Two new IHC members inducted Two new Individual Heritage Club memberships were announced at the 2004 INA Convention. The new members are Al and Dorothy Pinder of Grinnell and Stuart Clark of Tipton. The Pinders and Clark received attractive membership plaques. Identical plaques will be hung in the INF's Heritage Conference Room to serve as an ongoing reminder of the generosity of the contributors and their commitment to the mission of the Iowa Newspaper Foundation. Membership in the Individual Heritage Club recognizes a gift of $5,000 or more to the INF, given in one installment or over a period of time. Since it was created in 1985, the Individual Heritage Club has generated $200,000 in contributions. Membership now stands at 40. Al and Dorothy Pinder became Individual Heritage Club members as a team, a team that has published the Grinnell Herald- Register for more than 50 years. How that team came about is an interesting story. Dorothy was raised in an Iowa newspaper family and studied journalism and home economics at Iowa State University. Al, a native of Pennsylvania, was an accountant on the East Coast before joining the Army in 1943. Al was relocated to Chicago by the military during World War II and was working there as an accountant when he met Dorothy, who was working in public relations for the meat industry. When things got serious, Dorothy mentioned that her father, L.B. Watt, owned a newspaper in Grinnell, Iowa, and needed some help. Al married Dorothy and began his newspaper career --- taking a 50 percent cut in pay and nearly doubling his workweek. It all worked out well --- for Al and for Dorothy. Al was recognized with the Master Editor-Publisher award in 1975. He served as president of the Iowa Press Association in 1981 and in 1993 he received the INA's Distinguished Service Award. Al was co-founder of the Greater Grinnell Industrial Development Company and served as president for its first 17 years. In 1996 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by Grinnell College and in 1999 he received the NAA's coveted Amos Award. http://www.inanews.com/members/files/FORWARD%20Spring%2004.pdf ---------------------- Press Release For Immediate Release September 28, 1999 Contact: Gini Nelson, Director of Communications (703) 907-7927 gnelson@nna.org NNA To Honor Two Distinguished Community Leaders with the 1999 Amos and McKinney Awards Arlington, VA - Albert J. (Al) Pinder, publisher of The Herald-Register in Grinnell, IA, and Margaret "Peggy" Allen, Editor Emeritus of The Wake Weekly in Wake Forest, NC, will be honored during the National Newspaper Association's 114th Annual Convention with the presentation of the Amos and McKinney Awards. Recognized as the highest and most dignified tributes in community journalism, the Amos and McKinney Awards are presented to the individuals who have provided distinguished service to the community press and their community. The Awards will be presented during the President's Banquet on October 1, 1999, in Boston, MA. Pinder will be honored with the James O. Amos Award. The award was established in 1938 in honor of General James O. Amos, a pioneer Ohio journalist and early day member of the National Editorial Association (today known as the National Newspaper Association). General Amos was owner of the Sidney County Democrat, which is still owned by the Amos family as The Sidney Daily. Mr. Pinder has been involved with The Grinnell Herald-Register as publisher and managing editor since March of 1949. However, his sphere of influence has extended far beyond Grinnell. His professionalism has been heightened and shared through participation in the National Newspaper Association, Society of Professional Journalists, International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors and with service as president of the Iowa Newspaper Association. He has earned distinguished service awards from numerous organizations including one for educational journalism from Iowa High Schools, U.S. Information Agency and the Iowa Newspaper Association. Community has long been a priority for Pinder, and his commitment to Grinnell through work with hospital, church, community development organizations and the College bears out that goal. Mr. Pinder also serves as an International Goodwill Ambassador and has been a host for State Department guests for almost 50 years. Bill Monroe, executive director of the Iowa Newspaper Association, stated that "Al certainly personifies the criteria for the award." One long-time resident of Grinnell commented that Pinder "brought the world a little closer to Grinnell through his paper and his work." Ms. Allen will receive the coveted Emma C. McKinney Memorial Award. The McKinney Award was created to honor Emma McKinney, co-publisher and editor of the Hillsboro (OR) Argus for 58 years. Over the course of her career, McKinney was named dean of Oregon newspapermen and women in 1954, received the Amos Voorhies