The Mind's Ear

They cannot see -- but they hunger to learn. A blind college physics student wants to know what is in a four-part book on quantum mechanics written in Greek, Latin, German and English. A sightless theologian needs to absorb Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man. A farmer must learn the contents of Modern Fruit Science. An aspiring salesman pleads to know The Five Great Rules of Selling.

The only practical way to get such knowledge from the printed page into the brain of a blind man is through his ear (Braille is hopelessly slow to read, expensive and bulky to produce). Luckily, any blind college student, professional man or businessman in the U.S. can have the textbooks he is studying read aloud to him, and free at that. Recording for the Blind, Inc., a nonprofit group of 32 staffers and 2,400 dedicated volunteers, will put any educational book on 7-in., 16 2/3-r.p.m. vinylite discs and send it out to whoever needs it.

Better Motivated. The organization got started in 1949 when Mrs. Ranald H. Macdonald, wife of a New York investment banker, and a small group of volunteers began recording textbooks for G.l.s blinded in World War II. The Korean war casualty list sharply increased the need for help, and in 1951 Recording for the Blind was incorporated. Now, at the New York headquarters and 15 other recording units from Miami to Los Angeles, teams of readers and monitors (who check the spoken word against the text) spend hours inside soundproof booths to build up a catalogue of titles that stands at 7,000 and is growing by 1,600 a year.

The effort is enormous but singularly rewarding. Blind college students, more strongly motivated than students who can see, get better grades; 72% scored a B average or better in a recent nationwide sampling. Operating on a budget of $389,000, Recording for the Blind this year is aiding 1,000 undergraduates and 1,500 adults. Expanding toward lower grade levels, it is also helping 400 high school seniors to prepare for college. And by arrangement with Connecticut education officials, the group is recording textbooks for youngsters in Grades 4 through 12, the state paying the initial cost and the private charity making copies available to some of the 17,000 other blind elementary-and secondary-school children in the U.S.

Vested Interest. Among the celebrities who have sounded off on record are CBS Newsman Walter Cronkite and film stars Dana Wynter, Ed Begley and Bradford Dillman. Most volunteers are college-educated housewives, who usually read general histories and biographies. When a request comes in from a blind student (each needs about eight books a year), it is relayed from Manhattan to the field unit best staffed to read the subject intelligently. For that reason all but one unit--Oak Ridge, Tenn.--are located near a university with a good library and a big pool of specialists.

At Oak Ridge, a team of five nuclear scientists recorded tough texts on thermodynamics for Gerald McCollum, a blind student at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., and wound up feeling that they had a vested interest in his future. McCollum came through: he graduated second in his class. Now McCollum is at Brown University, and this summer he is using a translated Russian physics text in a research project financed by the National Science Foundation. His reader: Morton Hamermesh, assistant director of the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, who helped to translate the book.

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