Radio for the Blind on S.C. chopping block

By Carolyn Click
Published: October 03. 2010


COLUMBIA, S.C. — Since she lost her sight four years ago, Margaret Gutman has come to rely on a state-run radio reading program for the blind to provide her with news from the three major South Carolina papers, opinion pieces from local and national commentators, health and gardening news, and the occasional offbeat magazine article.

So when she learned last month that the South Carolina Educational Radio for the Blind, in existence since the 1970s, was set to become another casualty of the state's economic downturn, she was devastated.

“I just think it is cutting out so much of the outside world,” said Gutman, 76, who suffers from wet macular degeneration, a chronic eye disease that causes swift vision loss in the center of a person's field of vision.

Gutman listens “24/7” to the service, she said, often turning on her special receiver late at night when she cannot sleep to hear volunteers read from The State newspaper, The (Charleston) Post and Courier and The Greenville News. Volunteers read local stories, obituaries, op-ed pieces and even the grocery specials — information the sighted skim quickly and take for granted.

Cutting off ‘my outside world'

When you are blind, “You lose your driving privileges ... you lose the ability even to shop, to look at prices on things and to recognize things in grocery stores,” Gutman said Thursday.

“I just feel they are cutting off a big chunk of my life, my outside world to some degree.”

Her husband, retired Air Force Maj. Walter Gutman, already has written to the governor to voice his concern at the loss of the programming — the only service for the blind that focuses on state current events.

James Kirby, commissioner for the S.C. Commission for the Blind, said he understands the pain and frustration of the legally blind South Carolinians who rely on the service, delivered through special receivers tuned to a dedicated sub channel of ETV.

About 5,000 blind residents around the state have the lent receivers in their homes.

But as the agency's budget over the last two years was reduced from $3.9 million to $2.2 million, Kirby said he determined the $120,000 program, run by three staffers with 50 volunteer readers, had to go.

Kirby said he tried to protect the state-funded radio program, along with children's and blind prevention services, even as he worked to make sure there was enough state funding for rehabilitation programs that receive a significant 80-20 federal dollar match.

‘Double whammy'

“When we cut state dollars in those programs, we have a double whammy,” said Kirby, who plans to elicit support in the state Legislature to restore the service.

About four years ago, he noted, Gov. Mark Sanford tried to eliminate the program, an effort that was turned back.

“When we start the budget process in January we are going to seek the restoration of funds,” Kirby said.

That's good news, too, to the 50 volunteers who have contributed a total of 2,700 hours of reading time over the years and believe the program, with its emphasis on volunteers, is about as efficient as any in state government. The local radio programming is supplemented by additional programming.

“In the grand scheme of the state budget this is such a minor amount of money,” said Don Caughman, who has been reading newspaper and magazine articles to his blind listeners for 31 years. “I and other volunteers over the years have given an awful lot of time to give a service that didn't cost the state anything. It's a little bit annoying to me that it gets lumped in with everything else.”

Caughman began volunteering one morning a week before work, then two.

Since his retirement from BellSouth in 2000, he spends three early mornings inside one of the four sound booths at the studio.

“I try to think about people listening as I talk,” Caughman said. “I try to do it with a certain amount of enthusiasm and proper enunciation.”

Don Siebert, a retired University of South Carolina English professor who created a half-hour show “All About Words” for the blind audience, agrees.

“It seems like the defenseless are the first cut,” said Siebert, who like other volunteers had to audition to become a reader. “This isn't the biggest tragedy in the world, obviously, but it is a shame given how little it costs. It's a symptom of this whole climate of cutting, cutting, cutting.”
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