Palisade Pals

One of the things contributing most heavily to any successes I have enjoyed these past twenty-three years is the close and continued support of my family. My mom and step-dad, Lois & Pinky Kribs, went the extra mile in my behalf.

That first year we lived in Manti, we purchased a home on a lease agreement. We were nearing the deadline for exercising our option just about the time I finished my orientation at the Blind Center. We could make all the payments required to purchase the property, but under the circumstances the banks were very leery. I remember my step dad’s comment. “You won’t lose the home. We can get the money.” It didn’t matter what had to happen, he was going to make sure we kept the house.

The week I came home from the hospital, I stayed at my parent’s house during the day while Cindy worked. I remember lying down on the couch and listening to the morning news. My 88-year-old grandmother, Martha Tooth, who was born in 1893 and died in July of 1988 when she was 89 years old, came over and covered me up with a blanket. I just said, “Thank you Grandma.” I really was fine and didn’t need a blanket, but I remember that as a very touching gesture from someone I loved very much.

Mom really enjoyed driving my children, Jennifer and Wil, around to their school activities. I think it took her back to another time in another city when her own children were young.

Pinky and Mom followed the kids all through school. They traveled clear to Wyoming with us for Wil’s wrestling meet. Out of a special account they’d set up for their grandchildren, they gave Jennifer enough money to finance a trip to Washington DC with her senior class.

My mother was a secretary for the National Forestry Service for many years. She was very meticulous in her office technique and a very good teacher. She trained every one of the people who came to work for me and was able to follow up on their performance afterwards. She intimidated some of the girls, but most of them became very good friends and some even became surrogate daughters. One of her favorite sayings was “It’s too bad we didn’t start an insurance agency together fifteen years ago. We could have had a pretty good mother and son business.”

I never did figure out quite what she meant, because I believed that was what we were doing.

Cindy should get a commission as my manager.

I started playing gigs at the Wisteria about a week later. I knew a total of ten songs. I played those ten songs, then sat down for a minute, then I got up and played those ten songs again.

Robert Falls came in, and he liked the way I played and sang John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot. Eventually, he worked with me.

I played the Wisteria for a couple of months, then we went to dinner in Richfield at the “Down Under.” Bob McCall was the featured performer, singing and playing his guitar. After one of his sets, he and I struck up a conversation, and I told him that I had been playing guitar lately. He handed me the guitar and said, “Play a couple of numbers for us.” Once he heard what I could do, he asked me to come back and play with him some more.

I never thought I was the next Willy Nelson or Kris Kristofferson. I’m willing to say that I’m probably better at performing than 90% of the people who play. But it’s only the top 2% who make it big. I had fun and made a little money but I’m not good enough, and I don’t have the drive to do what it takes to become a recording artist.

When I was re-learning and performing, I’d sometimes play eight hours a day. Now I tell myself I’m too busy, but I still go in the basement and play my guitar every now and then.

The guitar was the means to an end. It saved my sanity that first summer I was blind, then it became a vehicle I could use. I’m a better singer than I am a guitar player, so I can go up on stage and sing some songs and get some people to applaud and 90% of an audience enjoys what I do.

Playing guitar and singing was not only a creative outlet that made some extra money, starting at about $45, then going up to sixty bucks, and eventually expanding to $100 per week, but it also led into my next career. When I started an insurance business in 1982, that’s the money I used to pay my secretaries.

That first summer, I was trying to find things to do and keep busy and occupied. I wanted to do things as I used to.
Then Cindy said, “We need to get you a guitar.”
I thought, “Now, why do I want to go into that again?”

Since I was little, I’d been involved in music, both singing and piano. I had to practice for one half hour when I came home from school. My music teacher was teaching me the song Deep Purple as a concert number.

So I knew how to read music, and I had a love of music. In fact, in my late teens, I traveled quite a bit as a single entertainer. I also played guitar with a number of bands. Cindy thought it was only natural that I should pick it up again. Thank God for her insight.

After Cindy finally talked me into it, we went down to a pawn shop in Salt Lake City and got an old Harmony guitar. That guitar probably saved my sanity. I picked it up and I could remember maybe three chords and about half a dozen phrases from about half a dozen songs. It gave me something to do and something positive to occupy my mind. When people are playing an instrument they don’t use their eyes anyway, except to read music.

