OUR NEIGHBORS: Disability doesn’t impair vision for Valley service

WASILLA — Pat Brown has been a lot of things in his time — engineer, businessman, bus driver, underground radio broadcaster.

But he said he never expected he’d be blind.

“It was a Friday morning I woke up and I couldn’t see,” he said.

It was May 16, 2008. The doctors, he said, still aren’t entirely sure what caused him to lose his vision. They were able to restore partial vision in his right eye. He can discern shapes on sunny days and read text if it’s blown up on the computer or in a magnifying glass.

“I have some modest vision so I’m greater than legally blind,” he said.

Losing his vision started him on something of a journey he’s still finding his way through. He was informed of some support groups for the blind and he signed up. He started getting involved with the National Federation of the Blind and attended the group’s Alaska convention. Then he signed up to be the state chapter’s secretary. And now he’s started a Wasilla chapter, for which he serves as president.

Attending these events has been a huge inspiration, Brown said.

At the conventions he learned of blind auto mechanics, anesthesiologists, and even pilots. A blind attendee from Pakistan, who had a cultural aversion to keeping a dog as a pet, had a seeing-eye Shetland pony, which got Brown and a friend talking about atypical animals they could use.

“I want the moose; he wants the Clydesdale,” Brown joked. “It’s kind of hard to get them on the bus but things can be worked out.”

But, seriously, the conventions proved to him something that the head of the federation, Marc Maurer, says.

“He states that blindness is a nuisance and once that’s understood then you can work around it,” Brown said.

That sort of inspiration, he said, has been a shot in the arm. He wants to start a rocket club for blind children. He wants to get together a submission to enter a contest Google is holding to put a robot on the moon. He wants to build a cannon to break the world distance record for launching a pumpkin. He wants to start a project to use low-orbiting satellites and blanket the world with wireless communication signals. He’s running for Wasilla City Council.

“I may have lost my sight but I have not lost my vision in life,” he said.

And through working with the National Federation for the Blind, he’s been able to connect others dealing with blindness to the same kind of inspiration he’s found.

Brown was born and raised in the Chicago area — Gary, Ind., actually. In the ’60s he got into broadcasting, starting out using an underground transmitter until the FCC paid him a visit and he dumped that transmitter into Lake Michigan.

“I used to be known as Smiling Pat, the most recognized voice in the Windy City,” he said.

From there he went to Minnesota and then to Alaska for the first time, where he worked in a sawmill in Seward until it shut down, at which point he went to work on the oil pipeline and then for various oilfield contractors and for the Kenai Peninsula Borough and finally on the team that brought a missile launch facility to Alaska. The Kodiak Launch Complex was the final result of that.

Somewhere in between all those things he spent a stint driving a bus in Seattle — a shuttle bus, one about the size of those MASCOT uses. There was what was possibly the most shocking experience of his life.

“In ’03 I was struck by lightning,” he said. “It was raining and hailing so bad I pulled into a parking lot and to this day I’m not sure where it was.”

He got out of his van and went to make a call to his dispatcher on his combination walkie-talkie/cell phone. He put his hand on the back of his head and his hair curled around his fingers.

As he raised the phone to his ear, when he got it about to his chest, “there was this almighty ‘kablam!’ and this tube of white light and I lost about a half hour,” Brown said.

It burned his arm like he’d been in the sun too long and put a white stripe in his hair. One theory, he said, for how he lost his vision four years later is some kind of delayed effects from the strike.

He said the lightning strike was a hard thing to get through at the time but he can laugh about it now. In fact, Brown seems capable of laughing about anything.

“There are people who are doing worse than I am and I’m thankful for what I do have,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.