In this August 10, 1955 correspondence on her Arcan Ridge letterhead, Helen Keller writes to Morris Frank:
It was a delightful greeting you sent me on my last birthday, as it were with a lick of darling Buddy’s tongue. My thanks to you both are none the less warm for being delayed by extra work which resulted from my world tour. With a love-pat for Buddy and cordial greetings to yourself.
The blind Morris Frank (1908-1980) was a Jewish “visionary” who revolutionized life for Americans with visual impairments. He helped start the first school to train seeing-eye dogs, and his dog Buddy – to whom Keller affectionately refers in our letter – was the first seeing-eye dog in America. Together, they traveled over 50,000 miles throughout the United States – including stops at the White House to meet with presidents Coolidge and Hoover – carrying the message of hope to blind people and publicly demonstrating the value of dog guides.
Frank was instrumental in shaping major policies and procedures, including establishing criteria for students, securing dogs with suitable mental and physical characteristics, and locating capable instructors able to keep up with the physical demands of working with both dogs and people. His job in public relations involved persuading leaders in agencies for the blind of the value of seeing-eye dogs and gaining approval from public transportation and restaurants to permit the dogs to accompany their owners.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Frank lost vision in one eye in a horse-riding accident at age 6 and his second eye during a boxing match at age 16. (Ironically, his mother had also been blinded, at age 3, from a horse-riding accident). He enrolled at Vanderbilt as perhaps the first blind college student in the South, and he paid his way from wages earned as a piano tuner, later working as an insurance salesman. After reading an article by Dorothy Eustis describing a European school where German shepherds were trained to guide blinded soldiers, he wrote to express a desire to obtain such a dog and to set up a similar American instruction center (1927).
Frank was shipped – as a parcel (the only way for the blind to travel overseas) – by steamship to Switzerland, where he met Eustis and her head trainer/geneticist, Jack Humphrey. After training with Buddy for five weeks, he returned to America to demonstrate that dogs could be safe human guides and to gain acceptance of the dogs in public places. Exhibiting resolute boldness, Frank successfully demonstrated that the consequences of enhanced and safe mobility were dignity, self-confidence, and independence. Along with Eustis and Humphrey, he founded The Seeing Eye, the first dog guide school in the United States and, serving as the institution’s managing director, oversaw its daily operations. He received much acclaim for supplying seeing-eye dogs gratis to members of the armed forces who lost their sight in the line of duty.
After losing both her hearing and her sight at 19 months, Helen Keller (1880 – 1968) became known as perhaps the most influential crusader for hearing- and visually-impaired individuals. Not as well known, however, is Keller’s involvement with Jewish and Israeli communities.
Early in the 1930s, she was among the first to take a strong position against the German persecution of the Jews. In a 1933 letter to “the Student Body of Germany” protesting the mass Nazi book-burnings (which included books written by Keller herself), she wrote: “Do not imagine your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit his Judgment upon you…” In a December 2, 1938 correspondence to John Finley, editor of The New York Times and a close friend and neighbor, she urged the Times to publicize the deplorable situation of the Jews in Nazi-occupied lands.
