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It's a beautiful spring day, so Sammy Skobel of Mount Prospect decides to take his bike out for a spin. It's no big deal for the average person, so why should it be any different for him - even if he is 73 years old and legally blind?
He can see light and shadow, and has a fine-tuned sense of hearing, but Skobel admits crossing busy streets like Elmhurst Road can get a bit tricky.
He'll wait until a car stops at the traffic light and pedal alongside of it when it crosses the street. On days when traffic is light, he might have to wait 10 minutes, but he won't budge until a car comes.
"I'd get creamed if I went out there at the wrong time," he laughs.
It might sound a little nuts - not to mention dangerous - but Sammy has places to go, things to do. It is spring, after all, and he wants to work on his golf game.
Sammy was just 4 years old when scarlet fever took 90 percent of his vision. His father sat him down and said, "You are not totally blind. You are just inconvenienced. You will learn to do everything."
Watching Sammy today, it seems as if "inconvenience" may have been too strong a word to describe his impairment. At most, it's annoying. But more often than not, it's a non-issue.
Sammy has spent a lifetime laughing in the face of blindness. His handicap has been a formidable opponent, but Sammy gets the last laugh whenever he hops on his bike, swings a golf club, joins his grandkids for a day of downhill skiing or regales crowds with stories about his days as a star performer in the Roller Derby.
A derby star is born
The Roller Derby. It was a fast-paced, in-your-face, knock-em- sock-em brawl on wheels. It was no place for a blind man, and yet, Sammy Skobel skated in the Roller Derby for four years before word got around that he couldn't see.
"All I could see was the white ring on the inside and the white ring on the outside of the track," he says, recalling a skating career that lasted from 1946 to 1965. "But I could tell...