Panorama City : Sight-Impaired Artist Loves Making Baskets

June Goldenberg loves making baskets.

She makes bagel baskets, gourmet snack baskets, Irish-themed baskets, corporate baskets, book and puzzle baskets.

“I love it here,” said Goldenberg, working out of her Panorama City home. “The only thing I miss is the social contact.”

Due to disease, Goldenberg lost partial vision in her right eye on Thanksgiving Day, 1991. Years earlier she had lost sight in her left eye. Today, she runs her company, the Basket Place, using special magnifying lenses, glasses, computer equipment and a closed-circuit TV that helps her read.

“Now it’s like I’m normal again,” says Goldenberg, whose business just finished its second holiday season. “My life is back.”

All Goldenberg wanted when she lost her sight was to get her life back to normal. She went from doctor to doctor until she was finally found to have recurrent multifocal choiditis, which affects the tissue behind the retina. With special glasses, Goldenberg was able to return to work handling real estate transactions for the Los Angeles Unified School District, but the job was later eliminated by budget cuts.

“I had to make a choice that has to be made by anyone who has an impairment,” Goldenberg says. “It is to live or to die, and if you choose to live, there are all sorts of ways to live.”

With the help of a loan from the Small Business Administration, her son, two daughters and ex-husband, Goldenberg set up the business in a converted master bedroom.

On one wall are dozens of spools of ribbons arranged according to a color scheme to make them easier to find. In an adjoining storeroom, Goldenberg has memorized the locations of her assorted supplies.

Trained as an artist in her youth, she can see well enough to beautifully arrange her baskets. Customers have called from as far away as Virginia and New Jersey asking for more, she said.

Though Goldenberg is something of a pioneer among vision-impaired entrepreneurs, “I do business as if it is no different than anyone else.”