09/10/2023
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This is a black and white photo of Morris Frank and Buddy disembarking from a ship. It is thanks to Morris’s efforts that guide dog handlers are permitted the same right to travel as anyone else.
On November 5, 1927, the Saturday Evening Post published an article written by Dorothy Harrison Eustis about a dog training program she had visited in Potsdam, Germany, where dogs – called “blind leaders” – were being trained to guide blinded veterans of World War I. Dorothy, a breeder and trainer of German shepherds, was initially skeptical that dogs could be trained to guide a blind person. But she came away a believer.
After the article was published, she received numerous letters from people who were blind, asking for guide dogs. A letter from a 19-year-old college student and traveling salesman named Morris Frank stood out:
“Is what you say really true? If so, I want one of those dogs! And I am not alone. Thousands of blind like me abhor being dependent on others. Help me and I will help them. Train me and I will bring back my dog and show people here how a blind man can absolutely be on his own.”
Dorothy, who was born in Philadelphia, was living in Switzerland at the time. She told Morris she would train a dog for him – if he could get to Switzerland.
“Mrs. Eustis,” Morris replied, “to get back my independence, I’d go to hell!”
But it was no easy task for a person who was blind to travel from the United States to Switzerland in 1928. He booked passage on a ship, not as a passenger, but as a “package.” Kept locked in his room except when escorted by a member of the crew, Morris said he felt like a prisoner.
“At ten, he exercised me as if I were a horse, methodically trotting me around the deck,” Morris wrote in First Lady of The Seeing Eye. “Then he deposited me in a steamer chair. If some friendly passenger invited me to take a stroll, we got only a few feet before my keeper ran up breathless, grasped my elbow, and steered me to my seat again where he’d keep an eye on me.”
Morris never forgot what it felt like to be treated like cargo. “The experience angered and frustrated me and made me all the more determined to undergo any hardship to overcome dependency on others,” Morris wrote.
After being matched with Buddy and returning to the United States, Morris would spend the next 50 years not just promoting Seeing Eye dogs, but advocating for the right of a person with a guide dog to go anywhere a member of the public is allowed to go.
