Still Living a Life of Service to Others
By Randy Murray, Volunteer
SLO Village brought them together.
They became project collaborators.
Teacher and student.
Social friends.
And both are blind.
Paul Wolff, 93, is a retired Cal Poly professor of architecture. He lost his sight precipitously in 2023. His doctor told him it was the most rapid decline he had ever seen. In Paul’s case, the causes were glaucoma and macular degeneration.
Kate Williams, 81, a human relations manager in her earlier career, lost her sight to a rare recessive gene disease. Her loss was more gradual -- but inevitable.
Paul, the professor, is the student; Kate, the more experienced in the sightless world, is the teacher. Both are enthusiastic in their respective roles.
Paul credits Sally Kruger, SLO Village board member, with suggesting that the two get together. “Sally said, ‘I want you to meet someone even blinder than you are,’” Paul recalled. They met at a regular Wednesday SLO Village coffee hour.
Kate and Paul live independently in their own homes, supported by relatives and SLO Village, which is dedicated to helping seniors age gracefully in place, at home. Both active, they regularly attend SLO Village social and educational gatherings. Life is not all about the work.
Paul and Kate attended a recent SLO Village coffee and tea social. They came to hear an expert talk about the promises and dangers of artificial intelligence.
Some of that work involves Access for All (AFA), an arm of The Community Foundation of San Luis Obispo County.
Working with AFA, Paul has devoted “many, many years to promoting equal rights for disabled people.” The annual Paul Wolff Accessibility Advocacy Awards (PWAAA) were established to honor Paul. His involvement with AFA coincided with the development of a Cal Poly course in the architecture curriculum that encourages students to design buildings that are accessible to all people.
He has gotten Kate interested. “We found we have a lot in common,” he said.
“She wants to be more active. She will put new spark into AFA,” he predicted. For her part, Kate is welcoming the opportunity to continue helping the blind and those with other disabilities, service that she began and continued for many years in San Francisco before moving to San Luis Obispo.
“She’s got a lot of energy and such a positive attitude toward life,” Paul said.
Kate, Oregon-born but a Southern California resident since her junior year in high school, earned a degree in English literature at Pasadena Nazarene College. She worked for many years in medical sales for a pharmaceutical company. Eventually with another company she helped recruit medical sales people from her office in human relations.
Her first loss of sight led to her having to give up driving. Her job required a commute from Laguna Beach to Irvine. Public transportation was poor or nonexistent. Later, she lost the ability to read text. She finally could not read the largest type produced by a magnifying device designed for those with compromised eyesight. Friends suggested that she retire.
Instead, she decided she would move to somewhere where she could work and use public transportation, considering New York and Chicago before settling on San Francisco. The year was 1996.
“Transportation was wonderful,” she recalled. She made her way to her new job on buses and BART.
In 2010, she joined Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, an organization serving all of California, as director of employment services. There she designed a program to help those who were blind or sight-impaired prepare for the job-search process: How to do computer searches, to make connections, to interview (“look at the voice”).
“We had tremendous success,” she said. “Up to fifty percent of those who followed the program were placed.”
For her work, Kate was one of four in the nation that year to win the Purpose Prize, given to those in the second half of life who changed careers and made the world a better place. Now administered by the AARP, it “celebrates the creativity, innovation and inspiration that life experience brings.”
Kate has brought her energy, skills and experience to San Luis Obispo where part of “the work” is helping Paul, although she disputes the word “work,” preferring to call what she does “a pleasure.” She talks about the shock that comes to many when they lose their sight. “They feel isolated -- so many issues when you lose your vision.”
“I have never met anyone who has dealt with the challenges as well as Paul,” she said. “He’s treating it as part of his life.”
It’s hard work. With Kate’s help, Paul is learning to master the ”Voice Over” function available on every IPhone. It’s equivalent to learning a new language, she explained. She demonstrated on her phone, where she has taught herself the location of key apps. She touches an app, and a voice responds. Strictly by touch, she called up her travel folder, selected Uber and was prepared to order a ride by voice exchange.
Kate, in her living room, displays the travel app on her I-phone. From that folder, she can order transportation from either Lyft or Uber using the Voice Over system in the phone. The system empowers sightless people, giving them the gift of greater independence.
Hardship and determination are not new to Paul. In Hamburg, Germany, just months before the outbreak of World War II, he watched as his father was hauled off by Hitler’s Gestapo, despite his mother’s pleadings and her display of the father’s commission and Iron Cross medal earned in the German army in World War I. Just 9 years old at the time, Paul said, “It introduced me to prejudice and discrimination.”
His father was fortunate to be released days later and managed to get the family out of the country in a narrow window of time before Jews and others were blocked from exiting and instead sent to concentration camps. Paul’s family gathered in London and sailed on to the United States, landing in San Francisco on Aug. 1, 1939, just 30 days before the outbreak of World War II.
“Fortunately, I was among those fated to survive this catastrophic history,” he wrote in April 2023.
Paul, who spoke no English when he arrived in this country, would go on to earn degrees in architecture from Cal Berkeley and in environmental psychology from the University of Surrey in Guildford, England, the latter giving him perspective on his interests in disabled rights.
He has devoted a lifetime to speaking publicly about the German past, warning a variety of audiences – sometimes schoolchildren – that the intolerance of those times is still present to an alarming degree in this country and is even on the increase. Paul focuses not only on antisemitism but on racial discrimination in America.
Paul relaxes on the patio of his San Luis Obispo home. The cassette player is loaded with fifteen books in his areas of interest. The audio books are provided free by the Braille Institute. The cassettes are replenished with new books as he needs them.
Sometimes, Kate and Paul get together to do the work; sometimes just for lunch; sometimes just to listen to a book.
“He has strengths and values I admire,” she said. “Looking at him makes me smile.”
For his part, Paul said he really admired her ability of get around on public transportation, even going on her own to a conference in Moscow.
Both had high praise for the services of SLO Village. Paul recalled how hard it was to give up driving. “I was not used to asking people to do things for me,” he said. “It (SLO Village) really made a big change -- taking me to doctors’ visits and social appointments.”
“Since my blindness two things have had a remarkable effect on my life,” Paul said.
“1. SLO Village and
2. Meeting Kate.”
Kate admitted that she held off for a full year on joining SLO Village, opting instead for regular phone calls to all of her friends in San Francisco. But, feeling isolated, she did become a part of SLO Village and said “I am so glad that I did. It enriched my life in a myriad of ways, including helping Paul and connecting with a new community of friends.”
Both Kate and Paul agree that SLO Village is a place to belong and worthy of support.