Blind man finds link to world through braille

When Charlie Kinder was a fourth-grader and still could make out hazy sunrises and sunsets, he was captivated by a place from a geography lesson: the Land of the Midnight Sun — where for several weeks the summer sun never sinks below the horizon.

For someone who grew up fighting blindness as his cataracts worsened, Scandinavia was more than a place — it was a metaphor for sight.

Kinder, now 72, lost his sight when he was 20, but he never lost his love for a land he will likely never see. He has not only immersed himself in the culture, he also began studying the Norwegian language.

At first his lack of vision made learning the language difficult, particularly with no class lessons readily available in braille. But that changed when Kinder began studying Norwegian at the Scandinavian Language Institute in Ballard and his classmates, determined that he be included in the lessons, combined their high-tech know-how to help Kinder "see" the Norwegian language. They researched, recorded, converted computer files into braille and repeated the procedure every week.

What emerged, for Kinder, was a ticket to the Scandinavia of his heart.

"It was wonderful," he said.

Kinder was born in the tiny town of Las Animas, Colo., into a family more inclined to emphasize his limitations than help him achieve his potential.

Even as a young child, he had cataracts that made the lenses of his eyes opaque, obscuring his vision. It was a condition that could not be corrected with surgery. Kinder wanted to be a professional musician, but his parents advised against it. Instead, he learned to tune pianos at the Colorado Institute for the Blind, his keen ears helping to compensate for what his eyes lacked.

He was filled with wanderlust, traveling from state to state, tuning forks in his pocket, knowing the inner mysteries of uprights, spinets and grands like the faces of old friends.

But he never forgot the geography lessons that took him to where the sun could shine at midnight. "I used to love to sit and watch it get dark at 4 o'clock," he said, recalling the distant days when he still had vision. "I tried to imagine what it was like to have the sun shining at 11:45 at night."

Kinder moved to Seattle in 1990 to take a maintenance job with the Lighthouse for the Blind. He was listening to the radio in his South Seattle apartment one Saturday morning when he heard Doug Warne and Ron Olsen's Scandinavian Hour on KBLE-AM (1050). Someone was teaching Norwegian and Kinder was enthralled — it was the language of a world of sunrises and sunsets different than anywhere else on earth.

Although Kinder is "Norwegian by choice," not ancestry, he joined the Sons of Norway, Leif Erikson Lodge, began attending "kaffestrua" (coffee klatches) and sported Nordic sweaters trimmed with pewter buttons. When the radio language lesson ended, he enrolled in Ed Egerdahl's Norwegian class at the Ballard institute.

Egerdahl, who has taught for almost three decades, has had four blind students in his classes and found they often struggled. Kinder was the exception. He had reached Egerdahl's third-level or intermediate Norwegian class — all without being able to read. Still, Kinder was not happy with his progress.

"I was frustrated. ... I wasn't getting anywhere," he said. And whenever the class read Norwegian aloud he could never take his turn. Skipping Kinder bothered the class.

Kinder made calls to Oslo for information about Norwegian language programs for the blind. So did other classmates. But the issue was how to translate the Norwegian lessons from Egerdahl's class into braille.

Several students had an idea. Wally Haugan scanned the text materials into a computer character-recognition program that allowed him to create a Norwegian text document. That electronic text could then be fed through a voice synthesizing program to create a compact disc recording of the text materials in Norwegian.

Once the materials were available electronically, student George Hadley, with the help of Tape Ministries NW in Seattle, transferred it into a braille-type font and added the extra letters of the Norwegian alphabet. It takes about five to six pages worth of braille print to equal one page of text.

When the first translation was complete — the students repeat this procedure for every lesson — Hadley walked in and put a braille document on Kinder's desk. Kinder was stunned. Suddenly, Kinder was reading, filling the classroom with flowing Norwegian as his fingers effortlessly tracked the braille as if he had read Norwegian his entire life.

"It was amazing," student Peggy Hilton said. "We can all see the [illustrations] of the little guys and how to make our mouths do the sounds for &Aelig;, Ø and Å and he's creating all the sounds that we do."

"We all applauded long and enthusiastically when he finished his first paragraph," Egerdahl said. "The excitement and joy in Charlie's face in something I will never forget. It is the best classroom moment I have had in my 27 years of teaching. ... [It took] the joint effort of so many to accomplish this miracle for Charlie."

A miracle indeed, Kinder says with gratitude. He lives on Social Security and knows he is unlikely to ever be able to afford to visit the country of his imagination.

But at least now, he said, the Land of the Midnight Sun is at his fingertips.

Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522 or nbartley@seattletimes.com