A Close-up Look At People Who Matter : Adviser Helps Clients See Way to Better Lives

Anna Otis can’t forget the terrifying staircase.

“My heart dropped into my stomach,” said Otis, a state rehabilitation counselor for the blind in Van Nuys. “I felt like I’d probably fall and break my neck.”

To get a job in England with a society for the blind in 1981, Otis took six months of training wearing a blindfold 40 hours a week. She was guided around Victoria Station, learned to use a guide dog, as well as prepare meals and change a fuse while sightless.

But the biggest challenge was learning to walk down a three-story winding staircase while wearing a blindfold.

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Now, working for the California State Department of Rehabilitation--in a job usually performed by those with visual impairments--Otis helps 110 clients with little or no vision find jobs. Other counselors in her office on Sepulveda Boulevard work with people who have other disabilities.

Otis has helped such people as Billy Rose of Chatsworth, who realized he could be a history professor rather than a telemarketer; Nellie Lamkin of San Fernando, a former farm worker who spoke little English, who is now certified to teach preschool, and Diane Domingue, a well-educated former Van Nuys resident who was too dependent on other people, but who parachuted out of an airplane at 13,000 feet two weeks ago.

“Without Anna, none of this was possible,” said Domingue, 33, who now lives in Sacramento.

Otis encouraged Domingue to attend a special 10-month training program where she was taught to live as a blind person after her retinitis pigmentosa --sometimes called tunnel vision--gradually worsened and finally took away most of her sight.

“She knows what it’s like, which is very rare,” Domingue said of Otis. Domingue, who parachuted to a celebration picnic when she had finished a training program, wants someday to be a career counselor.

Lamkin, 40, who is legally blind because of a childhood accident, came to the United States from Mexico at age 7 with an aunt who wouldn’t let her go to school.

“I had the dream always in my heart that I wanted to go to school,” said Lamkin, who was admitted to the child development program at Mission College five years ago. State rehabilitation services got her a specially designed pair of glasses and a minocular telescope so she could read the blackboard.

“The most important thing is to mature, to grow to learn a little more every day and not be a vegetable left behind,” said Lamkin, who earned her preschool teaching certificate in the spring.

With some help from Otis, she also is learning to type and talks about getting a two-year college degree.

Laser surgery saved Rose’s vision when he was a child, but later surgery for cataracts left him blind.

But thanks to Otis, being sightless has opened up a new world for Rose, 40, owner of a Chatsworth gift store. He said he did not enjoy reading before he lost his vision. But when he met Otis two years ago, she tested his intelligence and suggested he go back to school.

He is working toward a degree at Pierce College, the school he dropped out of 20 years ago.

“She was the main force behind my going back to school,” said Rose, a former telemarketer.

“I love school,” said Rose, who is interested in history because of what it can teach about the present. “It’s the funniest thing.”

Otis uses such success stories as these to encourage her new clients, and she has seen a dramatic effect on blind people when they find work. “A job is such wonderful therapy.”

Blindness should not stop people from getting their dream job, she said, if they have enough support and, perhaps, some special equipment that her department can arrange.

“Anything is possible for the blind now,” said Otis, “Except flying an airplane or driving a car.”

Personal Best is a weekly profile of an ordinary person who does extraordinary things. Please address prospective candidates to Personal Best, Los Angeles Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311. Or fax them to (818) 772-3338 .