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Show Author of "How to Win Friend C and Influence People. V"1 ) COURAGE V. ' The most inspiring sight I saw in Asheville, North Carolina, was a blind man. Ashevillef is proud of its Blue Ridge Mountains, its climate and the mighty Biltmore mansion that George Vanderbilt built in the gay nineties, a mansion that impressed me more than the Palace of the Hapsburgs in Vienna. Yet my most inspiring experience in Asheville was meeting Ike Kuperman, a blind Jewish printer. For years, Ike was make-up man in the Asheville Citizen-Times Citizen-Times composing room. Working under stress and strain, he helped to rush the various editions of the paper out on time. One day last July, a terrible thing happened. He was in the composing room, bending over a page of type, when suddenly tragedy struck him stark, blinding tragedy. He stopped work, put his hands to his eyes in confusion. A fellow printer asked him wThat was wrong. "I can't see," he said. He was blind ! He was rushed to the eye clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital where one of the most skillful eye surgeons on earth performed a series of operations. Ike Kuperman endured ten weeks of agony, mental and physical. Useless ! He went home. Blind, hopelessly blind forever! Now, here is the point of the story. Did Ike Kuperman Ku-perman whine and give up? Did he complain about his misfortune? Did he say, "I can't get a job now"? No, sir. Not Ike Kuperman. I am happy to report that a Catholic charity offered to give this blind Jew a sum of money. The very thought of it cut him so deeply that he wept. No charity for Ike. He marched right back to the composing room of the Asheville Citizen-Times where he had worked for twelve years, and fixe'd himself up a little lunch counter over in the corner where he now sells cigars, cigarettes, candy, hot coffee, cold drinks, ice cream, sandwiches, potato chips, and pie to most of the employee's of the paper. Some of them buy on credit; so he has learned to operate a typewriter by the touch system to enable him to keep a record of his accounts. He is making a good living at it, supporting his family, keeping his chin up. Despondent? I didn't meet a more cheerful man in all Asheville. He loves to hear the voices of printers with whom he has worked for years, to hear all the familiar sounds of the composing room, the shouted instructions, the clink and tinkle tin-kle of the linotype machines, the scream of a metal saw cutting through a cast. As I talked to him, he radiated cheerfulness. Ike Kuperman, you are a tribute to your race, to your country. You are fired by the proud fighting spirit that inspired our ancestors to cross the seas, conquer the wilderness and build a new civilization. You have in you some of the courage and self-reliance that inspired our great-grandfathers a century ago, to load up their old shotguns, climb in the covered wagon, and head out across the plains in the face of hell, hunger, high water and Indians. |