Award in 1957 and was inducted into the Oregon Journalism Hall of Fame in 1982. Allen, who has been with The Wake Weekly for over 45 years, has been credited with earning the paper nine General Excellence Awards in a 12 year period. News editor Jimmy Allen says she simply "knows what's news." Her dedication to the professionalism in the newspaper industry is demonstrated by her long and dedicated service to state and national newspaper associations. She has served on the Board and various committees of the North Carolina Press Association, as president of the Eastern North Carolina Press Association and as state chairman for the National Newspaper Association. She has served as advisor and confidant to hundreds of newspaper editors throughout the state of North Carolina.Retired editor Jean S. Boney of the Alamance News in Graham, NC, says "Peggy loves newspapering, but she also loves her family, church and community." All this is evidenced by her devotion to children and their needs, be it scholarships, education or role model. Her community has benefited by her devotion to freedom of the press and integrity of her reporting. Allen is a charter member of the Wake Forest Kiwanis Club, serves on numerous community-related boards and committees ranging from The Wake Forest Birthplace Society to the "Keep America Beautiful" projects. Established in 1885, the National Newspaper Association is the voice of America's community newspapers and the largest newspaper association in the country. The nation's community newspapers inform, educate and entertain 150 million readers every week. http://www.nna.org/AboutNNA/archive/1998dir/Amos&McKinney99.txt ------------------------------- Peggy Pinder Elliot Attorney, City Councilwoman, Politician Copyright 1996 by the National Federation of the Blind. Born in 1953 and raised in Grinnell, Iowa, Peggy Pinder attended regular schools until the middle of the ninth grade. When her eye condition was diagnosed as irreversible decline into total blindness, her father cried for the first and only time in her life--at least, as far as she knows. Pinder then spent what she characterizes as two and a half unhappy years at the Iowa school for the blind. Academically she learned nothing that she had not already been taught in public schools. The students were discouraged from learning to use the white cane and were never allowed off campus unless they were accompanied by a sighted person. But most soul-destroying of all, the students were discouraged from aspiring to success or from setting themselves challenging goals. Pinder resisted the stifling atmosphere and drew down upon herself the wrath of the school administration, which refused to permit her to complete high school there, forcing her to go back to public school. Knowing that she was not prepared to make this transition, she and her parents sought help from Dr. Kenneth Jernigan, then Director of the Iowa Commission for the Blind. Pinder enrolled at the Orientation and Adjustment Center, where she mastered the skills of blindness and explored for the first time the healthy and positive philosophy of blindness that has subsequently directed her life. Pinder went on to Iowa's Cornell College, where she achieved an excellent academic record and edited the "Cornellian", the school newspaper. She then completed law school at Yale University, receiving her J.D. Degree in 1979. After graduation from law school, Pinder passed the Iowa Bar in January, 1980. She then began a difficult job search. Although her academic standing at Yale was better than that of most of her classmates, she did not receive a single job offer as a result of the intensive interviewing she had done during her final year of law school. Virtually all Yale-trained attorneys leave the university with offers in hand. The inference was inescapable: employers were discriminating against Pinder because of her blindness. She eventually was hired as Assistant County Attorney for Woodbury County in Sioux City, Iowa, where she prosecuted defendants on behalf of the people. Pinder's lifetime interest in helping to improve the world around her has been expressed in politics as well as in Federation activity. In 1976 she was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City. During the Convention she appeared on national television and in a national news magazine, taking the occasion to acquaint the public with the philosophy of the National Federation of the Blind and the real needs of blind people. At the end of the convention, she was chosen to second the nomination of Senator Robert Dole to be the candidate of the Republican Party for the Vice Presidency of the United States. In 1986 she completed a campaign for the Iowa State Senate in District 27 (East-Central Iowa) on the Republican ticket. She won the Primary and campaigned hard in a district eighty by thirty miles in size and containing about 60,000 residents, a distinct minority of