"Yes You Can!"
I was at a Colorado Springs convention center in the
quiet of late afternoon, preparing to speak at a dinner that night. It
seemed that everybody else was off skiing as I stepped onto the deserted
patio outside my room. As I took a deep breath of crisp air, I heard a deer
rustling for berries in the bushes. I had been told the deer here were tame;
maybe I could actually touch one. I moved quietly toward the sound, reaching
out …
Suddenly I was plunging downhill, tumbling down a rocky slope some 30 or 40
feet until I crash-landed in a heap. I had walked off the edge of the patio.
There I lay, cold and wet in the snow. I’m a big guy, but I felt pretty beat
up, as well as scared and disoriented.
No, I hadn’t noticed how close I was to the edge of the patio, or that there
was a steep drop-off.
I’m blind. I can’t see a thing.
When I was 17, a normal all-American kid in Oklahoma, I went to the doctor
for a routine physical. He shone a light into my eyes and sent me off for a
battery of tests. The news wasn’t good: I had a degenerative eye disease and
would progressively lose my sight.
It’s a devastating thing for anybody to face, much less a happy-go-lucky
teenager. I had never even met a blind person. How did they act? What did
they do?
As terrible as the news was, it focused my mind in a practical way. If I
wanted to stay independent and make a living, college seemed a necessity. I
enrolled at a local university, but it was the early 1980s and there were no
facilities or arrangements for handicapped students. I always seemed to be
groping around in a gray haze.
During this time, while I still had limited vision, I began volunteering at
a school for blind kids. The teachers put me in charge of a four-year-old
they thought was particularly difficult to deal with. They didn’t have many
expectations for this little boy; because of multiple handicaps, they said
he would never be able to tie his own shoes or climb stairs. I was
determined to prove them wrong.
"You can tie your shoes," I told him. "You can climb stairs." The little boy
was just as determined to resist. He said, "No, I can’t," and I said, "Yes,
you can." We went back and forth like that constantly.
The truth was, I was having trouble saying "Yes, you can" to my own life.
Keeping up with college courses was increasingly hard, and the day came when
I decided to call it quits. On my way to the administration building to drop
out, I went to the school for blind kids and announced I wouldn’t be
volunteering anymore either. "It’s too tough," I said. "I can’t do it."
"Yes, you can!" a little voice piped up beside me. The four-year-old had
been listening.
"No, I can’t!" I said sharply.
"Yes, you can!"
Then it hit me. I had to keep on trying or admit I had been lying to this
kid that the extra effort was worth it. And in that second I knew: It was
worth it—for him, and for me.
I resumed college, listening even more attentively as other students read my
assignments aloud. One of the sounds that kept me going was the gentle voice
of a young woman named Crystal, who read to me patiently week after week.
Three and a half years later I graduated. That same week I stood by as the
little boy who had said "No, I can’t" climbed three flights of stairs by
himself, sat on the top step and tied his shoes.
My dream was to start some kind of business. When I talked this over with my
dad, he said, "Come back tomorrow and I’ll give you something." Great, I
thought, he’s probably going to stake me to some money. Instead Dad
announced that he had made arrangements for me to have a series of visits
with a local man named Lee Braxton. With only a grade-school education,
Braxton had become an entrepreneur and made a fortune during the Depression,
money he had then used to start and support many charitable and educational
organizations. Now he was in his seventies, and I went to his house to
listen to his philosophy of life.
One of his favorite biblical passages was, "God hath not given us the spirit
of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind" (II Timothy 1:7).
Each time, I left his house feeling built up and full of courage. I asked
Mr. Braxton how I could ever thank him. He said, "Someday God will give you
the opportunity to encourage other people—and you’ll pay me back by doing
just that."
I was able to start my own investment brokerage and I married Crystal. Then
at the age of 29 I lost the remainder of my sight. Any shadings of light
that I had previously seen were gone.
I set up a room in my house carefully arranged with everything where I’d
always be able to find it. My business was successful, and it was my
intention to operate out of this room, where events would be predictable and
under my control, more or less forever. I wouldn’t fear being awkward or
embarrassed or hurt by unknown or unfamiliar situations. I believed that I
could spend my entire life here—and for a while I did, mired in deep
depression.
