Reading Service Helps Disabled Stay in Touch : Programs: A special reading service run by KPBS helps the blind and other handicapped stay in touch with news and books.

As darkness closed in, Scott Sampson’s gloom deepened. A diabetic since he was 5, Sampson found himself facing blindness three months after his 31st birthday. The things he loved--rustling through the morning paper, leafing through magazines, watching television, working as a computer analyst, he eventually lost to diabetes.

“It was like going into a dark tunnel and not knowing if you’re ever going to see light again,” said Sampson, now 33.

“While I was in the middle of denial and going through the pain of losing my sight, a friend got a subscription for me to the KPBS Radio Reading Service.”

For a one-time $35 fee, the service beams 24 hours of programming from the station at San Diego State University to more than 1,000 blind, dyslexic and other visually or physically impaired residents of the county, said director Donna Warren. The $35 helps defray the cost of an $85 receiver that the station buys for subscribers to pick up a special KPBS sub-channel frequency.

Starting at 10 a.m., San Diego volunteers read news, sports, comics and food ads from the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor and other newspapers, said director Donna Warren. A cadre of 150 volunteers also read best-selling novels such as “The Hunt for Red October,” Time and Newsweek magazines, and a host of other publications.

At 8 p.m., the station switches over to satellite programming from New York for 14 hours of “Selected Shorts,” Spanish-language broadcasts and other shows. “Selected Shorts” is a program devoted to short stories such as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain and “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe as read by Dick Cavett, William Hurt and other celebrities.

The service, begun in 1975, is one of only four in California, Warren said. (The others are in Sacramento, Chico and San Francisco.) Celebrating its 15th anniversary this month, the service has evolved from humble beginnings when it had 20 volunteers reading to 100 listeners for four hours a day, to the current 150 volunteers reading to 1,200 listeners for 10 hours a day.

The service gives blind and visually handicapped residents a view on the world that they would not normally have, said Warren, who started out as a volunteer reader with the program in 1975 and became director in 1983. She still reads when volunteers can’t make their broadcast, and she also hosts an inspirational show, “Sunshine and Lemonade.”

“It’s meant to be the sweet and bitter of life--if life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” Warren said of the show. “More than anyone else, I know our listeners have to deal with a lot of problems, and they need to know how everyone else deals with problems. Anything I can do to help them pull themselves up by their socks.”

For someone who is newly blind, “the reading service is like a light that grows and grows,” said Sampson. After a while, “you feel better.”

“I appreciated the service so much because I’ve always enjoyed reading,” he said. Including the programming from New York, “they’ve got just everything in the world, everything from Ladies Home Journal to Penthouse. You almost get flooded with all the possibilities there are. The variety of material offered on the reading service is fantastic.

“I’m a real price shopper, and I love hearing the food ads read. On Wednesday night, they go through the whole food section and tell you about coupons and the discounts for the week.”

KPBS started the service after a survey showed that blind residents felt out of touch with current and cultural happenings, Warren said.

“I’m sort of a shut-in, but now that I have one of the KPBS receivers, I listen night and day,” said John Thomas, 92. I enjoy listening to those programs.”

Thomas started tuning into KPBS about four years ago, when he began losing his sight to glaucoma.

“I can see daylight, but I can’t see people or objects. I depend on my touch and hearing.”

Thelma Whiffen, 85, first heard of the service through friends.

While living in Venice, “I used to visit friends down here and listen at their house,” Whiffen said. When she moved to San Diego in 1980, she got her own receiver.

Blinded in an accident at the age of 13, Whiffen said she was used to having books on tapes, but, if she wanted current information, she had to have someone read to her. The reading service makes it easier to stay up to date.

“I love listening to the newspapers,” Whiffen said. “I like the world news and things on San Diego.”

Nearly half of the service’s listeners are 60 years or older, and they are about evenly divided between men and women. Some never finished high school; others have advanced college degrees.

“That’s why I encourage my readers not to think listeners are not interested in what they read to them,” Warren said. Some listeners are not blind but cannot read because of dyslexia, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis or some other disability.

“They want to hear about the latest art show, movie, photo show as much as you and I do,” Warren said. “They want to talk to their friends and be informed.”

But reaching all the people who would enjoy and benefit from the service has been difficult because the reading service does not have money to promote itself, Warren said:

“We’re a well-kept secret.”

