Blind People

For 60 years, Catherine Pieczynski has called the red-brick building home. She knows the wide, white corridors by feel and grooved habit. The bedroom holds a lifetime's possessions: pictures of family, two rocking chairs, stuffed animals, her Braille typewriter. She came to the Rudolphy Residence for the Blind at 3827 Powelton Ave. in West Philadelphia in the midst of the Depression, when her jobless father could no longer support her at home. For decades, the four-story building has protected her from the harder edges of a world filled with obstacles and hostilities unseen to all but those without eyesight.

BOSTON HE'S INDICTED IN ABORTION SHOOTINGS A federal grand jury yesterday indicted John C. Salvi III on charges he carried across state lines the rifle he allegedly used to shoot up three abortion clinics in Massachusetts and Virginia, killing two women. The 22-year-old student hairdresser, who was being held in a Norfolk, Va., jail, could get up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each of two federal counts. The indictment should get Salvi back to Massachusetts faster than if he had gone through the extradition process between the states, legal experts said.

It would seem impossible to imagine a more unusual dance than Motion Without View, a piece Michael Mao created for blind people. Yet he did come up with the impossible in the concert his troupe, Michael Mao Dance, performed at the Drake Theater last night as part of the NextMove Festival. Wittily titled Trespassing, this little solo is set to Saint-Saens' The Dying Swan, the music made immortal by Anna Pavlova. Mao trespasses on the dance by turning it upside down and inside out. For starters, it is performed by a man, Tim Martin, who is accompanied not by a violinist, but a boom box wheezing out the soulful music.

A TIME TO DIE. Almost two-thirds of intensive-care patients at a New Britain, Conn., hospital who die have "do not resuscitate" orders in effect. The increasingly common DNRs, based on family requests and doctors' approval, mean cardiac resuscitation and other massive interventions to prolong life are not to be undertaken. "This study finds that DNR orders have become the rule . . . rather than the exception," researchers write in the Archives of Internal Medicine. HEALTH AND OLDER WOMEN.

Abe Steinberg, 95, a partially blind, highly decorated World War I veteran who helped other people with vision problems, died Monday at the Bryn Mawr Terrace Nursing Home. He had lived in Philadelphia for most of his life. Mr. Steinberg was among the first U.S. troops sent overseas during World War I. A private in the First Division Headquarters Company of the 28th Infantry, he fought in regions of France including Mount Aiby, Braul, Ploissi, Beizy, Le Sac, Seicheprey and Cantigny.

Nazir Akbar Ali, 61, of Malvern, an electrical engineer who spent his career perfecting a device to improve mobility and independence for the blind, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on Feb. 2 at Paoli Memorial Hospital. In the 1960s, Mr. Ali went to work for Bionic Instruments, which had invented the LaserCane for the blind using infrared technology. By 1970, he had became the lead developer of the cane, and in 1978 he founded his own company, now called Nurion-Raycal, to continue the work.

Advocates for disabled people yesterday asked a federal judge to cite SEPTA for contempt of a 1992 order requiring the agency's bus and subway drivers to announce stops as a way to help blind passengers. "SEPTA continues to be in noncompliance with a very clear and simple requirement, that its drivers call out the stops," Thomas Earle, a lawyer with the Disabilities Law Project, told U.S. District Judge Louis C. Bechtle. "All we want is them simply calling out the stops," Earle added.

For Philadelphia's captains of hospitality, it might be the biggest challenge since last summer's Republican National Convention: making the city homey for one week, starting tomorrow, for more than 3,500 blind people. There's educating Center City police officers, and anyone else in the area, about how to help people who are blind cross the street. (Don't grab anyone's arm; they will ask and reach for yours.) There's informing cab drivers that state and federal laws require them to carry guide dogs.

George Bush must know more about disabled people than we think he does. For example, when he was campaigning for the keys to the White House he must have known there were many deaf people in the country, so, he encouraged his listeners to read his lips. Now that Bush lives in the White House it appears he believes there is a vast population of blind people as well. Moreover, it seems, the president and his economic advisers also believe that these blind people must be, in some way, mentally or perceptually handicapped and lacking the ability to do simple math or accounting.

For a few hours every Tuesday, you can find a Justice at the Upper Moreland Library. Not just in the law aisle, between Blackstone and Warren, but in the back room. There you can find Linda and John Justice, their hands tapping dimples into plastic labels with tiny styluses. The labels are then affixed to cassettes that are part of the library's collection of 185 recorded books and instructional tapes. The raised plastic markings speak volumes to the sightless, because the labels are in Braille.