by Taya Kyle
The procedure for blind swimmers in a triathlon is somewhat similar to running; he or she will usually swim with a guide, who helps keep him or her on the right path using a tether. (There are other techniques, depending on the individuals.)
Bike riding, though, is completely different. The blind rider teams up with a guide or “captain,” who sits up front, steering as well as pedaling. The person in the back is often called a “stoker.” Different groups and athletes use different terms, but the general setup is the same: both riders pedal like mad men while the guide does all the steering.
Artie suggested that Achilles start a bike program. Sure, said the leadership, and we know just the person to take charge.
Artie.
In no time, he raised money for the bikes and a trailer where they could be stored. Tandem bikes, incidentally, are rather special and not inexpensive. These bicycles built for two have to be extremely sturdy and, if they’re used for racing, as light as possible. That hikes up the costs. Entry-level bikes start at four figures.
Artie grew the bike program over several years. But it was always a rather small part of Achilles, and with other priorities by 2013, the club decided to phase it out.
Thus began the next act in Artie’s life. He began planning for a new club devoted entirely to biking. He had spectacular plans—until tragedy struck.
Besides losing his sight, Artie had battled cancer for years. He had chronic myeloid leukemia, a form of cancer that attacks the cells that make blood. In many cases, when caught early, the cancer is slow moving and can be put into remission with aggressive treatment. That was the situation for Artie, who had been cancer-free for some five years . . . until 2013.
CML can progress very rapidly, and it did in Artie’s case. Within a few months of the discovery that it was back, he passed away.
And so, too, might have his dream of a bike club for the blind, except for Artie’s wife, Susan, and two very remarkable friends, Stanley Zucker and Mark Carhart, both of whom had seen the plan for the bike club.
“We were shoveling the dirt over the coffin when I met Artie’s friend Mark,” recalls Stanley, a film producer who is now semiretired. Both men knew of Artie’s cycling dream. “We looked at each other and said, we have to do this.”
There is, of course, a little more to the story. To get the club off the ground, Artie had figured that they needed about $25,000, which would cover the cost of bikes, something to store them in, and other whatnot. He had not yet begun fund-raising when he died.
Mark fixed that with a check.
Meanwhile, Stanley went to work on the various permissions, paperwork, and bureaucratic hurdles. He negotiated with the Central Park Conservancy to find a place for the bikes—not as easy as it sounds in a place with literally thousands of eager though often contentious groups vying for space. He got the necessary permissions. And he purchased ten bikes and a trailer to keep them in.
Artie was relentless, recall his friends, but so is Stanley. One friend who witnessed them both at work, Jerome Preisler, says Artie was irrepressible, but Stanley (who has full sight) could give him a run for his money. Whether it was filling out IRS paperwork or getting a website together, Stanley would look up experts for guidance, do what he could himself, then find someone with expertise to handle what he couldn’t.
“It was almost a reenactment of scenes I’d seen with Artie,” says Jerome of Stanley’s frenzied work setting up the club to honor their friend. “Now it was Stanley—frustrated but determined.”
Artie knew a lot of people and was always coming up with different ways to get them together and get them involved in doing good things for the community. Stanley took the baton—or maybe the handlebars—and did the same thing, recruiting helpers as he went. Very likely he never envisioned taking on such an important role—but there he was, charging along in the path his friend had pointed out.
Within only a few months, InTandem was a full-blown organization, sponsoring regular rides not just in Central Park but in other parts of New York City. Artie would be proud. Today it has several regular programs, with a weekly ride as the centerpiece.
Each Saturday at 9:30 a.m., about fifty fully or nearly blind riders show up at the Engineers’ Gate in Central Park to ride with the club. For the next hour and a half or so, they ride with volunteer guides through the park. Other events over the course of the riding season take riders farther and sometimes combine unexpected pleasures. A fall daffodil ride, for example, had club members planting the flowers’ bulbs at Corlears Hook Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, roughly six and a half miles away from Central Park.
InTandem’s DNA contains quite a bit of the man who inspired it. Artie was a self-made guy who became a success by doing whatever it took to get a job, fulfill a promise, or meet a requirement. But perhaps his greatest talent was an ability to be a matchmaker—he could somehow intuit that certain people would get along, and he strove to put them together.
That’s exactly how InTandem works today. Riders—both stokers and guides—come from many different backgrounds and financial strata. A married couple from Connecticut; a kid from the South Bronx. Lawyers, shop clerks, businesspeople, housewives—there’s a wide range helping and being helped.
Is it worth it?
For the riders, certainly.
“The thing that Artie would say about riding a bike,” explains Jerome, “is that it’s sensory. Being outside makes a difference. He would say, you could drive in a car, but biking lets you experience things differently.”
The organization continues to grow; it had a $250,000 budget for 2018—“ambitious,” says Stanley, who currently serves as trustee. The money comes primarily from fund-raising rides and donations. InTandem takes part in the Five Boro Bike Tour, an event that takes riders into each of New York City’s five boroughs—a forty-mile trek in May that puts tens of thousands of New Yorkers on bikes.
