2011-10-11-The Story of Thunderdog
Seminars@Hadley
The Story of Thunderdog
Presented by
Michael Hingson
Moderated by
Billy Brookshire
October 11, 2011
Billy Brookshire
Welcome once again to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Billy Brookshire and I’ll be your Moderator today. Today we’re going to be talking about The Story of Thunderdog. You know exactly 10 years and one month ago you and I were probably sitting in front of the television or listening to the radio and we heard the broadcast of what was happening at the World Trade Center. And it was horrifying. I know you were horrified as I was.
But you and I were watching from the safety of our living rooms and seeing something that we thought was one of the most horrible things that ever occurred, while Michael and Roselle, his guide dog, were actually living it; they were in Tower One World Trade Center and helped lots of others get out of there. So Michael has written a book about this experience and about his wonderful dog guide named Roselle, called The Story of Thunderdog. He’s going to be telling you something about the book this morning and also about his experiences, and I hope a lot about himself.
By the way, Michael will probably share this with you, but Roselle was chosen as Hero Dog. I don’t know if you guys know that. And a lot of it thanks to some of the voting from those folks on this broadcast. So thank you all folks for pitching in. Well Michael, I’ve taken up too much time now. I need to turn the microphone over to you and let you talk with the group. And please, tell us a little bit more about yourself. I haven’t with you that Mike is the President of the Michael Hingson Group. So ladies and gentlemen, here’s Michael Hingson.
Michael Hingson
Well thank you all for coming out and being part of this this morning. I appreciate you being here. I’m glad to be here and talk a little bit about Roselle and the book Thunderdog and some other stuff along the way. I think it’s important to understand that the book Thunderdog is not a 911 book. I have grown up as a person who happens to be blind and I grew up with parents who took a philosophy that there was no reason that I couldn’t go off and do anything that I wanted to do just like anyone else does.
The result of that is that I had responsibilities like any other kid growing up, and I was treated with the same respect, I think is the best way to put it, and the same attitudes towards me as a child by my parents that my brother had. Of course there were differences. We always have this whole concept of equality that we talk about and I’ve been in school where teachers have said to me “Well yeah we treated you equally. We gave you the same material that everyone else had.” Or we gave you this, it’s just like everyone else had – that’s not equality.
If I don’t have access to the information, if I am not in the position where I can respond in some manner to the same information or the same requirements as everyone else, then we’re not in an equal environment. Equality means that I’m given the same access to and the same opportunity to handle whatever comes along as everyone else. And the same opportunity means that there may very well need to be certain things done so that I have that same access. And I believe it is not changing our world to go off and say we need to provide material in Braille, we need to provide access to material by providing good electronic copies of information and so on. Access is access.
And my parents basically said “We’re going to level the playing field for you and you can go do what you want with that. We’re going to encourage you and then you can make of yourself what you want.” That’s essentially what they said, although not in those words of course. So I grew up in public schools. Does that mean not go to a school for the blind; not at all. But that was the environment I was in and my parents wanted me to be around home. But I think education is where you find it. And that’s how we deal with education that makes us who we are.
So I grew up in public schools. I went to the University of California at Irvine and I got a Masters Degree in Physics. Took some administration courses along the way and also was a little bit involved in campus activities, specifically I worked at the local campus radio station; was the Program Director for a year, had a radio show on Sunday nights for six years. So that was a lot of fun. Then I became involved in a program that was established by the National Federation of the Blind and Ray Kurzweil, back in 1975.
Ray had come to the National Federation of the Blind and said I’ve got this machine that will read any printed material and he proved it. So the NFB, wanting to help Ray Kurzweil make that machine successful, secured foundation grants to purchase five of his prototype machines along with funding for having staff, which ended up being me, to literally travel around the country for 18 months making sure that the machines worked, setting them up in various locations, such as the NY Public Library, the Iowa Commission for the Blind, Blind Industries and Services of Maryland. We had one at the University of Colorado for a while and then also one at the California Orientation Center for the Blind and later the San Francisco Public Library.
And truly for 18 months I travelled with suitcases and lived in hotels. All my furniture was in storage and I was a gypsy. It was a lot of fun. It taught me a lot about people. It taught me a lot about this country. It gave me confirmation that I could do whatever I chose to do. I could travel anywhere. I went to a lot of strange cities; never had been to them before, and was able to survive. So I proved, to myself I think is all I needed to worry about, that I could do those things, which certainly helps today.
After that 18 month project ended, as it was supposed to, it was only scheduled to go a year and a half; I ended up eventually at Kurzweil Computer Products in Massachusetts. So I moved to Boston and lived there for three years. And then the company transferred me back out to California, where I was from, I grew up in Southern California most of my life. I should say I was born in Chicago but we moved out when I was five to California. Anyway I moved back to California in 1981 to be involved with the Kurzweil presence on the West Coast and also Kurzweil was being purchased by Xerox so I was to help from the West Coast end with the transition of Kurzweil becoming part of Xerox.
Well on the way I met and married my wife Karen in 1982. And in 1984, after the takeover of Kurzweil by Xerox was complete, all of the salespeople who worked for the company prior to the acquisition were phased out. Now not the people necessarily in the reading machine side, but I had been asked to go into sales along the way at Kurzweil on the commercial side, not the Kurzweil Reading Machine, but a device called the Kurzweil Data Entry Machine, which is what Xerox was interested in. The scanning technology that allowed companies to be able to scan any material and do something with it; put it into a computer readable form.
