‘Blind Man With a Vision’ Dies : He Gave Away 150,000 Christmas Trees

Bob Porter, “the blind man with a vision” who gave away more than 150,000 trees over 16 Christmases, is dead.

He was 54 and died Monday in Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood from complications of the diabetes that first had made him blind, then required amputation of his left leg and finally stopped his heart.

His Dickensian tale began on a night in 1967 in a grubby Los Angeles bar where he sat feeling sorry for himself, facing his third Christmas without sight. A sympathetic prostitute had handed him a dollar, he said in a 1970 interview, the first of many with The Times and other media.

“I hated her for taking pity on me,” he remembered, and vowed then that he was going to remove from his shoulder the chip he had put there when doctors had told him three years earlier he’d never see again.

He joined VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps, where he said he quickly discovered he had an ability for “getting to people and getting them to believe in my projects.”

The first of those was in convincing industries to donate blank recording tapes to blind students who could hear lectures but not otherwise retain them.

When the Downey Lions Club took over that endeavor, Porter searched for another and remembered the mental depressions that had begun to overwhelm him each year as Christmas approached.

“I got to thinking how much a Christmas tree meant to me when I was a boy (in Gibson City, Ill.). I also knew from my work in VISTA that a lot of kids in Los Angeles didn’t get Christmas trees.”

He contacted supermarkets and tree farms and asked them to donate the trees that remained unsold before Dec. 25.

The initial response in 1969 was 1,500 trees collected and offered at three sites. Last Christmas needy families picked up more than 25,000 trees at a dozen spots around the city where Porter’s friends and other volunteers had deposited them.

The tree project had become the most important thing in Porter’s life--more important than his health--the Rev. Brian Eckland of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church said Tuesday.

Porter had refused to undergo amputation of his gangrenous right leg, saying he needed the time to keep his tree project growing.

Much of his most recent efforts had gone into establishing a Bob Porter Foundation to insure that the tree project would survive after his death.

In 1976 the Los Angeles City Council proclaimed him “one of the heroes of the community” and handed him an official city scroll that he was unable to see. He smiled at the honor but said he owed the Christmas tree project more than the project owed him.

“It gave me back my self-respect,” he said.

Porter, who has no immediate survivors, will be celebrated at a memorial service at St. Mark’s, 3651 S. Vermont Ave., at 11 a.m. on Sept. 21. There will be no funeral because he willed his remains to USC’s Medical School.