WHAT'S IN A NAME

In his true autobiography, Don Donaldson provides a stirring account of a great variety of life experiences that would be rare to find in the lifetime of an average person.  There is, for example, frequent and interesting reference to two of Don’s close friends, Don Morgan and Ben Smith.  The interest, however, is not so much in the friendship, but rather in how those friendships happened to occur.  All three of these children, not knowing each other, were raised in families living within a few miles apart.  The significant feature is what happened to them independent of each other.  Each boy early in life became involved with a dynamite explosion that left Don Donaldson and Ben Smith with very little eyesight and left Don Morgan totally blind.  It was through this common experience that finally brought the paths of these three to cross.

Then, there is the meeting of Don and Ben at a blind school late in their high school years.  This led promptly to the formation of a business partnership of door to door selling and which provided many exciting adventures as the boys toured the state of Washington, earning their way through college.  During these events comes a heart throbbing account of Donaldson’s experience, when, at the beginning of his junior year at the university, he underwent an extremely delicate surgery that restored normal vision to one eye.  Not only did this inject a new dimension into Don’s vision of the world, but it also enabled him to drive Henrietta, the model A Ford used in their far-reaching endeavors to sell brooms and mops around the state of Washington.

Don is provided with even more excitement, when as a successful adult, he and his wife, Mildred, embark on a series of long ocean trips by freighters.  Here they met Dan Thren and his wife, Virginia, and add them to their list of lifetime friends.  Dan is a multimillionaire and thoroughly an unpredictable character who during many cruises injects a lively note of extreme adventure into the warm relationship.

Finally, in reviewing the careers of the three principal characters in this work, Don Donaldson, Don Morgan and Benjamin Smith, it is almost as if one can detect the guiding hand of some all powerful force at work.  First, it chooses three children and submits them each one independently to dynamite explosions depriving them of normal eyesight.  Then it gently guides Don and Ben into the understanding and accepting environment of a residential school for the blind where is found all the necessary equipment and know how to provide them with an excellent high school education.  In the end it leads the three friends into successful teaching careers and carries them to the top of their respective professions.  Could it be that this all-powerful source is none other than the one single God of Christian, Jew, and Moslem alike?  This question must be answered by the readers themselves as they wend their way through the pages of this interesting, humorous and always exciting volume.

Perhaps somewhat obscure in this story of Don Donaldson, but certainly implicit, there lies the controversy of the last three-quarters of a century as to whether or not residential schools for the blind should be abandoned in favor of integrating the visually impaired into public school.  The careers of Don and Ben speak loudly in favor of the residential school.