Independent Vision

Mention the words 'Seeing Eye', and most people will associate them with guide dogs for the blind and partially-sighted. Mention the name 'Dorothy Harrison Eustis', and most people will not recognize it, even though she is the woman responsible for founding The Seeing Eye, the first guide dog school in the United States. Since its inception eighty years ago, The Seeing Eye has trained thousands of people who are visually impaired to use guide dogs. The success of the program has spawned guide dog schools across the country and around the world, and the concept has been further expanded to include service dogs for people with other kinds of disabilities. Drawing on correspondence, private papers, and newspaper accounts of the day, Miriam Ascarelli chronicles the life of Dorothy Harrison Eustis from her upper class childhood in Victorian Philadelphia to her years as a young mother in the upstate New York boomtown of Hoosick Falls, her widowhood, her failed second marriage to a man thirteen years her junior, and the confluence of events that led to her launching The Seeing Eye. In doing so, Ascarelli reveals both a driven woman and a very private person who shunned media coverage of herself but actively courted it for her organization.