantuck said as we neared a 15-foot cut in some trees.

   It wasn't hard enough.

   "Stop, stop, stop!"

   The Impala nosed into the leaves as if foraging for food.

   "I keep forgetting it won't just stop if you take your foot off the
   gas," Terri said.

   Yeah. Think back to your first driving lesson, and then close your
   eyes and think of it again. Imagine learning to ease the brake, to
   slowly give the car gas, to coordinate your movements, without any
   feedback other than the shouts of the guy next to you and the bumps of
   the ruts below.

   There were, however, some among this group who weren't born blind, who
   were seizing the chance to get back a measure of lost freedom.

   Mary Alice Gallagher Minihan, of Crafton, a mother of nine who lost
   her sight five years ago, said, "It's kind of funny to get in a
   vehicle when the gas tank's full and the radio isn't on."

   She's spent most of her adult life taking her kids all over the map,
   and when she got behind the wheel she instinctively checked for the
   high beams. In her head, she said, she still saw things. Her 20-minute
   jaunt around the hayfield reminded her of the first time she put on
   ice skates after losing her sight. In little time, she felt in
   control.

   "Everything to me," she said, "is just a blasted miracle."

   Terry Lewis, 42, of Brookville, who piloted a medical-rescue
   helicopter in the Vietnam War, certainly wasn't shying from the
   challenge. He joined BOLD, paying the $8 annual dues, just to make
   this trip.

   Lewis had driven 18-wheelers cross-country for a living until losing
   nearly all his sight to diabetes a year ago. He has no sight in his
   left eye, and only 20-600 vision in his right, but he had no trouble
   finding the black 1947 American LaFrance fire truck that Larry Consolo
   brought.

   "It's been a year," Lewis said. "I don't think I forgot anything,
   though."

   Indeed, when the sighted man behind the wheel couldn't get the truck
   started, Lewis suggested checking the ignition switch. Moments later,
   the engine roared and Lewis drove 'round the field, testing the siren
   a time or two. He never took it out of first, but he said later the
   ride was definitely worth the trip to Butler.

   Peggy Walsh rode in the back of the truck as Lewis drove. She liked
   the sense of being taken care of by another blind person.

   "It felt like he was very calm and in control. I'm too cowardly to do
   any driving myself."

   And so it went. For a couple of hours on a sunny Sunday afternoon,
   blind people drove cars, trucks and even a couple of four-wheeled
   all-terrain vehicles. Jim Wiseman was one of the first to try one of
   those 'quads.

   "The idea of the freedom of driving around the field," Wiseman said as
   he rode in the back of a hay trailer later. "It was great. You've got
   to be alert. You've got to know what you're doing. This is a lot of
   fun. It's a great day."

   Before the event began, Kunkel, a former auto race driver and a friend
   of Scullion's, said, "We absolutely don't know what we're doing."

   But when it was over, and the last person had left seven hours later,
   the talk was of making this an annual outing. It had been the largest
   turnout at a BOLD event for some time.

   Not that there isn't room for improvement. I never did get the
   fellow's name, but when Scullion was addressing the group and asking
   for questions, a young BOLD member had a good one.

   "Next time we'll have to bring a plane, won't we?"