It’s all about speed for seventysomething Susan Genis, who quips that when she’s moving on a bike she doesn’t have to whack slow pokes with her cane.
I think she’s joking, at least about whacking people. But the yoga teacher does like to move crisply through Central Park.
“It keeps me young,” says the legally blind “stoker” who has been riding with InTandem for several years. “It’s such a boost to get out in the fresh air and to move fast. When you can’t see, everything slows down. And I like to move fast.”
Susan, who gradually lost her sight to glaucoma and other ailments, first heard about the group at the library. But though she’d biked a lot in her twenties and thirties, even commuting to work through the city streets, she was reluctant to participate until an acquaintance spoke about it. There was a period of adjustment—it was difficult to learn to trust a partner she didn’t know. But within a few rides, she was hooked, and now is accomplished enough to give advice to new volunteers when she pairs up with them.
The captains or pilots at the front of the bikes must learn the basics not just of riding with a partner, but of communicating their intentions clearly and ahead of time. A simple turn or stop can be unsettling if you’re zipping along without being able to see what’s ahead.
Aside from providing some recreation and exercise, InTandem occasionally inspires the riders with tales of others who have overcome their handicaps. That was the case when blind Green Beret Ivan Castro rode as a guest with the group.
Ivan, hit by a mortar shell in Iraq, was near death when he was evacuated from the battle site. Following scores of operations, he managed to recover from most of his wounds, even the loss of part of his hand. But there was nothing to be done about his sight. With one eye completely gone and the other severed from his brain, he had to completely reorder his life.
Being blind didn’t stop him from staying in the Army, nor did it prevent him from running or biking competitively. Since being wounded, he has run more than fifty marathons, biked across America and Europe, and trekked to the South Pole with Britain’s
Prince Harry.
His best competitive events are in bicycling. Ivan has won silver medals in cycling at the Invictus Games and placed from third to fifth at USA Cycling’s national championships in the blind category. He’s an awesome athlete—not only blind but fifty years old and still going strong.
“They have great hearts,” he says of the InTandem people. “It’s something they’re doing to show people they don’t have to be limited.”
As a competitive athlete, Ivan was on a different level than most if not all of the people he rode with. But he didn’t talk down to them at all. The former Green Beret is a natural coach, shouting encouragement and the occasional jokes. He yelled “You can do it!” and “Good for you!” so often that day it’s a wonder he didn’t go home hoarse.
But he’s not a pushover, or someone who gives out compliments merely for the sake of saying something nice. Ivan is one of those guys who doesn’t accept excuses, either for himself or from others. Those are the sorts of people we need more of in our lives. I believe we’re only limited by our imaginations when it comes to healing, and to life in general. A person may lose their sight, but that doesn’t mean they lose their spirit, or their love of activity.
One of the beautiful things I’ve learned from wounded warriors, is that they still have the warrior spirit and still have a lot of life to live and adventures to experience. I first saw this with Ryan Job, who managed to climb a mountain and go deer hunting after he was blinded and severely wounded in Iraq. Physical limitations don’t have to limit your spirit.
Perhaps surprisingly, InTandem has more captains—sighted riders who pilot the bikes—than blind people. That’s a tremendous statement about the spirit of volunteerism in New York.
It’s all free, for captains and stokers, sighted or blind. And so is the feeling as you pedal through the park, the wind slapping against your shirt, the sounds of the city muffled by the trees, the smell of hot pretzels and food trucks . . . yes, I do get distracted as I ride!
But after burning all those calories, don’t you need to refuel? That was Artie’s motto, after all. He was famous for taking a lead on those long rides through New York’s boroughs—then stopping for a donut or even an adult beverage.
As his friend Jerome put it, even after being diagnosed with cancer, he devoted his life to helping people—and had a lot of fun along the way. What if Artie had chosen instead to feel only the pain of loss and had rested there? How many others would have missed out? That zest for living in spite of hardship, that use of freedom to achieve different dreams to overcome different hurdles—that is the true American Spirit, and it lives on with Stanley and all the other volunteers at InTandem.
You Belong Here
Brian Blackwell
As a parent, I know the pain of seeing your child suffer. I often hear from parents who are distraught with worry about the troubles their child might have in school. Each time I do, I think of my friend Brian Blackwell. Through hardship we have the opportunity to leave the world much better than we found it.
Middle school may be the roughest time for a kid. So much in their lives is changing. They’re not yet adults—far from it—but they’re also no longer children. Their bodies are changing, and so are their minds. Their emotions are often in turmoil as a result.
It’s no wonder it can be the most prevalent time for bullying.
But this story isn’t an exploration of the roots of bullying or even a guide on how to combat it. Rather, it’s the story of a child who had a terrible experience in middle school and who said to himself, I’m going to do something about it when I grow up.
No one is going to have the lousy experience I did.
Brian Blackwell may not have used those exact words, but that sentiment absolutely describes the path he has taken to touch countless lives. He does it as a middle school principal: an everyday hero changing lives every day.
