Few people alive today have lived through more Bay Area blindness history than Elmer Chapson. On October 8, 2015 Chapson was interviewed by LightHouse CEO Bryan Bashin in a wide-ranging oral history unusual in its breadth and content.

Chapson spent ten years from 1935 to 1945 at the storied California School for the Blind in Berkeley and recounts a bit about Newell Perry and many of the other leaders in the early California blindness movement.  He also sheds light on the little-know Berkeley-based Boy Scout Troop #7, which was composed of blind boys, perhaps the first such troop in the nation. The troop, it turns out, spent summers in a rural Napa boy’s camp which 13 years later would be bought by Rose Resnick and later christened Enchanted Hills.

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