Stay in Contact with MARRS

By Jim Fernandes

You’re well over 65, having outlived your spouse of many years. Your adult children left their Western North Carolina home for better employment opportunities long ago and now reside far away.

Living frugally on Social Security, the one luxury you used to afford yourself was a subscription to the local newspaper because it kept you in touch with your community. Now you don’t have that expense anymore because with worsening macular degeneration, you no longer see well enough to read.

Age, infirmity, and vision loss have isolated you. Loss of contact with your community now threatens your mental and emotional health as well. This describes the situation faced by too many people in WNC.

More than six million Americans over age 65 experience vision loss that prevents them from reading, and there are another nine million like them between the ages of 45 and 64. Rates are even higher for African Americans as they grow older.

In fact, African Americans are five to six times more likely to suffer severe vision loss, especially from glaucoma, than any other ethnicity of people. The Mountain Area Radio Reading service will soon launch a new project to better serve people with vision loss in our area’s African American community.

Radio reading services in our state address an otherwise unmet need. According to the NC Department of Health and Human Services, retinal disorders, cataracts, and glaucoma are the three main causes of vision loss in North Carolina. As baby boomers continue to age, visual impairment among the elderly will rise dramatically. Others may lose the ability to read—not because of vision loss, but as a result of stroke, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, arthritis, and Parkinson’s disease.

In 1969, help arrived with the creation of the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, the first radio reading service. Volunteers in Minnesota began reading aloud newspapers and other publications over the radio waves. People with severe vision loss or other reading disabilities listened to the broadcasts on specially tuned radios. Soon, other radio reading services began sprouting up across the country.

In 1983 the Raleigh-based Triangle Area Radio Reading Service brought audio news and information broadcasting to North Carolina. A few years later, a sister agency emerged in Asheville: the Mountain Area Radio Reading Service: MARRS.

Two community-minded men with severe visual impairments, Tom Leeder and the late Robert Brummond, founded MARRS in 1987. Leeder remains an active MARRS board member to this day, and MARRS continues as an all-volunteer 501(c)(3) nonprofit, funded entirely by individual donations and small grants.

MARRS broadcasts, carried on a sub-frequency of Public Radio stations WCQS and WNCW, are also available on the Internet at www.marrswnc.org.

Monday through Friday in studios in Asheville and Hendersonville, volunteers read the Asheville Citizen-Times and Hendersonville Times-News on the air. Excerpts from other local newspapers, such as the Urban News, Mountain Xpress, Black Mountain News, and the Times, along with entertainment and opinion pieces, are read weekly. With national news and information programs broadcast when the local news is not on the air, MARRS can be heard 24/7.

For listeners in six WNC counties—Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, Transylvania, and Yancey—MARRS broadcasts “mean the world” to them, are “a blessing each and every day,” and a “constant companion” in their later years.

Most MARRS listeners are elderly and many live in poverty. Few have a computer, so the majority listen via the radio they receive free from MARRS. These radios are simple to operate, involving little more than turning a single on/off/volume switch. An estimated 12,000 blind, low vision and print impaired people in the region could be kept in contact with their communities through MARRS broadcasts, yet because not enough people know about the service, far fewer benefit.

In an effort to serve more African American listeners in WNC and enhance programming for all listeners, and thanks to a seed grant from All Souls Cathedral to lay the groundwork for the project, in the coming months MARRS will implement a new program for its listeners: an hour devoted to reading the entirety of the Urban News as it comes out each month, along with other news and information of particular interest to the African American community in the Asheville metropolitan area.

Founding readers for this program, slated to start in January or February of 2014, are the accomplished and respected community leaders Jacquelyn Hallum, Gene Bell, and Don Locke. Local actor and popular regular MARRS reader Scottie McCall joins them.

If you know people with a visual impairment or other disability that keeps them from reading independently, please tell them about MARRS.

If you would like to volunteer or make a donation, please call (828) 251-2166 or go online to www.marrswnc.org, where you can also listen to real-time and archived broadcasts.

The main MARRS studio is conveniently located downtown next to the US Cellular Center, 75 Haywood Street, Suite G-4, Asheville, NC 28801. More information can be found at the MARRS Facebook page: www.facebook.com/marrswnc.