Viking_Yearbook_93

IS d o n e — W hat some might call remarkable, Elaine Smith shrugs off as plain and simple persistence. At 68 Elaine takes classes, volunteers in the campus library and hopes to eventually have her writing sold. Elaine is also blind. “To me it’s not really very remarkable. It real­ ly bothers me when people set limits for them­ selves. People think because your getting on in years you can’t do a lot of things,” she said. “When someone tells me I can’t do something, that’s the very thing I do.” Elaine began taking classes with PSU’s senior citizen auditing program fall of 1990 which allows her to audit classes without a fee. Elaine and her seeing eye dog Dex have attended sever­ al writing classes since she began. “I would like very much to write something and have someone be able to read what I ’ve done and maybe sell it.” She also spends much of her time in the Branford Millar Library’s Center for the Visually Impaired as a volunteer. “Volunteering is one the ways I can pay back the university for what I get from them,” she said. Most of her class experiences have been posi­ tive. Only once did a professor tell her he didn’t understand how a blind person could take a writ­ ing class. Like everything she does, she stuck with it and proved she could keep up with other students. “I really feel the next time a blind person walks into his class he’ll be a little more toler­ ant,” she said.