After losing my sight, I tried to relearn some of the guitar chords and techniques that I had known in the 60’s. I started having my kids or Cindy work with me on two or three chords from some chord books I bought. I’d get the fingering correct and strum or pluck it a bit. Over the next couple of days, Id work putting those chords into my repertoire, running progressions from d, c, and g back to d and then maybe a minor. I’d get used to moving my fingers. That’s what it takes to learn guitar.

I began picking up songs, a lot of them, from the local radio station. I’d record songs, and if I had one I knew from way back when, I’d get a copy of it someplace, maybe from an oldies to goodies station, and work on it until I learned it.

It was after I’d gotten eight or ten songs down pretty good that we were having dinner in the Wisteria and talking with the manager, Sydney Vaughn, who happened to be from England and had just bought the place. He told us of his plans to open the back for entertainment.

“You ought to have my husband play,” Cindy said.
“Okay,” Sydney said, “We’ll have you in next weekend.”
So I said, “Duh, wait a minute!”
But neither of them seemed to hear me.

Gene Williams is a fellow who worked with the Lions Club. He was responsible for things like getting safety goggles to the high school shop classes.

The day after I got home from the hospital, Gene came by my house, put me in his car, and took me out for coffee. We sat down and drank some coffee, then at about 8 o’clock, Gene jumped up and said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He took off. At the restaurant door, Gene met a mutual acquaintance of ours.
“Is that Bill in there?” the guy asked him.
Gene said, “Sure is. Go on in.”
The acquaintance said, “I think I’ll come back later.”
Gene said, “Why not go in now?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Gene shrugged. “Say what you would have said to him last week.”

It’s amazing how few people realized that I was still the same person inside.
I’m not a hero, I’m not a good guy, not the best husband, and I’ve made plenty of mistakes. It really makes you wonder. If telling my story brings out some understanding in other people, then I feel like I will have accomplished something worthwhile.

One thing that helped pull me through was thinking about what kind of legacy I was going to leave for my children and family. Yeah, I had to deal with some tough stuff, but I had a choice in how I was going to handle it.

I thought of my kids. I had a son and daughter at home. I had to ask myself, ‘What am I teaching them?’ Life’s pretty damn tough at times, even when you’ve got your sight. What would my kids remember when they thought of Dad? Well, one thing it wasn’t going to be was self-pity, that’s for sure.

I lost my sight in two very different types of accidents and at two greatly different ages.
When I was a five-year-old playing mumbly peg with some older boys, I caught a pocketknife in my right eye.

Mumbly peg is where you toss a knife so the blade sticks into the ground. The point of the game is to see how close you can get to someone without actually stabbing them. I was admiring the skill of the older boys when I decided to run home and get my little pocketknife. I wanted to show them that I was big enough to have a knife, too.

When I ran back, knife in hand, one of the boys tossed his knife into the air with the command, “Watch this!” I turned my face up, watching the knife twist in the air, catching the gleam of sunlight as it reached its apex. It turned and fell back to earth, point down. I watched as the knife fell closer and closer to my face, ending its journey in my right eye socket.

For the next twenty-nine years, having only one eye didn’t slow me down at all. I don’t remember anything in the way of adjustment, acceptance problems, or anything of the kind. My mom used to say, “As a child, you never even slowed down.” I never thought of being blind in one eye as a disability at all.

Now, at thirty-four years old, I was blind in both eyes.
My wife, Cindy, met me at the hospital. I’m lucky to be married to a nurse. She has resources.
Cindy called the blind center from the hospital. Before I was out from under the anesthesia, a gentleman by the name of Lynn Cruiser arrived. It seemed that I had only just regained consciousness when he began showing me a slate and stylus and talking to me about Braille.

Later, when I was released from the hospital, I got to meet Lynn again and discovered that to this day, he has no idea how close he came to wearing that slate buried in his skull.

Morphine and Braille just don’t mix. I was groggy and confused and the last thing I wanted to talk about was being blind. He meant well, he just came to visit me a little early. What he did accomplish was to help me learn about the blind community and that help was available.

