By Ben Joravsky
Kennan was 28 when he lost his eyesight in 1976, blinded by an adverse reaction to a swine flu vaccination offered by the government. “It killed my optic nerves. Within ten days of that shot I began losing sense of color and larger objects. I got to the point where I could not read. I was left with 2 percent vision in one eye. I was a young married man, a Vietnam vet. It’s a bitter irony. I survived the war and came home to be blinded by the same government I fought for.”
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In 1980 he moved to Chicago to work as a writer for a corporation, a job that required a daily bus commute from his north-side apartment. “In 18 years I’ve met some truly fine bus drivers–models to be emulated. I’d be a liar and a fool to say otherwise,” says Kennan. “But typically I’d board the bus with my dog and say, ‘Please call out the stops.’ They’d say, ‘Where are you going?’ And I’d say, ‘I haven’t made my mind up.’ I shouldn’t have to tell them, and I don’t want to tell them. When I have to give an address to a driver I sacrifice my privacy. When the visually impaired gets on, there is no word spoken until his destination is reached, whereupon the driver says, ‘Here’s your stop.’ Well, what if I changed my mind? What if I realize that I don’t want to get out there? What if the driver forgets? It’s not his job to remember my destination. What if I just don’t want the driver to know where I’m going? There’s a security factor here. How do I know there’s not someone more dangerous–someone with a knife or gun–listening to where I’m going?
The drivers were “infantilizing” him, he says. “The minute they see me with my dog they want the relation to be on their terms. They want me to be the infant who begs and is led. We’re dealing with people who are at the bottom of the CTA barrel and here’s their opportunity to give a little out. They have the ability to use my disability to their advantage. I guess that makes them feel more powerful.”
“Yes, I talked to Larry years ago,” says Kennan. “I called a general number to City Hall and was referred to the disability office. I told Larry my story and he said, ‘We hear this a lot. We’ll pursue it.’ I could see this wasn’t going anywhere. So I said, ‘Who do you report to?’ He said Frank Kruesi, then one of Daley’s top aides. I began calling Kruesi, and to this day he’s never called back. I followed up those with calls to other assistants in Daley’s office who assured me they would get my message to the mayor. But they never called back and of course Daley never called back. And needless to say, Larry never called me back.”
Kruesi is now executive director of the CTA. Gaffney says he’s not familiar with Kennan’s case, but that he is particularly sensitive to the needs of the visually impaired because he himself once had difficulties using public transit after several eye surgeries. While expressing sympathy for Kennan, Gaffney points out that he often was abusive to drivers who were only trying to be nice to him. “Many times he’d board the bus in a confrontative manner. He’d say, ‘Call out the stops.’ And they would say, ‘Where do you want to go?’ And he got mad at them.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Sean Kennan photo by Jon Randolph.
