Editor Loses Sight, but Not His Journalist’s Eye

His brow crinkling, Howard Dupuis stares pensively into space while other editors call out the list of stories for tomorrow’s newspaper.

The big, bearded man rests his elbows on a conference table that stretches before him bare of pen, pad or notes.

“Is the tollbooth photo really boring?” he finally interjects in his soft baritone. “I mean, a woman in a tollbooth?

Dupuis can’t see the photograph, or the editors he’s talking to. Through the huge sheet of glass at the end of the room, he sees virtually nothing of the newsroom that he runs on weekends. He can’t read the newspaper.

Dupuis, weekend city editor at the Union-News and Sunday Republican, is 40 years old and almost totally blind.

Until early May 1996, he didn’t even need eyeglasses. Then a genetic defect struck, and within two months the 6-foot-5-inch Dupuis was stumbling into chairs. Today, he taps sidewalks with a white cane and some nights sits at home alone, the lights off.

From Homer to Jorge Luis Borges, the world has celebrated the writings of the blind. But for journalists, “Report what you see” is one of the oldest rules.

“Nobody has said writers can’t be blind. But the fascinating thing is, can you do it on deadline?” said Bryan Vashin, a longtime freelancer who helps run Blind Professional Journalists.

That offshoot of the National Federation of the Blind has just 60 participants. Some are aspiring journalists or retirees, but few are high-ranking editors.

Vashin predicts more blind people will qualify as journalists thanks to specialized computer equipment and broader social acceptance of physical disabilities.

Dupuis’ story, though, is steeped in fear and frustration as much as triumph.

“I hate these uplifting stories about people who had horrible things happen to them and they have great revelations,” Dupuis says. “My life didn’t end, but it still really stinks. There’s no great revelation.”

His hell is just waking up each morning to another day of darkness.

Dupuis wrote about it in his paper:

“The first sound I hear each morning nearly breaks my heart.

“When the electronic beep of the alarm clock invades my dreams--in almost all my dreams I can still see--and I move in that briefest moment from sleep to wakeful consciousness, the same thought washes over me: Oh joy, another damn day of being blind. Just like the day before and the day before that.”

His inherited disorder interferes with the flash of nerve signals from retina to brain. The genetic defect switches on for unknown reasons in some carriers and brings on Leber’s optic neuropathy, named for the German eye specialist who identified it in the 1870s.

Perhaps just as agonizing, it withholds the finality of certain, permanent blindness: There is a slight chance Dupuis’ sight will someday return.

His family, with a long history of newspapering, knew nothing of Leber’s. His grandfather delivered the Springfield newspaper. Dupuis’ father worked in the composing room, an uncle in the pressroom, and the woman who would be his mom was a clerk.

Dupuis was reared in nearby Chicopee, where C-5A transport planes from Westover Air Reserve Base throw monstrous shadows on the blue-collar city below. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a major in English and journalism and did graduate work in a poetry writing program there.

In 1986, he joined the Westfield Evening News as a reporter and, the next year, the Union-News in neighboring Springfield. He moved to his current post in 1994. Until he went blind, he read five newspapers a day.

“This guy really loved to read. If you took a kidney, if you took a leg, it would be a different thing,” said Tom Shea, a friend and columnist at the newspaper.

At first, Dupuis had trouble seeing while driving at night. The annoying, scary blank spot refused to go away. Within weeks, it grew and spread to both eyes.

Associate Publisher Larry McDermott told him to deal with his health; his job would wait for him. “I have to confess that, in the beginning, I didn’t know whether it could be done. I was simply determined not to lose a good editor,” McDermott said later.

“I was incredibly relieved,” Dupuis said.

But when he came back to work nearly six months later, he would be incredibly frustrated. He needed to relearn his way around the cavernous newsroom, master the newspaper’s new computer system, and switch from keyboard to a synthetic-voice computer program.

Meanwhile, he was responsible for putting out the paper’s Sunday edition, its biggest, with a circulation of 155,000.

Many colleagues, although sympathetic, were skeptical. They had to help him read his mail, look up information in books, describe photos to him. Dupuis could no longer catch mistakes in the composing room before they went to press.

He has kept final say in picking photographs. But he relies heavily on the judgment of others.

His wife, Karin Henry, 32, a copy editor at the Union-News, said he returned to work out of boredom at home and “sheer determination.”

A robotic voice reads his screen to him through earphones--words, punctuation, even the computer coding.

The paper invested about $8,000 to evaluate Dupuis’ handicap and buy specialized equipment. He is st

udying Braille too, preparing for a machine that punches out computer text in Braille. He also hopes to read literature with Braille.

He’ll bound from his seat and charge over to another desk or department on his long legs, navigating seemingly without effort from a mental map. His hearing sharpened by blindness, he sometimes surprises co-workers by joining in conversations from afar.

“Everything he needs for his job is inside his head,” says State Editor Tim Monaghan. “He can still read stories. He can still edit them. He can still tell a reporter that he did a really awful job.”

And, often, he still twirls a pen in his fingers, a newspaperman’s habit that won’t die.