DICK’S VERY BAD DAY*

*which stretched into years

By Dick Juhl, Becketwood Member

It must have been a summer day in 1937 that I was with my brothers, Tom and Allan, at a new house construction site near Lake Nokomis. They were playing around the basement’s newly dug hole, along with several of their friends who were older than I was. That is when a nice summer day turned out badly for me. A dirt ball thrown by one of the boys hit me in the left eye. (Of course he did not throw it with that intention in mind.) My world changed in that moment.

At first, my eye hurt so very much.  Allan carried me home to Mom’s care. We could not see a doctor, for some reason, until the next morning.  Mother had me sleep by her side that night to comfort me as best she could. Neither of us slept well, I am sure.

The next day we went to the Medical Arts Building downtown, to see a Doctor Fink. I am sure he was capable, but he was so gruff that he scared me very much. At any rate, he cleaned my eye, stitched the wound over the eye, ordered special glasses, and gave me an eye patch that I was to wear most of the day. Not over the injured eye, but over the good eye. Why, you ask?  It was to prevent my injured eye from becoming "lazy."

I was then to attend Corcoran Elementary School's “sight-saving” program, at 34th Street and 10th Avenue. To do that, I had to walk from our house on Edgewater Boulevard across Nokomis Park or one and one-half blocks and be on the streetcar on 54th and Chicago (the end of the line then) at about 7:30 a.m. I got off on 34th and Chicago and walked with my little blue lunch pail at my side, to 34th Avenue. That school has long ago been torn down. I do not believe I learned anything that year of any importance.  I was instructed that during summer vacation, I was to read every day using my injured eye. It was not easy, but I did learn to love reading, which I still love to this day.

We moved to Hopkins, Minnesota in 1940. I enrolled at Harley Hopkins Elementary School in the third grade. That was another long walk of about two miles, as during the war the bus only picked up in the winter. It was soon evident that the lack of learning the previous year would set me back a year. How embarrassing to be moved one day from third grade, across the hall to second grade. I really think that experience affected me for the rest of my life. I was always a year behind my peers. I would cover that up by saying “I was older than they were,  because of my late ‘September birthday.’”

I believe that every year I had a new eye exam, and probably new glasses, as my eye matured. That was an expense that my parents could not always afford. I never heard a complaint from them. That exam meant a trip on the streetcar back to the Medical Arts Building, and ordering new glasses at Benson’s, the large opticians of the day. To this day, I remember the name of the boy who threw the dirt ball, and have forgiven him, overcoming my past resentment.

I still have a not-too-good left eye. It still gives me faulty depth-of-field and peripheral vision. So all in all, things could be much worse. I still have my annual eye exam at Health Partners. I still wish it had not happened.