Shortly after I got out of the hospital, but before I began classes at the School for the Blind, I suddenly started to cry. I put my head on Cindy’s lap. She held me like a baby and let me sob for quite some time.

Finally, I quieted and we talked. I was blind, and now what was I going to do?
It’s not easy, and not just because I was completely blind. One thing that surprised me about that accident is that I lost not only my sight, but also most of my friends.

It’s quite a blow to catch a tree limb across the face at twenty miles an hour. But when you’re already blind in one eye, and that tree limb punctures your other eye and causes immediate blindness, your world just changed forever in ways you can’t begin to imagine.

I’d only been snowmobiling a couple of times in my life prior to March 5, 1981. My brother Bruce was visiting from Vermont and some friends and I decided to take him on a snowmobile outing before he headed home.

With my friend, Brent Cox, and my neighbor, John Jenson, Bruce and I headed up Manti Canyon late in the afternoon. It was a beautiful day, leading into a clear, cold night. We ran all over the mountains, hitting several places that I had traveled as a youngster and knew quite well in the guise of summer. I’d been up there and fished and hunted all over the mountain during deer season. Now, the same places were under six feet of snow, and it all looked different.

For the first time, I was seeing my stomping grounds under moonlight in winter. I didn’t recognize them. Brent and John had to convince me where we were. It felt very strange not to recognize the country I’ve known my whole life.

After a couple of hours riding around, we headed back down across the canyon, following the creek down toward our vehicles. Those snowmobiles are so fast, when you’re sitting that close to the ground, they were like greased lightning. We traveled along the top of a ravine cut by the creek, with a drop of forty feet to the icy water below. In one spot, we had to drop off the ridge and cut a trail through the snow to go around a pine tree, then come up on top of the ridge to go around a second pine.

Brent was cutting trail. I followed him, with Bruce and John bringing up the rear. As I dropped off the ridge in Brent’s trail, the snow started to give way beneath me, sliding me further into the ravine. The snow broke away in sections, dropping me down in stages.

As soon as I realized what was happening, I hit the gas and pushed my safety goggles up off my eyes, because they were fogging up. I sat up on my machine, threw it into the hill, and hit the gas. I broke over the ridge at nearly 20 miles an hour, which was none too fast to get me out of the predicament I was in. I managed to duck the first limb that came at me, then sat back down and caught the second limb right in my face.

Fear was intense. “Oh, God, what did I just hit? Damn, that hurts! Get it off, throw it off!” Through the pain, I realized that I was still on my machine and moving. But I couldn’t see where I was going. “Why is everything black? Why can’t I see? Get off the snowmobile. Roll off. Roll off now! Blood. Ah, you’re bleeding. Shake your head. You must have broken something. Why can’t I see the snow? Here comes Bruce. He’s really moving. He’ll run right over me! Get out of the way, roll over and get off the trail.” I heard Bruce’s machine zoom past me before he stopped. John was right behind him, and was the first one to reach me. “Yes, John, I’m hurt. Get me a rag and help me get this helmet off. Do you think you could find me a rag with more gas and oil on it? Bruce, you go first and keep cutting the trail. I will ride with John and we will follow you. John, slow down, I’m not going to die on you. Slow down, it hurts!”

Fear. Most people experience it as a short time emotion.
When I was a kid, there was a movie we used to see in school, an animated production about the heart and circulatory system. It illustrated what fear did to a deer’s heart when it saw a lion, and how all his fear went away when the lion leaves and things go back to normal.

Blindness never leaves. The fear never goes away.

Being Blind Is Not a Handicap, It’s Just Damned Inconvenient

Something you should know is that I’m kind of a rebel. Not that I like to start trouble or won’t follow rules, it’s just that when rules make no sense, it tends to bring out the worst in me, or the best, depending on your frame of mind.

The things you read about in the following pages would not have happened without the support of my wife and family. In a marriage, each partner has his or her role to play. That role is defined by society; examples set by parents and the evolution of the marriage itself, with or without the couple’s knowledge. When an accident, illness, or other such calamity occurs, the balance changes. Adjustments can be tremendous. Over the years, we have seen many families break apart under stress caused by debilitating accidents or illness. None of my accomplishments or achievements would have happened without my family.

Certainly the Pals program would not have come about.