The service estimates that as many as 60,000 visually and physically impaired residents in San Diego could benefit from the service, but only the 1,200 are receiving the broadcasts, Warren said. New subscribers often say they had never heard of the service until a child or grandchild told them about it.

But the service has no shortage of people who want to read, said Lindsay Barret, who auditions and trains new readers.

“It is a very desirable volunteer job, and we get many more applicants than we take,” Barret said.

Reading on the air is like being in show business, she said. Most volunteers say they like to read and that they want to do something for someone else.

Kathleen Lentini, who reads best-sellers, is happy to be helping listeners, but she has read each week for the past eight years because of what the service does for her. Confined to a wheelchair by an accident, she uses reading to escape for a few hours to do what she is professionally trained to do--act and perform.

“It was kind of a natural step for me to come work here. After my injury, it was very difficult to do stage performances and TV because they require acting with the whole body and I don’t have the whole body to act with,” she said. “For me, there was frustration with acting because my body was so limited in what it could do. But I’ve got the voice for radio, and there is no frustration. I can work on perfecting it more and more and more.

“I had no preference as to what I would read when I auditioned, but they put me in best-sellers and I loved it. It’s like the energy keeps building more and more as the years go by. I don’t get paid for it, but this is what I do professionally.

“Sometimes, I come in and read for hours, but usually various people read from a book,” Lentini said. Then the books are aired in one-hour installments.

“I just do a cold reading straight through,” she said. “I like that challenge. I know I can just pick up a script, start reading, and just go with it. I like to feel the part and feel the characters, and feel what they’re saying.”

Alone in a small, one-person cubicle with a desk, chair and recorder, she reads sometimes six hours at a stretch, she said. “The time goes so fast, especially if I have a good book,” she said. “The books are chosen by Harriet Stolorow, a retired literature professor, and she tries to get a good cross-section.”

Most of the readers were women when the service began, but, “We’ve had such an avalanche of men coming in, it now looks to be fairly evenly divided between males and females,” Barret said. Readers are attorneys, real estate people, former broadcasters, one is a school principal, another is an actress at the Old Globe Theatre, and others are retired.

“When I listen to their auditions, I have no idea what they do, but I listen for an intelligence that comes across,” Barret said. “We give them the most difficult articles from the newspaper we could find: items from the financial page, hard news and then a soft piece about art by Monet. I have to get the impression from their tape that they know what they’re reading and how to communicate it to the listener. It has to be the right pace, not too slow, not too fast. They have to be able to handle difficult words. Pronunciation is important and they have to read what is there on the page, not leaving out or adding words.”

Newspapers and magazines are difficult because they are not meant to be read aloud, Warren said. College students who audition often do not pass because they have not had much experience reading out loud, she said. Also, usually the older the reader, the better the vocabulary.

Paul Wells--a 61-year-old lawyer known by listeners for his smooth, sonorous voice--said he was not looking for a second career when he joined more than 10 years ago.

“I got it in my mind that it was something I could do to be helpful to somebody,” he said. “I’m a lawyer, my business is words. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to live without newspapers and books. I am delighted to alleviate the difficulty in any small way I can. It also keeps me current on fiction and nonfiction.”

Reading “War and Remembrance,” a historical book on World War II, was a poignant experience for him.

“I remember reading the list of those who were killed in a dive-bomber squadron,” Wells said. “It was an intense moment, because one of the bombers had graduated earlier from the same high school I had attended in Houston. He put his airplane down a smokestack of a Japanese battleship. It was an emotional moment reading his name out loud.”

Volunteers sometimes edit newspaper articles to fit the paper into a two-hour broadcast, but they never edit the books, Warren said: “We believe a blind person has the right to read every word that we do.”

Lentini said she would like to see the service expanded so able-bodied people can enjoy the programs too.

“In today’s world, people are running around crazy with all the work they’ve got to do,” she said. “The news comes across in a more complete way when you’re reading an article in the paper, but many people don’t have time to sit down and read. We can read it to them.”

People have an even worse problem with novels and best sellers, she said.

“How many will actually sit down and read a book? How many people have been wanting to read a book, but months and months will go by and maybe even years,” Lentini said. “They don’t have time to do that because they’ve got other things they’ve got to get to.

“But look at all the time they’ve got in the car commuting or while they’re doing their work around the house. That’s an opportunity that really needs to be expanded upon. If the service could be carried on a main channel, people could tune in like any other station. We’ve got real quality stuff to offer.”