March 2019

This morning, the Tuesday Seniors group hosted The Blind History Lady, a.k.a. Peggy Chong. Chong, a long-time member of the National Federation of the Blind, recently retired to Aurora from New Mexico with her husband, Curtis.

For a number of years she has researched stories and records of blind Americans, some as far back as the 19th century, in order to bring their more or less forgotten or never-known lives to light.

Her “blind ancestors,” as she considers them to be, become more fully rounded-out citizens, and not just Hollywood stereotypes as she tells their stories in person or in print.

These Denver high school students, Deya and Alma were two of the dozen middle school to college prep students who experienced all the sensory data of a spiny dog shark when they opened one up today at the Center. Well, except for taste. Thanks again to Arapahoe Community College’s Biology Professor Terry Harrison for leading these blind students through a meaningful lesson about anatomy – a lesson with the side benefit of learning that vision isn’t the only sense with which to do real science!

It was a relatively calm morning after yesterday’s Bomb Cyclone, with 8 to 12 inches of snow and extreme winds blowing the flakes sideways and into drifts. Admittedly we had to skate our way into the Center before eight this morning, climbing over ice boulders thrown onto the sidewalk along Prince Street by snowplows, but we are here. We are grateful not to be among the nearly 80,000 customers in the Metro area without power this morning.

And we are on for tomorrow’s shark dissection with Arapahoe Community College’s Terry Harrison. We’re plowing and digging and de-icing our way out in plenty of time for that! And the sharks come frozen anyway!

¿Habla Español? ¿Es una persona mayor? Ven al grupo de apollo los invidentes al Centro de Colorado Colorado Para Personas Invidentes.

That’s right, we’ve started a seniors’ group for Spanish-speakers who are losing vision, have lost vision or are blind. It meets on the third Friday of each month from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at 2233 W. Shepperd Ave. in Littleton.

Sí, mañana, a la una de la tarde.

Para más información, llame a Carina Orozco, 303-778-1130, ext. 233, o e-mail, corozco@cocenter.org.

Storm coming. If you’re lying in bed checking Face Book this morning, wondering what else is closing in advance of today’s predicted blizzard conditions, count the Colorado Center for the Blind as another of the closures. I mean, if the Arapahoe Sheriff’s Dept. is closing, who are we!

We well remember the big April storm in 2016 when staff and student’s slogged our way home at 11:00 a.m. through thigh-high drifts with heavy snow still falling.

So, no need to get up now, except to make coffee of course!

Let there be no doubt – students at the Colorado Center for the Blind form lifelong friendships. Monday, three such friends reunited at the center Kathy Kudlick, Bill Lundgren and Anahit LaBarre. They are shown above standing in front of our tactile CCB logo, left to right, Anahit, Kathy, Bill and Director Julie Deden.

All three were students at the same time, in fact, they began arriving shortly after our move to Littleton in August, 2000.

Kathy was first in October of that year. A professor of French History at the University of California-Davis at the time, she came ready to at last embrace her identity as a blind person. Today, she is Director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University.