So my job was phased out and I, well not phased out, but my services were no longer needed. I was sent a Federal Express letter in July 1st of 1984 saying “We don’t need you anymore.” And so that made life a little bit of a challenge because then I had to go off and find a job suddenly. That was difficult and I was unemployed for six months. And finally, with some friends decided to go another route; and that is we started our own company selling computer rated design systems to architects.
Now, computer rated design systems for architects are very visual animals and I mostly didn’t do the selling side directly; that is the demo side. I did a lot of the selling but not the demo side, but I did learn how to work with the products. And I got to the point where I could sit down in front of a computer with an architect and say “Now what do you want to do?” and they could tell me and then I could tell them here’s what you do to make that happen. So I could help them draw pictures on a screen and eventually get to the point where they could do whatever they wanted to do to convince themselves that this was a viable product.
So, a blind guy doing that – I didn’t have to see the screen to do it – what I had to do was to be able to know about the system and to know about the commands and so on so that I could help others use it. I did that for about four years and then went back into the computer industry again working for someone else; I decided I didn’t want to own a company anymore. And along the way in that new job search, which again as always is a challenge, something happened.
We found an article, an ad in a newspaper, for a job that I thought seemed really good. It was a product selling computer disc systems. It was in Carlsbad, California, about 45 miles from where I was living at the time. But again, I had the old same idea and concern that most blind people have. Do I say in my resume I am blind or not? I’ve had situations where I’d actually had job interviews cancelled just before the interview was to take place when somebody figured out that I was blind, if I didn’t say I was blind up front.
So I had this dilemma of what do I do about that; what do I say. Well finally my wife said “You know, you took a Dale Carnegie Sales Course back in 1980 and you’re the one who’s always talking about turning your liabilities into assets”, which is what the Dale Carnegie Sales Course says to do about your products. If you’ve got a product that has some weaknesses you figure out a way to make those weaknesses a strength. And it suddenly dawned on me that I could do this with this job presentation.
So when I wrote the cover letter to go along with the resume, the last paragraph of that letter went something like this – “When you’re looking to hire someone for this job the most important thing about me that you should take into consideration is the fact that I’m blind. As a blind person I’ve had to sell all my life just to be able to survive. I’ve had to sell to convince people to rent me an apartment, or sell me a house. I’ve had to sell myself just to be able to get on airplanes. Being blind is a constant sales presentation. So when you’re hiring someone for this job do you want to hire someone who just considers sales a job and does it when they get to work, or do you want to hire someone who understands the science and art of selling because that’s the only way I’m able to survive throughout my entire world?” And I got the job.
You see what we did? We turned blindness into an asset for that job. I think there are ways to word that in a lot of job cover letters and in a lot of job applications. You’d have to figure out why blindness is an asset and you have to come up with something that the people at the company are going to pay attention to about why blindness is an asset, but it certainly is doable.
Anyway, that job eventually moved me back to NY in 1996. So from 1989 to 1996 I worked for this company, we moved down near the company and then in 1996 I was asked to go to NY to open an office and sell for the company. Because in fact, I was selling most of my time at that organization to the east coast from the west coast, occasionally taking rips back there. But clearly that wasn’t the way to sell. We needed to have a presence. So I went in opened an office in Number Two World Trade on the 23rd floor.
So I did that from 1996 to 1997 and was recruited away by another company. I worked for them for about a year and a half. And then I was asked to join Quantum, which is the company I last worked for in the sales environment. Quantum manufactured what are called disaster recovery or tape backup products, products that people would buy, put into their offices and that would record all of their computer transactions. So every Wall Street firm for example, every Securities Firm has to take all their data on a regular basis and back it up and store those backups somewhere away from their facility so that they have constant records of everything that they do. The Securities & Exchange Commission requires that they do that for seven years, or for any backup.
So I went to work for Quantum in 1999 and in 2000 we opened our office for Quantum on the 78th floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center. Along the way, I had been using several guide dogs. I got my first guide dog in 1964 when I went into high school, my second guide dog when I went into graduate school, my third guide dog in 1986 and my fourth guide dog in 1996; that was Lynnie. Lynnie only worked three years before she became ill. She was bit by a tick, contracted Lyme’s Disease, which morphed into a kidney disease and then had to retire. We were able to save her with the help of some wonderful veterinarians and most of all a lot of prayer. And Lynnie then was with us for another three years, until the 4th of July of 2002.
But in 1999 that meant we had to get a new guide dog and I got Roselle. So Roselle worked with me in the World Trade Center when we opened the office in 2000 and worked with me every day for 13 months there. When I was in the World Trade Center one of the things I was concerned about was being the manager of the office, and I was the leader of our facility. I hired a staff, both engineering and sales and support and so on.
As a manager I knew that it was my responsibility to be able to be in charge, be involved in what my staff was doing, go to lunch with them, know how to go to lunch with them. So I learned the World Trade Center and the surrounding areas literally by just walking it every day with a cane and then with a dog. A cane because I wanted to learn the geography, and then a dog because that’s what I preferred to use.