whom are Republican. From April through November she made hundreds of public appearances and managed an efficient campaign. Like many candidates, Pinder was not elected in her first bid for public office, but she made a very strong showing and is often asked when she will run again. Her interest in participating in her community continues today through her service on the Grinnell City Council and in other community organizations. Pinder's work in the National Federation of the Blind has been as impressive as her professional career. She held office in the N.F.B. Student Division in Iowa and Connecticut, and then served as President of the national Student Division from 1977 to 1979. In 1981 she was elected President of the National Federation of the Blind of Iowa, an office which she continues to hold. Pinder was first elected to serve on the N.F.B. Board of Directors in 1977, and in 1984 she was elected Second Vice President. For the past several years Pinder, a 1976 winner herself, has chaired the Scholarship Committee of the National Federation of the Blind. Every year approximately twenty-five scholarships, ranging in value from $1,800 to $10,000, are presented to the best blind college students in the nation. http://www.blind.net/bw000005.htm ----------------------------------- Blind Attorney Activist Shuns Special Treatment by Mike Kilen From the Editor: Mike Kilen is a staff writer at the Des Moines Register, but the following article he wrote for the Cornell Report, the Cornell College alumni magazine. Alumni magazines like to write profiles of interesting or distinguished alumni, so it was not particularly surprising that Peggy Elliott, Second Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind, received a call from her Alma Mater, asking for an interview. Peggy was a bit leery of the idea, knowing all too well that such features all too often turn out maudlin or pretentiously inspirational. She insisted on seeing the finished product for approval before she would agree to schedule the interview or give the reporter the names of other people he could call. The resulting piece was as focused, lively, and decisive as Peggy herself. Here it is, reprinted with permission from the Cornell Report: Peggy Pinder Elliott '76 has always bristled at people fawning over her because she is blind. If one more person says that she is "amazing," it may just send this Iowa lawyer into a courtroom-like rant. So entering the kitchen of the former Cornellian editor with a notebook can be intimidating. "You aren't going to make this sappy, are you?" she asks. It comes off more as a demand than a question. Elliott is not about the sweet stuff. Exactly thirty seconds will be spent on the condition that has led to this unwanted attention. By fourth grade she couldn't even see the chalkboard; her progressive eye disease worsened until she was blind by ninth grade. Period. There is nothing in the record to relate any kind of psychoanalysis of what she can't see, how she "overcame" anything but a minor nuisance. "Blindness," she says, "is no different from having brown hair." Here's the rub, one that has defined Elliott's life. Her guiding philosophy is that people who are blind shouldn't receive special treatment. But she acknowledges that they may need special provisions to live in a sighted world. "That's the tension spot, right there," she says, her index finger tapping the kitchen table. "Right there." So it has been since the beginning, back when she left the state school for the blind in Vinton after two-and-a-half years and graduated from Grinnell High School. She enrolled at Cornell in 1972 and quickly recognized she must prove herself. She was told she couldn't be the editor of the paper alone. She would need a sighted coeditor. "He quit after about two weeks, and I ended up doing it alone," she said. She was told she couldn't take a logic course because she needed to see the chalkboard. "I ended up tutoring most of the class," she says. "I was listening, rather than watching." She was told she didn't need to take a physical education course, and although she disliked P.E., she took it anyway to prove she didn't need special treatment. Elliott applied to law schools during her senior year. The University of Iowa admissions officials, she says, told her there were looming questions about her ability to withstand the rigors of law school. Meanwhile Yale accepted her. She thought some of them pompous there, too. When a professor asked the class if they were ready to conduct themselves as one of the elite, she shot back: "I would think that the elite are the people who earn it." Elliott began to attract attention, a short Iowa girl with long hair down her back. People started to call her amazing. She wanted to fight discrimination against blind people, who were "overprotected and underemployed," she told one reporter. "When I first met her she was hoarse from yelling at a demonstration," says