“I was the chubby kid called ‘fat boy’ all the time,” says Brian, thinking back to his own time in middle school. Being called names and getting picked on was bad enough, but far more traumatic was the loss of his father to a massive heart attack when Brian was in eighth grade.
Devastated, Brian suffered through the funeral, returning to school the next day. Not one teacher, not one coach, not one counselor came up to him and expressed so much as a single condolence, let alone offered guidance or some sort of direction.
That memory still stings; you can hear the hurt in his voice when he recalls it. And yet, he persevered, bending but not breaking. He became the perfect example of why struggling can help you become stronger.
He didn’t do it entirely on his own. His family and interested adults helped change his course.
Things turned around when his mom enrolled him in a new school the next year. Unlike his old school, his new principal took a personal interest in him, talking to him every few weeks and checking on him when he could. That wasn’t just Brian he did that for, though—the principal made it his job to relate to everyone in his building. He seemed to actually care about his students and his school. He respected the children as well as the teachers and staff who worked with them, and it showed.
So much so that it made an impression on young Brian. He made a pledge to do that himself someday.
It took some time. Brian went to college—he was the first in his family to do so—and studied history and education. During his training, he observed at a middle school that reminded him a little too much of the school where he’d been picked on. But then he had a great experience as a student teacher in another school. And from there, the rest was history.
Well, not quite. He earned his stripes not only as a teacher but as an athletic coach, working for five years before returning to graduate school for a master’s. That qualified him to fulfill that promise he’d made himself as a teenager. He got a post as an assistant principal at one school, gained experience, and moved on to another, gaining more experience until finally he was asked to become a principal.
“Not every school is a great school,” admits Brian. Sometimes the problem is a lack of resources—a polite way of saying there isn’t enough money to properly fund programs or hire good staff. Sometimes the problem is simply that the community is so challenged by problems like poverty and violence that teachers and staff have a herculean task just getting the doors open and shut each day.
But sometimes the problem stems from poor attitudes among the staff. And ultimately, that’s the principal’s fault. In Brian’s telling, a school’s principal is both a team leader and a team builder—and it’s the team that makes all the difference.
“The most important thing is to hire great teachers, teachers who will have a great relationship with the kids,” he says. “Teachers who can make learning come alive” with great activities in the classroom.
That doesn’t mean field trips every day; it does mean presenting material in a way that catches students’ attention.
If it were easy, everyone would be a great teacher. Little things as well as big enter into it. A class on fractions might revolve around slices of pie. A science lesson on photosynthesis might feature the plants being grown in the back of the room in the class nursery. And so on.
Among the things that have changed since I went to school are the sheer number of activities for kids after and even during school. The number of clubs seems to have multiplied, reflecting a wide range of interests—from a Twilight Club for kids who like to read the famous YA book series, to a video-game club . . . things I wish I had when I was their age.
The school also runs programs for parents on parenting and connecting with their kids. It’s all about giving them “tools” to help their children grow and excel.
“We’re here to build leaders,” says Brian. Ultimately, that’s what his school is about.
One thing you notice when you walk into his building is a large sign that reads, “You belong here.” That’s the school’s spirit and mission in three words. Everyone who steps t
hrough the front door belongs there. No one is unimportant. No student is to be disrespected for who he or she is and can be.
Now you may get the idea that Brian is an easygoing guy and that therefore discipline at the middle school is pretty lax.
Not so.
Respecting others involves discipline as well as love. That, unfortunately, does mean fair punishment at times.
While fights are relatively rare at Brian’s school, they do occur. There was one, in fact, just before we spoke for the book. By the time the students got to the principal’s office, the boys’ passion had cooled and they were very focused on their punishment. One even burst into tears.
Brian reassured them. “You’re going to be disciplined for your behavior, but then it’s going to be over,” he said, adding that he himself had occasionally gotten into trouble as a young man, but things had worked out OK.
A fight brings a three-day in-school suspension, by the way. Good argument for talking things out before resorting to shoves and fists.
Among the principal’s innovations is an outdoor classroom, where classes are often held during good weather. Another—a team of elite students called SEALs—is inspired by my husband, Chris, and other members of the Navy’s elite special operations unit.
In the military, SEAL stands for Sea, Air, and Land, an acronym made of all the places the teams operate. At Brian’s school, it stands for Service, Education, Attitude, and Leadership—the qualities all the students must display in order to belong. Brian’s SEALs are a special volunteer force that rallies when work needs to be done—delivering meals to the hungry around the holidays, for example.
Teachers and educators who are really passionate make an important difference. That one teacher who encourages you, or excites you about a subject, can set you on a course to change the world.
It’s a nice thought, but how do you work it into the daily routine? How to remind busy teachers and active students that caring for each other is more than just a nice slogan? That’s where a good principal comes in. Brian has many tools. Some simple, some unusual. Walking into the school staff lunchroom, I was surprised to see a picture of every student on the walls. On closer inspection, I saw names scrawled under most—teachers’ names, I realized. It turns out that each time a teacher has a meaningful interaction with a student, they write their name under the student’s photo.