In August, I tagged along as Molloy and his mother road-tripped from Newtown Borough to map and memorize the 82-acre Allentown campus. As he measured the distance between dorms and academic buildings, Molloy inputted coordinates into a handheld GPS device.
The preparation paid off on the first day, when a transfer student in Molloy's Spanish class needed directions to the bookstore.
"I can take you there," Molloy told the stunned woman. After successfully delivering his charge to her destination, "she realized I was just another college student who happened to be blind, as opposed to a blind guy who happened to be a college student."
Academically, the studious freshman found his groove. Handouts are e-mailed to him as PDF files, then downloaded, converted to Microsoft Word documents, and saved on a memory stick plugged into a program called BrailleNote.
"When a professor assigns reading, I start it as soon as the class is over," he explains. Exams can't be e-mailed, "so I take them on a flash drive in the Disabilities Office."
Following his father's instructions to play as hard as he works, Molloy tells me he spends weekends with pals attending concerts or going to parties. He joined the pre-law society. He took up aikido.
Over winter break, once Molloy catches up on his sleep, the would-be lawyer will embark on his first job shadow: He'll spend a day with a lawyer in Doylestown - who also happens to be blind.
Catholic mothers speak out
In March, after the release of another unsparing grand jury report on clergy sex abuse, I had coffee with two suburban mothers whose Catholicism both devastates and defines them. Kathy Kane and Susan Matthews were meeting for the first time, but felt like old friends.
