The
First Lady of The Seeing Eye by Morris Frank and
Blake Clark
Happy New Year readers!
I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season and are ready to continue
with reading great books in 2014!
The
First Lady of The Seeing Eye by Morris Frank and
Blake Clark is the book of the week for this week. Morris Frank was a blind man
from Nashville who helped start the first school that trained seeing eye dogs.
His dog Buddy is considered to be the first seeing eye dog in America. This
amazing story started in November 1927, when Morris Frank was a 20-year-old
student at Vanderbilt University and a man very unhappy about his dependency on
others to get around. Frank's father read him an article by Dorothy Eustis, a
woman living in Switzerland who had seen shepherds training dogs to lead blind
people get around. Excited by the idea, Frank wrote a letter to Eustis and
received a response letter 30 days later inviting him to come see for himself.
Frank then took a ship to Europe and trained extensively with a dog that had
been bred specifically to lead a blind person. The training was hard, but after
weeks with the dog, Frank could get around the nearby Swiss village holding
tightly to a harness to which Buddy was strapped.
I’m not about to give
away the rest of this amazing story. To find out more about Morris Frank and
Buddy please consider reading this book…it will inspire you and give you
adequate knowledge about one of the most prominent Guide Dog schools in the
country.
Happy reading until
next week!!