Barbara Pierce, editor of the Braille Monitor and her longtime associate in the National Federation of the Blind. "There is nothing vanilla about Peggy. She is sherbet or chocolate fudge." Elliott climbed the podium at the Republican National Convention in 1976 and on tiptoes provided a nominating speech for Robert Dole. "She had the poise to be able to second the nomination and figure out how to work in the National Federation of the Blind, all in a couple minutes," Pierce says. "She pulled it off beautifully." NBC's Tom Brokaw approached her afterward for an interview. "Later," she told him, eyeing the podium where former Iowa governor Robert Ray was speaking. "I'm listening to my governor." When a reporter asked her how she managed to pull off such confidence, being "visually handicapped," she curtly cut off all the correctness by saying, "blind." "Every blind person has to move out of the safety net," she says. "Accept the choice of freedom to have the choice of success." Even with her pitch for no special recognition, she continued to see discrimination. After graduating from Yale, she got no offers from big law firms, unheard of for her strong classroom standing at Yale. Elliott says she wanted to return to Iowa anyway. After a stint as assistant county attorney in Sioux City, she came back to her hometown of Grinnell. One thing she had learned from her parents, Al and Dorothy Pinder, was to give back to the community. The giving occurred on two fronts. She toils tirelessly for the National Federation of the Blind, today as a vice president and a president of the state affiliate. In Grinnell she has served on the city council since 1988. She can talk sewers with the locals and disability legislation with U.S. senators with equal skill. It was her strong voice of disapproval which ensured important language was added to the Americans with Disabilities Act that a disabled person had the right to refuse special treatment. Yet among her highest goals is to make the world accessible to people who are blind when technology and other barriers make it difficult to navigate. Automated teller machines are one example. She encourages banks to supply machines with a unit that can be plugged in to help people who are blind navigate the transaction without fear of a mistake. During all her activism she still suffered the indignities of an ignorant sighted world. She was arrested and carried off an airplane in 1988 when she refused to give up her seat. Airline officials said it was their policy to seat disabled persons in another part of the plane. She voiced her displeasure, of course. She is an attorney, after all. In her private practice she works for nonprofit agencies that have difficulty funding representation. In her role as scholarship chairperson with the National Federation of the Blind, she pushes young people to represent themselves as equals. Today, living on a quiet street in a large house in Grinnell, she can see it from another angle after years of fighting the system. One of her cats, Sheriff, is blind. Elliott and husband Doug Elliott, who is also blind, carried the little kitten around at first, even to the litter box. One day they each thought the other had the cat downstairs. Sheriff had to do her business in the litter box, however, and had found her way up the stairs to it--without their help. "We were even doing it to our own cat," Elliott says, laughing. The resourceful cat also supplied another reminder of Elliott's lifelong philosophy. "If you believe you can do something," she says, "you figure out a way." http://www.nfb.org/Images/nfb/Publications/bm/bm01/bm0107/bm010705.htm The Braille Monitor, July 2001 Edition --------------------------------------- PUENTE owner and trip leader Anne Pinder was born and raised in Grinnell, Iowa. She graduated from Luther College (Decorah, Iowa) with a Spanish major, including junior year in Madrid. As a resident in Madrid for more than twenty years, Anne has seen most of Spain's fascinating transition from a country just emerging from a long dictatorship to its present position, a vibrant modern country, member of the European Union and light years from the Spain of her junior year program. Anne has travelled all over Spain and parts of Portugal, usually by bicycle or on foot. She has been organizing trips for Spanish friends for nearly twenty years, showing them their own country with her unique bi-cultural outlook, enthusiasm and insatiable curiosity about nearly everything. She has worked semi-professionally (helping local company with their activities) and professionally in this field for about ten years. To complement her wide travels and cultural experience, she has solid skills in a variety of sports (hiking, biking, kayaking, cross-country skiing), environmental studies, technical training in mountaineering and Red Cross certificates in First Aid and Lifesaving. http://www.puentespain.com/About%20Puente.htm