Lifelong friends talk of many changes

By Kevin Allenspach, St. Cloud Times

(Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the St. Cloud Times as part of our Central Minnesota Chapter’s promotion of Meet the Blind Month in October.)

Mary Beth Moline and Gayle Gruber-Bengtson have been friends for nearly 50 years, so they know one another about as well as can be considering neither can really say what the other looks like.

Moline and Gruber-Bengtson are blind, virtually since birth. Moline said she was told her eyes stopped developing even before she was born. Gruber-Bengtson also was born with defective optic nerves, though she later has been able to see basic shapes and outlines with the help of very strong glasses.

They grew up in St. Cloud and met in grade school at the former Washington Elementary, where Gruber-Bengtson was in the sixth grade and Moline was in the first. They learned braille from Freda Schowalter, who taught them a lot more, too.

"She had these squeaky shoes — think she wore them on purpose — so we always knew where she was or when she was coming," Gruber-Bengtson said. "She taught us to listen. There is so much you can be aware of if you concentrate and listen. We used to have this ball we'd play with. It beeped and we'd pass it around a circle. I used to call it the 'green satellite.’ There were nine of us in class and we were playing and it got lost. We asked her to find it and she said 'No, you find it.' It was one of the first instances where she was trying to teach us independence."

Gruber-Bengtson and Moline have been pursuing it ever since, and the rapid expansion of technology in the past 15 years has helped them achieve it like never before. It's something they've celebrated during October, which is Meet the Blind Month — sponsored by the National Federation of the Blind. Gruber-Bengtson and Moline are active members.

Moline worked two stints at Fingerhut, most recently from 1985-2002, answering phones, transferring calls and taking messages. She started out on an electric typewriter.

"I'd type messages and lay them out on my desk and people would walk by and the air current would sometimes blow the messages onto the floor and all over the place," Moline said. "Then in 1994, I got my first computer."

Compared with the software of today, it was archaic, but it was a breakthrough. Before long, text-to-speech technology became available and now Gruber-Bengtson and Moline can communicate with each other as well as anybody else on the planet via e-mail. A program, Job Access with Speech, nicknamed JAWS, is integral to a blind person working in the sighted world. And, the opening of the Internet to the blind has led both to a vast array of information that otherwise would've been unavailable to them unless they got it in braille or had someone read it.

"Oh, how I wish we'd had this technology when we were growing up," said Gruber-Bengtson, 59, a 1971 Technical High School graduate. "Now I can read Dear Abby, I listen to the St. Cloud Times through the Minnesota Radio Talking Book program, and there are a variety of old-time radio stations out there — including one I listen to (that is) run by blind disc jockeys. In the 1970s and well into the '80s, there was no assistive technology like this."

Gruber-Bengtson moved through several jobs after she graduated from the Minneapolis Society for the Blind. She worked in the Twin Cities at a law firm, then for the Minnesota Migrant Council. Later, she came back to St. Cloud and worked for an answering service. There she met her husband, Jim Bengtson, who was sighted. He died two years ago. She keeps busy now as secretary for the Central Minnesota Chapter of the NFB, by volunteering, and by playing bingo on Wednesday nights with a group of sighted friends. (She uses braille bingo cards.)

Moline also is an active volunteer. She has collated 95,000 volunteer cards for the United Way, ties yarn on quilt projects at Catholic Charities, and teaches preschool and elementary crafts at her church — Northland Bible Baptist.

"If people meet us, I hope they'd treat us the same as they would their sighted friends," said Moline, 54. "You should know there are a lot of things we can do for ourselves. We just do them in different ways. But don't be afraid to hire a blind person when they're qualified for a job, and don't be too shy to come up and talk with us. I actually think it's fun when people describe things to me that I might be seeing."

Just don't grab a blind person because you think they need help, Gruber-Bengtson says. Ask first.

"That can disorient you and you might fall or lose your bearings," she said, then joked, "Oh, and don't point when you're giving directions."