But my friends and family helped me work through my blackness. Slowly I
started to get back in touch with activities I had enjoyed. I had always
loved classic films, and one day I put a Humphrey Bogart movie into the VCR.
Even though I couldn’t see, I figured I could still follow the plot by
listening to the dialogue and sound effects. But about 20 minutes into the
film, a character in the movie screamed, there was the squeal of brakes and
somebody apparently fled. What was happening?
As the movie went on, I realized there were many other moments when actions
or images must have been on the screen explaining or advancing the plot—but
I had no idea what they were! Extremely frustrated, I thought: If the voice
of a narrator could be added to describe what was going on, the millions of
blind and visually impaired people in the United States could enjoy the
movie too.
It was time to come out of that room. Working with Kathy Harper, a wonderful
friend and colleague who is legally blind herself, I started out in 1988 in
the basement of a condo in Tulsa. We got permission from the owners of films
to add descriptive narrative to the soundtracks of classics such as The
African Queen and It’s a Wonderful Life. Using borrowed equipment, we
created a sound studio in a broom closet under my stairs, and I recorded the
additional commentary about setting and action.
So far, so good. But now we were technically stumped. I called a Tulsa TV
studio and asked for help. "Sure," was the answer. "Our most expert guy will
work with you."
I showed up the next day with all our tapes and wires in a cardboard box,
explaining that we hoped to splice our newly recorded material onto each
movie’s soundtrack. "Forget it," the engineer said. "What you’re trying to
do is impossible."
So I went back to the head of the station and asked him, "You got anybody a
little less expert?" Out came a kid, maybe 18 or 19, and I told him what I
wanted to do. "Let’s try it," he said. He fiddled around in the editing
room—and it all came together.
The next step was to try to get our shows on TV. We took a less expert point
of view on that one too; after a number of telephone calls, we reached a
cable company that agreed to let us air several hours of films on one of
their channels. We whipped off letters to "impossible-to-get" celebrities
such as Katharine Hepburn, Jack Lemmon and Eddie Albert, asking them to
appear on a half-hour show about the films—and they agreed. Every step along
the way, it seemed we were too naive to know our dream couldn’t work.
Officially launched in 1988, our organization was named the Narrative
Television Network. As more and more cable stations picked up our offerings,
letters from viewers started pouring in. "For the twenty hours a week that
your shows are on," one lady wrote, "you make me forget that I’m blind." It
made me all the more committed to continue doing things the "experts" told
me were hopeless.
As we added our narrative to more and more movies, channels across the
country signed up to carry our programming. In October 1990 I went to New
York to pick up an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences for outstanding contributions to the industry, and other
prestigious awards followed. Since I was onscreen a lot as host of many of
the programs, offers arrived asking me to be a motivational speaker. That
meant really coming out of my safe room, navigating airports and crowded
rooms and coping with unfamiliar surroundings.
So there I was in Colorado Springs, scuffed up at the bottom of a slope,
freezing cold and bone-tired. Nobody knew where I was, and I wasn’t even
sure myself. I thought longingly of that room in my house where everything
was predictable and safe.
But I also remembered my friend Lee Braxton, and somehow I felt he was
saying to me, "Tonight somebody is coming who needs to hear you, and you owe
me. God’s giving you the opportunity to encourage other people. Get back up
this mountain and get ready to give that speech."
I started climbing the hill, hand over hand. Finally I came to the top and
felt around till I found a place I could climb back on the patio, then
worked my way from door to door—all locked—until I found the one to my room
that I had left ajar. I got cleaned up, and gave my speech.
It was a speech I give often, and one of the things I told the audience has
become a theme for me: Whatever your situation in life, you too can step out
of that safe room and proceed with faith minute by minute, hand over hand,
not worrying about what lies ahead or what might happen, but trusting that
God will supply you the energy and courage to cope with each experience as
it arises.
Yes, there’ll be times you will fall off the patio. And you’ll feel like
shouting, "No, I can’t." But I’ve got news for you: Yes, you can!
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Narrative Television Network
5840 South Memorial Drive
Suite 312
Tulsa, Oklahoma 74145-9082
Toll Free 1-800-801-8184
Phone (918) 627-1000
Fax (918) 627-4101
E-mail: info@narrativetv.com